Sir Siegfried von Höflichkeit Interview

David Thewlis

Sir Siegfried von Höflichkeit

Duke of the West Kingdom

Founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism

Biographical Interview

Calontir Living History Series

November 1995

Barony of Forgotten Sea

The Elms

Sir Siegfried is the single most responsible person for conceiving of the SCA, though as you will find in this interview, the origins are very different form their current manifestations. The SCA is the result of the creative expression of over a hundred thousand creative and talented folk, stretched over more than thirty years. Sir Siegfried never claims to have created the Society by himself, yet his work and influence are enormous. He is a founder, if not the only founder. The organiser of the first list, he knighted our first knight, and was one of the seven first founding knights. He has been Society Marshal, Herald, twice King of the West, and thrice on the Board of Directors.Great is our debt to him.

Crag: This is Crag Duggin for the Calontir Living History Series, interviewing Duke Siegfried von Hoflichkeit...

Siegfried: Höflichkeit.

Crag: Höflichkeit.

Siegfried: Very good.

Crag: Mundanely David Thewlis, one of the founders and chief architects of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Your Grace, can you, in brief, give me the major list, your full name and major list of your titles?

Siegfried: I can do it, but since you have the piece of paper...

Crag: This is for someone who might not have the paper.

Siegfried: Alright. Duke Siegfried von Höflichkeit. Obviously, I'm a Duke and therefore, I'm a graf, although that title didn't exist. When I was King the first time (we weren't using "Count" yet). I'm a Knights of the Silver Molet, which is a Knightly order in the West Kingdom, that we'll talk about later, perhaps. I'm a Pelican, a Laurel, I hold the Order of the Light of Atenveldt. I hold the Leaf of Merit twice which is the service award in the Kingdom of the West. It predates the Pelican. I hold the Rose Leaf which is sort of a mini-Laurel. Queen's Cypher, Order of the Queen's Grace, Muckin' Great Clubbe which is a peculiarly West Kingdom custom which is an award for ferocity on the filed unmitigated by any sign of intelligence or anything like that. I've thrice been on the BoD and twice been Marshal of the Society, although the first time was at the third tournament and we weren't really having an institutionalized marshallate at that point.

Crag: Um, mundanely.

Siegfried: Mundanely, my name is Dave Thewlis. I'm 53 years old. I was born in Columbus, Ohio, grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland which is a suburb of Washington, D.C. Do you want a history here, or what...?

Crag: What you would like us to remember. Much of this interview is what you would like 20 years from now someone to remember about Siegfried/Dave.

Siegfried: The reason that I asked that is because if we go in detail to my life in the late 50's, 60's we'll go into the antecedents of the SCA and I'm assuming that's going to come up in a subsequent question. So I don't feel any great desire to go into that other than I grew up in Washington, D.C., went into the Air Force in 1960, spent 2 1/2 years in Germany and Turkey, moved to Berkeley in 1964. I am, by profession, a computer consultant. I got into the computer trade in 1965 and Fulk de Wyvern, whom you'll hear about, Ken deMaiffe, got in 1966. That makes me probably the first of the left handed computer dukes. I'm not sure if that custom is still extant. I've been in computers then, especially in the area of health care, since the mid-1960's and retired from Kaiser Permanente last year. I'm now an independent consultant.

Crag: I guess the first question is how did you come to invent the SCA?

Siegfried: OK. Give me leave to give you the long answer, because this is... I usually try to answer that very quickly, 25 words or less, right? How did you affect 100,000 people? But in this particular case, I'm going to take a little while and go into some of the origin points that will become relevant later because it stirs two or three major threads together by the time we get to 1967. I told you I grew up in Maryland in the 1950's. In late 1956, I think it was, I actually encountered the first US hardback edition of Professor's Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and read those. Liked them very much. Bought my own copy. I was also interested in medieval history in general. And in something like 1958, in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, they had run a write-in commentary from readers as to which character from Lord of the Rings they would like to be. And a fellow up on a farm in upstate New York wrote in and said he thought he'd like to be Gollum. Well, that was a startler.

Crag: Truly sick.

Siegfried: So I wrote a letter to Paul Zimmer, who happened to be Marion Zimmer Bradley's brother, although I didn't know it at the time, of course, and said in essence, "What on earth?" and that started a correspondence that was to have a fairly significant effect later on. I wanted to go into the Air Force Academy, wasn't able to do that. Joined the Air Force with the notion that I could therefore strike for Officer's Candidate School and become a pilot and found that when you ride a tiger, you generally go where the tiger wants to go, so I wound up going to language school at the University of Indiana and learning Russian. And while there I met a fellow named Ken de Maiffe who was also to be fairly instrumental in the birth of the SCA later on. Also in 1961, just before I went overseas, I went up to upstate New York and visited Paul on the farm that he and his mother lived on in upstate New York. Got a chance to meet him and we continued to correspond over the next few years while I was overseas. So I went off overseas and went to Germany and spent a little while in Turkey and a couple of other places. And as luck would have it, Ken deMaiffe also wound up stationed over in Germany in 1962. I had originally been stationed in a place called Bremerhaven which is up on the edge of the Baltic Sea. It was the Army Point of Embarkation, although we were an Air Force unit that was kind of parasiting on the base. Later on, I left there and after a few places, I went to Berlin.

Crag: An intelligence unit or...?

Siegfried: Yes. Like so many of us, I was what they call a spook. Ken wound up later on in Bremerhaven, so when opportunity... he couldn't come into Berlin, he couldn't get permission, but since I was already there, I could get permission to go out, so occasionally I'd go out. We'd pal around together. We learned to fence in the attic of the Luftwaffe barracks in Bremerhaven, and stuff like that. And as youngsters will do, we tossed off a lot of wine and talked about all the great things we would do and stuff like that. We were both ardent Anglophiles. Whenever we got together when we'd go out or when we'd have dinner or something, we'd always have a toast to the Queen, which became fairly relevant later on, also. Meanwhile, in another related thing, a friend, remember Paul Zimmer whom I mentioned earlier, Paul had a friend named Don Studebaker who came, I think, from the Baltimore area, although I don't remember, who had had a bit of a messed up home environment and wound up living with Paul and his mom on the farm in upstate New York from somewhere around 1962. Now Paul's elder sister is Marion Zimmer Bradley, the science fiction author, and so she was, of course, interested in science fiction. Paul and Don were both necessarily science fiction addicts and obviously he'd heard of Tolkien since he wanted to be Gollum at one point. And Don was a contributor to a science fiction fanzine and he tended to write alternating columns. He would write one column which would talk about what was actually happening in his life and in the next column (these things tend to come out on a monthly basis, or whatever) where he was carrying on sort of an extended, quasi-fantasy, people he'd meet traveling around the world and so on. So he really wanted to ...I don't remember the exact circumstance, but what it boiled down to was my inventing Siegfried von Höflichkeit, who was a perfectly nice German Hochwelgeborgen who happened to have a couple of billion Deutsch marks and who was a character that Don could meet and interact with in one or two of these ongoing stories. The key to this one was the name Siegfried von Höflichkeit, because at some point, and I don't remember when, Paul's sister, Marion, had rather jokingly created nicknames for Paul and Don and I. I don't think she'd even met me at the time, or if she had it was only briefly. But Paul wound up being "the blushing Tarzan", Don, "a jaded Peter Pan", and, me "an urbane Siegfried". So when I invented Siegfried, I translated urbane and Siegfried von Höflichkeit means the Urbane Siegfried because Höflichkeit is urbanity. So that's where the name comes from, and the name predates the SCA by about three years. Let's see. I happened to come back stateside in 1963 for about three weeks to go to a friend's wedding. I was able to get up and visit Paul and Don briefly. Went back overseas. Ken came back, I came back. Ultimately by mid 1964, Ken and I and another friend were sharing a flat in Berkeley, California. Now, as a result of knowing Paul and Don, of course, I met Marion Zimmer Bradley Breen (her husband was Walter Breen) because they were living in Berkeley at the time, and also what was the Berkeley science fiction group, which was the Elves, Gnomes and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder, and Marching Society.

Crag: Say that again.

Siegfried: Elves, Gnomes, and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society. Through those contacts and through some going to a couple of things like the Westercons and so on, I met a number of the local science fiction authors, like Phil Dick and Poul Anderson and Marion herself, of course, Avram Davidson and so on. Some of this is relevant and a lot of it isn't. And the important thing is that we had a fair number of contacts in the science fiction community and I think that's how we originally met Diana, whose name was Diana Paxson and who was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley and had gone to Mills College in Oakland. Now, Ken and I, to get back to an earlier thread, had been extremely interested in the concepts of medieval fighting. Well, we were interested in medieval history in general and I think you could say that our interest was focused on both the romantic, chivalric tradition, if you will, and secondly on broadsword fighting as a phenomenon. We got interested in that because of noticing, in part, the way in which foil and saber fighting had in fencing, diverged from use of the other weapons in a realistic way. So we got really interested because the only depictions that you could find of fighting with broadswords or other medieval weapons tended to be either the extremely romanticized Walter Scott variety or the Errol Flynn kind of nonsense, or at the other end of the spectrum, the nasty, brutish, and short notion as translated to the 40 pound sword that you could barely lift and so on. And since we did know that broadswords didn't weigh any 40 pounds, I was fairly clear that nobody knew, and lot of drivel had been written on the subject. And so we established (this was in 1965) the beginnings of what became the final SCA trait of finding out by actually going and doing the thing. We built steel and leather heaters and we started building swords and maces and trying to figure out how this stuff was actually done and we actually started to put notes and illustrations together for a book on what we were, at the time, calling "Broadsword Fencing". And you've seen...

Crag: The illustrations.

Siegfried: The illustrations and a couple, some of the previous notes 'cause that still exists. Through Diana we knew a bunch of other people that she knew and there were, there was both the science fiction crowd, there were some university people mixed in, just people that knew each other. It was a phenomenon and I can't remember whether it predated or happened after the First Tournament when a bunch of us got together and recorded something called "Das Rheinstones" which was a very deliberate japery, of course, on "Das Rheingold". And there were... I distinctly recall that several of the people that were doing that were also people that were at the First or Second Tournament. So it's all right there in the mid 60's. You remember this is in the middle of that enormous, yeast-like cultural phenomenon that was the San Francisco Bay area in the mid 60's which was an era of, a renaissance era in the sense that trying things new was interesting. Almost everything was being questioned, not as to its worth, but as to whether it was the only way to do things. So there was a lot of ... that particular environment contributed a lot to the start of the SCA, also. But the immediate start, of course, was that Diana had come over to visit our flat on one occasion in early 1966, had seen the shields and swords, and she was a fencer at UC and got interested. And since we didn't have a backyard, we come over and used her backyard to do broadsword fighting in. We were using real heaters. We were using wooden swords (there's another story about that, too) and fencing helmets, saber fencing helmets which we had brought back from Germany. And that started the inkling in our minds, and especially in Diana's mind, of having a party and having a tournament. And if memory serves me, when she first said, "hey, let's have a tournament," our reaction was, "Yeah, right. That would never work. But you know, it's kind of a neat idea." So the net of it was that Diana hosted a tournament on May 1, 1966. I have given you a copy of the flyer for it. It was an interesting event. The people that attended, there were people from Mills College, that's where the madrigal group came from, people from UC-Berkeley including a fellow, a German fellow whose name was Deutsches Bursenschaft, or at least that's the name he fought under. We found out later on it meant German Student Union, but he never saw him after the First Tournament. So there were some fencing people from UC-Berkeley, there were some people from the local science fiction group in the Bay area, and some other acquaintances. And we'll talk more about some of the things that happened at that event a little later on, but probably the important thing was that it was really a very magical day, and that led afterwards to people thinking "Gee, that was neat. Maybe we ought to try it again." Now I mentioned Paul Zimmer and Don. Somewhere in early 1966, Don had come out from the East Coast and he was staying with Walter and Marion Breen in Berkeley. Paul was still back on the East Coast. He was not at the First Tournament I don't think. Or if he was, he had just gotten there and Don had been out for a while at the time. But the First Tournament was presided over by Dr. Elizabeth Pope who was a professor of medieval English and literature at Mills College, and who is the author of a book called Perilous Guard, by the way. And by Don who was being an archbishop. And the video of that, there is a video of that, shows that. There was a grand march and a blessing of the swords. The blessing was pretty interesting because it was "Ecce eduaidus uisus scalis nunc tump tump tump occupitas gradis pulsnate pust Kristopheius Robinus descendens (Siegfried thinks and I hope)which, of course, is "Winnie the Pooh goes thump, thump, thump down the stairs after Christopher Robin" in Latin. But it sounds very good when it's done like a Gregorian chant. We obviously did fighting, we had some dramatic readings. We had a scene from a play done by a troop of Spanish players. We had a Maypole dance. Madrigal singing. One of the singers from Mills College was named Marynel Hodghead and she later became my first wife. Her father came over to drop her off, saw what was going on, whipped back, he had made a crossbow and a longbow, he brought the crossbow back and we tested the shields by firing crossbow bolts at them. And I, for years, had the arrowhead from that bolt, it was not a 4-pointed head. It was a two-pointed head like a hunting arrow and it curled up when it hit my shield. So I had this curled up arrowhead and, of course, the shaft had snapped, that I kept until my house burned down in 1974. It burned with it. From an SCA point of view, subsequently, the really significant things that happened, first of all was probably the invitation for people to wear garb from (I forget how we cited it) but from Christendom or Outremer or Fairie or any realm in which swords were used. That was the original key. We invited people to tournament for that it was spring and fighting was billed on the initial flyer, obviously. We had the weapons that Ken and I had made, the majority of which got broken during the course of the day, of course. We hadn't found rattan yet. And there was a knighting. David Bradley, who was Marion's ...

Crag: I want to go back at this point and describe the rest of the things that make that a scene in your mind. Tell me the weather and how many people were there.

Siegfried: OK. Sure. My recollection is there were about 35 or 40 people at the First Tourney. It was in Diana's backyard and her backyard was very large and it had a garage sort of at the far end of it. This was in south Berkeley on Oregon Street. Roughly, for people that know Berkeley, it was Oregon Street between what was then Grove Street and one block up. I think the 1900 block, 1920 Oregon is what sticks in my mind, although it's on that flyer. It was on the first of May. The day was bright and shiny. The weather was probably in the low 70's. The event was scheduled from 12 to 6. Ken and the lady that came with him and I and the lady that came with me... this is embarrassing, but I haven't seen her since that one event, so I honestly don't remember her name, which is very embarrassing. But I have a photograph of her. We had fairly good looking clothes. We had done some attempt to pull together decent garb and as you'll see in the video if we get a chance to look at it or some of the pictures. So along about noon or 12:30, there were about four people there: Diana and her roommate, Molly (I've got it written down somewhere. She had other roommates, but Molly was the other one who really participated in the thing) and Ken and I and our ladies, I think, had just gotten there and we're all standing around wondering if this thing is going to come off. And people started to arrive then. And then, as I said, it was a lovely day. The weather wasn't too hot. Enough people were in some form of costume. Many of the people came as historical characters or as fantasy characters. The...Astrid Anderson, Poul and Karen Anderson's daughter, came as Queen Lucy of Narnia. Remember this was a one-of. There was no attempt to try to define an SCA or anything like this. We were just holding a glorious tournament for that it is spring, and we'd asked people to come from some realm in which swords were used and by extension chivalric concepts. So you got people that were doing the historical thing and you got people who were doing the fantasy thing and people who came as historical characters and so on and so forth. But it was quite all right, really, because nobody really tried to play the character or the historical person they were supposed to be, that it merely dictated how they chose to dress. The day, as it progressed on, seemed to be sufficient in it's own right. The fighting was very interesting. It was very primitive by today's standards. There was one, and only one, shield made out of the top of a garbage can and it, in fact, was spray-painted black, and that was borne by Aeginius the Gladiator who fought with trident and net and that shield. There's a myth running somewhere around that we were doing this thing with trash can lids and sticks and it wasn't quite true. But...I think the thing was the vast majority of people there, other than maybe one or two people, had chosen to come in some form of garb, some form of costume, but they were drawn from all different periods and all different histories. So you can see a couple of the origin traits of the SCA already. You can see the request for costume of some period that we deemed to be within the domain of what we were doing. The notion that everybody there is a participant. Not confining it to any one particular historical or fantasy theme. The...David fought very well. And, in fact, in one fight about two thirds of the way through the day, he managed to beat his uncle. Paul had to be there because Paul fought. That's right, because David beat him.

Crag: Now, we're going to go back to where I pulled you off on the digression about David.

Siegfried: OK. David was David Bradley. That's his real name. His SCA name now is Ardral Argo ver Kaeysc. He was the first Knight of the SCA because I knighted him on May 1, 1966. He was being my squire, OK? He fought really well, he beat Paul and so we had a field knighting. Again, this was in the context of a one shot event. It was something that was appropriate for the time. It felt right. It went well. It looked wonderful. And nobody had the foggiest notion that this thing was going to grow up into a 4,000 pound gorilla.

Crag: He was heralding at that event?

Siegfried: David was being the herald at that event, but he was also fighting. You'll see him in the video. He was about 14. Most of the other folk simply were being called "Sir" Whatever, but if you go back and you look at the really early TI's, you will find that it wasn't until a couple, three years in, that people really started to firmly use SCA names. You'll find, for example, the article that I wrote in the first TI's will be under Dave Thewlis rather than Siegfried von Höflichkeit because to some degree, we were still using our own names then. We hadn't formalized, and the formalizing of the names started to come around 12th Night II. Came around 12 Night II because by that time you can see that we were using people's SCA names when we actually went through knighting ceremonies and things like that.

Crag: OK. Tell me about knighting David. What went through your head? You said it was within a context, but...?

Siegfried: Well, it was in the context, clearly it was in the context of having...of doing a tournament. Clearly Ken and I, being the people that had started the fighting were the people who started this kind of tradition. You might say we were the...at that point we were more senior fighters than anybody else there by virtue of having started the thing up.

Crag: You'd been doing it for about three years?

Siegfried: Uh, no. We had been fencing for about three years. We had been doing this kind of thing for about a year at that point. I'm not real sure, to be honest with you, 'cause I can't remember, just how many other people that were there, other than Diana, knew that we actually been doing that sort of thing very much, but it wasn't much of a problem for people to at least make a stab at putting on one of the fencing helms and a saber gauntlet and try to fight this stuff. Well, you see, there's very little of what we would consider appropriate science and such now. The reason that I was the one that knighted David was that David was being my squire. So when it became appropriate to knight him or when it felt right, that would be the thing to do and I honestly think I did it on the spur of the moment. We were having a tournament. It was a wonderful day. David had been fighting well and then he really did something that was quite remarkable or seemed to be quite for a 14 year old in defeating an elder and doing it very well. So we stopped the event and I had David kneel down and I whipped out my sword, and I had a real sword, and did what would be called a field knighting at the time. There was no ceremony other than simply the left shoulder, right shoulder, head. Right shoulder, left shoulder, head, depending on which way you're looking at it from. I've generally seen it from the point of view of doing the knighting rather than being knighted. So I think of it left shoulder, right shoulder, but that's OK. After 30 years it's difficult to recall specific details and I do not believe the knighting ceremony is on the tape that was made at the time. And it would have been nothing more than an entirely appropriate part of the day and if we hadn't gone on. But it turned out to be one of the key phenomena. And it turned out to be a key phenomena in the sense that later on when we got into the debate as to whether we were going to have Kings and the historical traditions and so on. And when we decided we had, we deliberately decided to regularize things to recognize knightings that had taken place prior to the point at when we did this. So in a sense by doing that we created the bootstrap concept and the so-called grandfather clause, and regularized that and incorporated into the SCA one of the fulcrum issues that was going to make it a success which was the existence of Knights. In the article I wrote "Why we have Knights" I talk somewhat about the reasons why I think that was as important as it was, but I can no more claim that I was doing it with that deliberate intent, that I can claim that we deliberately intended the SCA to grow up and become what it is today. Although I have been occasionally asked, usually by some dewy-eyed 17 year old, "Did you really think it was going to turn into this when you started?" and I usually say, "Absolutely, up till the point that you'd be standing here talking to me about this on such and such a date." And I actually once had this young girl look at me an say, "Really?" Terrified me.

Crag: So David was knighted. What accouterments or chivalry did you wear that day?

Siegfried: Did I wear?

Crag: You were a Knights. You wore a sword.

Siegfried: I can show you, as a matter of fact, because the pictures are here but I was certainly wearing a sword because I had one, I brought a nice sword back with me from Europe. I was not wearing a white belt because we hadn't invented those at that time. And it doesn't look like I was wearing spurs because we hadn't built those into the ceremony until later. They were part of traditional knighting ceremonies and that's why we built them in. So really the only accouterment of what we called a Knight today that existed at the time were swords. And both Ken and I actually had real swords. But you can see that's Ken and I there.

Crag: Beautiful belt.

Siegfried: The belt was... the wide belt I made and that was leather and various brass studs and such. The sword belt is, would you believe, a quick draw holster belt? Because the sword I had came back with, I had made a holder for it...the sword hung straight down. It was of an appropriate length to do that.

Crag: Or a hammer.

Siegfried: Yes. Not that I tried to fight with that because that was a real hammer.

Crag: There's the garbage can.

Siegfried: That's...notice the axe painted on it? That is Aeginius the Gladiator's. He came with that and he came with trident. You'll see some fighting done with that later on, didn't work very well, but...that fellow, by the way is Richard the Short, now Duke Richard of Mont Real.

Crag: How would you blazon that?

Siegfried: The...my arms or the thing? Sable a labrus argent.

Crag: Tell me the story about...

Siegfried: If you want to blazon my arms you have a problem because the heralds argued for years because I have that section very stylized on my arms. The heralds argued for years over whether that was a cross or whether it was a star or whether it was a mullet or four points elongated in one direction, and so on, and finally with real economy of interest, Ioseph, who was herald at the time, said, "Why don't we call it “a Siegfried's sword” and be done with it?"

Crag: Josepf Alaric?

Siegfried: No, Ioseph of Locksley.

Crag: Ioseph of Locksley.

Siegfried: He was the Laurel King of Arms in the mid 70's.

Crag: So he was Atenveldt.

Siegfried: He was Atenveldt. Still is.

Crag: Anything else of that first tourney that clicks?

Siegfried: Well,...

Crag: The fellow that came back...

Siegfried: The guy who came back with the crossbow, his name was Beverly Hodghead and he became Master Beverly. He was one of the first two Laurels. He was the artificer. He made the first crowns. He was active in the SCA for years and he finally died a few years ago and he was active until he died. And his wife, Elen Crossquills, was also...active is sort of the wrong word because when they got up into their 70's, they weren't going to be wildly active, but they still came to events. They were kind of instrumental because I wound up marrying Marynel in September of 1966 and that was, in fact, the first medieval wedding. We have that on tape as well. And as a result, their living room, the Hodghead's living room, became sort of a center for a lot of the early political discussion of what the SCA was and where it was going especially through 1967. So you'll find references to that in various places. But Beverly because of his profession, he was a master machinist, so he was very good at making things, although he tended to overbuild things, too. Made the first royal pavilion and he made the entire framework out of pipe. Iron pipe. The things wouldn't fall down very easily, but it weighed an enormous amount.

Molly Kidcombe was the name of Diana's roommate. I would say...the important thing here was that the aftermath of the first tournament...by the way, there's a story in there, it's quite true, about marching up Telegraph Avenue to the UC campus protesting the 20th Century. I don't know that you'd call it a protest exactly. We all got together and did a walk in garb up Telegraph Avenue, but it was fashionable to have protest marches at that time. This was early '66, so it was the SDS and things like that, that were happening. So it was...then we all came back and we had a bonfire in Diana's backyard that evening where we burned all the broken weapons and talked over what had happened. And subsequent to that, Diana, of course, went off into the Peace Corps that summer. She was gone by the beginning of June. But several of us had enjoyed ourselves enough and there had been enough interest and magic to it to want to start doing a second one. And at that time we were probably getting together and talking about doing this at Marion and Walter's place which was on Arch Street in North Berkeley. And so, Marion was the person that went off and got, reserved the site at Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland for the second tournament. And they asked her what the name of her group was and she snatched “Society for Creative Anachronism” sort of out of the air to have a name. That's where the name of the SCA came from. And so since she and Walter were the people that made the arrangements, or at least were the center of making the arrangements, they got to be what we called the Supreme Autocrats and sit on the thrones and the tourney played to them. But the first tourney, it played to "the judges" which were Elizabeth Pope and Jon de Cles (or Don Studebaker). The second tourney played to Walter and Marion.

Crag: You said in your outline, "Initial lessons - lath swords don't last."

Siegfried: That's entirely true. One of the real problems we had was figuring what to make swords out of. Maces weren't so hard. Especially if you used old socks which is a fine old tradition. But swords broke unless you made them out of hard wood and made them so heavy that they broke you. So until we found rattan, there were a lot of experiments of a lot of different kinds of things. But the original swords we're using there had been made by taking wood and cutting it down and shaping it. And it just snapped if you hit too hard.

Crag: "Fencing is incompatible" you said.

Siegfried: I really mean two things about that. First of all, fencing if you have learned to be a foil fencer was incompatible with what we were doing because of its stylism, because of the ritualized nature of it, because it was so far removed from the actual use of the things as weapons. And also because of the way of calling blows or calling touches and such. Also what had happened was, we had at that event the German fellow that showed up, Deutsches Bursenschaft was a fencer. So he wanted to fence and so we tried to find...we have a couple of fights where he was using a foil while the other person was using a sword and shield. The problem with that turned out to be the rules were so different that it wasn't even interesting to find who might beat the other. They didn't mix very well. You can do one or you can do the other, but you can't have one person effectively using a foil and the other person using a shield and sword and have an interesting fight. Unless you want to kill someone one way or another. You won't do it with a foil. You might do it with dueling swords. Even then whether or not the person with the dueling sword would neatly thrust in and wipe out the other person and they'd be unable to block the thrust is arguable because it obviously depends on skill. But what we found was, we had a couple of fights where one person was using fencing stance, the other person was trying using sword and shield and it didn't work well together on way or the other.

Crag: "Judging by eye is a tricky process."

Siegfried: Is that the reference to the photo finish?

Crag: Probably.

Siegfried: Let me go back and find my set of notes here. Well, it is. What we were doing at that particular event was that when somebody landed what looked like a good blow, then there was sort of a little informal discussion as to would it have been good enough and what would have happened. That ultimately evolved into our custom of get a blow and lose your arm and so on. But we discovered it is extremely hard from the outside to tell what was going on. And I think one of the reasons, for example, that you find in fencing, you have evolved from any touch being good enough, the touch itself is the score, is because it's very hard to tell how hard “hard enough” is. And that's, of course, the kind of thing we're trying to deal with in SCA fighting. The photo finish issue is another thing. The final fight, and you'll see it on the film, was between Aeginius the Gladiator, who was later Richard the Short and even later Richard Mont Real, and Deutsches Bursenschaft. And for that fight we made the German fellow, we told him, "No, you're not going to do the foil fencing business. You're going to use a sword and shield." And Richard did. The German guy won. And he got his thumb broken in the process. He named somebody, and you know, we don't even know anymore (at least I don't know who it was), but somebody who was there, some lady became the maid who was Queen of the May or whatever it was we called the lady of the winner. And Deutsches Bursenschaft went back to Germany and nobody ever heard from him again. And he probably has this strange memory of 30 years ago, 'cause he'd be about my age now. But the interesting thing was that later on, Marynel, who became my first wife, had her super 8 movie camera there and that's why we have films of the first tourney. Later, when those were developed and people looked at it, they came to the conclusion that Richard had landed a blow that the German guy hadn't counted before the German guy got him. And consequently, based on that, they decided that really Richard had won the first tournament after all. Now, in part that had several consequences, by the way. One of them was that it was by no means a universal agreement, but it was a very pragmatic one, because the German guy was no longer around and Richard was around, and Richard felt very strongly that he had won and was making a bit of a point about it. But the net of it was to leave everybody with an extremely uncomfortable feeling about judging from outside what is so hard to tell even inside and that started the trend that led to not having judges, that led to being on your honor and calling the blows yourself. And Richard had fought for Marynel so she was named his lady. Later on you'll find that until the second year, none of the tournaments were fought to name your lady to become King or to make your lady Queen although the second tourney was fought to name your lady "Queen of Love and Beauty" and so was the matron of it in 1967. Those were the two tournament that Fulk won, interestingly enough. The net of it is when at Twelfth Night 1968, we regularized things, one of the things we said, original grandfather clause, was that everything in precedence would be held to the rule that said we were using the customs we had just established all along. So that, therefore, Richard is held to actually have become King after winning the first tournament, even though we weren't having a King then. So his date as Duke in precedence is set from the date his successor won after he had won his second tournament in 1967, even though we weren't really having Kings quite yet then anyhow.

Crag: So, moving on to June 25th when we had the second event that you were telling me about and they were playing to the Breens.

Siegfried: That was held in a very nice little park, in Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland which was sort of a little bowl with...

Crag: Joaquin Miller, I think, was a poet?

Siegfried: Well, he was a naturalist.

Crag: "I think I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree."

Siegfried: Possible.

Crag: Go ahead.

Siegfried: In any case, the park's up in the Oakland hills, the north Oakland hills. Sort of a little bowl with a lot of trees and forest around. That was, I believe, the first tournament which a fellow named Owen Hannifen showed up. He was from Los Angeles, later on Los Angeles, at the time, I think he was living in the Bay area and he became one of the first Knights. His name by that time was Karl von Acht. There used...Marynel had film of that, but the films have been lost and that had one of the most hilarious sequences in the history of the SCA, because that was the attempt to have aluminum swords. He'd made himself a couple of swords out of aluminum pole. So there was this sequence of strike a blow, stop the fight, straighten out the sword, start the fight, strike a blow, stop the fight, straighten out the sword and so on. So we learned very quickly that aluminum swords weren't really effective either. As I said, leading up to that was the naming of the Society by Marion, and the institution of the supreme autocrats being by intention the people that did the work to put the event on, or the people that organized the event, and therefore got to sit on the thrones and have the play toward them. It was fought, the lists were fought to name your lady Queen of Love and Beauty. And at this time, since there weren't anything...well, this was still only the second event, but as we went on from there, the lists were the lists. I mean there weren't other lists, 'cause the only events were what we would now call a crown event for the first couple of years. Mandatory costumes policy, that was where we come to the conclusion that at the very least we weren't interested in playing to an audience. Every one who showed up ought to wear appropriate garb. We had medieval music, The Consortium Antiquam, showed up led by a fellow named Alfonso de Castile who was the second..one of the first two Laurels. His was for music. This was a group, they played medieval musical instruments. They were sort of a West Coast Musica Antiqua. In that period of time, I was actually doing some recording for them, recording a demo tape.

TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO

Crag: Once I could do, twice not. Also I found out a very interesting thing once upon a time, that you can't tell the story twice.

