Or and Vert

Okay, first off, I have to say that this is probably the scroll I am most pleased with to date. I have criticisms of my work, as always, but overall this came out a lot closer to my intent than most of my previous work, and it’s nice to see the gap between taste and talent starting to close a little. I wasn’t planning on doing any scrolls this reign, given how busy I currently am as reign herald for Donovan and Meghanta, but I saw the AoA for this recipient come up on the list of upcoming awards, and given that (a) it wasn’t assigned yet and (b) I absolutely adore this person, I cornered Kingdom Signet at an event and made grabby hands. Given that level of busy, though, and the fact that I work a second job in December, I knew that my timeline on this would be pretty crunched, so I would need to continue using fairly simple exemplars that lean into my strengths, rather than work on expanding outside my comfort zone. So! What do we know about the recipient? Their persona is ea...

It is the custom of the SCA College of Arms to create and publish Letters of Misintent on April 1, rather than the more usual Letters of Intent, full of shenanigans of some type or another. Much of the time these are filled with pop culture references made documentable to SCA period by means primarily of the FamilySearch records and the fact that late 16th-century English surnames were often found used as given names as well, but there are occasionally other types of shenanigans, though those are generally funnier to heralds than to layfolk. This is the second year I've been the East Kingdom's submissions herald and therefore nominally in charge of deciding on a theme (or lack thereof) for the April 1 letter, creating it, and publishing it. Last year, everything was Very Too Much and I didn't get around to it; this year, I was determined not to let it pass me by, as I'm stepping down this summer and I wanted to have at least one with my name on it. Behold, the East'...

One of the best resources for consulting heralds is Appendix A of SENA , as that provides lists of name patterns that do not require further documentation, sorted by language group. If you're not particularly familiar with a given language (and even if you are!), it's a fantastic resource to help you construct historically-plausible names using a structure that's been previously documented to period, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time. Things like "late period English names can use double bynames" or "French descriptive/occupational bynames may use the article le, la, l', les or un/une or omit it." Not every language is represented, but it's a fantastic starting point and one that I point every new consulting herald towards. The Czech table, so far, has been empty, with merely the note "Czech: All patterns in Czech must be documented. Academy of Saint Gabriel report 3244 ( http://www.s-gabriel.org/3244.txt ) gives some leads fo...

 Figured I might as well actually keep notes on what progress I'm making on this project! As a recap, I'm working on pulling the names out of various data sources for 14th-16th century Czechia, categorizing them by year and by gender, and looking for patterns both in the formation of the bynames and in the construction of the names as a whole. The first source I'm working with is Marta Štefková's Antroponyma v urbářích z 15.–17. století  ( Proper Names in Urbars of the 15th–17th centuries,  https://is.muni.cz/th/u1ye5/ ). This paper includes an index of names, with the full list of names from each year of her data (1483, 1581, and 1695); focusing on SCA period means I don't care about the names from 1695 and would prefer to exclude them from my own data. Since I want to do my own analysis of these names, and this sort of data works best in spreadsheets, I started by copying Štefková's list of names from 1483 and 1581 into my own spreadsheet. Each year in Štefko...

Here's a too-detailed list of the heraldry projects I've got on my docket at the moment. I'm putting it here for accountability, as much as anything else, and so I can look back at it later when I've finished all of them. (This list doesn't include the usual consults and commentary arguments in varying stages of completion, because those are constant.) Personal projects: Write up the research I did for my name into an article on Czech byname patterns. probably also do more research to flesh this out some; I mostly only did enough research to justify the name I wanted, and there are more patterns than just the ones I used. Possibly just split this into an article series instead of a single one, because otherwise it'll never see the light of day. submit this to Palimpsest for an edit to SENA Appendix A Pull out dated lists of Czech given names and bynames from the sources I already have. names (given, byname, construction) in Vepřeková names (given, byname, constr...