Siegfried: Not the same way. I've told much of the story enough times that it...i'm rather consciously not telling the way I usually tell it because the edges are fairly worn down on that story.

Crag: Continuing where we took our tape break. I was...we finished with the Consortium Antiquam.

Siegfried: Right.

Crag: I was about to ask you,...now, Fulk won for Mary of Tamar. Besides the humorous story, did you remember anything else about any of those fights? You didn't tell me about either of your fights, any of your fights in the first two tournaments.

Siegfried: Because I don't remember a lot about them. First of all, the first tourney clearly...we had at least six people had won at least...everybody was sort of issuing challenges. That was another thing about the first tourney was there was challenges. Everybody was challenging people with a fine disregard for sensibility for whatever weapons were available, toothpick and rhinoceros or what have you. So it was just...there wasn't an organized list, but we got to the point where I think it was six people had won two fights and we went into an actual list to determine the winner. And that was a single elimination list. And I lost, maybe to Fulk, but I don't remember for sure. But as I said, ultimately, Richard and the German guy were the ones that were finalists.

Crag: And they were both kind of natural athletes that had not played much.

Siegfried: I would say this: The German guy was, first of all, he was in gorgeous shape. He was a competition fencer. He was really, really good. So disregarding what the issues would be of equally capable, fencers and broadsword fighters, or equally trained ones, if you tried to put somebody who has never tried to fight broadsword and shield up against somebody who's a competition level fencer, you can be really sure that the guy with the broadsword is going to get plinked a fair number of times. And that's one of the reasons why...that was another element in the fencing and what we were doing doesn't mix. It really was less that the forms don't mix, but the level of skill didn't mix. Richard was as much determined as anybody else. He's a short guy, he's not squat, but he's extremely compact. Very tough, extremely tough. He also has one other trait that led us into one of the two enormous fundamental debates in the first years and that is psychologically, Richard is one of those people who believes that you need to have a set of rules and anything that isn't explicitly forbidden is legitimate. The classic sports role of approaching things.

Crag: We have a few of those in Calontir.

Siegfried: Yeah. Richard was the fellow that invented kicking people's shields aside so you could hit them because he was very quick on his feet. Disregarding the fact that if you tried that in real life, your foot would probably be chopped off, but since the rules said you couldn't hit below the knee, then he could stick his foot out and kick your shield aside and the worst that might happen would be that he might get a bruise on his foot. Or something. And even then it would be unchivalrous of you to hit his foot. So he really feels...his approach towards life and his approach towards fighting in the SCA was there are a set of rules and you fight by those rules. And what the rules say you do and if the rules don't say, then you can do what you please and anything goes. So within the rules, anything goes so long as you win. He did not subscribe to fighting according to a philosophy unless the philosophy were whatever isn't forbidden is legitimate. Now the other point of view is that we were trying to build this according to a kind of chivalric tradition that ought to lead to a kind of common understanding and, I hesitate to use the word "Code of Honor", but a common approach to what we're doing that shouldn't lead to that kind of lots of rules and judges watching and things like that. And that was the start of the great debate and probably the two, the people who were fundamentally on opposite sides of that were Fulk on the one side and Richard on the other. I wouldn't say that either of those is intrinsically wrong or right. I would say...I have a personal prejudice towards the chivalric tradition approach and I think that's actually what the SCA is all about. But it would be idle to suppose that everybody has always believed that. And we have always had some problems with that kind of thing. People that don't grasp or don't find convenient the notion that you fight according to a premise of ... to the set of premises that are built into the chivalric tradition from which come things like, some things, even in the first tournament, such as if your opponent loses, loses his sword arm and has to throw away his shield, you throw away your shield as well and things like that. That has subsequently in recent years, I guess, codified into something where it's almost a set of rigid rules in some places, point of honor and so on, which to my mind doesn't have a lot to do with the chivalric tradition either, but that's yet another discussion.

Getting back to the second tourney, Richard showed up at that tourney with an enormous sword that he had carved out of solid oak. It was extremely heavy. He's a very strong man and he could use it, but it was extremely dangerous, 'cause it weighed a lot. And it wasn't going to break, clearly, but his take on it was that if you weren't willing to face that sword, well, he won by default. So there was a lot of debate about that and I think that was the start of the antipathy between he and Fulk as far as the approach toward what we going on. That later turned into...they had two or three fights over the course of the next year to year and a half that were not particularly edifying. Because they were very, very close to grudge matches. And a lot of it boiled down to the fact that Richard felt that the people that were talking about the chivalric tradition and so on were essentially saying that they wanted things to go according to a set of rules that they devised as insiders and if you didn't naturally feel that way you just couldn't play. And the other point of view was that Richard was trying to operate according to a set of rules that said essentially that anything goes unless somebody's already invented a rule against it. Sort of what happened to the NFL and the Raiders where people kept inventing new rules every time the Raiders found a loophole. And that they weren't interested in building a sport where you had to have a bunch of judges watching with eagle eyes and inventing new rules as people found new ways around them. That it didn't fit into the custom. So there was this dynamic kind of seething in the background. And that monster sword was one of the things that helped to contribute to it.

But the net of it was that Fulk did win and...you remember the first tournament the flyer I gave you said the reason why you are fighting is to crown your Queen of the May or something like that. The second tournament, "Crown your lady Queen of Love and Beauty." And I think that was the code word we used at the third tourney as well. But Fulk won. It was a lovely day. There were probably about 50 people at that event. And the next thing...that was June 25th, 1966 and the next thing that really happened was the first medieval wedding which was Marynel and myself. That was in Berkeley, California in September...somewhere around September 9th. That's on the video as well, not surprisingly, since her family made a fair amount of Super 8 film out of it. As an aside, what happened was that years and years and years after 1966, Henrik of Havn, who at the time was called Henrik the Dane, got interested in making motion pictures and such, went around and tried to collect as much early film as he could find and capture it, make a copy of it and record it on video. And the film that I have, the early stuff, was the stuff that Marynel was able to dredge up from the first tournament and wedding, the third tournament, there's stuff in there from April '67 which would have been the fifth tourney. And there's some other sequences from later on as well. But there's a lot of film I know existed that has vanished. And, although there may be many people who have photographs of those early events, I certainly don't because most of my photographs of the early events died when my house burned down. So you've seen most of what I have from everything prior to 1974.

Crag: Fighter practices.

Siegfried: Fighter practices. They started up somewhere in the summer of 1966 about the time we actually found rattan. And Fulk and I found rattan. We found it in a little shop on San Pablo Avenue near Gilman in Berkeley and it was a Cost Plus kind of place, but it sold some rattan furniture and in the back the had a bunch of sticks of rattan. We found the stuff and sort of looked at each other with wild surmise, like “Stout Cortez,” and said, "Aha." And bought a bunch of it and went and tried to make swords out of it, and found we'd actually found something that worked. And it took about 13 milliseconds for that to become the material of choice to make weapons with in the SCA.

Crag: Tangent. Several years ago, I was visiting with Bela of Eastmarch, and Bela said that he quit fighting in the SCA after he had made this long beautiful oak sword and then suddenly we switched to rattan and he just didn't have the time and energy to build another. Tell me about Bela and his involvement. He's a neat person.

Siegfried: He's a very neat person. He, as you know, was one of the people we made a Knight in 1968. He'd stopped fighting, as I recall, by then. He is also a Knight of the Silver Molet and we'll get back to that later on.

Crag: Describe him then.

Siegfried: Bela? He's about 6'4", he's extremely thin, Danish extraction. Very...he's kind of long, loose-limbed, gangly and kind of ungainly. He's one of those people that sort of looks like he's all hands and feet some of the time. And he wasn't a natural fighter at all. He did it because he thought it was absolutely wonderful and marvelous and neat that somebody was doing this kind of thing and he threw himself into it with everything that he had, but he did not have any of the instincts or natural grace of movement.

Crag: He must have been 40 then.

Siegfried: He's older than I am so, I honestly don't know how old he was. Astrid (his daughter) would have been about... well, she would have been about 12 then, but you won't believe it when you see her on the film. She was an early developer. But I would guess he's in his late 60's now, so he would at least have been in his late 30's then. Might be in his 70's now, I'm just not sure.

Crag: Had he written any of his medieval fantasy/science fiction things, or did they come afterwards?

Siegfried: That's a good one. Three Hearts and Three Lions I think was written before the SCA started, but I think it was written in the early 60's.

Crag: Out of that, out of that same post-Tolkien, new (?).

Siegfried: Hard to say. Bela is a scholar. He really knows his stuff.

Crag: Again. Poul Anderson.

Siegfried: Yeah, Poul Anderson. His...most of his early writing was science fiction, as you know. He could write pure, he could write pure history if he wanted to, or pure historical fiction. The closest he came with that was probably been The Broken Sword. But his interest in history is always with the mythic tradition that's associated with it, of course. He's written a couple of pastiches. You'll find Ken and I in two of his books if you know where to look.

Crag: Which ones are those?

Siegfried: Oh, God. One of them is in the Polesotechnic League stories. It's been so long since I've read them, I'd have to go back and look. I'll try to do that and tell you, but it's...(sotto voce) what is the name of that? Sorry, I can only tell you that they were written after we got to know Poul which would have been after 1964.

Crag: When did that one that he wrote that had the Tavern in the Middle of Time? That always struck me as an SCA related.

Siegfried: Well, I'm not real sure. That...I know what you mean and you may be talking about A Midsummer Tempest.

Crag: Could be, yes.

Siegfried: A Midsummer Tempest is extremely interesting because it's written entirely in blank verse, iambic pentameter, except for the two chapters that take place in the Tavern out of Time. If you go and read it, you'll find that it's essentially a gigantic Shakespearean blank verse epic. And it's a tremendous job. However, the Tavern out of Time appears in other Poul stories as well. It's in...he's got some quasi-magical thing... boy, it's been so long since I've read some of these that it's real hard to remember. But certainly...what would have been late '64 is think it was, four of us, Ken and I and Mary and Judy went to a costume party at Poul Anderson's house and I went as Dominic Flandry...Sir Dominic Flandry is Poul's hero in his empire stories. He's something of an interstellar James Bond I think would be the closest parallel you could get. But an interesting character nonetheless. So it was a bit of lese majeste in a way going as one of Poul's characters. And I don't think he minded particularly. That was the party I remember primarily because Bob Heinlein was at it. My memory has he and Poul getting really snockered and doing a Mexican hat dance on this enormous sombrero that Poul had brought back from Mexico years earlier. But I have to be a little careful about that because that also could have happened at something else 30 years ago that I was told about. But my recollection is that that was the only time I actually met Bob Heinlein. And I also remember being yelled at by Jack Vance on the grounds that I was wearing a costume because he felt it was very inappropriate that people actually try to live out any of the fantasies, that you should sit down and write them. It was really strange. It was an odd conversation. But, and in a sense I suppose that might have been one of the things that helped to get to the SCA later, but I'm not real sure it was one way or the other.

Crag: During this period of time, ... go ahead an finish about Poul.

Siegfried: Well, what I was going to say was, there was somewhere along about... real early in the SCA, as I recall, I had a conversation with somebody who asked me whether or not the... whether or not I was attempting to deny reality by being in the SCA. What I said was, "I don't deny reality, but I refuse to be constrained by it." And I think that's probably a better description in general for the state of being of the SCA in people's minds, anyhow. It's not so much that most of us are out there denying reality, but we don't see any reason why that should be the only reality we have. Whatever reality is in the mind of the person asking this. Think of it as cultural enrichment.

Crag: With Poul, his period of fighting was in the wooden era?

Siegfried: Well, his period of fighting... by 1967... let me back up. In the first couple of years of the SCA, originally we hadn't found rattan yet, so we were still experimenting. And even by 1967, there was a lot of experimentation going on as far as weapon forms and weapons being used. We had, on the one end we had little throwing javelins and stuff like that and maces and 4' long mauls and so on. And people trying to make axes. And we had, the first weapon ever banned in the SCA by the way, was a morningstar, a morgenstern. You know what those are, right. The ball with spikes and a chain. And we found that the problem with them was, and it was a special case of the general case of trying to make effective fake weapons, right? With the morgenstern, the problem is that either it doesn't behave like the real one or it does. And if it doesn't behave like the real one, you can't do anything useful with it, and if it does, you kill somebody. And that's due to the nature of a weapon with a chain on it and how it delivers kinetic energy. But we had, by April of 1967, by a year out, we had definitely had rattan. We had zwei-handers, swords that were modeled after double-handed broadswords of the landsknechts, 6 1/2', 7' long swords with 2 1/2' handles and one hand just in front of the crossbars. Those things started to illustrate another problem which was the the bigger and longer you start making rattan swords, the less they weigh or behave like the real thing. 'cause these things had a whip effect to them. You learned to fight with them, you'd throw a blow at somebody, push the weapon in with the outer hand, and then jerk it back and let the head snapping it to deliver the blow and actually curl a little bit around. Those were really dangerous. I nearly had a knee taken out by one of those at the, I guess it was the Midsummer Tournament in 1967. It was at Mills College at any rate. Ultimately, those and some other weapons got banned on the grounds that if we were going to retain anything that resembled the actual combat that we were trying to recreate, we were going to have to eliminate weapons which behaved so differently from the weapons of the time as cause you to evolve a wholly different kind of fighting or fencing to use them. That was the origin of Courts of Chivalry in the SCA, of course, was in order to judge weapons. And you'll even find in the early rules of the lists that this business of you can appeal a weapon to the Crown or the Crown's representative to use in that tournament, but then it has to be judged by a court before it can be used again. And that's where that came from. But Poul had really given up fighting by the end of the second year.

Crag: When did he, he told me his daughter was at the first..?

Siegfried: Yes.

Crag: And he came to pick her up a little bit early and was just fascinated, and that's when he came back and sat around and talked to people.

Siegfried: That's right.

Crag: Regretted intensely that he hadn't been part of that day. How did he seem, you were not a green college kid at that point. You'd already had military service, things like that. You were in graduate school, just living in Berkeley?

Siegfried: I was gainfully employed working as a computer programmer.

Crag: How did people relate to him?

Siegfried: In what sense? Most of them knew him well. Remember that, of the people at the first tourney, aside from the madrigal singers from Mills College, what you had was a mix of about 40% science fiction, and a total of 35, but 40% or more maybe 50% were people from the Bay Area science fiction community, and the other from a couple of universities. So most of them knew Poul. It wasn't as though they were meeting him out of nowhere. Poul is also an extremely diffident, self-effacing man. Unless you met him in the context of a science fiction convention or an author's workshop or something, you might not know even who he was. He's certainly not going to come up to you and say, "Hi, I'm Poul Anderson the famous science fiction writer. Kneel and kowtow." That is not his style. In fact, you may find it difficult to find out that's what he does for a living, because he's so interested in so many things, that you're liable to find yourself talking about what you're interested in and found out you have some common interest with him.

Crag: Tell me just while I'm on the track of that as a natural package. There were a number of other people that for a time floated with the SCA that we recognize now primarily as science fiction people. Jerry Pournelle.

Siegfried: Yeah. Jerry was Robert of MacKenna. Laird Robert of MacKenna. He, Poul brought Jerry into the SCA and Jerry was into SCA in the late 60's. He was interested in it. I think Jerry inclined a little bit more to...he never really fit really well with a lot of people and ultimately found that he had other things of more interest to him. And to some extent he may have fir a little bit more into Richard's notion of how rules ought to work than the chivalric tradition. Although it's hard for me to say. But I think ultimately Poul really felt that Jerry ought to be a Knight, and it hadn't happened, and it probably didn't look like it was going to happen. And Jerry just kind of lost interest after a while. But he was the person that provided a lot of the money necessary for the original incorporation.

Crag: The story of that?

Siegfried: I can't tell you the story of that because I wasn't there and I will tell you why if you want to know. But the, ... did you want to do that now or when we get to this? You gotta remember that the incorporation of the SCA was actually done as an attempt...as a palace coup attempt and it succeeded.

Crag: OK. I wasn't aware of that. The part of the story that I was pulling for was that...was the thing that I read several years ago that it was...Jerry Pournelle bought a helm form someone that was the first made SCA helm and paid $75.00 and that was used in the price of incorporation. And you told me Poul also...

Siegfried: I believe that Poul had as much to do with providing the money as Jerry did. That might be true. Although the first SCA-made helms came from one of two models. Henrik of Havn and I both made conical Norman helms. Well, mine was actually a spangenhelm and Henrik's was a conical Norman. And you've seen pictures of both of those in pictures I have had here. And both of those were, we were fighting in by the beginning of 1967. Meanwhile, Fulk had drawn up, out of whole cloth, designs for riveted great helms of the kind that came around, that bend around the back of the head, made out of plates with a teardrop-shaped top and then have a riveted sort of a cross piece across the face and came to a point there. And the first SCA manufactured helms other than the two conicals were according to Fulk's design. And then the third thing to happen was the attempt to make helms out of freon cans. And those were very popular in the late 60's and early 70's. Mostly it was people who hadn't quite figured out it was more work to do to follow Fulk's design. I am looking for something here. It's not on this piece of paper , so I can't say. It might be in something else I have. In any case...

Crag: We can come to that, the palace revolution at the appropriate point.

Siegfried: There's more than one in our history.

Crag: OK. Let's move on and just walk on down, walk on down your chronology...the third tournament.

Siegfried: OK. The important thing here...oh. fighting practices were happening in Berkeley. Edwin Bearsark started doing some.

Crag: That's Edwin Zimmer.

Siegfried: Paul Edwin Zimmer. He started doing some, I started doing some. We were starting to make weapons of rattan at this time and...right around then there was the third tournament...and Marynel and I had gotten married in early September. We went off on our honeymoon and I managed to thoroughly sunburn my feet. I couldn't even get into the boots I used for fighting. So consequently at the third tournament, I wasn't fighting. So I got to stand around and be earl marshal instead. So that was the first time we ever had an earl marshal that was an official job.

Crag: Where did the title come from? I mean...?

Siegfried: From the English term for...just the English term earl marshal.

Crag: Was it consciously used at that moment?

Siegfried: Yes. Yes it was. More importantly, however, the first official at that event was Clint Bigglestone, Harold of Breakstone, who was the herald. And you'll see him on the video as well. That was the first time he heralded an event. The last was 12th night 1968.

Crag: Was there something about the green tabards with the golden crosses that the heralds use that derive from his...?

Siegfried: It might be. I think he's wearing a green tabard in that, but green tabards, or tabard or some form, were not uncommon. However, the colors were set when the SCA colors were chosen. Then very deliberately some of those colors were chosen to be part ...most of the SCA heraldry and... the original attempts at serious armory came once Randall of Hightower got involved in the Society because he was extremely interested in heraldry. And so a lot of the stuff, the first armory, started to actually give people arms and so on didn't happen by 12th Night II. You'll find no references to Patens of Arms or anything then, but it started happening in 1969.

Crag: OK. Back to the third tournament.

Siegfried: First real armor. Henrik showed up wearing real chain mail and his helm at that event. The chain mail was made out of coat hangers. Henrik was a high school student at the time living in San Anselmo. And he had just taken a bunch of coat hangers and cut them up and wrapped them on a rod and made himself a shirt of mail.

Crag: Butt mail? Butted mail?

Siegfried: Butted mail. It wasn't welded at the time. And that's the shirt of mail and the helm that's in...

Crag: It's a fairly creditable...

Siegfried: Oh, it was an excellent job. I was working on mail at the same time and that's the camaille that's on my helm that showed up in March the next year, 'cause I didn't get it done till over the winter. The Queen...he fought, we were fighting to make her the Queen of Love and Beauty, and he won it and he did not have a lady at the time, so he chose a girl out of the crowd. Her name was Wendryn, Wendy,...

Crag: She showed up in Calontir last year and had no clue of what had happened in all the previous years.

Siegfried: Really? She finally popped up again?

Crag: Yes. She is on the faculty at a university up in the north part of the Kingdom.

Siegfried: Oh, I'd love to get in touch with her.

Crag: We faxed... I sent her some copies of some of the stuff that I had. Jog my memory and I will do that, because she was just sort of blown away when she saw some people out practicing. "I did something like that once."

Siegfried: Um, hm. Well, that's it. This particular...this is September of 1966 and mind you... remember the first tourney was held on the first of May. Right? "For that it is spring." And May Day seemed an appropriate day. The second tourney was held in late June. The third tourney was held in late September, and the nominal reason was it was Bilbo's birthday. You will also notice that whether by intent or by chance our tournament come very close to the equinoxes, the solstices and what would now be called the cross quarters. Which is to say May Day and the first of August and so on, and that's probably just because whether, whatever belief system you have, those tend to be important dates in human history. They're great days and consequently there was a tendency to do then to celebrate there. One slight effect of that was that for a very long time a lot of neo-pagans have found a problem going to SCA events. In some places, they happen on the same days as their religious holidays. Which is difficult, I suppose...I guess it's like being a Seventh Day Adventist if you don't believe in driving and you want to go to a tournament on a Saturday, you're kind of stuck. But, for a long time that was an issue. Morgensterns. This was the experimentation with a morgenstern and there were two of them. One of them had...

Crag: Morningstars.

Siegfried: Morningstar, yeah. It's a spiked steel ball with a chain and then a length of wood that attaches it. The problem with that is if you actually make the ball out of lead or steel, right? It's kind of like making a mace with a head of spiked steel 'cause there's a lot of energy in it, but the thing is, the only time I've ever seen the use of a morgenstern or a flail done appropriately was in a movie called "The Warlord" with Charlton Heston. And they show him galloping, swinging this thing, on a horse, around his shoulder like that, building up the kinetic energy and then just whaling. You can't swing it like that. Not if it's heavy, right? It's really, but there's a tremendous amount of kinetic energy in that thing when it hits. And if it's made out of something heavy and especially with spikes, it's really going to kill somebody or hurt them. On the other hand, if you make it out of rubber or old socks or something like that, it's just going to wobble around on the end of a chain and do no good at all. So it turned out we just couldn't make one that behaved anything like the real thing without doing serious damage. Here is where you see swords, iron, wood, lath, rattan becomes introduced, strange weapons forms. The armor at this point was still pretty much limited to fencing masks and gloves. Henrik had his mail and he was starting to try and fight in it at that time. But that was about the size of it. There was a music contest. Um, first earl marshal as in our, although we didn't institute that as an office for... till a little later. And Henrik won for Wendryn and I believe you'll see that on the video, and I hope you can get a VCR today.

Crag: That would be most marvelous to be able to show her some of that.

Siegfried: We'll see if it's there. I kind of think it is on that video, but I don't remember for sure, so we'll find out, but she'd certainly remember the event, especially if nothing's intervened, in the intervening years to kind of deaden it in her mind.

Crag: Anything...tell me about that weather. Was it...?

Siegfried: it was a beautiful...we had beautiful, beautiful weather. In fact, for years and years, the Society in the West Kingdom, before the West, because this is the Berkeley Society for Creative Anachronism. There were no Kingdoms at this point. Had just spectacular weather. Didn't even rain until 1970 on an event. So again, it was probably in the low 70's. It was clear. It was... this was up in Cragmont Park in the Berkeley Hills. Lovely day. This had gotten publicized. It had actually been announced on radio, KSAN, which was the alternative radio station in San Francisco. We had a ... a girl showed up named Dusty Rhodes and she was actually an announcer on KSAN.

Crag: I remember that name.

Siegfried: It was one of...there was a phrase for things that were occurring called “Happenings”, and in that context, I would say that the SCA was a Happening. And a lot of people would come to something and get interested and follow up on it.

Crag: About this time was when the Marin County...

Siegfried: Marin County.

Crag: Marin County Renaissance Festivals were starting.

Siegfried: That's next year. That's 1967. The Renaissance Fair started in Southern California in 1964 or 5, I'm not sure which. Ron and Phyllis Patterson who both taught school in Los Angeles, the original Renaissance Fair was a... a school fair to earn money for the school, and it was held in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. And the Ren Fair grew up, and I think that was somewhere around 1963, and the Ren Fair grew up from that. She was an elementary, maybe a kindergarten, elementary teacher. Grew up from that and then it moved into Northern California in 1967 and the SCA helped get it going up in northern California.

Crag: "Cause I went to that in '78, a trip...anyway, which was neither here nor there. OK.

Siegfried: you'll find a reference here to the 1066 party. And to be honest with you, I don't remember a thing about it. I don't even know if I was at it, although I think I must have been, but the name draws an absolute blank for me. Let's see if there's any reference in Hillary's work. Why don't you pause that for just a second while I rummage here? And we can also look at Wilhelm's stuff and see.

Crag: OK, we are...Henrik had practically come out of nowhere and to win that tournament. If that right, or has he been practicing a bit?

Siegfried: No, no. No, Henrik was at the first tourney. he...

Crag: Oh, that's right. He was.

Siegfried: he was the guy who had made... that had started working on equipment. He showed up at the second tournament...second or third tourney...

Crag: He was fairly young.

Siegfried: He was very young. He was still in high school. But he was definitely one of the early comers.

Crag: OK. We are ready to hit the first 12th Night.

Siegfried: OK. Now, the first 12th Night was.. I have it as January 6th, '67, and I think that's the right date at Mills College in Oakland. Mills College is kind of one of the instrumental places, too. Remember that Diana had gone there, and the group of singers, the choral group at the first tournament, had come from Mills. It's a girls' college in Oakland, and still is as far as I know. They have a really nice Union building that we used for events for several years until we grew out of it. And a field next door that we had tournaments at. And the first 12th Night was held at Mills. Which was the first non-fighting event of the thing. There's a note here that says, "fighting in hall," and I'm not sure what we meant by that because I don't remember there being any fighting at that event at all. What I do remember is that we did the Lord of Misrule which was... and that was Steve Perrin. He was either in high school or just started in college by that time, and he found that bean or whatever it was in the cake, and became the Lord of Misrule. And thus, in a sense became the first King of the SCA because he was the King of Misrule, but I think... I don't think anybody's ever made that claim.

Crag: That's Stefan de Lorraine.

Siegfried: That's Stefan de Lorraine. Now, the "Muckin' Great Clubbe" ... this requires a bit of backtracking now. You remember Don and Paul living up on the farm in New York that I knew. Well, Paul and Don and I had started back in the 60's when I was still overseas, jokingly collaborating on a book which was going to be called "The Tijuana Vikings". And the notion of the book, it was about a... you gotta remember this was the early 60's when we were doing this, and this was when the conformity culture of the late 50's was still very heavy on the land. So the protagonist was going to be one James A Baker who was going to be a commuter in New York or Philadelphia, I don't remember where, but who has the habit on his way to work of whenever he passes under the "S" sign in Kresge's, he actually stops and thinks about things for a couple of minutes. And one day he's doing this when he notices three or fours guys standing around in chain mail and war helms and things like that, totally invisible to everybody else walking by on their way to work. And so he gets taken up by them and wrapped up in a plan to steal a dragon ship that was allegedly built as a prop for a movie and sail around the Horn and sack Tijuana for some reason that we never quite found a reason for. But a fair amount of work went into this. Actually the...eventually in the fall of 1966... we had written the first three or four chapters, more or less together, and then in the winter of 1966, I actually sat down and wrote the rest of the book, and then rewrote the whole thing. Wrote a second draft of it. And it was fantasy wish fulfillment of the most remarkable sort. But it had Ken in it and I in it and Paul in it and Don in it and a fellow named Richard who was another friend of ours, and of course James Baker who was the commuter. And the characters in the book, well one of them was Siegfried and so on. And the characters were sort of consciously styled after Marion's nicknames. We did some illustrations. In fact, we did some very deliberate illustrations that had to be done to give me a feeling in writing of what the layout of the ship was and things like that. She was called "Sleipnir", of course.

Crag: Called what?

Siegfried: Sleipnir. After the...

Crag: Spell it.

Siegfried: S-L-E-I-P-N-I-R. The key to all of this was that those original writings kind of predated or led up to, or were in the period of time just before or during the start of the SCA. And to some degree, some of the illustrations that we worked out for armor, like one of the illustrations of the Siegfried character had the helm with the great big wings on it. And that's why when I built that helm, we built the wings out of aircraft aluminum. They actually came off the helm so I could fight in it. But I could put them on just to do that, just for the hell of it. And so in any case... the... in the midst of all of this, there's one event in about chapter four where they send Jamie down below on the ship to come up with some armor. And he comes back up and he's still got his business suit on, but he's got this ridiculous helm with horns that he's found somewhere , and a couple of others, and he's got this enormous club. Which is about 4' long with a great big nail through one end. Down in Bev Hodghead's basement, (my father-in-law when I married Marynel in September), I found this old hunk of lightning blasted elm. So just for the hell of it, I carved it into a club about this big and drove...

Crag: A large chunk of what?

Siegfried: Elm. E-L-M.

Crag: Oh, elm. The wood.

Siegfried: It was about... a little over 2' long, 2 1/2' long. Carved it into like a Neanderthal club, smoothed it. Put this huge nail through the end of it. Waxed it carefully and gave it to Ken de Maiffe, Fulk de Wyvern, as a Christmas present.

Crag: At this event?

Siegfried: At this event. I gave it to him as a Christmas present at this event. And he turned around and instituted an award for ferocity in... next year. Right? Later on in 1967 which became known as the Muckin' Great Clubbe. And to this day the MGC is given at each Crown lists in the West if the current holder feels that somebody fought ferociously enough. And it's given strictly for ferocity. Not intelligence. Not necessarily for winning. Just for being a ferocious fighter. Each person who has the club while they have it is supposed to be dedicated to put at least half a can of wax on it. And today if you hold the club up to the light, you can see a thin translucent coating that's probably well over an eighth of an inch thick. It's just the coatings of wax that have been put on this thing over 30 years. The most well-protected hunk of lightning blasted elm I've ever heard of. There was dancing, singing, various performances. There was one event that probably won't make it into your fictional history. Now remember, this is 1967. Well, somebody brought a great big batch of tapioca pudding to the... to 12th Night, to this event. And it was green tapioca pudding. They had laced it with marijuana. The... which might or might not have been a problem. Unfortunately, Marynel's mother, Ellen Crossquills, who is a remarkable...was a remarkable woman in several ways, but she loved tapioca pudding. She ate about 3/4 of the tapioca pudding and she was consequently stoned for the next three days and never found out what had happened. She would have been horrified to know what she'd actually eaten. And nobody was mean enough to tell her, even amongst the people who knew. And we only figured out what was wrong with the tapioca pudding when she sort of started walking into walls, behaving really strange and went back and found the remnants and tasted some and said, "My God. This stuff is really loaded with dope." And I have no idea who brought it. But, or course in the mid 60's that's the sort of thing that happened to some degree.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: That was, as far as I know, the most, that I can think of, of any thing like that ever happening. At least in the early days of the SCA. And that's definitely not a well known event, shall we say. But it was a grand party, and everybody enjoyed themselves a lot. And lead off to the fourth tournament which was March 25th, 1967, which was a Coronation and a Crown. Now, up to this...remember the first tournament is to name your lady Queen of the May or something, and Richard wins.

END OF TAPE ONE

Crag: Alright, we're up and running again.

Siegfried: OK. Where were we? We had just gone...to the fourth tournament.

Crag: We had just taken up...yes, you were recapitulating the final thing about 12th night because Stefan had been the King of Misrule. Now you're transitioning into the First Crown/Coronation.

Siegfried: Right. And the... well, what I was saying was at the very first tournament, we had neither a King nor a Queen. At the second tournament, it played to the Supreme Autocrats and Fulk, who won, crowned Mary of Tamar Queen of Love and Beauty. The third tournament Henrik won, and as I recall, he got to crown his lady Queen of Love and Beauty. Course she was from then on anyhow. We never saw her again. I think. Now there's some recollection in my mind that somebody saw her once more before she vanished completely from the Berkeley scene, but it wasn't anything that I know anything about other than this vague feeling. Comes the fourth tournament. The notes say it was the first March Crown Tourney. In fact, it had rained the night before and the field was extremely muddy, so everybody got very, very wet up to their knees. And this was where we actually created the institution of King. And what actually happened was that Fulk now, since I created David the first Knight, Fulk knighted Henrik. As I recall, in the name of the ancient institution of Knighthood or something like that. And then made him King. "I now crown you King of the Berkeley Society for Creative Anachronism" or some works to that effect. No formal ceremony. Most importantly, no crowns. But this was the first time that we now have the idea of playing to a presiding...the presider being the person who'd one the previous tournament. Wendryn wasn't there so the King presided over that. And now we had the first Crown list to determine the next King. OK? At this we also had the first usable helms, since Henrik had now built a great helm and mine was functional, Fulk's great helm design was working. So now we are at March 25th, so the SCA has existed a little bit over 11 months. We have the first couple of pieces of real chain mail. We've got workable helms. Some armoring is coming, although armor sort of took a long time in a lot of ways. At that event there was a...somebody showed up calling themselves Aragorn and irritated a whole bunch of people. That was the point at which some folks started to realize that they weren't real happy with taking the identity either of historical people or of mythical but known people. And I would say it did start to be the origin of the "establish your own identity" as a formal concept in the SCA. And one of the origin points of the differentiation between what you are in the real world and what you are in the SCA. Something that was also to come up again when we formalized Knighthood, but we'll see that later. We had a high school girl that tried fighting. That was very unfortunate because she made an awful lot of noise about it. The first time she got hit, she said, "ouch, don't hit me. I'm just a girl." And it kind of put women fighting back by a number of years as a result. Wish she hadn't, but what can you say? My notes say the first pavilion, but I don't recall a pavilion at that event. However, it's not surprising. I don't know that I would one way or the other. And Richard the Short, that was the fellow who fought as Aeginius the Gladiator in the First Tourney, he won fighting for a lady named Ann of San Anselmo. So that was the end of that event. Now here...the mode of operation we put into here was, at the beginning of each tournament now would be a Coronation or the recognition of the new King. That King would preside over the tournament that selected his successor, and then be King until the next tournament. So in essence, there's only a period of about five hours where you're not a lame duck King. But since nobody's thinking in terms of a King with power at this point, that didn't seem to be a big issue. This is just how it worked out. Because we wanted a presider, so it had to be the person who had won from a previous tournament in order to do it, but it never occurred...but since the coronation was going to be in front of everybody, it just wasn't practical to do it at the end of the last event. So we did it this way without thinking about it. Alright. So Richard wins. The fifth tourney was April 30, 1967. So that was the first anniversary of the SCA. This takes place in Cragmont Park, Berkeley. There Richard and Ann are made King and Queen. And at this event is the first attempt at establishing a knighting hierarchy, and that is the senior fighters, who are more or less the people who became the first Knights and Masters, wore red sashes. And you'll see that in the video. This event is on video, or parts of it. They are wearing red sashes to identify them. The organization's now growing. You've got more new fighters and so on, so it's not too surprising. This is the event at which Fulk instituted the Muckin' Great Clubbe, as far as I know for sure. This one was also fought to name your lady Queen of May. Fulk won it for Mary of Tamar.

Crag: And this is where you first started having real helmets?

Siegfried: No. That was the previous event. That was at the fourth tournament.

Crag: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes.

Siegfried: OK. And now we get to Year Two. The SCA's now a year old and at this point, this is when Tournaments Illuminated begins publication.

Crag: Whose idea was that?

Siegfried: Well, in a sense it was Don Studebaker, Jon de Cles, idea. Or the Red Baron. He usually called himself the Red Baron at this time anyhow, but underlying it all was the fact that Don had always wanted to have his own fanzine, science fiction fan magazine. And he'd never been able to get around to doing it. And Tournaments Illuminated in a sense was Don's ability to have his very own magazine. Originally, it very nearly was called "Better Keeps and Baileys", by the way, but Tournaments Illuminated seemed to be a better name, and what it was initially was was announcements of events and waivers because we were starting to do waivers very early on.

Crag: Waivers being authorizations.

Siegfried: fighting waivers, not authorizations. We weren't authorizing yet, but waiver of potential damage.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: The sixth tournament which is, a little bit of it is also on the video, is at Mills College in Oakland.

Crag: Can I go back and backtrack on paper?

Siegfried: Sure.

Crag: You had the second coronation at the fifth tournament.

Siegfried: Right.

Crag: You remember anything about that?

Siegfried: No, I don't.

Crag: Any coronets yet?

Siegfried: No. There were no crowns or coronets or anything of the sort, nor were we really, to be honest with you, doing Kings and Queens as such until 12th Night II. So while the people came in and so on, I don't recall it's being formal in the sense that we would think of a coronation now. And you'll see at the sixth tournament, how informal it was. "Cause at that event, Anne wasn't there so Diana took her place. Richard and Diana rode in with him on a motorcycle and her on a motor scooter. OK? Sort of a procession for the thing. Since this one we didn't have a new King and Queen, just one person, so we didn't have a coronation or anything. That's is another thing that helped to start kicking off the "what are we" debate. That's where it really heated up into high. The Aragorn had done a bit of it. The debate about are we fighting on our honor or are we fighting with rules had done a bit of it. But the motorcycles and so on really started the debating. And there are three different things going on more or less simultaneously.

Crag: This again was because Richard looked at it and said, "Well, this isn't specifically forbidden and it not..."

Siegfried: The rules versus tradition debate was... I use Richard as the focal point of it and at that time he really was, but the debate was in essence about whether or not the organization should have a specific set of combat rules that you followed and everything that wasn't forbidden was legitimate. Or whether we are trying to fight according to some more long standing chivalric tradition and so on. Well, that led us right into, “what are we doing it here? Are we doing historical recreation? Are we doing fantasies? We have something we call a King riding on a motorcycle. We have people who are consciously doing elvish things. So just what's the game?” Now the third thing to kick this over... part of it was the medieval versus fantasy debate. Part of it was the rules versus tradition. Part of it was the growing ill blood between Fulk and Richard, 'cause Richard was really the fulcrum of all of that. Part of it also was, unfortunately, the business of knighting Henrik. Because now we had two knightings and Richard... and it sounds like 'I'm bashing on Richard and I don't mean to be, but he was at the middle of some of the early things and there you are. Richard was saying "Well, I'm a better fighter than Henrik is, so why am I not being knighted?" Well, to be honest with you, the bottom line was Richard wasn't behaving with any of the attitudes that you would have expected a Knights to behave. And Henrik was. So regardless of how well Richard was fighting, we had a real problem on our hands there. At the same time, if we were being serious about what being Knights were, that was a different game than the SCA necessarily agreed to being playing up to now. So it was all stirring in the same pot. But the public face on it was well, we're not going to do any more knightings till we know what the hell we're doing and that's going to take a while to debate. And it did. It took the rest of the year. And it took one more terrific event to really finally bring the cauldron to a boil, and that was the tournament in September. Getting back to the sixth tournament for a minute. The Muckin' Great Clubbe went to Kerry the Rock as we said there. This was the first time we started to have people really doing costume... it wasn't quite costume nazis, but it was starting to pay attention to people's costume, people's outfits and costumes. Henrik won that. The revel had our first belly dancer which was Louise the Phoenix and the Louise that Steve Perrin eventually wed. This event is really strong in my mind because Richard the King got roaring drunk on the throne and we actually had to stop the fighting for an hour while he sobered up. What really bothered me about that one was ... well, there were two things about it, about that day. One of them was that was the event where I caught a great sword or zweihander on my left knee. And by the time the hour interlude when we sobered Richard up was over, my leg was froze n and I couldn't fight anymore. So I've always been a bit peeved at Richard for that because I think I would have won that tournament if it hadn't been for that, but of course, we'll never know. This was... may have been... well, I'm not sure... this may have been the event where we had an abduction that led to a confrontation in ...that had to have been somewhere else. There was one event (I can't remember when it was) when there was sort of an abduction and the people doing the abduction were sitting there... were in the trees with real bows and arrows aimed at the people coming after the abductee. Right? War arrows. And that led to "You're not playing the same game we are" King of thing. In any case... let's see... that's pretty well the sixth event. The next event that happened was at Westercon July 4, 1967.

Crag: Do you remember anything about the fighting that day? I mean besides yours?

Siegfried: Well, there was a lot more of it. The field was bigger.

Crag: Have you gone to a real list system now?

Siegfried: Had we then?

Crag: Still just everybody challenging.

Siegfried: The custom in the West Kingdom was essentially by this point, everything was challenges for a while and the... there were at first and then it sort of solidified into single elimination lists. And it was for a long time single elimination then it went to doubles eventually. This would start out, you would go challenge X, X would... somebody else would go challenge them. After everybody had fought a single challenge round, it went into the tourney. It wasn't that formal yet. It became a little more formal after 12th Night 68, and the reason it became more formal was because what happened in the West Kingdom then was that by custom Knights could enter the Crown Lists by Right, but other people entered by invitation. Now in the West Kingdom, the custom was anybody was welcome so long as they weren't either banned or something like that, that is to say somebody would be told no rather than told yes. But the way it worked over time was we... for the first round, we allowed as many non-belted fighters in as we had belted fighters. And then lined them up and each of the non-belted fighters got to challenge a belted fighter.

Crag: This was later?

Siegfried: This was a little later than this. Before this it was still a little bit more informal. It was challenge rounds...just challenge matches. Anybody fought anybody else for any reason and then it sort of solidified into the lists later on. Anybody who was going to fight, after the challenge matches, then everybody who wanted to fight sort of drew straws and then issued challenges for the first fights and then it just went up. But it was still very informal.

Crag: Course this was the tournament that Henrik won...wins the second time.

Siegfried: That's right.

Crag: Is he addressed as Sir Henrik? Tell me about the use of honorific.

Siegfried: At the very first ... well,...

Crag: The first tournament.

Siegfried: The very first tournament, my recollection is that the honorific was used a little bit, but not a lot.

Crag: You were Sir Siegfried.

Siegfried: Um... in essence, but it's very difficult to remember quite honestly 'cause we weren't even consciously trying to use the names, so I may have just have been being Dave. I don't remember right now.

Crag: But you did have a squire?

Siegfried: I had a person who was being my squire, that was David Bradley, because he was a kid. So that seemed appropriate. But again, remember we're not building a system there. We're simply doing things that fit the period.

Crag: I'm just asking for the post hoc serendipity or whatever you want to call it.

Siegfried: The specificity of the honorifics didn't really start up until late in the second year.

Crag: So thereafter, if David fought at a fighter practice, he wasn't Sir David.

Siegfried: No, per se.

Crag: And addressed thataway.

Siegfried: I don't think so.

Crag: And when Henrik was knighted, he did not style himself...

Siegfried: He would have been being called Sir Henrik by this time, I think. But to be honest with you, I don't remember and this is one of the things we're going to have to check somebody else... see if somebody else has an explicit memory about that.

Crag: I have his e-mail address. I may pop him.

Siegfried: I'm just not 100% sure the degree to which any of the honorifics were significantly in use.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: During the summer of 1967.

Crag: But Henrik wins the second time and...

Siegfried: If they were in use, the other possibility is that they were in common use but we meant nothing specific about it. At the very first tourney, sort of everybody was a sir except for David kind of thing.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: So we may very well have been using the terms, but so loosely that the weren't meant to mean anything very specific or dramatic.

Crag; OK. So Henrik wins. There's no formal ceremony except "Hi. I've won. And this is my lady." Did they make a formal presentation to her as Queen of love and beauty?

Siegfried: Yeah. That would have been done, yeah, if I remember correctly. He would have...

Crag: Were roses given? Was there anything like that?

Siegfried: I think he may have had a garland of roses or something like that for her, but the institution of the laurel wreaths and so on came out of 12th Night II also.

Crag: OK. Alrighty. We are now jumping to Westercon.

Siegfried: Westercon 67. OK. Westercon was in Los Angeles and a bunch of us went down to it for a couple of reasons. One of which was that several of the people who were in the SCA at the time were also involved in a skit that was being performed at Westercon called H.M.S. Trekstar which was obviously a pastiche on Star Trek and on H.M.S. Pinafore and...

Crag: That's really demented. That sounds like that was fun.

Siegfried: It was truly demented. I didn't bring the photographs of it but they were really bizarre. It was mostly written by Karen Anderson. And I was Kirk, Karen was Spock, Dorothea, her name at the time was Dorothea of Caer Parevel... guess where her name comes from? Later Dorothea of Caer Myrddin... who was the lead singer for the Consortium Antiquam, but Dorothea was... whatever her name was, the captain's yeoman... Yeoman Whosit.

Crag: Uhuru?

Siegfried: No, not Uhuru. Yeoman Rand, I think is who it is.

Crag: Oh, yes, yes.

Siegfried: The plot was sort of irrelevant, but it had a couple of clever songs in it. Of which was Spock's "I am the scientific officer and a right good second in command. I have fascinating work as a second Captain Kirk and I'm proud to be his right hand." At the end they of course sing, "Give 3.1416 cheers for the science officer with the pointed ears." Whereupon somebody asks... and they all go "Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip". Someone says, "What's the hip?" and Spock says, "That's the residual .1416." Consequently giving a subsequent "hip" after hip hip hooray thrice in the SCA became very common place for several years. So you'd always hear somebody putting that last "hip" in. And probably why in the West Kingdom they still hip hip hooray rather than any other kind of cheering, although it's gradually died out to be replaced with huzzahs or something like that. The oddessy of Richard the Short... the point of that one is Richard came down on his motorcycle with his... he used to fight in his motorcycle helmet at the time. He had a great shield. He had it strapped to the side of the motorcycle bike. He went around the side of a truck and the slip stream blew him off his bike and he managed to keep himself from being run over by the truck by jabbing his elbow and knee into the pavement at 65 miles an hour to swerve himself off the highway. So he actually shows up at this event bandaged up from being in the hospital and fights.

Crag: Gotta respect that.

Siegfried: Oh, yeah. Giving rise to the belief that if you managed to cut off all four of his arms and knock out all his teeth, he'd probably roll over to you on the field and gum you to death. He's one rough guy. I mean I disagree with him about how we ought to do fighting, but he is one tough fighter. But he can be a good friend, too. We just don't agree philosophically some places.

Crag: Did Leiber play...?

Siegfried: Fritz Leiber was never a member of the SCA but he was fascinated by it. I don't think he was a member. He showed up and actually fought. I fought him. I fought sword and shield and saber. Fencing. He was a saber fencer.

Crag: He was German, wasn't he?

Siegfried: Fritz Leiber?

Crag: I don't know. I've never met him.

Siegfried: His family... he's of German ancestry, certainly. He's an author, of course. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. He's probably about Poul's age or even older. In fact, I think he was even older then.

Crag: I think he was in World War II... I seem to remember he and Sprague de Camp talked once about World War II stuff.

Siegfried; Could may be well have been. He was... boy. I don't know if he was old enough to have fought in the second war. If he had been, he'd have to be... he'd have to be born by 1930 at the very very latest which would make him 65. It's possible. More likely he'd be in his 70's now. It could be. It's not unlikely. But the Harlan Ellison and King Kong thing. Randall of Hightower had shown up right about this time. Randall of Hightower is Randall Garrett, another science fiction author.

Crag: He's been on the Board.

Siegfried: No. Randall died years ago. He died of... he had what would have been rheumatic fever, brain fever I think, back in the 1970’s, and it kind of burnt his brain out. He never really recovered and after it (this was in the 70's), he really was sort of forgetful and never really quite knew who he was. He never really wrote again. He remarried after he and Alison got divorced. And his second wife, and her name I think was Vickie, wrote two or three books in collaboration with him, but I'm not sure how much. On a really good day, he knew that he was Randall Garrett and he knew that he had written these things.

Crag: What had he written before? Where'd my memory go?

Siegfried: He was a very good science fiction writer in the 50's and 60's. He wrote the Lord Darcy stories if you've read any of those.

Crag: The Lord Darcy stories. Yes. OK.

Siegfried: You betcha. Those were all Randall. The Angevin Empire.

Crag: Yes.

Siegfried: And he specialized in pastiches. He wrote a whole bunch of... he used to write science fiction stories in somebody else's style. And there are two books called Take Off and Take Off II which are Randall Garrett stores all written in somebody else's style. And some of them are absolutely brilliant. And the best ones of all, he used to write verses. And the object of it was to tell the entire story of a science fiction novel in verse, the whole story, and leave out the point. And the best one of them is Three Hearts and Three Lions which is a calypso. He also did Caves of Steel of which the last line is, "You're a better man than I am, Hunk-a-Tin." Randall got involved in the SCA right about at this time. The King Kong in reference is Randall Garrett. Randall had had an ongoing "feud" with Harlan. And got Harlan to fight him at this event. It was the only time, I think, that Harlan has ever gone to an SCA event or fought. But Randall got heavily involved in the SCA. Was probably the person more than anyone else that was instrumental in getting the College of Heralds off the ground and heraldry and armory active in the SCA, helped to devise some of the basic armory of the SCA, some of the early ceremonies. He wasn't there at 12th Night. I don't think he was at 12th Night II, but he showed up right in here somewhere. And I'm... a little muddled as to exactly when... I think he must have showed up in 1968 because maybe we met him down there and then he moved up in ... thereafter in 68 or something like that. But...

Crag: So what was King Kong?

Siegfried: That was Harlan... That was Randall.

Crag: But the... when they were fighting, they weren't fighting SCA.

Siegfried: No. It was just Harlan... Harlan comes out to fight and... I'm sorry it wasn't Harlan. I've mixed my stories. King Kong happened to be Edwin, Edwin Bearsark. And the remark came from somebody... somebody talked Harlan into coming out and fighting, and Harlan comes out and tries this thing and runs into Paul in full armor and says something along the lines of "You know, I didn't come out here to do this and fight King Kong." Or something like that, and that's the origin of the quote. That's why I got mixed up with Randall because it was subsequent to this that Randall was trying to get Harlan to come to another tournament to fight a fight. But it all gets mixed up in your mind.

Crag: Paul had full plate?

Siegfried: On, no, I didn't say that. I didn't mean to say that.

Crag: You said something about plate.

Siegfried: Didn't think so. He was just large and Harlan made some kind of joking remark about King Kong and that was the origin of why.

Crag: That was Poul Anderson being... no.

Siegfried; Edwin Bearsark.

Crag: Edwin Bearsark. OK.

Siegfried: But that is the point at which... the Society starts to spread. LASFS which is the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and one of the oldest science fiction organizations in the country, if it’s still in existence, people in LASFS started to get interested. Owen Hannifen, who I believed had lived in the Bay area for a while, had moved down to LA and started to get SCA interest going there and as you'll see later on, a contingent of them came north from Los Angeles to fight in the chess game with us.

Crag: Was the... I remember when I was first in the Mythopeic Society and the Tolkien society, I would read about SCA events and living chess games, when did the paths of the SCA and the Mythopeic Society cross... pretty much contemporaries.

Siegfried: I would argue the paths of the groups didn't cross in this country, but people who were active in both did. I think Nan Brody and Ruth Berman were active in the Mythopeic Society almost at the time... they were... at very early events and they were certainly active in the Mythopeic Society, so I'm sure there has been crossover from the beginning.

Crag: So Glenn Goodnight wasn't ever part of the Society.

Siegfried: Sorry.

Crag: Glen Goodnight wasn't part of the SCA that you know of?

Siegfried: I don't recognize the name.

Crag: That's the founder of the Mythopeic Society.

Siegfried: OK. I've never been involved in it, so unfortunately I just don't know.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: there may have been more crossover than we know. Certainly there was in Sweden.

Crag: Ed Meskies was the Tolkien Society. Took over from David Fox on the East Coast and Ed was the one who spread the SCA up and down the early East Coast.

Siegfried: In conjunction with Walter and Marion and a host of others.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: Now Ed, you understand, was the publisher of the fanzine Noeles in which Diana's article on the Last Tournament appeared. And Ed was involved with the SCA early on. And he was a mechanical physicist, mechanical engineer, out at Lawrence Labs.

Crag: And then he was teaching at Belt Nap (?) University up in Belt Nap, (?) Maine. Wherever that was, but he went blind just about the time the SCA really took off.

Siegfried: What I do remember is those enormously thick glasses and he had that typewriter with... he had an old IBM A Model with micro elite type. So he'd churn out this 6 point type fanzine, hundreds of pages of this stuff. But right about ...

Crag: But it was very important to the early fantasy.

Siegfried: Early fantasy was very important, and to a lot of folks there. As a matter of fact, somebody, and it wasn't Ed, I'm trying to remember who it was now, had started work on a cross index The Lord of the Rings that I reviewed for them around 1966. It isn't the one that got published, and I can't remember whose it was, but all the stuff was churning around 1965-66-67. And again, since we're talking about a 30 year distance, you'll bring up a name and I'll recognize it and so on. But some of it I'll have to do a lot of work on to remember better then I am.

Crag: OK. I'm sorry. That was an important diversion to me, personally.

Siegfried: That's just fine.

Crag: That does show that the SCA began to spread via science fiction fandom which is an important concept.

Siegfried: The SCA absolutely spread via science fiction fandom because the other seminal event in spreading the SCA... well, first of all, Walter and Marion moved to the East Coast and started some SCA activity in the 60's. Secondly, Ed Meshkies was out there. Thirdly, the Bay Con in the fall of 1968 which had science folks from all over...

Crag: "Cause I don't see that one here, the Bay Con.

Siegfried: Oh, it's there but it's later on. It's...

Crag: Oh, we're still in '67. OK.

Siegfried: We're still in '67. But the interesting thing is in what was to become the Midrealm, and large parts of what were to become the East Realm, the SCA sprang up primarily amongst college students. And primarily on college campuses. As opposed to where it started in Berkeley where it was not primarily or even predominantly a university directed phenomenon, although occasionally university property was used and there are certainly some university students involved in it. But it did not have a college flavor to it.

Crag: And I think that is reflected in the Midrealm more than any place else. It is a college phenomenon in the early days. They had that different outlook because, for instance, the Northwoods Barony that Finnvarr and all of that came out of, came out of the Tolkien Society. Cariadoc came out of the Tolkien Society. All of those people were...

Siegfried: And why not? If you dig deep enough, you will probably find that the Maryland Medieval Mercenary Militia, M-Quad, which later turned into Markland, has its origins in the SCA. But you won't find anyone who will cop to it publicly.

Crag: I remember hearing that, though at Pennsic XI or XII, when I first bumped into them.

Siegfried: Yes, but Geirr Bassi would certainly tell you that it's wholly different if Geirr Bassi is still around which I don't know. But he...

Crag: How do you spell that?

Siegfried: G-E-I-R-R B-A-S-S-I. Geirr Bassi Haraldsson. He was at one point the editor of TI. He's an academic at the University of Maryland. He is also a Norse priest, and he was very strongly in favor of trying to turn TI into an academic publication in which you could publish for academic stature. If you're an academian at all, you have the publish or perish problem.

Crag: How do you spell his last name 'cause I'll never dig that one out of the transcription?

Siegfried: I think it's Haraldsson. H-A-R-A-L-D-S-S-O-N, but I probably have it written down somewhere.

Crag: Put a question mark after it is fine.

Siegfried; I think it's Geirr Bassi at the University of Maryland. And he was a very influential person in M-Quad and certainly Markland later on.

Crag: OK. First Island War.

Siegfried: OK. Now this is probably of all of the SCA events, with the possible exception of the first one, was the seminal event that literally created a world out of time. This took place on... Nicasio Reservoir is a small reservoir in Marin County. It's about 15 miles in toward the coast out in the country, if you can believe there is country in Marin County, but there is. But there is a little island in the middle of it connected by a very narrow causeway to the mainland. And the island is... it's not a small reservoir and the island is not miniature. It's small. It's big enough for a bunch of people to go out and wander over all day long and have fights and everything else easily. We held a war there, and at that time, I and Henrik and Richard and Fulk and a bunch of the others were there and some of the non-fighters were... relatively few of the non-fighters were there because it was intended as a fighting day. So we all went out to the island and we took... We had a problem at this time, and for some time thereafter, we were starting to overcome the problem which was we didn't have enough helms for everybody. So there was the loaner armor problem but originally there were only the two fencing helms and we started to build other helms and gradually it was being overcome. So there was still a fair amount of weapons and such in common. We got out to this island and started by having various kinds of battles and so on and then we decided to set a scenario just for the hell of it.

Crag: How many? How many of you were there?

Siegfried: People?

Crag: How many fighters?

Siegfried: Maybe 20.

Crag: This would be the first SCA war?

Siegfried: This is the first SCA war. I would say 20 to 30 perhaps, no more. And relatively few non-fighters because it was very difficult, because this was fairly mobile, so it was very hard to follow or anything. But what we staged was... the hypothesis was that Henrik... Henrik and Richard were the leaders of the two groups. OK? And Henrik stole Lady Dorothea. He abducted her. And Richard was trying to get her back. And this was the sort of thing where it's almost like conscious make believe that you believe in while you're doing it. So we... the premise was that Henrik had stolen Lady Dorothea and Richard wanted to get her back and so we were fighting skirmishes and so on around the island and as the thing progressed ... what started to happen was as the day went on, three or four of us broke off. Henrik decided to take Dorothea and myself and two other people and try to send us off so we couldn't be found. So we were kind of guarding her and we were off in... the island had a copse on it and then a fairly empty area then another one and... you couldn't see all the island if you were on the island. The net of it was that as this thing dragged on, it started to become more and more real. The people that were doing it were starting to get into the game so much, they were kind of forgetting.

Crag: Happened at our first Lily War.

Siegfried: That they were just out there playing this thing. It really was a war. "Cause what we'd done was we'd set up an extended scenario that ran for about 3-4 hours, and in the midst of that... with everything being done in the pursuit of that one scenario. So Richard and his forces managed to wipe out two or three different groups of Henrik's and finally Richard does in Henrik, but in the mean time what had happened was...

Crag: And you guys were resurrecting at these things?

Siegfried: No.

Crag: One death and you were out?

Siegfried: If I remember correctly we were.

Crag: Over a four hour scenario with 20 people?

Siegfried: Something like that. We weren't doing resurrection battles at that point. I don't think we were.

Crag: How could you have made it last all afternoon?

Siegfried: Because most of it was wandering around hiding and things, looking for folks. The part that I remember primarily was the end of the thing. Because what happened was at this point the two other guys had been killed in a skirmish and Dorothea and I were sort of, as far as we knew, the only people left other than a rear guard that was being fought by Henrik and a few other people to try to keep them away from us. So we snuck back to the prime camp and stole all of the weapons that we could find there and then headed back... the highest point on the island was this one rock. It was near one edge of it and it was sort of very sheer on one side and there was kind of a way that you could walk up to it on the other that I could defend. So we took all the weapons that we'd been able to collect that nobody had and went up to the top of that thing. So there we were, hidden, and Richard manages to wipe out the rest of them and then Richard and the remaining of his forces find us. And so now he's got the problem of here we are on the top of this thing and he's got to come up this easy to defend area to get to us. And the sun is sinking. It's getting late. And at this point we've completely forgotten that we're playing a game. This has really gotten very serious.

Crag: Testosterone is running.

Siegfried: Exactly that. And Dorothea and I had signed a lover's pact. What Richard finally did was, he had his troops come up the path to keep me occupied and he scaled the nearly sheer back of this rock and came in from behind. OK? Got up enough, so I'm trying to fight in two directions. They finally got me. He finally kills me and I swing around and killed Dorothea and I went down. So here's the sun setting, Richard has finally won. He's standing on this rock. She and I are both dead and the thing ends. Diana subsequently turned that into a song called "Lady Dorothea's Lament." Which is one of the relatively... I won't say relatively few really good SCA songs, but I will say one of the relatively few non-filk really good SCA songs. It was published in TI years ago. But that was the First Island War, the small war. And it had several effects. One of them was that without really meaning to, it had started to drive a deeper wedge between Richard and some of the other points of view. It had started to make us realize what we had ahold of here, 'cause we were all interested in how real that had gotten and it got us into the debate of "what are we doing here, are we serious about this or are we not serious about this" 'cause it's very clear that if we choose to pick this up and run with it, we've really got something, but if we make the wrong choices it's not real clear what will happen. If we all sat down and decide we all want to be elves and gnomes, it's probably going to collapse out of sheer weight. We started to realize on some level that we were tapping into archetypes, we were tapping into the mythos but there were at least some of us that were really kind of unwilling to do that deliberately unless we meant it, unless wee were serious about it and unless we seriously honored the institutions that we were choosing to copy. That now gets us to the next thing.

Crag: But in essence you realized the Pandora's box was opened and you couldn't close it.

Siegfried: We didn't want to close it, but what we didn't know was what we were going to turn into. The Seventh Tournament, September 30, 1967, which was in Palo Alto at the Newman Center. Since Henrik had won in... June 24th. He and Leane were made King and Queen. There were about 100 people at this event and there were 16 entrants in the lists. And one of the things that happened here and now was the elimination... eliminating judges. At this point we abandoned the idea of trying to have judges. And this was also a part of people on their own. Honor as a part of rules and tradition, all the rest of it. Meanwhile there was a growing contingent between Jon de Cles and Fulk on the one hand, and Fulk and richard on the other hand, and what you see is a lot of the dynamic tension involved in an organization that is trying to be born and decide what it's going to be, with very differing ideas on the part of what people want to do. To make this a little more difficult, Richard on the one hand, as I said, was rather didactic and very strongly rules oriented. He was also a theology student at San Anselmo Theological Seminary. Fulk, who was a close friend of mine, was very strong into the chivalric tradition/romantic tradition kind of thing. He was into computers and had been in the military. Jon de Cles, who was Don Studebaker, was a friend of ours and Paul Zimmer's, but Don was always going to be an author. He wanted to be an author. He was one of those people who wanted to be an author a lot more than he wanted to write, in my personal estimation, but what had happened to Don, and it was happening with Tournaments Illuminated, was, and you've seen it happen over and over again, but somebody who wasn't getting much of anywhere in the real world suddenly decides the SCA is a place they can be a big frog because it's a small pond. So Don is starting to want to try to run things. So that's where the dispute between Jon de Cles and Fulk started to come from. At this point was the judging issue because Don was trying to be a judge because he'd been a judge at the first tournament. You'll see what that turned into later on. The really interesting thing was a number of the red sash fighters did not fight for whatever reason. And the person that won was a guy named William the silent. He won for his wife whose name was Sheryl. What made it bad there was that William and Sheryl were from the LA area. They were... they had moved up to the Bay area. They were friends of John and Bjo Trimble, and William had never been to an SCA event. He'd gone to one fighter practice, never been to an event, and won the tournament. Well, you can imagine what happened. There was a lot of grousing. And also the other thing was Henrik knighted William at the revel that evening after the tournament.

Crag: Anything about that night stick to your mind?

Siegfried: It was done at Felice Rolf's house. It was the final thing that together with the grousing kicked us over into, OK, now we've got to decide what we're doing here.

Crag: Here was another Knighting and Richard was going, "But still why not me?"

Siegfried: That's right, and you'll see what that turned into because at this point now, it turns into "I wouldn't take it if you offered it to me."

Crag: Where have I heard that?

END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE.

Siegfried: OK. Let's go on.

Crag: OK. We were talking about the...

Siegfried: Henrik had knighted William after the event and... right around this time the other thing that was going on...

Crag: Was that done also on a whim? Or did Henrik feel like that was an appropriate thing to do?

Siegfried: I think Henrik felt like it was an appropriate thing to do. And... now this is my recollection that that's when William got knighted. There is another recollection that's equally strong that in fact Henrik knighted William at 12th Night II prior to making him King.

Crag: That's the story I had heard.

Siegfried: And... but, I'm almost sure that this happened so it may simply be that he redid it. Or it may be that I don't remember it correctly or it may be that the official story is wrong and I don't know. But my recollection is that he knighted him at Felice Rolf's, and I recall Fulk being there and I recall a dust up right after. I'm sorry, it's an archaic English expression which means a brouhaha.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: Not a fight, but a verbal, a very tense verbal, very verbal discussion about what's going on here. Why him and not... that kind of thing.

Crag: And Richard was part of that.

Siegfried: I kind of think so. But all I really remember was several debates of "are we going to do this kind of thing or are we not going to do this kind of thing." Like I said, it sounds like I'm making Richard out to be the monster of all this, and I really don't mean to, because I don't think Richard was the only person who expressed his particular point of view, but he was the best fighter expressing that particular point of view and was the spearhead for one philosophical approach...

Crag: Therefore he was the champion for this group.

Siegfried: Whether he thought of it that way would be hard. I don't think it was an organized group. I would say that Richard was the embodiment of one philosophy.

Crag: OK. Alright.

Siegfried: And he and Fulk by this time had achieved a violent antipathy towards one another as a consequence of holding violently different points of view. Meanwhile we had been gotten in touch with by the Renaissance Faire who was going to move into northern California. And they wanted help to get started. So we were fairly instrumental in helping them get the RenFaire up and running for the first time in 1967. And I might add, at that time, the Renaissance Faire in California was a lot more loosy-goosy about what exact period it was doing. I mean, yeah, it had Queen Elizabeth, but it had Robin Hood and his merry outlaws and it had Knights and it had all the rest of this. Later on in later years, Phyllis got more and more hung up on specifically 1587-1588, the Spanish Armada, and as that happened, the SCA became less and less welcome, and also they had less and less need of the SCA. And so, although there were still lots of SCA people that did Faire, the SCA as such had no presence at the Faire because the periods were too far out of touch. There was an artisan's guild...

Crag: So at that point, just to dig at some of my friends because I'm an early period person, you would have said that Elizabethan was really stretching the point for the original concept.

Siegfried: Well, if you go... well, first of all the original concept was...

Crag: I'm trying to put words in your mouth.

Siegfried: The original concept was any culture that did swords, which is to say any chivalric culture.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: That eventually hardened into a statement of any culture pre-1650. But by the time 12th Night II happened, it was very clear that the aim, the thrust and the theme of the SCA was the High Middle Ages in Western Europe with a particular focus on England probably because we spoke English. And many of the names of our customs, the names of our traditions and the names of our titles of Knighthood are the English names. Consequently, while the SCA has never chosen to set a flat, we now say pre-1600 rather than pre-1650, and in fact what you'll find is the Articles of Incorporation (I think) even say pre-17th century. And they're floating around here so we can check. Somewhat before that, something had been published saying pre-1650, and a lot of people have used that as legitimacy for guns or for cavalier or for Elizabeth or for whatever. There is no question that Elizabeth lived prior to 1600. There is equally no question that what was going on in Elizabethan England is not the thematic primary point of the SCA. Any more than the kind of tournament that would have been fought in 1555 is the kind of tournament fighting that we're doing. What we're doing is a lot closer to the late 12th or early 13th century, if anything. We're late enough for the concept of romantic chivalry to have existed -- the chansons have clearly taken hold, and early enough that it hasn't started to turn into the post-chivalric period, the post-Knights period. And I would personally say that the theme of the SCA is prior to the Wars of the Roses. And I would put the SCA as spanning the period, from myself and say the focus of the SCA, where we drive the strength of the traditions and most of the definitions of the mythic elements with a few exceptions, derives from the high Knighthood period of Knighthood in flower from roughly 1100 to roughly 1450. Does that mean we can't do anything else? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that as what you want to do gets further and further away from that central focal point, it inevitably becomes more and more tangential. You become more and more of a visitor at court rather than a fundamental part of the court. Or you distort and twist what's going on just a little bit to make place for your character. Now, the reason why it kind of works is 'cause the SCA has always been inclusive rather than exclusive. From the very earliest, what we've always said is anything plays so long as it fits within this block framework. Think of it as a heap of sugar, or a heap of dirt or something, without a fence around it, but you always pile the stuff up in the middle, so it's going to slide down the sides, but it's going to get thinner as you get toward the outer edges.

Crag: Statistically, you're talking about standard deviations.

Siegfried: Probab--... I'm not talking about...

Crag: Distribution.

Siegfried: You will get that... yeah, yeah, and you'll get that distribution curve in a lot of different places. Whether or not it's relevant in this case, I don't know. What I'm really trying to get after is that the two ways that you could have gone about building like the SCA would have been to say, "This is what the SCA is, and only this, and anything that fits is equal, and anything that doesn't fit is not in at all."

Crag: And that's what some people do say.

Siegfried; That is essentially the pond with water up to this level. If you're in the pond, the water's this high. Otherwise you're dry. The other way is the mountain with little peaks around it thing, which is to say the closer you are and what you are doing are to the philosophical center of the SCA, the more you're a part of that creative process and that set of elements, if you choose to be something very far away, then you are either going to be... there will be less like you around, you're going to be, and I'm not talking about whether or not you choose a costume from 1550 versus 1250. I'm talking about whether you decide to deliberately marginalize yourself on the one hand, that is you insist on being a 17th Century Scot or 16th Century Cavalier, or you insist on finding the SCA to be a ready made set of... a ready made audience in which you can do the thing that you want to do without having the bother of starting your own group as in what's called swashbuckling.

Crag: Correct.

Siegfried: Both of them stem from much of the same things. Hey! Here's this nifty thing going on. And it's vaguely like what I want to do, so I can do what I want to do and do it there. Well, maybe you can, but maybe it won't be very satisfactory. And if what you want to do is tangential enough to what the SCA is mostly about, it's not going to fit real well, and there's always going to be some push and tug and maybe you should start your own thing. There are lots of different things going on in this world.

Crag: Let me... you know, we've talked about...dog gone, there's a great work for the...for the final date of something. Talk to me about what you think about the earlier date.

Siegfried: The early cut-off?

Crag: Yeah.

Siegfried: Again, the thing...what I were to get at is this...

Crag: Roman seems to me a little bit too early.

Siegfried: We have had people who have done Roman or have done Greek. One of the great Caidans in history was Lysander of Sparta in their early history, I believe he's dead now and the baronial order which is named after him is probably the most coveted order in Caid, I think, if I remember my Caidan history correctly. We've had Romans, we've had a little bit of everything, probably more samurai than anything else. There's something incredibly attractive about being a samurai rather than a 12th century Knights to a lot of SCA fighters, and I'm not sure what it is. What I would argue is this: in a sense the early date and the later... you can set them. George is... oh come on... I can not remember the man's name...

Crag: Talymar Gan y Lyn.

Siegfried: right. Talymar is very strong on what he calls a thousand years of history. He would like to have an early date and a late date and probably like to say, OK, it's western Europe. And I can understand that in a sense, what he's trying to put the bounds around it. The organization has largely instead of putting the bounds around, simply been clear about it's core focal point that it hasn't really needed to do that. In Califia many years ago in the mid 70's a girl showed up dressed as a Klingon. And the reason she showed up was that a bunch of SCA folk had showed up at a star convention (that was the Star Trek thing) the previous weekend and helped. And she showed up at their event to show solidarity and to help with that and she felt just a tad out of place. So she went home after the event and came back to the revel that night and she had dressed as an American Indian. So she's the only person I know of that managed to miss the SCA period by 300 years both ways on the same day.

Crag: The thing that I was fishing for was, and I'm not asking for a ruling type, but just your philosophy. How does the later Anglo-Saxon period of England fit into the chivalric tradition? How close to that mountaintop is it?

Siegfried: You're talking about the Anglo-Saxon of the 800's and 900's.

Crag: Nine through 1100.

Siegfried: It's a little hard to say, because quite frankly if you want to talk about the romantic chivalric tradition, it's largely European and it largely stems from the time of the great chansons and such that come after that period. But the culture of that time was firmly built on the feudal culture in Europe, it was built on the Norse culture, it was built on the English cultures. So you can't completely separate them. I don't have much of a problem with an SCA group that has an althing, to take as an example. I find that for me, it's a little bit difficult to necessarily jump from some of the institutions of England or Scandinavia in the 9th century directly to the full fledged chivalric tradition, but it's less of a jump than many of the other things I think that people are doing because while it's culturally, in some ways they're even more remote, but they're close enough in linked time, and they're close enough in derivation, the one deriving from the other.

Crag: I always thought, though, that if you could take an Anglo-Saxon warrior from the Battle of Hastings and you could put him in one of the battles in the 1200's and you'd show him, this is a sword and shield are a little bit different, and he'd catch on to it pretty quick. By the time you get into the Jacobean period, fighting and all that had become so different that he wouldn't be able to move into that army very quickly.

Siegfried: That's probably true, but remember what I'm far less concerned, well I am, there's no reason why it should be me, but I would say my philosophy would be, the quick way to judge how well something fits...one can argue endlessly and do argue endlessly about what is and isn't in the SCA period ..or whatever. But it isn't too hard, unless you car being deliberately obtuse to have a feeling for how close or distant something feels to what the SCA is all about. The SCA isn't purely romantic chivalric tradition. It's not purely much of anything. It's an amalgam of Victorian neo-feudalist, neo-romantic revival with a bunch of... for a bunch of people who got interested in actually trying to do the thing and find out how things really worked with some 20th century institutions stuck into it because none of us are really 12th century Knights or 13th century peons and a whole bunch of other stuff glued together. Nevertheless, it's glued together according to some common identifiable themes and common identifiable goals. And the cultural goals and themes of the SCA are pretty strongly those of what I would call romantic chivalry. Consequently, the degree to which you can feel that a given character or a given period or a given culture is a good fit is the degree to how distant or close either that period, character or culture or the values, traditions and aspirations of someone of that period or culture would fit with what the SCA is doing. You can't make a good map with a Babylonian to the SCA. You might be able, and there will be cases where that argument doesn't completely hold up. You could easily, and people have gone to immense amounts of trouble to come up with persona stories to explain how and why such and such a person might actually have been in a European court in 1415. And, yeah, you can do that sort of thing. But that is more or less trying to find a way to slide something in on the outside. Ultimately, I would say, as long as the SCA does not decide to drive nails in the ground and say, "this and only this is what the SCA is" you'll always have those kinds debates about what fits and what doesn't fit. But it's defined less by fighting style than it is by joint aspirations, because if you talk to people and find out what attracted them about the SCA, what they say attracted them, the common themes are things like... that I hear, are things like the value system, like the aspiration to a set of values that have largely vanished from modern life, honor and courtesy and chivalry, the pageantry, the personal relationships, the cultural structures and so on. And they're all talking about things that are recognized and the external trappings, or they are embodying those external trappings. What they're really saying is, they can go to a costume party if they wanted to, but there's something about this particular set of running costume parties that is particularly appealing. And it has a lot to do with culture and shared values and stuff like that, and those were very deliberately and consciously and intentionally established on top of what was then the nascent SCA, and that leads us back to 12th Night 1968.

Crag: I was thinking just about that last night about 10:30 as I was getting close to your driving on up, and I thought, you had taken a significant risk to take your time and fly out here just on the basis of our phone conversations and a couple of e-mail exchanges...pretty much taking me at face value to fly out to Kansas City for a weekend to do this. And I thought that's interesting in the real world, mundane world, people don't do that as much. There's a lot less willingness to say "I'll trust you to that degree." I thought that was really neat.

Siegfried: There may be some truth to that, and that's not to say that we don't have charlatans and fairly despicable people in the SCA... in fact, one of... a few of the most despicable people I've ever known have been in the SCA, and one of the reasons they managed it was because the SCA gave them chance after chance after chance to prove that they were reformed characters, which they never did. But if there's a fundamental commonality, it is that this group will continue giving people chances forever because they want to believe that the people that they share this set of cultural values with, share the dream with to borrow a phrase that I could... that gets overused, but is real despite it, that particular dream is one where the people that share it with you are people with whom you enjoy those common feelings, with whom you will take at face value and seriously. Now as you know perfectly well, I think that it's very desirable that some of this work be done, that the stuff that would go into an SCA history be collected, that such a history be written. I'm not convinced that I will ever get to it. I would violently argue that you need, would need to talk to as many people as possible, not just me, because as I said in the introduction of one of the things I wrote, it's been 30 years and I'm one person, and even assuming that none of my memory has either been worn down by time or affected by my personal prejudices whatever they may be, I was only in one skin at one time. And so I will inevitably have a distorted view of what happened. Any one person does.

Crag: I thing it would be... I hesitate to say distorted because I think you have your viewpoint and the reality is a fluctuating thing of many different viewpoints. I don't suppose unless you're God, you can step back and say, This is how it really happened." You can only say, "This is how I perceived it happened."

Siegfried; And that's what I'm telling you, the caveat I didn't put at the beginning of the tape. What is obvious is what I'm telling you is a combination of my personal recollections, my personal point of view, and whatever conclusions or opinions I've drawn over time as affected by my personal prejudices. I happen to believe that they are fairly reasoned, fairly calm, and fairly objective, but nonetheless that's all true. And since I only was able to see events through one pair of eyes at a time, my viewpoint, if not distorted, is at least certainly incomplete. One is minded of the blind gentleman trying to define an elephant.

Crag: It was a delightful digression. But let's go back now, we have built up to the...

Siegfried: We were talking about the Renaissance Faire. Very briefly, to get through that. At that Faire, we had Robin Hood and his merry outlaws, and those were SCA people. Jon de Cles was Robin Hood and either at this event or at the next event, or the Faire in '68, Randall Hightower was the Sheriff of Nottingham or something like that. The first live chess game was staged here. And the SCA challenged LASFS as it were, 'cause the BSCA at that time was in the Bay area, and a bunch of folks came up from Los Angeles for this thing. Fulk and Richard were the opposing warlords.

Crag: LASFS functioned as a second SCA group to fight against in the tournament.

Siegfried: Well, they accepted the challenge and provided people. We had to provide all the weapons and everything.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: Actually didn't provide quite enough, so we had a little trickle over. And there was some staged fighting and so on, and some demo fighting, and there was a lot of that later. But after that is what's been termed in the paper "The Long Fall."

Crag: Tell me about the first concussion and the quarterstaff.

Siegfried: I remember somebody getting a concussion fighting and I kind of think it was Flieg, but I don't remember at this point. There may be a note one something I have here if you want to pause for a second while I check. but...

Crag: Tell me about quarterstaff.

Siegfried: well, that was one of the things that somebody tried to do was fight with quarterstaff versus sword and armor. And again I don't remember a lot of it. I do remember Lord Mediocrates. He showed up at a couple of events earlier, and he was the one that was offering to take Bank Byzanticard. He had slave girls. This was... but nothing like what slaves have turned into in later SCA in some Kingdoms. That's a phenomenon that doesn't happen out West, by the way, which is intriguing. I've never seen any, so...

Crag: It doesn't happen in the Middle or Calontir either, so.

Siegfried: That's good. This is really strange.

Crag: To my knowledge, never has happened.

Siegfried: My recollection...OK. if, and I don't remember who the hell got the concussion, but it was an attempt to do a quarterstaff versus sword and armor fight, and somebody got walloped on the head and got a concussion out of it. And that's... or was deemed to have gotten a concussion out of it. And that's honestly...

Crag: The reason I ask is when I joined I remember in the late 70's, the quarterstaff was considered too dangerous to fight with, and I wonder if modern armor standards, if the quarterstaff wouldn't be to fight with because it's... more so than a greatsword.

Siegfried: Depends on the kind... depends on the blow being delivered. Quarterstaff is longer. OK? Some quarterstaff blows were delivered like that with the edges. Right? But some of them were delivered by changing your hand and shipping it around and sliding the hand down so you swung it around...

Crag: Baseball.

Siegfried: ...like a really long baseball bat. That would be like delivering a blow with a zweihander. Because you'd be delivering a blow with a seven, potentially a six to eight foot long hardwood stick swung at one end as hard as you possible could. And you could... modern armor is very good, but that might be a real stinker. Some of it would depend on how much of a blow you could deliver. So... hard to say. If I were going to have to fight somebody, and I don't even remember who got the concussion told you the truth, so I can't tell you on that.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: OK. So let's got into the Long Fall. Part of what was going on here was not the "why can't I be" only by this time, we had Richard basically saying, "I wouldn't take it if you offered it to me," which was extremely difficult because Richard had won two tournaments and was clearly one of the outstanding fighters, and if we were going to create anything we called Knights or anything like it, it was clearly going to have to be offered to him. And what do you do if you are trying to be all formal and pompous and nifty and one of them refuses it? Meanwhile, there was the fantasy versus the real tradition, and the archetypes and the fact that we're touching them... we're touching them in ourselves for real, so we're not doing a fantasy whether we know it or not. We're doing something that's real. It may not be real in the sense of parking meters, but it's real in the sense of visceral attachment.

Crag: So now... so now this is a difference. A while ago, I was talking to you about it, and, well, it seemed like do do do do do do do. Now, in the Long Fall, all of a sudden people said, "This... there is something hooked into my psyche about this and you can't degrade this myth."

Siegfried; Well, essentially that's where we're getting to. The problem we had was if we're going to be doing a fantasy, we could pretty much do anything we pleased. But we already know that we're touching into some very real visceral, very real archetypal imagery, so it clearly wasn't just fantasy. But if that's true, if it is real, then we mean it enough that we could be tackling this stuff for real. In the meantime, we also had the question of what do we do about the people that do things like don't bother to fight and then grouse about the person who won, and say, "Well, he wouldn't have won if anybody good had fought." And so on. How do we get people to recognize... because if you're talking about archetypes that matter , then the very worse thing you can do it start gnawing away at the edges 'cause it's going to backfire on you one way or the other. You're either going to damage something you really cared for and not know it until too late, or it's going to come out in some other place in a way you didn't recognize because you're messing around with some of the Jungian basics in there.

Crag: Yes. Absolutely.

Siegfried: So we got to a point...

Crag: Time. Were you aware that you were dealing with Jungian basic archetypes at that or is that something that you now look back and say, "Ah, it's obvious now." When did you become aware and able to start putting the handle "archetype"... when did it go from a feeling to...?

Siegfried: that is extremely hard to say. I would say...

Crag: When do you first remember thinking of it in terms of archetype?

Siegfried: I don’t enow. I'm quite sure that I was award of some of the issues in more or less those terms at the time. But I don't think I had as clear or as codified a picture. What I do know is that the necessity to resolve some of these issues is what led to the ... what led to the outcome.

Crag: Have you read a book call King, Warrior, Magician, Lover?

Siegfried: No. I have not, although it's probably relevant.

Crag: Very. Go ahead. I'll scrounge you a copy some time.

Siegfried: Is it Campbell?

Crag: No. It's a kind of post-Campbell but it's a Jungian approach to those mythic archetypes that blows everybody away that I hand it to.

Siegfried: Well, the point is we were clearly playing to that. Now in the meantime, here was yet another one. Somebody started a rumor and I'm unsure where the rumor came from, that Fulk and I, Ken de Maiffe and I, had actually been knighted while we were in Europe by somebody who was a member of an ancient bachelor order of Knighthood. And therefore that people who we made Knights were really Knights.

Crag: Oh, I'd heard that. I'd heard that rumor, yeah.

Siegfried; I thought it had died out and it absolutely horrified me when Merowald showed up with it in the late 70's, kind of the original rumor, when he came out West. But... that, by the way, is one of the reasons why we made the terrific distinction that said if you're something in the SCA... you can't be the same thing in the SCA and the real world. Not that you can't be. You can be a Count in the real world, and become a Count in the SCA, but it isn't the same thing if you can do it. If you are a Count in the real world that does not mean you are one in the SCA.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: If you follow me. Or a Knight or whatever. So my answer to people when they bring that one up is, "You'd better hope that it isn't true because if it were true, then you wouldn't be a Knight today in the SCA. Because you would be real one and therefore you couldn't be an SCA Knight." And that usually gets them confused enough to stop. But that's also why we bootstrapped it. That's why William knighted Henrik. And myself and Fulk. "Cause once that had happened it was circular. It didn't matter anymore. What was really happening was it was herald's disease in a very early form. Herald's disease is the tendency for heralds to desperately want these to be really real arms and to be legitimate. And this was an early sign of that in the SCA Knighthood area starting up and this happened right there in 1968, 69 especially. That finally died down as people realized that it really was irrelevant. In fact what Knights are in the SCA is an awful lot different than what Knights are in the real world.

Crag: Real world today, real world when?

Siegfried: Probably almost any time, to tell you the truth, because we are more of a... we are trying to be more or a conscious manufacturer. So we're trying to be more like an idealized set of characteristics and we don't really know how close any real world Knights back in the 13th century go to that idealized set of characteristics.

Crag; I almost think that when we think of our Knights...

Siegfried: ...except maybe for Chandos (?).

Crag: We're more of the Chanson du Roland than Roland.

Siegfried: Well, of course we are. But that's fine. To aspire to something great is to set your eyes maybe higher than you can get, but you'll certainly go higher that way than if you set 'em at your feet.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: So...

Crag: So you...

Siegfried: So eventually the net of all of this, and there was a lot of discussion, and were some fairly difficult times. Probably the core group of the people that were talking about this were myself, Fulk, Don, Henrik, Richard, Jamie, ummm, three or four others at one time. Never necessarily all in the same room at the same time, but different parts of the discussion at different time. What this finally turned into was Don and I holing up and writing... there were some more ore less conclusions that had been reached, like, OK, let's do it for real, let's use the institutions, let's define what we consider to be a real Kingdom... or a real medieval structure and so on, and then Don and I holed up for a weekend and wrote that 14' scroll. And bootstrapped the SCA. And there are several things in it that were very significant. One of them was, of course, the deliberate decision to have Kings and Queens for real, to have Knights for real. Another one was, we were trying to resolve the problem of fighting for the crown, and we were trying to deal with the fact that... what we wanted to do was to get rid of this business about people who didn't bother and then griped. So what we did was, we said, OK what we'll do is, we'll arrange it that anybody who is a Knight (we're going to create Knights) fights for the crown by right and therefore by obligation, it is the duty of a Knight to fight for the crown if you are present and not incapable of doing do. But we also said if you'd twice won, if you'd been King twice, then you have the right to not enter the lists.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: So that was what the original ducal prerogative was, was the right to not enter the crown lists. And then we had to... the reason the only title you find are Knights and Duke and King and Queen are because we were very very concerned about the issue of landedness. We were trying to avoid a situation that we could see on the horizon where we used titles that deliberately implied the owning of lands or fiefdoms within a larger structure. Because what we didn't want do to was to recreate the feudal model of people in subservience to X to Y to Z and on up or anything like that. What we wanted to do, what we were looking for were title of nobility that didn't inherently have those characteristics. The arguments for Knights is pretty obvious -- Knights banneret and such, bachelor orders of Knights. The argument for Duke is more tenuous, but at least in the English tradition, there are titled dukes that do not actually... do not have duchies. God knows, there's been enough Kings and Queens that didn't have Kingdoms, too, but we already had Kings so that was sort of built into the structure. But we deliberately avoided any other titles. That is why we didn't have Knights of the Laurel or Marquises of the Laurel or something like that. With Knights we were on firm ground because we were borrowing an existing institution. But we could not find an equivalent institution from the period we were interested in to recognize artistic talent, if you will, because in fact there wasn't one. The closest you could get would have been the head of a guild. If you had had a noble who could do those things they would be not more or less a noble because of it. But you would never have become a Viscount because you were an artisan or musician. So we... and Knights were about the only thing we could find that you might have become without getting it... you might have realistically gotten at the time without getting it because your daddy was. Eventually what we wound up doing was saying, "OK, we don't know what to call then, we're going to call them Master or Mistress of the Laurel," And we chose the laurel wreath as the symbol of the SCA because the laurel wreath was the symbol of victory for the winner of the Olympic games, and because bay laurel grows in the Bay Area. And so we crowned our victors with real laurel wreaths. We crowned our Queens with crown of real laurel and roses. And do to this day. So the SCA symbol is the laurel wreath and in fact the various Kingdoms are variations upon that. The other thing we did was very interesting and... let me talk for a little bit about some of these things. Notice I said we had the formal establishment. We had this long speech.

Crag: OK, now you're now into the 12 Night revelries.

Siegfried: I'm into 12 Night.

Crag: Can I back in and finish the Long Fall?

Siegfried: OK.

Crag: In this discussion that was on the net here a while hack, it was on the SCA-West's net that I got a piece of, it talked, Steve Perrin was talking about the people that were, you guys that were making these... kicking this stuff around during that period. He called a band of brothers to the outsiders. He said that there were more than six, but... perhaps Dave and Diana feel that those who had won tourneys before were already Knights and the ceremony was just acknowledging that status. Is that...?

Siegfried: No.

Crag: No.

Siegfried: it's not... by the way, I left Diana out of that label and I should have had Paul and Don and Diana were all in that nuclear group of discussers, and that's my fault for leaving...

Crag: Paul Zimmer. Edwin Bearsark.

Siegfried: Bearsark. No, that's not true because not everybody who was knighted was the winner of a tournament. What is true is that everybody who had won... I believe everybody who had won a tourney up to that time was one of the people who wound up being knighted, and everybody who had won two , of which there were three, wound up being made a Duke. But Ardral had not won a tournament at all, but he was already recognized as a Knight, so it wasn't an issue, right? Kerry had not won a tournament. Kerry the Rock.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: it was the people who were... it was sort of a combination of the folks who were generally recognized to be the best fighters with a little leavening of folks who had been around the whole time and were universally respected even if they weren't necessarily the best fighters. And I think I would put Poul, and Karl von Acht, Owen Hannifen, in that category. Kerry was probably the titular younger fighter 'cause he was right about high school or just out of high school at that time. There was no conscious intent that I can recall to try to pander to the Los Angeles crowd by making Owen a Knights. He'd just been around the whole time. So I think that the reality is just that it was, it was the sort of folks who had been around long enough that were wearing the red sashes that were sort of self-appointedly and mutually...

Crag: How did you get your red sash? Who gave it to you?

Siegfried: Kind of the other people who'd been doing it. The institution only lasted for six months. So it didn't last long enough to really get hammered into the ground.

Crag: Who made the first ones?

Siegfried: Good question. You know, I don't even remember. That would be interesting to find out because I don't recall.

Crag: The people you remember as being the red sashes were, one more time?

Siegfried; They were pretty much the same people that were knighted.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: OK. Because I think that was when we started to recognize the nuclear group of fighters or the old line fighters, the better fighters or whatever, plus as I said a leavening of folks that were... like in Poul's case, Poul was never a terribly good fighter, but he was a staunch supporter and had been around pretty much from the beginning and everybody liked and respected him.

Crag: And we're still only near the end of the second year.

Siegfried: That's right.

Crag: OK.

Thyri: You know, it would be really nice if you let people know where you are.

Crag: Why? That takes all the fun out. That just takes all the fun out of it, Thyri.

Pause.

Crag: OK, if you want to set the test.

Siegfried: Ultimately, by the... what made it even worse was, I knighted David at the first tournament and after Henrik had won the third tournament before we made him King at the fourth tournament, Fulk knighted Henrik. Bu the time we go... and now we have the following situation: richard was one of the best Knights, but Richard...

Crag: One of the best fighters.

Siegfried: One of the best fighters, but his approach towards things was almost antithetical to what you would think of as being the chivalric tradition or anything. And by virtue of that, Richard didn't understand the debate. He didn't think that way. So Richard was saying, "Well, I'm a better fighter than Henrik is. Why haven't I been knighted?" And the public debate turned into well, are we going to have Knights or not? And it turned into a much broader question of what are we really doing here. Bu the fall of 1967, however, it had gotten to Richard in effect saying, "I wouldn't take it if you offered it to me." And in fact he explicitly said that once in my hearing. So here we were trying to figure out what we were going to do with the SCA and we had also found by this time that we were tapping into some real fundamental archetypal issues here. The first war that happened in mid '67 when it became real for everybody involved.

Crag; Talking about the first SCA war. Be like our first Lilies War.

Siegfried: It became pretty obvious that we were touching real stuff. So it wasn't just a game we could pick up and put down with no effect on ourselves. Which meant that we could actually use the institutions of... the medieval institutions of chivalry and Knighthood and Kings and Queens and all that with a reason of seriousness if we wanted to which had been part of the debate. At the tournament that happened in the fall of '67, there had been a real problem with the guy who won the tournament had never been to a tournament before, had been to a fighter practice, but he showed up and most of the old time fighters didn't fight that day. Then there was a lot of grousing of the, "Well, if anybody good had won (fought) he wouldn't have won, so he really doesn't deserve it" variety. All of that went into a giant melting pot and the end of the giant melting pot was a 14' long scroll that created the SCA. It was typewritten and double spaced and the parts that were ceremonies were repeated as many times as we were going to do things. You could sort of imagine what the effect was on the herald. At the end of the day, he proclaimed he would never, ever be a court herald.

Thyri: I'm a herald. I would never do that again.

Siegfried: This was Harold of Breakstone. That was the last time he ever heralded anything. But what finally happened was in the late fall of 1967, after a lot of discussion and a lot of disputes and so on, as I recall it, Don Studebaker and I, Jon de Cles and I, holed up in my office at Kaiser with a Selectric typewriter and a lot of paper and a lot of coffee and wrote what became the scroll that created the SCA. It proclaimed the Berkeley Society for Creative Anachronism. It proclaimed the King and the Queen. This was the first time we had a formal crowning of the King and Queen. I have the original crowns with me, by the way. So if people are interested in those. And I've got some video tapes if there's a VCR around.

Thyri: We can rent, we can get access to one here.

Siegfried: OK. The... we actually created the first formal King and Queen. Crowned them and put them on thrones and...

END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO

Crag: Alrighty.

Siegfried: OK.

Crag: Go for it.

Siegfried: So let me back up and explain how we got out of a couple of things. As I told Crag earlier when we were deciding to borrow, to really use the medieval institutions for the SCA. Kings and Queens A) we had to have, and B) we already had, so that was pretty obvious. Knights were also obvious both because of the archetypal nature of it and because it was a title that was not inherently landed... the bachelor orders of Knights, sort of roaming around, stealing from everybody, but at least they didn't automatically come with land, they acquired it on their own, generally. However, virtually with one exception, all of the other titles of nobility that we could find had built into them the concept of feudal landedness within a structure, and we deliberately tried to avoid that because we did not want to try to create a landed structure within the organization. We wanted to avoid any implication that So and So by virtue of their title automatically ruled over So and So by virtue of theirs and was subservient to So and So by virtue of theirs with the sole exception of everybody under the Crown. The one title we could find that did not always have landedness associated with it, of course, was Duke. And the connection is relatively tenuous, but the English do have non-landed dukes. And so that's why we borrowed Duke. So... remember I said we also had the problem with people who groused about the winner of the tournament. So what we did when we actually... what we decided to do was we said, OK, we'll create Knights, and Knights because they will fight for the Crown by right and fight for the Crown by obligation as long as they are there and able to do so. Physically able and mentally able. Everyone else fights for the crown by invitation. People who've twice been King, however, and we also decided to formalize the institution that said what you're fighting for is to become King and for your lady to become Queen, later the reversal. Before that it was fighting to make your lady the Queen of Love and Beauty or something like that. So we formalized the King and Queen business. Then we said people who have twice been King and become dukes and their prerogative will be to not enter the crown lists. They can fight in the challenge matches, but they ... even though they're Knights, they don't have, theoretically at least, they don't have to enter the crown. So that's how we'll solve the problem of the people who have done this enough, don't necessarily want to do that part of it again, but need to be recognized and so on. When we looked at creating the Order of the Laurel, the problem we had was we could find absolutely no contextually valid title of nobility that fit for recognizing essentially a master artisan of some sort. The one thing we could find for sure was that if you were going to be a Viscount, you were going to he a Viscount, and whether or not you could play the flute was irrelevant. And being able to play the flute or whatever however well wasn't going to make you a Viscount or not, certain stories not withstanding. Knights, we could not find in period any particular relevance of the term Knights to non-fighting traditions. So we finally said, "OK. We're going to call them Masters and Mistresses, and we're going out on a limb there because we can't find that directly, but there we are." The one problem we had left was... you all remember we already decided by this time was, as you'll see in the video if we can set it up, by the middle of '67, the... sort of the core group of good fighters or the ones who have been around and so on, were now wearing a red sash to identify them. And that's pretty well the people who became the first Knights. But we already knew we were going to have a problem with Richard. We clearly couldn't ignore him. He was one of the best fighters. We already knew if he were offered Knighthood, that he would refuse it. So we invented Masters. That's where Masters of Arms came from. It was cop out to find something when Richard said, when the King said, "Will you accept Knighthood from us?" And Richard said, "No," we have something else in the ceremony that would work so we didn't wind up with... now that turned out to have been a very interesting decision, and I use interesting in the Chinese sense, because if I had to do it over again, I would never had done it. And the reason is not completely obvious. But the real reason, personal belief, is that the institution of Knighthood the way it has been created, creates a Knight who is in fealty to the crown and the crown is by, therefore, in definition therefore in fealty to the Knight. Creating a Master created a person of allegedly that stature who was not in fealty to the crown and owed no implicit allegiance to it because of that position. That does not necessarily make it bad or good, but people who liked to play on that position found the position of being a Master attractive. And consequently you have a very high comparative percentage of what I would tend to identify as long term problem kids in the SCA that are Masters. And I think it's not because Masters make problem kids, it's because problem kids like to become Masters. And there's some wonderful Masters, but there are a few we that should take out and shoot if it were only in period. It created a situation which we could have probably avoided by simply saying, "Well, we know you're a great fighter, but if you're not willing to do this", because there was no, there also was no particular parallel for creating Masters of arms at that level. Because now we were mixing the question of prowess and nobility or feudal relationship. Nobody every said what we were doing here was pure history either. However, what's done is done.

Crag: Is there... Steve... I guess it was Steve Perrin... Steve Perrin said that he had heard it said that Richard had said that he could not take the Knighthood because he was a divinity student and therefore that fealty relationship was problematic. From what you've said, there's probably a great deal of emotional reasons, but the reason that's important is that periodically comes up, I know of some people legitimately who feel that way.

Siegfried: I can't tell you whether... to be honest with you I have no idea whether if Richard hadn't gotten himself into that frame of mind, he would have had a problem becoming a Knights or not. And I have no idea whether or not Richard's subsequent relationships with the SCA would have been affected by it or not, and there is no way to tell. It is absolutely true that the publicly stated reason was that Richard was a divinity student and felt that he could not, he could not in good conscience state a fealty relationship with anyone other than God. I can't see into Richard's heart and soul and I don't know. What I do know is that what Richard had previously said publicly was that if he were offered Knighthood he wouldn't take it, and he said that long before the business about being a divinity student came up, so even if either one would have prevented him, we were in the same pickle. Although if only the question of being a divinity student... if none of the rest of the issues had ever arisen prior to that, it might have played out differently. We'll never know now. Edwin, on the other hand, who also refused Knighthood and became a Master, had no such problem with being a divinity student, and I've never completely understood why Edwin did it. But Edwin also in subsequent years got himself into a bit of a rogue position. So I would also say that some of our best rogues have been Masters over the years, or our worst ones, depending on how you want to look at that. And probably the worst case that I know of is a guy down in Ansteorra who changed off wearing the baldric of a Master or the belt and chain of a Knights depending on who was on the throne and whether or not he felt it was reasonable for him to be in fealty with them. The... what can you say? But... the problem all along there is as somebody once said, if you have a bad King, it's more important than ever to be in fealty to them because now you have got some hold over them. By virtue of the two-way relationship. If you aren't, you don't have any hold over that person. Then how much they ascribe to it I don't know, but there is both the organized force of the organization and the public image and all the rest of those things, and ways that that actually plays out in day to day life that are simply the external manifestations of the construct of the existing feudal relationship. But when you have somebody who has decided that it is entirely appropriate that they can have the good parts of the deal without what they would regard as the bad parts, then you have an unbalanced situation and the real danger with Masters was the situation was imbalanced. That was also the problem with the Laurel and the Pelican until fealty oaths for all of the peerages and/or the populace later on, started to be written in as people started to recognize, what I think started to happen was people started to feel imbalances in the relationships and feel it desirable to pin those things down more appropriately over time. It took a long time to do it, but,... in any case, so when we started this whole thing, this was January 6, 1968 and it was at the Student Union Building at Mills College which is all finished in old oak and very pretty. And we had banners and we had thrones borrowed from an Episcopal church. No, they were... not those. We had the crowns that Bev had made for the occasion and we had a seal. And ceremonies lasted most of the afternoon, quite frankly, because it was a long, long, long preface to establish this thing and then we had the potential re-knightings of William and then Henrik and Leann made William and Sheryl King and Queen, and then William turned around...

Crag: Did they crown them?

Siegfried: Yes. Because we now have the crowns. I've got a photograph here of that. Do you want to pause that for a sec? I think I have a photograph of the crowning. I'm not sure. My house burned down in '74 and I lost a lot of my photographs then. This is William crowning Sheryl. That's January 6, '68. I've got a few photographs left that are kind of singed by fire.

Crag: Um, continue.

Siegfried: So after that, then we went through the recognition of the existing Knights and the first court knightings, and in the process of the court Knightings, Fulk and I, both of whom had created Knights previously, were knighted which closed the circular loop of knightings, so everything bootstrapped. And then we put in, then when the two who wouldn't accept Knighthood, and the way the ceremony was written was "will you accept from us, and will you now swear fealty to the Crown and Throne of the Society for Creative Anachronism?" If the person said no, "Will you then accept from us..." and so on. Now that ceremony is in the fragmentary records I have left, that explicit part of the ceremony is not present. At the time of 12th Night 1968, the fealty ceremony was not the ceremony that was borrowed from Tolkien. That came much later and was instituted by James Greyhelm in the early 1970's. "Here do I swear by mouth and hands fealty and service to the King and Crown of the West to have and to hold, etc. etc." We didn't use that originally.

Crag: Did...?

Siegfried: Next time we hit a break, I'll look and see if I have actually got the first fealty ceremony here. I'm not sure.

Crag: You said the existing Knights were recognized, Ardral, Heinrich and William...

Siegfried: Henrik.

Crag: Henrik. William was there obviously. Were Henrik and Ardral?

Siegfried: We... what we did... when I say existing recog--...Ardral was not there if I remember. Well, I don't remember now that I think about it. He was... he went west in... he may will have been there because he went East in mid '68. So I think possibly he was there. But the important thing is what... when I say this, what I'm saying is we recognized the existence of the Knighthoods as dating from the dates they actually happened.

Crag: Um hm.

Siegfried: Subsequently, also recognized the titular dates of peoples Count-doms, we didn't have counts then, but of people becoming dukes based upon when they would have stepped down from the throne the second time had we had thrones then, because the original grandfather clause was that everything that happened prior to 1968 was held to have caused things to have happened in precedence as though the rules had been in operation from May 1, 1966. So even though the first three tournaments were not fought to become King, the effect in precedence was as though you had been and you became King.

Crag: We did that with a lot of Calontir awards when we became a principality and Kingdom.

Siegfried: We really had to do that.

Crag: Tell me about the choosing of the first Laurels.

Siegfried: OK. There were two of them: Beverly Hodghead and Alfonso de Castille. Beverly Hodghead was, Master Beverly, he was the husband of my then wife, although it didn't have a lot to do with this.

Crag: Try that again. He was the father.

Siegfried: Father. Very good. It was an odd lot, but not that odd. No, I was the husband of my then wife, then. Beverly was, he was the one at the first tournament that, his daughter was at Mills College at the time, was at the first tournament as part of the madrigal group, saw what was going on, ran home and got his crossbow and came back and we tested his crossbow and his long bow against our shields, we had steel and leather heaters which are also in some of these pictures. And I used to have for years I had the arrowhead off the bow. It was a standard hunting arrowhead and it had curled up where it had hit the shield. I used to wear it. There are first tourney pictures. These are taken at the tourney site, but they're just some snapshots. They're not picture of the fighting or anything. In any case... let's see, where are we? The first Laurels. Beverly made the first crowns. He made the seal. He was by trade a... what's the word I want?

Thyri: What's it have to do with?

Siegfried: Works in metals. Makes things.

Thyri: Metalsmith?

Siegfried: No.

Crag: He wouldn't have been in the SCA long enough to use that term.

Siegfried; It'll come back to me, but what he did in life was he made machines.

Crag and Thyri: Machinist.

Siegfried: He was a machinist, a Master machinist.

Thyri: Tool and Die maker

Siegfried: All the above.

Thyri: OK.

Siegfried: He actually made the first royal pavilion for the Kingdom of the West, and he made the entire framework out of pipe. Heaviest thing you've ever seen, but it worked. He was an extraordinarily pragmatic man in many ways, but he became the artificer because of making the crowns and everything else. Alfonso de Castille who was the head of the Consortium Antiquum, which was the medieval music group, became the first Laurel for music. The third Laurel which was made later on was Janet of Breakstone, Harold's wife, and that was, she was the first Mistress of the Lists and that's what she got it for. You'll notice that "Laurel" was simply a recognition of ... originally the intent of Laurel was to recognize service to the Society whether it was necessarily an artistic form or scientific form or service kinds of things. It wasn't until years later that the Pelican got invented. And we made the first three dukes who where people who had twice been King. We've talked about ducal prerogative and the grandfather clause and why we have Masters, but the second medieval wedding happened then which was Steve Perrin and Louise Petty. We had a King of Misrule for the second time. And we also had Harold Breakstone saying he would absolutely never, ever herald an event again after getting through that. And in fact he almost couldn't talk by the end of it. He was "talking like this" (sic). Poor man. He was just miserable. So I would say that was really the end of it. At the end...by the end of that evening, January 6, '68, the SCA was less than, really less than two years old at this point. It was two years old on May 1, 1968. It now had a formal structure. It had a monarchy. It was the Berkeley Society for Creative Anachronism. It had two noble orders. It had an established hierarchy within that. The nascent beginnings of heraldry and such, hadn't really started, but they were going to start as Randall of Hightower burst on the scene later this year, giving rise to the best one liner in the history of the SCA. We'll get to that a little later. The... and the thing was pretty firmly at that point in a medieval rather than a fantasy model.

Crag: How many fighters did you have at that time?

Siegfried: Well. Let's see. Fall of '67 we had 16 entrants in the Crown lists. People that probably... many... probably 25 to 30 or so, although it's a little hard to say. Maybe more.

Crag: Total people.

Siegfried: Total would be more. It's a little hard to say because people who had been to fighter practices that had just come to something but weren't quite fighting yet and the starting of what became a system of authorization was happening about then as well.

Crag: Who was responsible for the authorization system?

Siegfried; Well, a little after this when we put the actual marshal in place that's when that started to grow up.

Crag: Did... how many total people, though would you say if... would he have said if you had asked them at that point... roughly "are you a member of the SCA?"

Siegfried: My guess would have been on the order of 150 or so.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: Now, as I told you here...

Crag: That's more than a rough number.

Siegfried: Well, we can cross check it pretty easily because we've got the actual mailing list. Those are certainly people that would have said they were members of the SCA as of April of '68. And... 2 1/2 pages... that's probably between 150 and 200.

Crag: Thank you.

Siegfried: The thing that really kicked the SCA nation-wide of course was the Bay Con that was going to come up in the fall of 1968.

Crag: OK. March Crown.

Siegfried: March Crown. This was at the San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo. The dukes did not fight. And all of the Knights who were physically able did fight, so all of that worked. We actually... we were now starting to formalize the Grand March now that, of course, we had an Order of Precedence, we immediately started to have some issue as to who fit where in the Order of Precedence. This then fit into one of the oldest established problems in the SCA which is getting the heralds to shut up long enough for people to get through the Grand March. From one point of view. The other one is to get everyone to stand in the proper order long enough to conduct the Grand March from the herald's point of view. I might point out that England has had the same problem for as long as I know, but they only do it when they get a new monarch, so it only happens once every 40 years. That was when we first estab-- when the Order of Precedence was first established in the sense of something was used because now the grandfather clause, the invocation of things by precedence now established everything firmly in order. So at that point we knew who stood first in precedence and so on and so forth, and that also having an Order or Precedence. This also started a very unfortunate circular set of discussions that...which was a new set of who's in charge here discussions. OK. And that is up to now we had pretty well made do with something we called a supreme autocrat who was the person that made all the arrangements for the tournament. Now we had the start of a civil service, so we also had a seneschal, and that was Jon de Cles by the way, originally. But we also had a King, so who's running the show. And which parts of the show? So there's plenty of room for discussions and debate, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, the Crown... This is what we used to call the long day's tourney into night because it ran all day. This is March and it got too dark on the field to see, so we finally had to move the quarter finals indoors. So the quarters, semis, and the finals were fought indoors and that never happens in the West. We just don't hold tournaments inside. But they did this time. And I won that one. And the funniest thing about it was Marynal, my wife, wasn't there 'cause she had had to leave to... I forget what it was she had to do, but she had to leave and came back and found out I'd won. So these things do happen. After that the, as you can see, there was some real thrashing now starting here because... you remember I mentioned earlier that you were going to see the first attempts towards a political takeover in the SCA here. And a lot of that... there was one thing we would now call a household which was then called Rivendell and this was Diana Paxson, Don Studebaker, Paul Zimmer and Tracy Blackstone. Paul and Tracy wound up married, Don and Diana wound up married. They all shared a house and this later became known as Greyhaven and that is the Greyhaven that is connected with Marion Zimmer Bradley's stuff. But there was a joke that used to run around the West Kingdom for years which was why is Greyhaven like a beehive? And the answer was because the drones make all the noise. Because, in fact the two ladies worked and the two guys got to pretend they were writers. That's rude, but it seemed like that. However, here was what was really... you remember I had mentioned that Don had started up TI in large part because he wanted to have his own fanzine. Well, he wanted to be the editor of the Society newsletter and that let him sort of control what was being said about what was going on. And so the seneschal, he being the seneschal naturally established his authority on who said what about whom versus the authority...

Crag: Who was this? Oh, Don. Don was the seneschal.

Siegfried: Don was that. Establishing that authority was a little bit difficult because at the same time that authority was being established as a... he was trying to establish a civil service with no authority on the part of the Crown which was presumed to be strictly titular which wasn't particularly the way the fighters liked it. Then there was an attempt... the ultimate answer to all this was not to split off. There was one separate organization which called itself the Wombats which was going to be the Association for Medieval Combat. And it was nothing but fighters that didn't have any depth. That failed. But still you understand the organization's in place. It's starting to go, but although you've got something like a direction, something like a point of view, something like a purpose, you've got no internal structure at all and that's what now the next two years started to happen. And ultimately it led to a very interesting set of situations. We got to May Crown Tourney which was in Berkeley. That was my coronation and Marynel, and oddly enough that was the only major event that was officially fought for the Crown because the following year we went to staggered Coronations and Crown lists. So only for a little while there we were, every tournament was both a Coronation and a Crown list for the next one. William stepped down off the Crown and he and Sheryl just disappeared and that was largely because Don had sort of driven them out at that point, Jon de Cles. Richard won that one for La Rana. Right in here is where the East Coast organization started. Walter and Marion moved to Staten Island. There was a tournament schedule out there. Ardral Argo ver Kaeysc, David Bradley, and a friend of his, Silvanus An Dur (?) went East and they took the accolade from me for the first winner of the East Crown Tournament. So Ardral was to Knights the first winner of the East on my behalf. Well, what happened by the way, was their first tournament got rained out and by the time they held it, Richard had taken the throne after me, so Ardral delivered the accolade on behalf of the King of the West who was a Master, but it had come from me, so go figure. I still figure that the East and the Middle both derive ultimately from me because I also knighted Cariadoc. Meanwhile come summer which was...

Crag: You know that Ardral was Marion Zimmer Bradley's son?

Siegfried: Still is as far as I know.

Crag: Most of the time. That was something that was connected and I didn't make for a long time.

Siegfried: Right. He didn't have an SCA name and... none of us did on May 1, '66, but he chose the SCA name Ardral Argo ver Kaeysc, ver Kaeysc was probably one of the very first SCA households and it consisted entirely of a semi-fantasy group at Berkeley High School which had got a long history with which I'm totally unfamiliar. But they had a lot of fun with it at any rate. So that's the ver Kaeysc. At this point, we got to the point where the Grand March, we now had too many people to have the Grand March have everybody individually introduced. So we went to having the nobility being actually introduced and bowing or curtseying to the Crown, and the people would come up as the populace or household or something. And that pretty well continued in that form until they finally abandoned the Grand March, at least in the West, although much later. It's an interesting note here, and I'm going to have to go check my notes because my notes here say that Diana was the first Laurel and I had kind of this weird feeling that Janet of Breakstone was, but it... Mistress of the Laurel. But I can check that. At this point now we get the first major household. And that turned out to be an interesting phenomenon because households started to turn into those same fiefdoms that we'd been trying to guard against. And we've always seen a smattering of people... I don't know if you ever noticed, heralds have probably noticed, the correct style of my name, for example, is Duke Siegfried von Höflichkeit, not Siegfried Duke von Höflichkeit. Right? There is no Höflichkeit for me to be the Duke of.

Thyri: Right.

Siegfried: OK. But you will find people that will style themselves So and So Baron Such and Such, and not be...

Thyri: You can't do that.

Siegfried: I know you can't, but you will find people who will do it to this day. And usually they are barons who have gotten a little bit too hungry, but not always.

Crag: Discuss exactly what you're going with.

Thyri: When you say... it's like saying John... Here we go.

Siegfried: If I...

Thyri: Siegfried von Höflichkeit means Siegfried from Höflichkeit. If you say Siegfried, Duke von Höflichkeit you're saying Siegfried the Duke of Höflichkeit and it's entirely ... it's giving him lands that he does not have.

Crag: But I though we had given founding barons that privilege of utilizing that title after they step down.

Susannah: It's not their name.

Thyri: It's not their name, it's a title.

Siegfried: The only people who can right...

Crag: OK, you're talking about naming...

Susannah: William V'Tavia, Baron V'Tavia.

Siegfried: The only people in the SCA who are rightly styled of their lands are Barons, Crowns and Coronets. And Barons come for a few years after we started this thing.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: Let's see. What else do we have here?

Crag: The abduction you talked about.

Siegfried: This was... yeah. OK. We also had chivalry awards here. For the first time, there was actually an award sort of a recognition of chivalric conduct award. And this was the first major abduction. And that one was difficult because when we went charging into the woods after the abductee, we found some folks standing there with live bows with live arrows on them. And come screeching to a halt, and said, "Wait a minute. This is a different game than we're playing, thank you." And that started another interesting set of debates. But now you go to the first Crown Tourney in the Kingdom of the East which appears to have been July 1, 1968, and at least they know when it was. It's more muddied in the Middle it would appear. Adrian appears to have hosted the event and seems to have sat as Queen of the event and... if you go back into Eastern and Atlantian history, at least in Atlantia, they seem to have this feeling that Adrian is legitimately a Countess. But the only place that ever could have come from is this.

Crag: According to El that's exactly where it comes from.

Siegfried: Right. Bruce of Cloves won. Ardral knighted him and he was then crowned King of the East. OK? Then came the second Small War, and I missed that Small War because I was on duty that weekend. That was the dukes versus the Black Swan which wound up being the dukes versus pretty near everyone else. And that was the last fighting event Fulk was ever at. At that the disagreements between he and Richard had reached the point where it was "Sorry, that's it." And Fulk has never really come back to the SCA since then. He still works at Kaiser. I still see him occasionally. He has gotten into horses and he rides in shows and such, dressage. But that's not a part of his interest any more. Then came the events that really kicked the traces over in more than one way. One of them was the Bay Con in September of 1968 in Berkeley, and the other was the incorporation of the SCA. As I mentioned, Bay Con was seminal for some areas because there were people from all over the country that attended that, that saw the SCA because the SCA put on a tournament at Bay Con. And one of the photographs running around here somewhere actually is from, black and white photograph that I think was taken by Ruth Berman but I'm not sure, that was from that event. But a lot of people first encountered the notion of the SCA. And we put together a little thing called "A Handbook of the Current Middle Ages" which was funded by the convention, and it largely consisted of articles that were taken out of issues of TI, which was about a year old at this point, and sold that. I have a copy of one of those, I don't have an original with me. So a lot of folks got copies of that. There was a medieval fashion show. This was also the first appearance of the freon helm at this point. This was also where the East Kingdom stated that it... formally said it's part of the SCA, and now the delineation of the West Kingdom. But the real kicker was the incorporation of the SCA. And the reason that was a kicker is that because it was by no means a sought after phenomenon. What it was more than anything else, quite honestly, was a power play by Rivendell. By Jon and Diana to essentially take the organization because Don, with the East Kingdom coming in, Don moved from being seneschal of the West, which Stefan de Lorraine became, to being Steward of the Society. Meanwhile Don and Diana and one other person were on the BoD, the newly incorporated SCA. The Articles of Incorporation stated the direction being historical recreation and all that sort of thing, which was the first time that was ever formally said. And the attempt was, in essence was to... a power grab, to take the SCA, because there was still this cantankerous thing rankling between Don and William having gone out and so on, between essentially the monarchic structure within the SCA on the one hand and this which was an attempt to pick the organization up and walk away with it on the other. That's the origin of the distrust between the Board and the medieval organization that's stayed with us ever since. And it dates right back to the very creation of the SCA, Inc. And the creation of the Board of Directors. Now, I have come to believe it was probably a very good thing it happened in one way because I actually believe that without the umbrella organization the organization would not have grown and prospered in the ways that it did. The unfortunate legacy was that element of distrust that... of the Board and certainly in the initial years there was sufficient to distrust them about. That led to some fairly nasty disaffections, fairly nasty confrontations and even after years when the Board became a much more reputable organization, distrusting the Board is ingrained into the SCA cultural mythos now to the point where it probably can't be fixed no matter who's on the Board. It's kind of like the joke about kreplach. You like all the parts of it, but when you put it together, yuch, kreplach. So... for anybody who is interested, since we're handing around interesting things here... if I can find it... I don't know if it's interesting or not, now that I think about it, I think it is but I'm prejudiced. I'm into some of those... oh, well. I may never find it. I'll dig it up later. I've got a copy of the original Articles of Incorporation if anyone wanted to see moldy old paper. There you are. So that all happened. It didn't create an immediate disaster, but what it did was to create on the one hand a civil service structure that held that it reported only to the BoD and the Crowns were not in charge of anything and a medieval structure that felt that not only were people in fealty to it and so on, but they actually were in charge of things. And that was the two-headed monster of the SCA. A little bit later that turned into the first confrontation between the monarchy and the BoD, although that took a little while. By now... let's see if we're in the right place here... probably. Let's see. The Second Pleasure Faire, October of 1968. Randall Garrett was Randall of Hightower was the Sheriff of Nottingham at that. I told you that happened. There was a knighting on stage at the Pleasure Faire. That was Frederick of West Tower who was the... I think he was the founding baron of Three Mountains, maybe... which was Seattle. No, not Seattle, Portland. I'm guessing. I'm just not quite sure any more. Um... and we had... that was when, Geraldine who founded a huge, incredibly influential household called Toad Hall in the West Kingdom, first found the SCA right about that time. There was a live chess game there. And then came the autumn coronation and crown tournaments at the Airplane Field in Tilden Park, September '68. Henrik and Leann became King and Queen. And there was a really interesting situation, hassle over knighting. Earl of Morris got knighted in here, and ever since then Richard claimed, Richard of Mont Real has claimed that he actually knighted Earl, himself with not other hand on the sword, and therefore all this balderdash about only a Knights can make a Knights can't be true. Which is a hell of a thing to do to Earl whether or not it were true, for one thing. And that's how I remember it, but that's another issue. What was even worse was that we also had somebody who blew up on the grounds that they were a Knights and felt that they weren't consulted before the knighting was done, and that was sort of the origin of what turned into who's in charge, who makes the decision about admitting a new person into a peerage order, which is very different from Kingdom to Kingdom. And that was the beginning of it's the Crown's decision in the West Kingdom. Caradoc ap Cador won that one for Amie of Exeter and this event that led to the great one-lines, because at that time, it was before... ah, ha. Richard has to have been wrong. And here's why. My squire at the time was Earl of Morris. He hadn't been knighted yet. Henrik and Leann had just been, had taken the crown and they were having a... it was after the coronation ceremony and it wasn't formal court anymore. They were having a presentation court. I was off on the other side of the field talking to Randall of Hightower and two or three other folks, and back over here at the presentation court, Henrik's squire who was Steven of ... boy that'll come... Blackridge or something like that. Steven gave Henrik a war maul as a coronation present. And this particular thing, I mean it was a monster. He made it himself. He was a high school kid. He made this thing himself and it had a handle about yea-long, leather wrapped with brass studs and all that and it had a length of chain about like that. And the war head was about like this and it had 3" spikes on this thing. And Earl was at the presentation court, and he saw this and he went completely out of his mind. He comes whistling across the field just running as fast as he can run, slams to a stop in front of Randall and I and everyone else, and says, "You should see the King's weapon. It's 3' long and spiked." There's dead silence and Randall says "God save the Queen!" and for sheer... and that later turned into a song called "The King's Weapon." Whereupon the Queen finally admits that she prefers Her music Master because his instrument is 10' long and is called Great Bay Shawm, and the song ends "For such a weapon, God save the Queen." Let's see. Caradoc ap Cador won that. We are now moving... let's see... I'm going to start hitting less detail in this if you want.

Crag: The... that's fine. The places that I want to hit on the next bit... I do want to go into some detail about the... about Ansteorra's, us, Atenveldt's founding and then Cariadoc because his memory... he has trouble with any of this. We can stop and go have some lunch now and then come back and pick up there. That's fine.

Siegfried: Either way. It's up to you. I don't really care.

Thyri: It is 2:00. If you didn't eat breakfast until late, you may want to eat something now.

Siegfried: Well, we ate breakfast at about 7:30.

Thyri: Why don't you got... because they haven't had lunch either.

Siegfried: Oh. Let's stop.

Thyri: I, on the other hand, got lunch when I got here because I couldn't find you.

Siegfried: Yes, you told us that.

Thyri: Sorry.

Crag: After what had been slightly more than an 18 minute gap... we had just finished the 12th Night.

Siegfried: Well, we didn't.

Crag: No, we didn't.

Siegfried: We were just down to the third 12th Night revels and the significant thing about that one really is that's when the first arms scrolls were presented. On of the reasons for that is, you'll notice that by now, Randall of Hightower is active in the Kingdom.

Crag: That name was triggering with me quite a while earlier and he finally reminded me of where it was. Do you all remember an of the Lord Darcy novels?

Thyri: Yes.

Crag: Science fiction. That's Randall of Hightower.

Thyri: Oh.

Siegfried: Randall Garrett.

Thyri: Is he dead?

Siegfried: Yes. He had... he suffered a severe attack of what I guess would have been called brain fever back in the early 70's. He lived through it but it really pretty well ruined him after that. On a really good day, he knew that he was Randall Garrett and he knew that he had written those books, but he couldn't write. On a bad day, he didn't even remember that much.

Crag: Remember Tedric's wife had much the same...

Thyri: Audeen.

Crag: Audeen.

Siegfried: But Randall was...

Susannah: She's better now.

Crag: Yeah, but she's not the same person she was before. She had to learn to be a new person 'cause the old one was cooked.

Siegfried; He never really recovered and finally did die.

Thyri: Anyway.

Siegfried: The significant thing about the third 12th Night revels really was the beginning of the establishment of an order of armory. Grants and Awards of Arms happened at that event, too, and the first court baron. So that event was significant for those items. And we also found a nifty way to completely clear a feast hall in record time. There was this young lady named Alison of Rohan and she stood up and started to declaim an epic. And it worked miraculously. However I do not remember what the Kingdom's arms almost were, and I am going to have to find that.

Crag: Nowadays we would get lectured for being rude to performers to do that.

Siegfried: Oh, nobody was rude to her, they just left.

Crag: Let's see... That's...

Thyri: Side A.

Crag: Side A.

Siegfried: You need to flip?

Crag: yes, I need to run this one.

END OF TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE

Siegfried: Let's see. What else do we have?

Crag: OK. The first feast.

Siegfried: OK. The first feast. Well, that was at least the first at which an admission was charged. And it probably was the first feast now that I think about it, other than just kind of potluck stuff brought by people.

Crag: OK. Now here is the beginning of Atenveldt mentioned. I have that from a Western perspective, from an Atenveldt perspective. Tell me...

Siegfried: Unfortunately, I can't tell you very much about it. I know some of the originators of the Kingdom of Atenveldt. And... I know Robert Roundpounder and I know... man. What's Arthur, Duke Arthur. I know, or knew, Michael of Moria and some of the other of that lot. What is really not obvious about the Kingdom of Atenveldt is that it has had from its inception to this day, and we're now talking about the nuclear Atenveldt in the Phoenix area, a series of divisions of loyalty and long running feuds and gathering up into small groups and taking sides that none of them understand. And the reason they don't understand it is because if you go back to their origins, it was three different high school cliques in the same high school in Phoenix. And some of those people are still more or less active in the SCA today and this stuff has trickled down through the years. So long since, I mean it's a little bit like the Balkans, long since anybody can remember what the original issues were, you still have people subscribing to this group or that group or that group and you get these divisions.

Crag: That's the same still true in Lonely Tower. In our Barony of Lonely Tower. Anyway, yeah, go ahead. I had heard one of them was a biker, biker group.

Siegfried: In Atenveldt, not precisely. I don't think so at least. The biker dukes of Atenveldt were largely from Albuquerque. And that was the dwarves. That's another story, but I don't think there was a biker group. There's a biker story that comes out of that period. But the problem is that there were people from Arizona, there was a growing interest down there and...

Crag: How did they first come across what you were doing? How did they... was it science fiction con again?

Siegfried: I believe it was the Bay Con that first drew it to people’s attention. And then some people got interested, started coming up. The biker, I know who you mean when you think of biker. Richard Ironsteed is the person you're thinking about. He was one of the founders of Atenveldt and the Ironsteed in question was a motorcycle. And he knew Henrik very well, so he's probably, and he's the one of them I knew least well. He seemed to be a nice guy, but I just didn't know him. So I think that's probably where you get that connection. Later on, there was in the group in Albuquerque that grew up, there was a very strong tradition in the western part of what was then Atenveldt for hulking monster fighters of whom Dennis of the Titans and Deaton Claymore were probably the primary proponents in Phoenix, and in Albuquerque it would have been Johann and another couple of names that are trailing in the back of my mind that'll come forward. It doesn't matter so much.

Crag: Johann. Not Johann Blau?

Siegfried: No. This is back in the early to middle 1970's, but these are the people that founded Grand Outlandish which is the... which is, of course, now the Kingdom of the Outlands that was then a principality and before that... the whole idea of punning off of Grand Outlandish, Grand Outlandish was an odd event. I've been to a couple of them and they're held up in the mountains south of Albuquerque, way up in the mountains. And it's been known to rain, snow there in May. They had hail one day. That was Grand Icelandish. It's... and that group was really the get down, party hardy, rough and tumble boys kind of group juxtaposed with some of the nicest work in poetry and the arts and song being done. It's kind of interesting. When SCA groups tend to go to extremes, they tend to go to both at the same time. So you get some of the nicest stuff being done in the serious arts and such at the same time as you get real, the real top heavy, bottom heavy fighter jocks that if it isn't a stick, they're probably not very interested. If they can't smoke it, drink it or fight with it, they don't care. And it was a very interesting period also, because we may talk a little bit later what the ducal prerogative turned into when it went through the Southwest. But largely speaking you can kind of divide... one way of dividing the Kingdoms of the SCA is into the legalism and into the power of the throne divisions. On the far side of power the King's word is law. That's still the first item in West Kingdom law. It was written into it. And the Crown is still held to be the head of state, and essentially the Crown can do nearly anything on its own if its willing to face the music afterwards. On the other end of the thing you get things in the East Kingdom where the Crown largely can't sneeze without calling a Curia and where patents can not be given without, for God's sake, voting and closed ballots and things like that, which is very foreign to Western thinking, any of the Western Kingdoms. One of the things that happened, and that seems kind of antithetical to monarchy in a way, depending on which view of monarchy you want to take. One of the things that happened in the Southwest, and I think Deaton and Dennis had an awful lot to do with it , was the reinterpretation of the notion of the ducal prerogative to anything the Duke damn well pleases. And it really turned into a case where people offered more courtesy and grace to dukes than they did to the Crown. They bowed lower to them and all the rest of that, and that's because you had two or three big, important, very powerful guys that essentially were certainly not going to tell folks that they shouldn't behave that way toward them, and were just as happy with the notion that they were really in charge of everything. It was one of the few cases where the person desperately trying to manipulate the politics wasn't somebody behind the scenes but was in fact somebody right out there on the bleeding edge, dare I use the term loosely. But... at the time when Atenveldt first fired off, one of the things that also happened is Richard, we're talking about Richard Mont Real now, went (I forget who the hell he went to work for) but he was in New Mexico for a while. He founded a group down there which was the Freehold of Great River. And then he founded the Barony of the Steppes in Ansteorra. And he kind of left each of them, and maybe one or two other groups, kind of left each of them with some interest in the SCA and some odd traditions that took them a while to figure out how to rework into the overall group. Because Richard was still really wanting to do SCA, but really wished it had been a different model and so he was kind of setting up a little bit of a different model, and then they had to come hack and put themselves back together in the rest of the organization. but...

Crag: What sort of traditions were those?

Siegfried: Oh. I would say a lot more egalitarian. A lot more... well, like for example he founded the Barony of the Steppes so he decided their baronial award would be the Tread. Things that when you step back and took a look at it were not just bad puns, but weren't things you really wanted to be associated with. I mean it was sort of funny. It was kind of like the group that named themselves Shittenwolde because they thought it was so hilarious when they started, then a few years later, they kind of very quietly changed the name because by that time they had grown up and the joke was no longer funny. That's the problem with that kind of thing is even if you think it's funny at the time you're very likely not going to later. But Atenveldt... I had met some of the Atenveldt people by 1969. Atenveldt really springs from Henrik because it was his connection to Ironsteed and such that took the accolade down to Atenveldt. And they were a barony of the West originally and then grew up into a principality and became a Kingdom.

Crag: Why is it that the... from your standpoint, why is there so little of the West in Atenveldt?

Siegfried: So little of the West?

Crag: It just seemed to me that there was the... at least as I understood it they pretty much rejected most of the traditions and insisted on starting everything from scratch.

Siegfried: If you take a look at it, I think what you'll find is that each new Kingdom as it goes through its formative phase, goes through a period of what I guess I would best call adolescence where it's consciously trying to define itself as a grown-up and is busily rejecting or at least changing the institutions from its parent as it defines what its own are. The degree to which animosity might have sprung up in the meantime is the degree to which that will happen amicably or it will happen with a certain amount of deliberate fury and anger. The splitting off of Calontir from the Midrealm was not entirely fun and games from what I understand. And one of the reasons for that was that the Midrealm held on too long.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: You know, "as long as I live, I will not give up one foot of Midrealm soil" was the quote, or something very close to that. And that didn't help anybody very much.

Crag: Who quoted that?

Siegfried: I'd rather not go back... I won't go back to that. Back to Atenveldt, though, I think a couple of things happened. First of all, I think that the people were nuclear... the first people in Atenveldt were very young. You had a lot of this high school thing stuff. Secondly, you got a concept of how things ought to be done that was very radically different. Have you ever seen an Atenveldt coronation?

Crag: I've seen the daughters of the Atenveldt coronation because that's the way Calontir coronations have been. I think. Go ahead and describe it.

Siegfried: At an Atenveldt coronation when the... when the time for the coronation happens, the new King presents himself alone. OK? And he is announced "So and So by right of arms this that and the other." At which point the old King and Queen doff the crowns, leave them on the thrones and depart. The new King comes and crowns himself by right of arms King of Atenveldt, and by my standard there is no transmission of power and no true Kingship possible.

Crag: Well you have to under--...

Siegfried: By virtue of the failure of the mythic connection in that. The transmission of power having to do with the King as an archetype. And I think, my personal belief, is what happened to Atenveldt was that that reinforced the notion that the Kingdom belonged to each King to do as he damn well pleased with because there was no sense of continuity built into the process and never has been. And Atenveldt has been more jerked around by its Kings than almost any other Kingdom, and I think that's probably the reason. By now, of course, that's invested with tradition so it's hard to say.

Crag: One of our most potent Kings started in Atenveldt and kept coming back until the... that tradition, by the time we became a Kingdom, what the third coronation from then on had been... are we at the 25th? Are we at the 25th?

Thyri: Yeah.

Crag: I can count three...I can count.

Susannah: The next Crown.

Crag: You crowned Gilly this time.

Valens: Right.

Crag: And Volkmar was crowned and Chepe and Shadan. That's the only four that I can count that didn't have an Atenveldt ceremony.

Susannah: No, Lorell was crowned by Thorvald.

Crag: OK. Lorell was crowned by Thorvald.

Siegfried: I don't mean to throw stones at Calontir.

Crag: No, that's OK.

Siegfried: And that phenomenon may not be true here, but it's sure true in Atenveldt.

Crag: Well, it... probably what you say is true, but we have such a clan mentality that some times when the hat is put on the head, then they get the "closet Curia" and the discussion after that.

Valens: It is not a hard and fast condition, that that's the way it's done. We have sporadically had people who have broken that tradition, but nobody has raised an eyebrow if that tradition was not followed. So, it is not a hard and fast tradition.

Thyri: Each coronation is different.

Siegfried: And look at Meridies where the Crown...

Crag: But the majority...

Valens: The majority is.

Siegfried: ...yeah, they kill the King and everybody writes their own coronation ceremony. To someone from the West that's extremely antithetical because the West Kingdom coronation ceremony is almost unchangeable. By which I mean not that you couldn't change it, but it's almost impossible to change it in a way that people would like and keep the change there anymore because they've been doing it... they're up to about their 90th or so.

Thyri: You've got three reigns a year.

Siegfried: We've got three reigns a year. It's only been changed substantively twice since Year Three. So at this point, the ceremony and especially the oaths are so ingrained in culture that most people will say them sort of under their breath while the King is taking the oath or whatever, because they know them so well. That's a little bit like prayer in the Church. It reaches a point of... there's magic to it. There is the reality of the repetition and the reality of the alignment that everybody feels with it, so it's part of the common rituals that hold the Kingdom together. And so you'd find very little, there the notion of just changing out the coronation ceremony at every coronation seems impossible whereas I suspect to someone from Meridies the notion of have the same old coronation ceremony three times a year forever sounds horrible. So lot of it also depends upon where you come from. But I have seen in my own eyes, some of the problems that Atenveldt has had that I tend to personally relate back to that mode of crowning and the fact that they don't have one coherent group, really. They've got at least three. And so you have a ... that was the origin of things like people deciding whether or not they were going to be a Knights or Master, although Jonathan got it from there when he took it to Ansteorra.

Crag: What do you know of Roundpounder's resignation? The knighting.

Siegfried: I was not there. All I know is that he resigned and he was allowed to become a Master or became a Master or something. I can't speak to it first hand because I wasn't present at it. And I wouldn't speculate 'cause I don't know anything that isn't at least third hand and I don't know very much even now.

Crag: Just for the record, I think Valens misunderstood me. I don't think, I didn't mean that we would take the King into the closet and fuss at him for what kind of ceremony.

Valens: Oh, no.

Crag: But if we started doing a Trelon, I think... that that kind if we really truly had a Brom's reign.

Siegfried; Had a what?

Crag: It's s song. I'll send it to you.

Siegfried: OK.

Valens: Calontir, we're just getting used to the idea of having dukes. We have never had anyone dominate our government through winning crown tournament after crown tournament.

Crag: We've had some people pretty much dominate finals, though.

Siegfried: But you know, the biggest reason that has happened so badly to Atenveldt is because their dukes have a tendency to build up their own households, hold their own methods of fighting more or less in secret, have their own dojos and all the rest of it. And have no notion of sharing or advancing the art in general.

Valens: I just wonder if that's true in other Kingdoms, Calontir, you're talking about the birth of Kingdoms. It seems like the founding personalities in this Kingdom burned themselves out in the birth of the Kingdom. They stayed around for one generation, maybe, afterwards, one round of crown tournaments. None of that generation has stayed on to dominate the Kingdom level. It's like when we became a Kingdom, they, their dreams were fulfilled and they've all drifted away. Does that seem to be similar in other Kingdoms?

Siegfried: To be honest with you, I don't know if there’s enough data to find similarities. The reason I say that is this: If you look at how things happened, you start in Berkeley and the thing grows up all on its own. And then there's a little bit of something starting up in the East and a little bit in the Middle and then there is Bay Con and now you've got lots of interest springing up, the core of what appears to be a, a central organization in Berkeley and Atenveldt growing up. Atenveldt becomes a barony because it's close enough to do so. The East and the Middle become Kingdoms because they're not close enough to really make it part of the thing. At the same time, however, the BoD and the national organization perpetrates a completely different picture of the SCA and how they're allowed to behave and what they're allowed to do through the paper that's being sent back and forth to the East and the Middle than is being done out West and in Atenveldt where people know these folks and would laugh at them if they tried to do it. So there's a terrible dichotomy between what folks in the East and the Middle thought was going on with the SCA and folks in the West thought was going on. And a lot of that was a big confrontation in the early 1970's. And more of the reason why there's a certain amount of on going distrust. But if you go from there, now you've got four Kingdoms. You've got the East and the Middle, both of whom started out of whole cloth way out here. You got Atenveldt which stretches from here to way the hell out there. Then you have four Kingdoms that spring off essentially from Atenveldt. Right? "Cause you've got the Outlands, you've got Ansteorra, you've got Meridies and arguably you've got Trimaris. Meanwhile the East is fragmenting into Atlantia, and the Middle fragments into Calontir.

Crag: Why did Trimaris get given to Aten--... why was Atenveldt allowed to run the entire South?

Siegfried: There is a reason for that and... first of all, there wasn't anybody there. The East Kingdom was in the Northeast and Atenveldt was essentially ...just sort of spread all along the South. And probably the people that did it, figured, well, hell, it's just the South or something for all if know. I honestly can't answer that. I believe at one point there was some kind of quid pro quo cut that left... well, remember Meridies was part of Atenveldt, too. So the whole South, the whole south of the country was one Kingdom because nobody else was there.

Crag: But Meridies was started by Michael of Moria and some... and Bearkiller and those folks.

Siegfried: Right.

Crag: And they immigrated more or less from...

Siegfried: From Atenveldt.

Crag: Atenveldt. I can see that.

Siegfried: That's correct. Now Trimaris. Why Trimaris? The big reason why Trimaris is a Kingdom is because their culture is radically different than Meridies is.

Crag: Yeah.

Siegfried: Trimaris is not a southern culture. Florida is not a southern state. It just happens to be located there. I mean it consists entirely of snowbirds and alligators as near as I can tell, so you have a wholly different culture in Florida than you have in the rest of the southeast, and people from Georgia have more in common with people from Milwaukee than they have with people from Orlando, I think. Just chatting with them. The...but another thing is if you think about it, Southern, true Southern old boy culture is a lot closer to Texan, and even possibly to Arizonan then it is to Florida or to Washington, D.C. So there is a cultural similarity that probably fit right across the South.

Crag: So basically... basically Trimaris and all that just happened to be a map, a map-hanger-on to Meridies. And then...

Siegfried: They were geographically there at the time, but the reason they went independent, I think, was because as they started to grow up, they were so very very different from anywhere else that it was just natural to do it. That's my guess. The Trimarans I've met certainly have got an operating culture that doesn't seem to me to be a lot like Meridies.

Valens: What was inclusive in the West Kingdom at that time? Did that include the Northwest?

Siegfried: The West Kingdom started out... when... one of the rules has been that the SCA only claimed, really claimed territory there were groups in. That was to avoid subdividing the known universe. The West Kingdom spread from Seattle... and at one point there was some question as to whether British Columbia would be in the West Kingdom. And that's an interesting thing. British Columbia, however, didn't really start up until An Tir was already a principality, so. But the West included Washington, Oregon, all of California until Caid split off, Nevada. It included Atenveldt when Atenveldt was nothing but Arizona, but of course, they split off early on. Today the West is Alaska, northern California, the Far East in general, Guam, Okinawa,...

Thyri: Australia.

Siegfried: Australia.

Thyri: Korea.

Siegfried: Korea, Japan.

Valens. What was the mindset in the period that, I mean the founders of the SCA are in California on the West Coast, and to some extent in the Phoenix area in Atenveldt. They were willing to let the East and the Middle Kingdom divide up the rest of the United States between them, this huge geographic area, and the West never really seemed to be in this land grab to claim everything west of the Mississippi belongs to the West.

Siegfried: No, no. Remember very early on, very early on, part of the same bias aga--, I think, personal opinion, part of the same bias against fiefdoms was the bias against anybody, letting anybody claim territory there weren't active groups in. There is a geographic barrier between the West Kingdom and most of the rest of the country. In fact, there are two of them. One's called the Rocky Mountains. What essentially happens, if you look at the way the SCA started, you got northern California, then you got a little bit of southern California, a little ... some interest in Arizona and a little bit of interest way out here in the Staten Island area and a little bit of interest here in Chicago. And then all of a sudden things went "Boom" and now what you've got was things popping up on college campuses all over the Northeast and all over the northern part of the Midwest. Meanwhile you go across the South, the largely non-collegiate culture from Atenveldt streaming out across through probably other mechanisms than universities, at least as much. Whereas through the Northeast and through the Midwest, I think they largely sprung up through university groups early on. The West Kingdom wasn't logically going, wasn't logically going to be moving interest outward and also it was fairly large in population terms when these things were starting up. And philosophically, it's very different but I think most of what was reality was it made absolutely no... if you look at what that pattern was, where wasn't there anybody? It's a huge swath that you cut right down the western half of the United States that says between California and about Iowa, OK? I've got Colorado, I've got Wyoming, I've got Utah, it's an area that only gradually started to get infill and in between it was non-claimable territory.

Valens: But didn't the Middle just immediately claim that territory?

Siegfried: They couldn't because there wasn't anyone there. Now there have been cases of Kingdoms or Crowns attempting to deliberately cede area so that they could claim the territory. But that doesn't really work in any effective way. And they wouldn't let them claim the territory until there actually was a group there. And again, there's this strong bias about trying to watch out for claiming territory in a group that's not supposed to be geographic, per se, even thought we don't have any other way of mapping it.

Valens: Does that essentially function at a state level? I mean using the political divisions of the United States seems to be how the SCA functions. 'Cause Calontir has nobody in the western half of the Kingdom. There never has been. And when the Middle Kingdom was here, there was nobody in the western half of the region of Calontir.

Siegfried: Really? OK.

Crag: 'Cause there were hardly any people living there.

Valens: Well, yeah. Calontir only has population in one third of Kansas and one third of Nebraska and two thirds of those state is (unintelligible).

Crag: Now partly because we ceded a piece of that over to...

Valens: We gave Grand Island, Nebraska to the Outlands.

Susannah: Not Grand Island.

Valens: Something. Something out there.

Siegfried: But what you also see, when they draw division lines, there's a strong tendency to the division lines on state boundaries, or more precisely, according to the first three digits of zip codes. And that had to do with the organization and distribution of Kingdom newsletters and things like that. It's comparatively difficult to sort some little thing out and put it elsewhere because you can't automatically generate the labels and the printing houses, it costs a lot more money to have them do the special cases. So when areas tended to be assigned, they tended to be assigned on a statewide basis unless there was a good reason not to. Sometimes there have been good reasons not to. But what they've never done is assign anybody a state that had nobody in it. That had no group. Now there are cases where there was a group and then the group's gone away and there's nobody there now. Once it's assigned it wouldn't be taken away usually. There have been a couple of cases of changing allegiance. Let's see. Hawaii started in the West and went to Caid or they started in Caid and are trying to go to the West.

Thyri: They're part of the West. I thought.

Siegfried: They're part of the West now? I'm not too sure about that. If they are now, they weren't originally. New Zealand counts itself as part of Caid.

Thyri: OK. Even though Australia is part of the West.

Siegfried: That's quite true. Australia and New Zealand are not the same place. They're three hours away by plane.

Thyri: I know they're not. I know they're not.

Crag: Let's drop back. There's one more little run in this period that I want to pick up and conveniently, we'll talk about your coronation next.

Siegfried: OK. There are a couple of things here I'd like to just touch on. You notice that thing that says in March which was the tournament that I won, the coming of the pavilions. That's when we first started seeing real pavilions in the West Kingdom. And it was just as well because in May, mid May, which was my coronation, my second coronation, that was the first overnight event in the Kingdom of the West. So now was had to have things like pavilions and such. And that was decided on at the Grand Curia in April which was where the West Kingdom decided to alternate Crown and Coronation events, established the first overnight event and from that rime on then the Western events were set for late March, the beginning of May, the middle of June, early august and the Middle of September, although there was a few years there where the September event was pushed off until early October because so many people were trying to do Renaissance Faire. And then later on they gave up and pushed it back.

Crag: How did you all stick with the three times a year? That seems to be burdensome.

Siegfried: Because it's always been done that way. The only true answer is it's always been done that way and people see no reason to change it. You'll find a lot of answers such as, well, if you get a bad King, he'll be gone sooner. And if you get a good one, he can always come round again. But the real answer is that it's tradition, it's always been that way, somebody tried to change it once or twice, got changed right back.

Crag: Actually I'm speaking, I can understand now, but back when you guys were still reinventing things, things were so fluid, I'm surprised it didn't change then.

Siegfried: No. Because when we were first starting in the first two or three years, the whole thing was local to within a space of about an hour or and hour and a half's drive. In fact...

Crag: That's true.

Siegfried: The big thing here about the Grand Curia, one of them was that first overnight event was almost a two-hour drive and a lot of people said that was far too far and we can't do that. Because that was near a town called Turlock. And that was a great big issue. When everybody's there every event, remember the only thing that we had were tournaments, and what a tournament consisted of was, it started with a Grand March to the current King and Queen, followed by the Coronation of the new King and Queen and then they presided over the tournament to choose their successors and presided until the next tournament. So, in fact you wanted more not less. And remember the question of how much authority, whether or not... all this stuff was still very fluid.

Crag: That's true.

Siegfried: And during this period of time here, 1969-70, was where a lot of the real issues of the civil service and so on were being thrashed out in the Kingdom of the West as they subsequently got thrashed out in much of the rest of the SCA. So...

Crag: What was the upshot in this period of time... what was the fallout from the incorporation that a lot of you guys had not been part of?

Siegfried: Several different things. As far as locally in the West Kingdom goes, it seemed very obvious that it was an attempt at a political take-over which was Rivendell household which really now was 2/3 of the BoD, and it incorporated the thing and kind of tried to take it over, and Don, who was part of Rivendell, was already the publisher of Tournaments Illuminated, and he in fact kept himself being the editor of both newsletters when there were two newsletters, and really trying to control information flow and such. But all of that seemed relatively irrelevant to going on and having the SCA, just like the whole set of nonsenses that have been going on with the Board over the last couple of years have in many places only marginally affected people actually doing the SCA within local groups and regions because it's almost irrelevant. What happened was is the SCA started to grow up around the country as I alluded to earlier, the BoD and the Steward of the Society and Torvald (what ever the hell he was) I guess he was Steward for a while, and there was Sam de Basset who had some other title that I can't remember. They were presenting a much more rigorous model, much more administrative control from the top, much more review of everything. They insisted on reviewing everything that was going to be printed in the newsletters to see if they wanted it said. They were presenting the SCA as explicitly a historical recreation organization, educational this, that and the other, all things that people in the West Kingdom were relatively unfamiliar with because they never heard those stories played because the Board didn't come out and try to play them at local events. What finally happened was a set of confrontations about the relative power of the civil service versus the monarchy where the Marshal of the Society, which was Edwin Bearsark, told the marshal, the Kingdom marshal of the West, which was Caradoc ap Cador at the time, to do certain things and the King of the West said no, you can't do that. You will do this instead, and Caradoc said, "I don't report to you. You can't tell me what to do. I only report to the Marshal of the Society." So the King of the West and a bunch of people went to talk to the then BoD. This was about 1972. And had a discussion, the nature of which was Paul essentially falling on his sword by saying, "I'm Marshal of the Society and these people report to me, and only report to me and if you won't back me up, I'm quitting." And they said, "Boy, it was nice knowing you, Paul." And there you were. That was the time when the SCA came closest to fragmenting because we actually had an alternate corporation set up and ready to go. It was called the Sword and Chivalry Association, and it was designed to keep the same initials. So we didn't have to change things.

Crag: never heard of something like that before.

Siegfried: But that was in the early 1970's. Now meanwhile what had happened here is if you look at the history working, and that happened elsewhere as well. The difference is there are actually a couple of Kingdoms that are seriously going ahead with doing their own thing. As we get into the discussion later, it will be very interesting to see what that bodes for the SCA in the long term, but... the big thing that then happened over the summer of 1969 was two things. First of all was the growing power of the Steward or the Seneschal, who's in charge, leading to confrontations between the Crown and between the seneschal and the Steward. After I got off the throne, I, Ardis and I, my second wife and I, really sort of dropped out for about a year and a half because we'd just about had it at that point. And much of the problem was the civil service at that point really wanting to run, wanting to be in charge of things and not wanting to do things. Or at least some of them. And that was a real problem for us or a while. It gradually got better, but it's hard to invent a civil service out of whole cloth. It certainly didn't seem like a small thing at that time. But the first laws of the Kingdom of the West were proclaimed largely to clarify some of those administrative issues about who's in charge of what, and who reports to whom and who's responsible for what. Little things like does the royal pavilion and crown get to events. And who's in charge of seeing they get to events and so on and so forth.

Crag: And that occurred on your watch? No.

Siegfried: part of that occurred on my watch originally. And the dust up about that was only of the things that led me to drop out of the SCA for the first time right about then for a year and a half. If you notice in here, we have Cariadoc, the formation of the Midrealm in the summer of 1969. The Pale started up there. Now earlier back in the fall of '68, Pennoncel, which was the first name for the newsletter of the East Kingdom, started, and it later turned into Pikestaff. Now you have the Pale starting up. And these things are all, if you go back and look at early issues, they are all being typed on Jon de Cles' typewriter by Jon de Cles. Well, what can you say?

Crag: What was the first biker story we missed?

Siegfried; Oh, I'm sorry. The... that actually happened at the first overnight Coronation, the one where I became King. There was a local biker group that came by and thought this looked really interesting and maybe should be trashed or something, and ultimately somebody called the police and the police showed up and got introduced to the King. And it's been elaborated a lot, but those are the bare rocks of it. So as far as, and there are a lot of stories of the general... the SCA has got as many of the urban myths as anyone else, but we don't call them urban myths. Right? And one of them is how do you want your steak? (Sound of flipping coin) Cooked. Another one is the classic one of the guy breaking into somebody's house and being chased with a sword, only that did happen, and it happened to Ken and I when we lived in Berkeley. It's probably happened many times. I know it happened that time. There was the classic one of the bikers that are confronted by the fighters, only there was no confrontation at this event. There was very close to a confrontation, but usually the line is along "you hit people with those things?" or words to that effect. I don't recall there being any actual confrontation. I do recall a ten man call at one point. But as far as I know the bikers never really invaded the camp.

Crag: A tin man call.

Siegfried: Ten men? You weren't in the service I don't think. The classic line to call folks, like in the barracks, you have a problem, "I need 10 men," you get people there. And what it says is, "Show up and be prepared for action." So... to be honest with you to this day, I'm not real sure whether or not our biker friends decided to try to invade the event or whether we just had somebody that got nervous and yelled, but what's very clear is that there was not a fighting confrontation between bikers and between SCA folk. Certainly not in the Kingdom of the West in 1969.

Crag: OK. Cariadoc has...

Siegfried: Cariadoc.

Crag: Cariadoc has been, has won the tourney at Wilmette, Wisconsin. Is knighted by Adrian of Toledo which is held to be a non-appropriate knighting. He is crowned at St. Louis, no, I guess that's later. OK. He comes out to California then.

Siegfried: He came out to California in the summer of 1969. The... it is a little bit unclear as to where I actually knighted him. I knighted Cariadoc, my recollection is that I knighted him at Rivendell. And this would have been in early July of 1969. But another story in one of the histories has it that it happened at Westercon which happened in downtown Oakland. And I no longer remember which except if it happened at Westercon, it had to have happened over the July 4th weekend. And I think there's some kind of conflict with that.

Crag: I think that he... I think that he told me that he sort of remember it being done not at an event.

Siegfried: And that's perfectly possible. That would have been, if you ask me what I thought had happened without reading anything else, that' what I would have said, was that I got a call from Paul Zimmer, Edwin Bearsark, and saying they had this guy staying with them who was the fellow who had just won the first event in the Midrealm and as King of the West would I come over and Knights the guy. And I came over and chatted a bit and knighted him. There is no...specific identification in any of this stuff as to when that happened and you wouldn't expect that.

Crag: OK. The first laws.

Siegfried: The first laws? I have a copy of them here. The reason for them happening was the whole series of confrontations with, primarily with the seneschal about who's in charge and who's supposed to see to things like the providing of the accouterments of the Crown and such. What happened was, when things first started out, we had the Supreme Autocrats who were in charge of hosting an event. And we've had autocrats and an autocrat in charge ever sine. But at the same time, we were coming up with the fact that there were more and more accouterments of the Crown and of the Kingdom, like the royal pavilion and the this and that and the other, that somebody had to be in charge of and make sure it got to events. Now it's fine having somebody who's in charge of it, but whose responsibility is it that that person doesn't fail. The issue was, we took the position that's the responsibility of the civil service and of the seneschal, with which the seneschal agreed, but the seneschal couldn't be bothered to see that it was happening, which was part of the problem. There were also some issues about whether events were happening according to the published schedule, whether they would be jerked around at any one person's convenience, even though we published things months in advance. And what it finally led to was a proclamation, and the big this in this thing said first of all... it begins, "We, Siegfried Rex on this the 80th day of Our Reign, being the fifth day of August 1969 Anno Domini, in consultation with Henrik, Duke of Havn, Crown Prince of the Realm, Sir Caradoc ap Cador, Our Predecessor, David of Oberland, Lord Advocate, and diverse of Our subjects and advisors in Privy Council assembled and elsewhere to better provide for the maintenance and conduct of the affairs of this, Our Kingdom of the West, do hereby proclaim, One - That the King's word is Lay, and any proclamation of the King is the Law of the Kingdom from the moment it is spoken," and goes on. And that is the first point in Kingdom law in the Kingdom of the West ever since. It has never been changed. And in fact what you will find in general, the theory in the Kingdom of the West is that there is one vote, or two votes. And there's a very famous scene at a, what would be a Curia now, in the West Kingdom where James Greyhelm was King of the West, and the subject was under debate, and finally the King said, "I am interested in how people feel about this," and the herald, who was Randall at the time, conducting it, and Randall went around the table saying, "My lord, what is your opinion on this?" and we heard, you know, "Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye." Gets around to the King, and Randall says, "My liege?" and the King says, "Nay." And Randall says "The nays have it!" Without even blinking. Of course he was a monarchist from way back. What these proclamations provided, first of all, was to say the King's work is law, but is has to be published before you’re responsible for breaking the law, first of all. Then it established six official dates, specified when they were going to happen, specified where they were supposed to happen, specified that there could be exceptions, but there had to be some sort of calendar that was adhered to, specified that the Crown couldn't hold another office while being King or Queen, so you can see where some of the things... Bill Rolls who was Chairman of the Board for a long time until we finally kicked him off (which is another story) once observed that you could show him any group's by-laws, he could tell you their history reverse. And just by listening to things they've had to make rules about. Right? OK. Fighter has to declare that they are available for the periods of time in which their Coronation and subsequent events have to happen, what happens if they're not available, on, on, and so on. And what really got to it then was, we issued the proclamation, we held the Curia, we did the thing, and then Don refused, absolutely, flat-assed refused to publish the Page and get it out. So I had the things printed up and went over there and did it myself to get them out to people. But... so things were not well and I was one of several monarchs that had running problems. And as I said, it later on let to a confrontation in the early 1970's between Greyhelm and the then BoD. The Board operated pretty much in private up through the mid 70's, up through about the first 10 years of the Society. They tended to meet in the basement of Greyhaven which was the new house that Rivendell moved to. Meetings may or may not have been open. And a lot of them were tape recorded, strangely enough. But there was a weird... remember this whole situation created this weird combinational feeling of paranoia and irritation and who's in charge here.

END OF TAPE THREE, SIDE TWO

TAPE FOUR, SIDE ONE

Siegfried: ...After the first three years. Probably they were the ones that I was personally involved with, the ones that came up when I was on the Board the first couple of times and those are in that brief bio I gave you. And we can talk to those if you want to. You know, we were talking a little earlier about the ducal prerogative, of not entering the Crown lists just to show you how that mutated in Atenveldt, that turned into the ducal prerogative was to withdraw from the Crown lists whenever the Duke chose, so in essence the Duke could stay in there, knock out whom he pleased, and then pull out later on if he felt like it. Then it turned into the Duke could enter the Crown lists and knock somebody out or be sent in by the current King. And in Atenveldt the manipulation of the Crown lists is a long and honorable tradition, to be honest with you.

Crag: Do the people of Atenveldt as a whole validate that, or are they so used to being abused that they're incapable of knowing different?

Siegfried: I'm not sure that anything seems like abuse when it's built into your system structure. I don't think the people of Atenveldt and Ansteorra necessarily perceive that that's wholly inappropriate, although I would argue that it certainly is. Interesting stuff. But I've never really heard the kind of an outraged reaction that I would have thought. Now whether... I should also point out that it's been a number of years since I've been directly involved in Atenveldt politics and it may be that is mutated away from these customs. But they were this way certainly in the 1980's.

Crag: Certainly a time that I had much to do with them when we were dealing with heavy fighters in Ansteorra still did that. And that was a... it's culture shock being next to a ... being a daughter Kingdom of the Midrealm against a daughter Kingdom of Atenveldt. That's a kind of thing I can say. OK. We're going to move on, and you're beginning to say some things about Atenveldt there, the Order of the Light, those sorts of things. Is there anything that's worthy, springs a memory on your part?

Siegfried: Well, it's a little bit hard to say because as I say, I wasn't very involved in the period 1970, 71, 72. A lot of other things going on in my life and as a result, that's the real formative periods for Atenveldt, so I'm not as familiar with them during that period as I became familiar with it about 1975, which is the first time I actually went down there to an Atenveldt event.

Crag: Let me ask you just in terms of things you heard repercussions when you got richard Mont Real making Robert Roundpounder a Master at Arms. I understood that there was some question early on whether it was permissible for a Master at Arms to make any branch of chivalry.

Siegfried: Well. OK. Now we'll get into another one of thos dirty little items. A Master at Ams was not a member of the chivalry in 1968. It was not created as an order of the chivalry in the sense that the Knights and the Laurels were. It was simply created as a way of recognizing somebody who was an equal at fighting and unwilling to be in fealty. When we set those things up in '68, we were not setting up, we were not setting up peerage orders yet. That really happened over the following year and a half. However, nothing, the only constraint that exists about what a King can do is the single statement, and it's still in corporate as far as I know, that says only a Knights may make a Knights. What that says is if a reigning King is not a Knights, he has to have the hand of a Knights on the sword when he gives the accolade. Anything else whether it's create or recognize is absolutely within the domain of the reigning King, because it's done by the power of the Crown. King or Queen. Depending on how your Kingdom works. But the original thing about the accolade was that it was an individual to individual transmission rather than a Crown to subject or Crown to Crown transmission, and thus could only be delivered from an individual.

Crag: But you have twice used the phrase "the accolade was sent." Is it a very specific use?

Siegfried; That's quite right. The accolade was sent, for example, from me as King of the West to the East Coast with Ardral. Ardral was a Knight.

Crag: Was that a verbal, or was that a ...?

Siegfried: It was an explicit charge. I don't remember if we had it in writing or not. We may well have, but if we did, I don't think the writing exists. Actually I think there was a scroll, in fact, but I'm sure it no longer exists, unless David has it somewhere which is possible. I see him about once every five years by accident. So... but it was an explicit charge on Ardral as a Knights to deliver the accolade and Knights the first winner of the Crown of the East. In the case of the Midrealm, Cariadoc came out West so that wasn't the case. The... you see... in this you would see the, there had been other cases where a Knighthood has been done remotely, but only if it's been done through the specific medium of a Knights, because it's the same issue as the transmission of power issue. And since that's one of the first customs in the SCA, and that's one that most Knights would hold to, I think, and say if you're going to do that, you know, if you go back into real world history, there's a time when a Knights could be made by another Knights. It didn't have to be made by a King. Although Kings found it very convenient to have that be something that they and only they could grant. And our first two Knights were not made by Kings. So our customs say that a Knights, now that we've bootstrapped it, is made by a Knights because we wrote that into the ceremonies at 12th Night II.

Crag: The first two?

Siegfried: The first two Knights in the SCA were made by Ken and I. They were not made by Kings. You can also...

Crag: Unintelligible.

Siegfried: I knighted David.

Crag: Right.

Siegfried: And Fulk knighted Henrik.

Crag: I thought Fulk was still on the throne then?

Siegfried: There was no throne.

Crag: OK. He was retroactively made King.

Siegfried: He was retroactively recognized as a Duke on the grounds of sitting the throne that he didn't do. Now since he won the third event, or he won the second tournament and David won the third...sorry. and Henrik won the third tournament, then you could argue that he was nominally King at the time.

Crag: Actually that's exactly how I did when I drew out the lineage of the...

Siegfried: But if you want to argue that, you would have to argue that I was nominally King of the SCA at the first event for a parallel and you can't make that argument 'cause there was none. Because there wasn't a reigning monarch at the first event. But in any case we're talking about the legitimacy of the accolade rather than the legitimacy of whether or not there was a monarch, and that's why at 12th Night II, we had Henrik knight William, and William then turned right around and knighted Henrik, and knighted me and knighted Fulk and that completed the loop. At this point you can argue about it before, but you can't argue about if afterwards. We chose to recognize the knighting of those that happened earlier, but the bootstrap event was 12th Night II, and after that it's always, theoretically at least, always been done in this process.

Crag: Now, so back to the point of this. So Roundpounder is done by...

Siegfried: He's made a Master by Richard. And there's, that there was nothing in any of the rules at the time that I know of that said he couldn't do that.

Crag: Were there any eyebrows raised over it?

Siegfried: I have no idea because I wasn't there.

Crag: OK. That's true.

Siegfried: Now I would argue, argue is not the right word, I would suggest that they had to modify the ceremony a little because he had to already know that Roundpounder wasn't going to be a Knights. He couldn't have made him a Knights, but if he already knew the guy was going to become a Master, he could just leave out that part of the ceremony, and what the hell? And so you would. Although in the West Kingdom we didn't really leave that out for a long time. We didn't really leave it out. We always asked if you want to be a Knights first. And if the person said no, then will you accept from us et cetera. But essentially what you can say is that the establishment of Atenveldt as far as the West Kingdomers that are primarily involved in it, it's primarily Henrik and his household and Richard for a little bit. And that's because they were the people who were being King and such at the time as well. And the people who knew them. Also Arthur was very early on interested in Japanese tradition, Samurais and such, and that was an interest that Henrik has had for a very long time, so they were drawn together by that quite early on.

Crag: OK. Let's move on...

Siegfried: Rather quickly.

Crag: Move on down. Calafia, Caid gets started. Does that trigger anything?

Siegfried: I don't know. It doesn't really trigger a lot. I mean what you see here now in 1970 is Ladrone which is the Seattle area starting up, and Three Mountains which is the Portland area, and Caid. In reality Caid is simply a anacronym formed of Califia, Angels, Isles...

Thyri: Dreiburgen.

Siegfried: Dreiburgen. Right. They were the four baronies that were the nuclear part of Caid at the time. That's where the name comes from. It's an easy place to get the name. Sure.

Crag: In May of '72 at the Beltane Coronation... by the way, when did they start naming the events? I was a little curious about that.

Siegfried: I don't know that they ever did... well once we started... well once the West Kingdom started officially having a major event at the beginning of May, then it started to be called Beltane because that's also the old name for May Day. There is, there was an event in early August, however, that wasn't called Lammas, so go figure.

Crag: OK. In May of '72, the county rank is discussed, and Duchess.

Siegfried: And Stefan gets his name back? OK. The reason for that was that Stefan used to call himself, started calling himself Stefan, Comte de Lorraine. And that was back in 1967. That was back, remember this is before we had all this stuff. Then we established dukes and Knights and Masters and the Order of the Laurel and there are no counts, and Stefan can't do that. So Stefan goes out and get himself knighted and get married and he finally wins the Crown and he finally reigns, and then finally we have counts, and finally he can be Count Stefan de Lorraine, but he can't be Stefan Count de Lorraine after all. So he almost gets it back.

Crag: And the duchesses established, was there anything special about that?

Siegfried: The big issue about that one was the question of courtesy titles versus titles in your own right. The issue originally didn't particularly exist until relationships started to prove more fluid than the history of the SCA did, and you had people breaking up and reforming. And then you started to have the possible question of ladies fighting and now what do you have. And that finally got brought to a head when... let's see, Andrew of Riga made Lady Patrice a Duchess in her own right, and then they broke up, and she acquired a new gentleman, and reasonably asked whether or not he would be a Duke by courtesy. And that created a lot of.

Unknown: (Unintelligible)

Siegfried: I don't know about a brouhaha, but it sure created a lot of people looking at their navels and saying, "Gee, it doesn't feel as good when we try it on that way, does it?" The net of it eventually was to kill off courtesy titles.

Crag: They were still doing it in the Midrealm towards the tail end of when I joined.

Siegfried; And to this day, people may still use that, but , like if I show up at an event with a lady, it's possible someone might refer to her as "Your Grace" if they didn't know, or weren't sure. That's been known to happen in fact. I was thinking of a number of years ago when I wasn't married to anybody, and showed up at an Outlandish with a young lady, and people started calling her "Your Grace" which shocked her completely, practically out of her underwear in fact.

Crag: OK. October of '72 the Pelican was created and there was some discussions about that.

Siegfried: Um, hm. And there's both the discussion of the Pelican and the broader discussion. The Pelican was created by the BoD and it was originally given to three people and it created a giant furor because that was about when the Board started to style themselves the Imperial Electors.

Crag: This was still the Rivendell cum Greyhaven?

Siegfried: Or part of them. And there was a real, real question as to now, wait a minute. The model that we have of the Middle Ages that's running here does not have a super-national organization called Imperial Electors. Nor does anybody seem to want it. The question of whether or not there even should be and whether or not the Board has any business granting people titles if it has no medieval existence was one that exercised people fairly strongly right about that time. When the Board gave those Pelicans, of them one of them far as I know, the guy still has, but he hasn't been active in 20 years, and that was Douglas Brownbeard. One of them was reacted... one of them gave it back later on, one of them was replaced with four or six Kingdom Order of the Laurel. But... remember the thing we said about owning the methods of communication. Two or three years later, the Board didn't give any more Pelicans after that, but you find that in fact the Kingdoms had started to adopt it, and there's even one case of a Laurel trading his Laurel in and requesting he be allowed to trade it in for a Pelican because he felt that what he did was in fact more appropriate for a Pelican than for a Laurel. So given enough time for the award to be seen in its own right, it finally got adopted as an acceptable phenomenon but it took a fair amount of time and it contributed to the more general debate of what's going on here because in fact the Board was very much seen as people who didn't go to SCA events at all and didn't have any, at this point, have much of any SCA existence, but were trying to meddle with the Known World, quote unquote. So that was a strain, and especially if you've ever tried to read the Corpora that was being written through the mid 70's, and that's an interesting exercise trying to read it. It's written forsoothly and kind of cutely in a way that makes it extremely difficult to tell what the hell it's even talking about. But the Board of that period largely looked like three folks and later five folks that tended to be in the basement of Greyhaven, and pontificate to themselves and affect alot of people that were far enough away that they didn't know what was going on on the West Coast. That's a West Coaster's point of view. Heaven only knows how it looked for the rest of the world. But I expect it didn't look too good.

Crag: You ever listen to the song "Causes of Rebellion"?

Siegfried: Course.

Crag: Well....

Siegfried: And I used to know Astra (of the Grey Shadows), so.

Crag: Now, the next thing you have there, 1973, is called the second revolution.

Siegfried: Remember I talked about that. That was the Sword and Chivalry Association and what amounted to the essence of the barons showing up and demanding that the King fight. That was James and the West confronting the BoD over the issue of the marshallate that forced the resignation of Paul Zimmer as marshal.

Crag: But there's no particular written record of this. This was just a personal...

Siegfried: I really doubt there is. I suppose there might be if you go back far enough in the Board minutes, but I don't know if I have any Board minutes that go that far back.

Crag: OK.

Siegfried: I think my Board minutes records start in '75.

Crag: You say in July of '75 King Paul chartered the baronies.

Siegfried: That was the first baronies in the Kingdom of the West, yes. Landed baronies.

Crag: But there had been baronies other places before that?

Siegfried: The baronies... OK. The big difference here was there were baronies that started up outside of what appeared to be the domain of the Kingdom, as in Three Mountains and as in Califia and as in Nadrone. And that later resulted in the scope of the Kingdom growing and those groups grew up and went off and became their own Kingdom eventually. In this particular case, you are now talking about baronies being chartered within the heart realm with no intention that they would ever turn into Kingdoms eventually of their own.

Crag: When did they, or do they to this day, baronies out there, swear fealty to the Crown?

Siegfried: The all do on a yearly basis, I believe, still.

Crag: On a yearly basis, not per reign?

Siegfried: I don't think so. My overall impression is that it sort of depends on the charter of the barony, too. But it's... you got to remember that there is still one combat barony in the West Kingdom where the succession is chosen by combat on a yearly basis.

Valens: Did you have shires at that time? Were there shires in other groups?

Siegfried: We had the effect of it, but I don't recall whether we called them that. That was still early enough on that's there's... my mind, I just don't remember. I could tell you by going back and looking at documents of the time, of which I have some, but I don't honestly remember. My feeling is that the first local groups ... if you remember, you started out with a Kingdom and then all there really was, was the Kingdom. And then you got groups outside the Kingdoms starting to start up and some of those were other Kingdoms, and the other ones were called baronies when they first started up until they grew up and became something bigger. And eventually grew up to go off and become their own Kingdom like Atenveldt.

Valens: When did the Kingdoms start subdividing into baronies and shires and local...?

Siegfried: More... in one sense it always had done, but the recognition started happening in the 70's, in the mid 70's. So certainly by 1975-76, you were finding that kind of thing, although it was still as common, a new place would start up and then it would ask to become the shire of this or whatever. And this was about the time they started to institute some sort of structure for what you needed to have to be a group of a particular size, and some sort of cohesion in to how areas might grow up to become larger parts of the SCA.

Crag: The next question I have is how did we come to have viscounts?

Valens: Now that we've come to have one.

Siegfried: Well, if you go back to 12th Night II, the... you was that question or...?

Crag: I actually do, but it was a good time to tweak Ternon since he walked in.

Siegfried: If you go back to 12th Night II, remember the only titles we used were King, Queen, Knights, Master or Mistress of the Laurel, and Master of Arms. After that, then it was two years later that the term "baron" was used. And it was about two years after that, that the term "Count" came into use. And it was about... when the idea of having principalities choosing the prince and princess by combat is when viscounts first came to be, which would have been in... oh bother, middle 70's somewhere. Probably started out in the West Kingdom simply because the only place that had been around long enough to have principalities. I'm sure it started because I think James created viscounty, the viscounty rank. I know he created counts. Let's see, what else can I tell you about this? If you look at... where's the page I want? The order of the Silver Molet was January 1, 1974. One of the problems that the Kingdom of the West at least was having throughout the 1970's was rapid growth. And the consequence of rapid growth is failure of assimilation. People coming to the SCA, there aren't enough people around to really give them a good solid understanding of what the game is, and what's going on. They seize on some of the external trapping. They don't really integrate the cultural values and they can't very well. One manifestation of that tends to be stick jocks and especially rhino-hiders because they're people that seize on the stick fighting and the winning as being the important attributes and they haven't been around the SCA enough to figure out the important part of it, and things like that. And if you look at SCA history in almost any group, you'll find fluctuating things like this where you get a sudden rise of people coming into the group and then you get problems with folks that just don't seem to understand how to behave. They're too loud, too late to events or they seem to run around and they don't wear garb or they don't understand the rules of a fight, on and on. And then that smoothes out over a while as you assimilate them, and you've got the same pattern over. We were going through a really bad pattern of that in the early 1970's. And finally Henrik and I had a long talk. I remember setting down with him about it. He was trying to figure out what could be done and what we finally came up with was to create a Knightsly order within the order of Knights which was originally going to be called the Order of Chandos, but was eventually named the Order of the Silver Molet.

Crag: After John Chandos?

Siegfried: After Sir John Chandos, who else? And it's purpose was to extol the non-combat Knightsly virtues. You had to be a Knights, you had to have been a Knights at least a couple of years to even be proposed for the Order of Chandos, but the idea was these were people that extolled chivalry and courtesy and all the other... the idea was to be able to hold this up as an example of the perfect gentle Knights, of what people ought to be aspiring to. So that got created in 1974. The order never did grow to more than about a dozen people. It was finally closed in the 1980's by King Geoffrey who had a strong egalitarian streak in him, and couldn't , just didn't like the idea of something existing that was deliberately not available to most people, regardless if whether or not there were other things not available to most people. He just had it up for that one particular thing, and he wasn't the first King that had that. William the Lucky had the same problem. Again a monarch with a strong egalitarian streak. But the Silver Molet was widely respected within the Kingdom of the West and written into the Coronation ceremonies and things like that.

Valens: Was that the first Kingdom specific award or order?

Siegfried: It was the first Kingdom specific peerage award.

Valens: So it was a peerage?

Siegfried: You had to be a Knights already, so you had to be a peer.

Valens: Did the Kingdom have, did the Kingdom of the West have orders that were just Kingdom specific?

Siegfried: Yes.

Valens: Did they come from the West?

Siegfried: Did the idea come from the West?

Valens: Yeah.

Siegfried: Probably, originally. The first such order was the Leaf of Merit which was kind of a miniature Pelican. It was the Kingdom service award. And much later came the Rose Leaf which was the Kingdom arts award, sort of a miniature Laurel. Whether they copied it, I don't know, but they all have it. You get the Silver Crescent in the East. The Order of Light of Atenveldt... all of these orders essentially hold either an Award of Arms or a Grant of Arms. Although in the West Kingdom, by decree of the Crown, while and Order of the Leaf of Merit and the Order of the Rose Leaf hold Awards of Arms, they rank at the top of the Awards of Arms, so they are super Awards of Arms or something. It's highly unlikely that... that's also because Grants of Arms have never been used for much of anything in the West. They were originally intended as a holding pattern for people that were probably on their way to become Laurels to be perfectly blunt about it. Because there needed to be something between Awards of Arms and Laurels, but what made Grants of Arms mostly irrelevant was the fact that the Kingdoms invented their own service awards and their own awards that were armigerous, but in fact served exactly the purpose that a Grant of Arms might have served. In retrospect, we probably never needed Grants of Arms, but we didn't know that when we invented them. Let's see. August of '74 is when the West Kingdom Order of the Pelican happened. Viscount and Viscountess happened in September 1974 with the Coronet Tournament in An Tir. Year 10, January 1976 was a 12th Night and that was the first time that the King and Queen of all four Kingdoms were present at the same event that I know of. And by that time, of course, Caid was already a Kingdom. It's really kind of funny. An Tir would have been except there was an issue involving... well, it's a long story, but it largely had to do with the fact that An Tir wanted to do its own thing to the extent that it didn't even want to be nice... it never could figure out whether or not its problem was the BoD or the Kingdom of the West, and never quite understood the difference between them which pissed the West off no end as you can imagine. And they never have to this day quite figured it out.

Crag: According to Lizzie who's seneschal of An Tir right now, they still haven't figured it out.

Siegfried: And then on May 1st and 2nd, 1976, was the 10 year anniversary of the Society. And that was when the new crowns were presented to the Kingdom, and those crowns were retired. The new ones, you've probably seen the Western crowns. The King has the huge acorn leaves and the Queen's got the rose leaves. And they're cast silver. These crowns were then retired. And at the same time someone came up with caps of maintenance because the new crowns were very heavy. They're pretty... aside from that, we've largely gone through much of the early history that I know a lot about except for some spotty things in a few places. And after I got out of being... after I became a Duke, I was relatively inactive for a few years... for about a year and a half went to tournaments, fought occasionally, did fighting demos and things like that, but really became involved again in a totally different level in 1977 when I got asked to join the BoD. And so sort of a second phase of my existence was getting on the Board for the first time. And that was kind of an interesting experience both because of the old despised Board which by now was five people but it was still a lifetime appointment. When you made it on the Board, you were there until you chose to resign. And the Chairman was a permanent appointment until the Chair chose to resign. And all that changed in the three years I was on the Board. Not just me, although I certainly had something to do with it. I don't know if you want to go on to any of that or not.

Crag: As far as that's pertinent the very little of that is known by any of us.

Siegfried: OK. You have that two page bio that I handed you? 'Cause rather than rambling, what I'd rather do would be to hit on the issues there that I felt were the major issues that happened. Apparently you don't have it so I'll have to...

Thyri: Crag? It's not in the stack of stuff on the floor there?

Valens: While he searches for that, I have a question that sort of touches on this period. Viscount Ternon and I were talking about this a little bit last night. Between the time he joined in the mid 70's and when I joined in the very very early 80's fighting in the SCA seemed to have gone through an incredible metamorphosis. He joined in an era of freon cans and basketball pads. By the time I joined five years later, pretty much all of our current rules for armoring and fighting were in place. What was the impetus for such a radical change or formalization at least?

Siegfried: Critical mass.

Valens: Were people getting hurt? Was it fashion? Was it a desire to recreate the period?

Siegfried: I would argue... well, there were two or three things there. Part of it was simply the fact, that for a very long time, everybody assumed that making real armor would be impossibly difficult or far too hard to do, so they had to make do with carpet armor and freon cans and whatever. The funny thing is it turned out to be less hard to make real stuff than it was to make fake stuff. But it was hard to tell a newbie that. I think that a lot of the changeover in armor is directly due to Polidor and the armorers in the Midrealm because they were the first ones that really popularized and spread blacksmithing and making real armor widely. There was a journal called... what was it... The Hammer?

Valens: Yeah.

Siegfried: Was that the name of it?

Valens: I believe so.

Crag: Polidor Haroldsson.

Siegfried: Yeah. Polidor Haroldsson. Secondly, I would say that the codification of the fighting rules and so on was largely in place by the mid 1970's and just starting to spread out. But a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the vast majority of all of this sort of thing sprang from the first real interkingdom contacts that started happening after Pennsic happened, and a couple of the other interkingdom wars where there started to be more inter-group communications, more feeding off of what each other were doing and more frankly competition not just in fighting but in upgrading the art of fighting. The actual art of combat, per se, of developing a true fighting style... Paul, Edwin Bearsark, used to talk a lot about fighting style and things like that in the 60's. But the thing really started to take off when Bellatrix became active because he's the one that developed the original snap blow and started to thoroughly integrate the Eastern concept of martial arts into sword fighting and try to build a common practice out of it. And then that started to spread very widely. And by the mid 70's you would find snap blows and so on were at least starting to be heard of more and more.

Ternon: It was just being circulated in '75 when I went to my first fighter practice. And everyone did cry.

Siegfried: And you got to remember Paul only invented it four years before and for the SCA, that's very rapid dissemination because there was no formalized dissemination going on then. But I think a lot of it was yeast. I think a lot of it was, there were now enough different SCA groups growing up and interacting with each other that enough of the basic technology was in place and enough people had made real armor and so on, to show that it could be done, that it wasn't impossibly difficult. There were by the early to mid 70's, armories, at least in the West, set up where you could buy armor for a relatively inexpensive amount. You know, you could at least buy plate legs and arms and so on. The basic stuff you needed to defend yourself better than bicycle pads and such. It was kind of like the pot rising to critical mass and then it really started to boil around 1974 and then things started to froth out and move, and by the early 1980's, this steaming pot had boiled over and boiled all over the SCA and very rapidly things started to level up after that. And there's been a leveling effect as well, too, and one of the things is, there was a time in the early 1970's where there was very little question that you would probably find the best fighters in the SCA in the West Kingdom or conceivably in parts of Atenveldt. By 10 years to 12 years later, the best fighters in any Kingdom were pretty well on a par. The general level of fighting was probably better in the West because it had had fighter practices running longer. But the best fighters, especially the naturals, will very rapidly climb as high as the state of the art will allow them, and they will learn from one another, and they will start taking it higher. Which, of course, creates the other problem about the rising level of what you have to do to become a Knights but that's another discussion.

Crag: Kidney belts.

Siegfried; Dave Thewlis. Glad to meet you.

Crag: Good. Good. I'd heard the story of why we had to, of why we had kidney belts came out of the West when somebody lost a kidney.

Siegfried: Not as far as I know. They may have come out of Richard going off on his motorcycle and nearly losing his life back in 1967. The reason you wear cups is because I caught Flieg one in the groin, shall we say, on stage at one of the Renaissance fairs and discovered that he wasn't wearing, or he discovered he wasn't wearing a cup. He knew he wasn't wearing, but he really knew it after that. And I don't think Lynn (his wife) would talk to me for a year. That was quite unintentional.

Crag: Can you recall any... reminds you of Stephen Ironhand and the convent story. Do you recall any other particular tombstone fighter conventions, things like?

Siegfried: Tombstone fighter conventions.

Crag: We talk about tombstone anatomy. You know, this is the Isle of Valens that Valens discovered between the kidney and the liver, or something like that.

Valens: I always heard that the no two-handed polearm weapons had to do with Andrew of Seldomrest and a maul.

Ternon: And Randall Longsleeves.

Valens: Something about he hurt somebody, and we can't have two handed polearms.

Ternon: He actually broke their arm through their shield.

Siegfried: But there are two-handed polearms even today.

Ternon: Two-handed striking head.

Valens: Like a maul head on each end.

Siegfried: Oh. That could be, I don't know. What I do know is that as we said earlier, back in 1967, we found rattan around July of '66. By the following June... the following April, we had evolved rattan weapons to the point where we had zwei handers like the Landsknechts would have used. Six and a half, 7' tall rattan sword, where the grips were like that, and when you swung a blow, you'd swing it and stop it like that and the blade would whip in and actually whip around the edge of the shield and hit some. So you were evolving a fighting style that you couldn't possible do with a steel weapon. And those things were vicious. That led to the general discovery that the bigger, the longer the sword got, the less like a real sword a rattan sword behaved, and was a special case of the general problem of trying to construct tourney weapons that behaved enough like the real thing that you didn't come up with a fighting style that had no relationship whatsoever to what you were really doing. The biggest problem we still have with that is the fact that real steel blades hydroplane and nobody's ever really figured out how the devil to reproduce that in delivering blows with rattan swords. So a lot of the blows that we use and that we kill with wouldn't actually work with the real thing as anyone who has taken a real sword out and swung it has found out. But there isn't any way of figuring out how to make it better that I know short of attaching little vanes to the swords.

Ternon: And once again, if you have a blade cross-section that can do that, by definition you have a minimized striking surface and the number of fractures or serious injuries would increase correspondingly.

Siegfried: Exactly. So there's no particular interest in doing that at all. The only thing that has really happened is the tendency to delineate what were supposed to be the edges on the sword and to try to tell whether it was the edge that hit somebody. And when you're in a suit of armor trying to tell whether or not that really hit you or not, somebody should ask you if it was hit, was it the edge as well. Right. Gee, I don't know, it looked like a railroad to me. That's a difficult set of propositions, and about all you can say is on the whole the SCA's done surprisingly well. As far as I can see, we haven't evolved sword and shield combat horribly away from what it might be like with the real weapons. But what we definitely find is that the bigger weapons, the two-handed weapons, get less and less like it. One reason why there was such a resurgence of interest in Japanese weaponry, of course, was the long, two-handed Japanese arms.

Valens. All the early events were tournaments. When did the idea of doing this in groups, I mean melee, come early, or did that come out?

Siegfried: Melees as inchoate multi-person combats on a tourney field happened very early on. The first war happened in 1967. That was the first... well, the first non-tournament SCA event was 12th Night 1966. The first non-tournament combat event other than fighting practices was probably the Small War that was held in Marin County in mid 1967. Then as you go on from there, in the West Kingdom at least, the notion of having events that were coronations rather than crown tournaments happened in 1969. There was a surprising amount of opposition to that by people who felt that folks wouldn't bother to come to a tournament unless the Crown were being fought for. And, of course, what they found out was that of course they would, and they would enjoy it perfectly well. What the West Kingdom has not found out was something the Midrealm found out, was that if you design your Crown Tournaments properly, almost nobody will want to come. But that phenomenon may be unique to the Midrealm, I'm not sure.

Ternon: I've heard that out in the West that the nature of an event itself is somewhat different, that they have a tendency to have events that close down after feasts, or don't have quite as many events that run two days. Is that true or is that just cultural rumor and backwash?

Siegfried: I don't know. I shouldn't have thought so. Then starting in 1969, all West Kingdom events, Kingdom events, other than 12th Night are overnights. They typically start noon Friday and last through Sunday afternoon. What that means is the March Crown tourney, May coronation, June crown tourney, August coronation, September crown, and what's call Ducal Prize which is an overnight prize competition tournament, are all of them overnight events. And in fact the fundamental cultural model in the West Kingdom is the overnight Crown event. Now the principality events of which there are four or six a year depending on what you count in each of the principalities may or may not be overnights, because in the Mists, for example, if I remember correctly, the Mists Coronet tourneys tend to be overnights, but the Investitures tend to be done in a hall with a feast and investiture, and be a one day event. But West Kingdom events tend to be camping events so there don't tend to be things like post-revels because those tend to happen at the camping events.

Valens: I think what Ternon may be talking about may be more indicative of Caid. Why is there such a cultural division between the West and Caid? The number of Crowns, the way Kingdoms function.

Siegfried: OK. Well, I think there's a three syllable answer and the answer is Hollywood. I realize that's a facile answer, but realistically Caidan culture is radically different than the West. Caidans tend to have events where they would have a tournament on a field somewhere during the day, then everybody would go home and change clothes and go to the feast which would be that evening in a totally different location, possibly in a different city. They would wear far more formal clothes, and much more enjoy the formal clothes at the feast in the evening. They tended not, certainly through the 70's and early 80's, they tended not to have overnight events. When they did go to overnight events, they tended to have campers, and didn't tend to have a lot of pavilions. Pavilions came very late in the game in Caid. What really started in Caid was, Caid started having

TAPE FOUR, SIDE TWO

Valens: ...support.

Siegfried: Egalitarian jealousy.

Valens: From the very beginning.

Ternon: Would there have been a similar problem if there had been an order for bad Knights called the Order of Sir Robert (?)?

Crag: The Order of John Chandos.

Siegfried: Yeah, right. The order of (?). To be very honest with you, the problem that the Order of Chandos ran into was originally one particular monarch of the West whose name is William the Lucky and an associate of his, Steven MacGanruig and William is a very estimable man but he is fundamentally an egalitarian. He is the guy who started and still runs the oldest continual fighter practice in the Known World. It's been running since the 70's. It meets every Tuesday and Thursday at the Rock Ridge Boat Station in Berkeley, California. And they're still doing it. They will train anybody and everybody, and they have been. William was one of the first proponents of women fighting. He's trained many women fighters. Hilary is one of his trainees. He is a very strange mixture because he loves the SCA, but he's firmly egalitarian in his belief systems. And fundamentally believes that the Order of Chandos is wrong because it was not available to every member of the Knighthood. And he didn't like it. He wanted to se it gotten rid of the two times he was on the throne, he did everything he could to get rid of it. And finally he managed to talk another King into simply closing the order. The stated reason was that the order didn't do anything. Well, orders that are done in recognition as opposed to in pursuit tend not to, but that was a good reason. I think it was actually a mistake to close the order. I think it was a valuable accouterment but, having said that, it also has to be said that since they tended to choose people from the non-fighting attributes, they also tended to get people who either weren't fighting anymore or who were gradually going away from it into other things, so you got less of the current fighters that were in the Silver Molet. You got people who were largely looked up to as having been early movers and shakers and those kinds of things, but over time, I guess that what William did... not William. What I think happened was Geoffrey first decided that he was going to open the order to not just Knighthood, but to Laurels and Pelicans. And you could argue that maybe that's appropriate, but it kind of gets away from why you did it in the first place. You're changing the reason for it. That made it lose some of its coherence and meaning to people, so then he could demonstrate that it didn't have the coherence and meaning it once had and therefore closed the order.

Valens: Was it intended to be an interkingdom or international...?

Siegfried: It was never intended, no. It was intended in 1974 by Henrik as a way of trying to point out to some of the newer and more stick-jocky and less civilized of the fighters that there were estimable things to be looked for in Knighthood other than simply swinging a heavy stick. And that in fact the highest accolades went to folks who exemplified the non-fighting virtues. It was one of the very few cases that members of the order were allowed to... the arms of the order were essentially Chandos differenced by the Kingdom of the West. So it was Gules a pile argent and on the pile was the antique crown Or of the Kingdom. And the members of the order were allowed to put a charge in honor point on their shields or anywhere on their arms they wanted to, they could take a charge of Chandos. And they wore cloaks of the Chandos arms as part of the coronation ceremony and a few other things like that.

Valens: When did the Knights of the Golden Rowel get into this?

Siegfried: Knights of the Golden Rowel?

Valens: Isn't that some sort of club or Knightly group?

Siegfried: I don't know about that, but the rowelled spurs were the mark of the Silver Molet. It wasn't golden, it was silver, and a molet is, of course, a multi-pointed star. So the silver molet was the starred rowel, was the rowelled spurs. However, in other Kingdoms, it's not at all uncommon for Knights to wear rowelled spurs. Rowelled spurs were restricted to the Silver Molet in the West only. One of the interesting debates that has gone on a lot, of course, is sumptuary laws and restriction of certain... and they were very common in the Middle Ages, but they're not very common in the SCA, depending on where you are. But there are places that have them, and in general in the SCA the rule is if there is a rule saying that it's restricted to something then it is, and if there isn't any rule about it, then anybody can wear it that wants. So consequently although you can not wear a baronial or a viscounty or a county or a ducal coronet, you can wear any kind of crown you please as long as its not one of the 13. That is unless you're wearing it by right. Because in fact, there weren't sumptuary laws against crowns in the Middle Ages.

Valens: Another thing, Calontir is a very egalitarian Kingdom and it has very few sumptuary laws, although William tried very hard to change that.

Thyri: We have a few.

Susannah: Mostly we ignore them.

Valens: Yeah.

Thyri: The one that always got me, though, however, is that a person who has a bare Award of Arms can wear a fillet with no decoration at all whatsoever and it can only be 1/2" high. OK?

Crag: Is that Arwyn's?

Thyri: I have a feeling it is.

Ternon: I was in fact the progenitor of many of our sumptuary laws.

Siegfried: A born herald, right?

Valens: Yeah.

Thyri: She was our Kingdom's original Gold Falcon.

Siegfried: If you go back to... oh, by the way, something I didn't mention. In 1968 when we created all of this, what a Knight got was a gold chain and a white belt and spurs, and a Master got a white baldric. The Laurel was a medallion and the Dukes were designated to wear ducal coronets which were the coronets with strawberry leaves. And those were the only sumptuary laws that were established at that time. They only restricted what you can wear and what you can't.

Crag: Why did you pick those?

Siegfried: Why did we pick them? Because strawberry leaves are the insignia of dukes already, so that was built in already.

Thyri: That's an ancient...

Susannah: English.

Siegfried: It's English, but we were building largely on English tradition 'cause we could at least read the materials.

Susannah: That's good point, good point.

Siegfried: That's right. The Laurel medallion was very simple. It was being the non-fighting recognition of great talent in service, so what they got was a medallion of the arms of the SCA which were adopted at that time and the reason the SCA has a Laurel wreath is because that's what we crowned, and still crown, the victors in our tournaments with is a wreath of Laurel which derives from the Olympics.

Thyri: Yes.

Siegfried: And the reason we do that is because bay Laurel grows wild in the hills in northern California, and it's bay. You can go out and pick that and put it in your stews just as delightful. In fact, a lot of old Laurel wreaths have wound up in pantries being used for years thereafter. Our Queens have Laurel and roses, and so the Kingdom arms of the West are the Laurel wreath and then an antique crown voided. And the Queen's arms are a wreath of Laurel and roses with a crown in it.

Valens: Where did the Order of the Rose come from.

Siegfried; OK.

Susannah: Good question.

Siegfried: That's not a bad one. OK. The problem, after we created all of this, we created a situation where, well, after 12th Night II, we created a situation now where we said, OK, if you've been... if you're a fighter, you can become a Knights. If you're not a fighter or maybe if you're a fighter, you can become a member of the Laurel. But if you're a Knights you can become King and if you do that, you can eventually become a Duke, but we really didn't create anything for what happens to somebody who has been Queen, even though if you've been King you could actually become a Duke. And that was starting to create a little problem because we felt that it was highly inappropriate, so what we finally did was create the Order of the Rose. There's a little thing here I can read to you because it actually says it rather better.

Crag: I always wondered why the county or the duchy just didn't carry a peerage rank and be done with it either way.

Thyri: You mean a patent?

Siegfried: Why the duchy?

Crag: Yes, why didn't it?

Siegfried: Because originally when the peerages were originally established and that was established in Corpora by the Board in the early 70's. It wasn't established in 1968. The peerages...the problem was that the peerages were the Pelican, the Laurel, and Knighthood, and later on the Order of Chivalry. In the Kingdom of the West it had always been customary to Knights the winner if he wasn't always a Knights up until very late. And consequently there wasn't really an awareness of the fact that you could have somebody stepping down from the crown that wasn't a peer. And when that became an issue in the Kingdom of the West as with several Kingdoms, there's an automatic peerage associated with becoming a Count or a Duke or a Countess or a Duchess, or a Viscount or a Viscountess. But that is not true in all places.

Thyri: My problem is that I do not know for certain that the county rank carries, I don't think the county rank carries a patent.

Crag: I don't think it does. I don't think it does.

Siegfried: It does in the West. But it may or may not here.

Susannah: It's in our laws.

Thyri: It's not in our laws.

Crag: It should be something we fix.

Valens: If you won crown once and stepped down, you didn't get anything at all.

Thyri: That was the whole thing about the Order of the Rose and why it didn't carry a patent here.

Siegfried; Except you were probably a Knights once we had Knights.

Crag: Yeah, that's what we're talking about.

Susannah: No.

Thyri: A Rose does not carry a patent here.

Valens: You were just in a holding pattern.

Siegfried: You were in a holding pattern, right. And that was until about 1972 when we created counts.

Valens: It might be a really good system. It would put a lot of pressure on our 18 counts to get off their butt and do something.

Thyri: What?

Valens: If you won crown, you step down the first time and you didn't get any title at all. There's no county title. You were just in a holding pattern to be a Duke. It would make our 18 counts get off the butts.

Thyri: Butts. Well.

Ternon: You know, there are some people who could just do that and remain a Viscount.

Crag: I have to say I kind of like the idea of new blood.

Valens: So we have 12 guys who have been King, but they got no title out of the deal, sitting around like "Man, I'd like a title."

Ternon: Didn't have the staying power.

Valens: Might make crown tournaments a little more exciting.

Susannah: Well, I like when he was explaining that originally if you were a Knights you had to fight in crown tournament and the only way you could get out of it was to be a Duke.

Siegfried: Well, it wasn't the only way to get out of it. What we were trying to do was to eliminate the dishonor to the crown being shown by people who were acting like jerks. Let me read a little something to you. This is a thing called "Some customs and traditions in the West Kingdom". It was actually written by William the Lucky in its original form. And he says, "First there were Knights. In the beginning at the first tournaments, there were Knights which is to say virtually all the guys who were fighting assumed the title. There was only one squire and others thought he fought as well as they did, so he was knighted at the end of the day." That's not quite how it happened, but you see what's going on. "Then there were dukes, because first all fighters are expected to fight, then some of them didn't fight, so then we made it their job to fight, but the guys who were (?) overwhelming and likely to win were made dukes and they didn't have to fight, so it gave a chance to other people. Then we got organized. At the second 12th Night, the chivalry was regularized meaning that those who had been presumed to be Knights at the beginning were formally knighted or Masters of Arms, or (?). the Order of the Rose, those ladies who had reigned as Queen were made members of the Order of the Rose and they ranked after the other peers. The Order was also conferred on those who the winners of tourneys had fought for in the days before crown tourneys just for symmetry's sake. So now there were three ranks: Dukes, Knights and Master of Arms, and Masters and Mistresses of the Laurel (and that wasn't quite) of Masters of Arms, but peers) and then ladies of the Rose which ranked just after the other peerages." And that is what was established then because the idea was the guy who won the tourney was probably a Knights, but the lady who was Queen wasn't anything at all. Then we had Awards of Arms, then we had Grants of Arms. Then we invented Leafs of Merit. And then in William's great words, he goes on and he says, "Counts: it was felt that those who had been King once ought to have some recognition, but not so much as those who had been King twice. The obvious course was to make them Counts. This was delayed for a couple of years because there was a succession of first time Kings and it was desirable that the King who would proclaim it be at least in his second reign, so as to not be aggrandizing himself. It was finally accomplished in the second reign of King James." Well, the reason's different, but that's not... then he says, "It came to pass that certain members of the chivalry, to use the term for the rank rather than their honor, were treating the Ladies of the Rose slightingly on account of the lower rank. So those who were in charge of keeping the Order of Precedence, by now covering both sides of a piece of paper, set their minds to addressing this problem. And Duke Siegfried and I said to each other of an evening, 'We'll give them a dose of their own medicine. We'll change the Ladies of the Rose to Counts and Countesses, and we'll put the Countesses up with the Counts and the Duchesses with the Dukes, and then the Ladies of the Rose will outrank the stupid twits.' And so we did, all on our own non-existent authorities." And that's almost exactly what happened, was we invented Duchesses and Countesses, and bingo, did it. Now all this kind of existed in fairly nebulous state until Corpora was rewritten in the late 1970's. And when it was rewritten, the discrepancies about the peerage orders of nobility, whether or not Counts and Dukes and Countesses and Duchesses were peers, and what came to the fore, and when we put the proposed revision out for comment, it became obvious that there was going to be no agreement Society-wide because different Kingdoms held to different things. Specifically in the East Realm and the Midrealm, the peerage orders, especially the non-fighting peers, the Laurels and the Pelicans, were violently opposed to the notion that somebody who was only a fighter or had only been a Queen or only been a King should ever outrank a true peer. So in the Midrealm and the East Realm possibly to this day, they do not allow (at least I think it's still true) they do not give a patent of arms to somebody who becomes King or Queen, and thus becomes a Count or a Countess or a Duke or a Duchess, but is not a peer of the realm. Whereas in the West a patent of arms comes along with the title.

Crag: The canard that they use to justify that behavior is that only polling orders are allowed to give patents of arms. And you're just saying that in the Kingdom of the West from the beginning, not from the beginning, but from relatively early on, the necessity for polling didn't exist.

Siegfried: It still doesn't. There is no such thing as a polling order in the Kingdom of the West and never has been. The premise in the West is fundamentally is if you do not trust your fellow peers of the order that will be present at the event where the Crown wishes to discuss the potential for new members of the order then you have no business being a peer in that group, because you clearly don't think they're your peers. So it is customary for people to write to the Crown and say we think this is a good idea, especially from far-off places where they're advancing the cause of somebody who is also far-off, and not going to be at it. But the actual meetings of the peerage orders generally happen at the Crown and Coronation events with the Crown present, and they will discuss nominations and whatever, and if you're not there, you're just not there. If you feel something is important enough, you write a letter or you have a person take a letter from you and have it read. But, sorry, there's no such thing as a proxy, there's no such thing as a polling order, there's no such thing as a written vote. And it's a good idea because in the places that typically have done it, what I've seen, and I've seen it the worst in the East and at one time in the Midrealm, it turns into a quid pro quo if you're not willing to vote for my protégé, I'm going to make sure your whoever never has a chance at it.

Thyri: In the Midrealm, the Order of the Rose was a polling order. Which is why the Order of the Rose...

Siegfried: I remember hearing about that.

Valens: ...on that issue something that has caused immense problems throughout the Society ever since. You and William were sitting around and you decided to make Duchesses and Countesses. Why did you not wipe out the Order of the Rose at that moment? Instead you have this dual thing that has caused so many problems.

Siegfried; Legitimate question and the other reason it's a legitimate question is because the Order of the Rose dates from when, if I remember, from when you're won for rather than when you step down.

Susannah: Really?

Crag: Not in this Kingdom.

(Miscellaneous unintelligible conversation)

Siegfried: The bottom line is when dukes and duchesses, when duchesses and countesses happened which was back in the early 70's, was back when a bunch of other things that had internal contradictions were all there, and it wasn't until the attempt to regularize Corpora in 1977 through 1980 that the realization of those irregularities and discrepancies really surfaced. And at that point it was impossible to regularize it without stomping on somebody's feet. But what really happened, and I know it happened in the Midrealm, was that there were some family spats that spilled over into the Order of the Rose. The Order of the Rose was essentially a... something that was an automatic thing... unless you managed to be so dreadful you got kicked out of it for some reason, but if you became Queen, then when you stopped being Queen, you were a member of the Order of the Rose. Or maybe it was when you became Queen that you became a member of the Order of the Rose. I don't remember. I remember there's some discrepancy about exactly when you became the one versus the other, but I don't remember what it is.

Crag: It was the end of the reign you got voted in in the Midrealm.

Siegfried: Well, voting...

Susannah: Or not voting.

Siegfried: Certainly never happened in the West Kingdom. In fact, I think we tried to get rid of the Order of the Rose, but there were some people who still wanted to keep it around, and I kind of think the Midrealm were people who wanted to keep it around. So at this point the remove is such that without going back and researching some of my old papers and thinking real hard, I couldn't give you a much clearer answer than just to say that this is one of those cases where custom had become so widely variant, by the time we tried to regularize it that it couldn't be made regular. All we could do with the peerage orders are the Chivalry, the Laurels and the Pelicans. In those Kingdoms that choose... OK. The titles of Viscount, Viscountess, Count, Countess, Duke and Duchess...

Thyri: Royal peers.

Siegfried: Royal peerages are provided for in Corpora and are true in all Kingdoms, but only have a patent of arms with them if a person isn't already a patent if the Kingdom decides to write that into their own Kingdom law, and some Kingdoms do and some Kingdoms don't.

Thyri: I don't think in ours and I think it should be.

Crag: You know, I wonder, this almost sounds like at the time the East and the Middle were getting going remember you were talking about the cabal, the officers' cabal that was sending out information (?) opposed to the Western Crowns, and I remember, I've forgotten whether it was El of the Two Knives or Cariadoc, was talking about how the East Kingdom and the Middle formed based on the material, they read the play book and invented the game according to the rules.

Siegfried; Or at least they deemed at the time the rules to be.

Crag: well, what they were told the rules were.

Siegfried: Yes, that's absolutely true. No question.

Crag: Could this be the origin of the split of the Order of the Rose? How does Atenveldt do it.

Siegfried: I think Atenveldt looks just like the West in that respect, and I think Caid does as well.

Crag: That makes you sniff out that that's probably where...

Siegfried: What it probably boils down to is the fact that the Order of the Rose was just there and nobody ever questioned what was going on with it because we all knew what it was. But I don't know... one of the things you remember is that the rulebook, as you call it, was the Articles of Incorporation, which don't tell you a lot, and Corpora. And Corpora was up to four volumes by the time we revised it, and was internally very contradictory, and it was essentially all of the decisions the Board made which constituted both policy and process for the organization in theory, but so phrased in pseudo-medieval forsoothly and so on, that it was very hard to follow. And I think it's sort of like OSHA, you can't follow all the rules no matter how much you want. So I believe that's what probably happened, however, if some of this stuff that seemed obvious to the people who had been doing it for a while, if it was referenced in Corpora it seemed far less obvious in Corpora. What actually happened was somewhere around 1976, the Board embarked on a Corpora revision and under the guidance largely, I think it was Maethen who did it, Corpora, the existing Corpora was boiled down into what appeared to be independent, sets of independent statements of things, and all that was put together into a Corpora revision document that was then mailed to everyone in the SCA at the time, and that was about 2000 members, I think. And then we got comments back from everybody. And then we took all those comments, stirred them back together and we produced a revised Corpora in the late 70's. And that was when I was on the Board, first time. And that era was also the time when the Board went from five to seven members. It went from being on the Board permanently to have a three year appointment. It went from the chairman being a permanent appointment to being a six months rotation. When Oengus degradation from the peerage came up before the Board and failed and subsequently was reinstated and that was also the thing that let to the Chairman of the Board being fired and so on. And there was a whole bunch of things that happened in that three year period including legitimization of women fighting which also happened around 1978.

Valens: Wasn't it also just an era of tremendous growth in the Outlands, Calontir, Ansteorra, Meridies, Trimaris, all these Kingdoms really coming...

Siegfried: Well...some of the... well, Atenveldt really ... their beginnings were all coming up then. And a lot of what you're seeing is what you would expect as the organization grows and starts to develop and one of the things that there was a big rash of in the middle to late 70's was, was bogus people starting their own things that called themselves SCA groups that tried to keep control of them themselves. The Free City of Murmanstadt in Fort Worth was a good example. There was a guy named, I can't remember his name, down in Bjornsberg in San Antonio, that tried to do that. There were several others. All of these basically, somebody said, "I'm the local agent of the SCA, and all your memberships have to be processed through me. And you can't write to the Corporate office or anybody in any other Kingdom without sending a copy of it through me for approval." And it's amazing how many people went along with that kind of thing, and followed what they deemed to be the rules and all the rest of that. Not that it looked all that different from what I guess the early Board was doing in some ways, but it was pretty strange. But probably the big thing, I would say the biggest single thing that happened in the period 1978 to 80 was the complete revision of the By-laws and Corpora and the Board decisions, and the formulation of an actual set of real By-laws and real Corpora. Because the By-laws were held to govern the Society... the SCA, Inc., and the Corpora to govern the Known World, and the Board Decisions into a usable manual of practice which it really hadn't been before. And once that was done, things really started to steamroll because now you had something that resembled a rulebook you could follow for getting a local group started and how it related to the rest of the world. Up until then, it was a very capricious business with people on the other end of the phone who didn't answer and never returned letters. The other big thing that had to happen, and it happened in 1977...

Valens: But when they did, it happened very, very quickly.

Siegfried: Conceivably.

Valens: Yeah.

Siegfried: The other thing was finally the formation of a real registry in 1977. Because you remember TI being Don's personal baby for a long haul. One side effect of that was that TI which almost never got out when it was supposed to and got to be years in arrears, and the Registry got to be years in arrears as well because nobody joins the SCA to manage mailing lists. One of the rules of non-profit organizations is that you make a job a paid job when it's either too big for a volunteer to do, too critical for a volunteer to do, or when the job is so far removed from why anybody joined the organization that nobody is going to volunteer to do it and do it successfully more than about twice. And the Registry is certainly one of those. And it only really started to work when Cliveden took it in the late 70's. And then we finally had memberships being processed and all the rest of those things. And then we finally started to get TI back on track again, although it got off-track at the least provocation even today. Let's see. We had the big peerage dispute, and that led ultimately to... there were five members of the BoD, and... let's see if I can remember how this thing worked. There were five members of the BoD, and Angus' degradation of peerage came before the Board. And after discussion, the chairman called for a vote. And three people voted for the degradation, one member voted against the degradation saying that she actually thought it ought to happen, but she wasn't really willing, she wanted there to be at least one vote against it to make Angus feel better. And the chairman then voted, who was supposed to vote only in times of tie, voted against it and said it failed a 2/3 majority.

Valens: Why did the Board assume they had, I mean a Kingdom grants peerages. Why does the Board...?

Siegfried: Because the rules as written say that a degradation of peerage can only be finally accomplished by agreement of the Board, and the reason it does it is to avoid retaliation on the part of monarchs who have private vendettas. It's a lot less bad to block somebody than it is to...

Valens: ...So the Board, was there any big discussions about what the role should be... where they balanced out the Kingdoms.

Siegfried: This is hard to... I'm sure there were, but I was not on the Board until 1977. My belief is that... remember, my perspective is that the incorporation of the SCA in the original, set about as a way to do an end around power play and keep the control of the SCA in the hands of basically Don and Diana, rather than in the hands of the medieval monarchs and such. And frankly, I think that in the long run if that hadn't happened, the SCA probably wouldn't have succeeded because it was the existence of the supra-Kingdom organization and the coherence that it provided to let things grow in some kind of umbrella structure. But I think that for a long time there the original Board was essentially playing at two's and three's with themselves down in the basement and pontificating on what they were doing and setting rules and so on that they published to these other Kingdoms but never published to the local groups that they were actually from. But in the process, remember reality is what you read. Reality is the communications you get, and to the people in the East and the Midrealm and a lot of other places, reality were the communications that's saying the Corpora are what guide the things, the SCA is this, the SCA it that and so on. And although I have my doubts about the motivations of how the Board got started, by the mid 1970's the Board had some fairly hard headed people on it... a few of them. It also had one dippy woman who wasn't ever a member of the SCA they put on because somebody on the Board ought to have some experience in being on some kind of organization. And she was impossible because she did not understand a thing about the SCA or anything about what was going on in the organization and would constantly require half hour explanations just before there was going to be a vote taken. This was Carol Conway. So I think the position of the Board in relationship to the Known World was something that underwent considerable change over time and when we revised the Corpora, we made a very clean cut. And we said the Board is not a governing body of the Known World, however, the Board has certain ratification principles and there are certain rules it will fill rather than attempting to have a supra-monarchical emperor or something like that, especially having to do with things like revocation from the peerage and third level banishments and a few other things like that. And those have largely stayed at that level, because to do anything else requires you to invent yet another administration infrastructure. And the SCA does not have too few administrative infrastructures. What it has got is Kingdoms that are too large to be run by volunteers, which is one of the reasons the SCA's in the pickle it's in now, but we'll probably talk about that later on. You want to ask another question.

Crag: When you play that I'm, well, I'm thinking when we follow these set of thoughts and digressions out on the Board and all that, I want to talk about some of the mythic archetype stuff. That was so cool.

Siegfried: OK. We'll get back to that then. OK. I said I was on the Board from December '77 to December '80. I got off the Board. I got back on in October of 1982 and I was asked back on the Board at a particularly interesting time in the Board's history in my opinion. Remember by the time I got off the Board we'd scrapped the permanent Board members and gone to three year terms and rotating chairmanship. One of the things that meant was they'd also lost a corporate history because as people rotated through and left the Board and there was no permanent staff, you were losing the ability of anybody to understand long term what the thinking of the Board was or what the organizational direction was or things like that. This is a constant problem that non-profits tend to have and one reason that you have things like an Executive Director is some way of collecting and having an institutional memory. But I got back on the Board and largely when I got hack on the Board two things were going on. First of all the Board instead of generally being unanimous on issues was now...you were starting to see 3-2 splits on things. Another one was they were having a tremendous fiscal problem. And it turned out to be the fault of the treasurer. The guy who had become the treasurer couldn't be bothered to do it any more, wasn't paying any bills and it was almost like the first time I got on the Board. And this is the story I told them, when I first got on the Board I came to my first Board meeting in December of '77 and everyone was sitting around in an twather twit because the SCA was about to lose its second class mailing permit because the mean old nasties at the Post Office were going to take it away from us. And it turns out they've been talking about this for months. So I said, "Well, what needs to be done about it?" "We have no idea." "Well, what about the chronicler? What does the chronicler say needs to be done?" "Well, she doesn't seem to be sure." "Well, has anybody gone to the Post Office and asked?" "Well, no." Next day, I went to the Post Office and it turned out that the whole problem was that we need to once a year publish the little statement that says we publish a second class thingy and we publish this many of them and my mother's maiden name is George, love and kisses, us. It's a very simple document to fill out. All we had to do was to fill out the form and sign it on a yearly basis and publish it. But the then chronicler of the SCA was one of those authority-crippled people who could not confront authority in any form especially in terms of a "Postmaster of Berkeley". So as a result she was about to let the whole damn thing go down the tubes and these five nits were sitting and dithering about it rather than doing anything about it. So I get back on the Board the second time, and what's happening but the organization's about to default financially. So...the net of that was we went out, and that was the check's under the rock bit, when we picked the check up from Gordon...

Crag: Go ahead and tell it.

Siegfried: There isn't a lot of story there. You tell what you've heard and I'll tell you if it's right.

Crag: Well, I'm very third hand, but I remember there being a point where there was a big gap in any records and finally somebody called up and said, "We've got to have the...we've gotta have the records and stuff," and the next morning they found the check for the SCA balances under a rock in the front yard.

Siegfried: That's not quite true. What happened was the guy who was treasurer at the time which was Gordon, very nice guy, again, it's not what he joined the SCA for. It's one of those jobs that weighs on you more and more and becomes harder and harder to do. If you've ever been your group chronicler, if you've ever been a treasurer, if you ever do those kinds of things, being a registrar. What had happened was, he'd' started to default on some of the job. He started not making entries in the books and it became harder and harder to write checks. And after a while the mass of things that he hadn't gotten around to doing had gotten up to the point where he couldn't get himself to go near any of it any more, and so it was just building up and up. And finally what happened was we called him up and told him we weren't going to take him out and crucify him, but we had to have the money. And he couldn't even face people. We didn't even talk to him, we talked to his wife. And he wrote out a check and signed it and left it under a specific rock on one side of his driveway. We drove out there and picked the check up and deposited it and then started new authorization cards with the banks and everything else and started over.

Crag: Now Hilary was the successor treasurer to that.

Siegfried: I kind of think that's right. And that sort of thing would not happen with Hilary. When Hilary goes through burnout the only sign of it is she becomes a little less convinced that anybody else can really get the job done. Unfortunately, it may well be true, but... Hilary's only real fault in my personal opinion is that she constitutionally believes that the West Kingdom is always right and always has the best way of doing things, and it drives other people crazy. At least in other Kingdoms. But as against that she is a very competent lady, and has done every job she's had very very well. So I go back on the Board in October of '82 through '85, and probably the big things that happened there were, the first thing was the fiscal problem and the second one was ... the Board by this time was back into, there were a lot of people coming to Board meetings and griping about how things were going and the SCA wasn't being run the way it should be being run, and we should be electing Board members and we should be moving Board meetings around, but we shouldn't be spending money on them and this and that and the other. And this led to two things. The first of which was a survey that was sent out to every member of the SCA. It was a long survey. It was about a three or four page survey with a whole series of questions about how would you like various things to be done. And all that data came back. There were 1783 responses, and I know because I got the key punch staff at Kaiser to keypunch all those results, and I cracked them with SAS and broke them down 198 ways from Sunday and published about a 150 page report and did a slide show at the Board meeting in January of 1984 and all the rest of this stuff. And largely how we then put things together from then on was based on the output from that. And it wasn't fundamentally different. People did not particularly want to have a Board member from each Kingdom, and they didn't want to be able for everybody to vote on the Board members, but they definitely wanted anybody to be able to nominate Board members, and on and on and on. I can show you the data if you're ever interested. In the midst of all of that, one of the problems that had happened was that when the registry, when Cliveden first took over the registry, Cliveden was doing it by computer, and she had an agreement with her husband's employer that they could use computer time on that company's machine. Her husband at the time was working for, I want to say for Datapoint in Berkeley. He later moved to Tandem. And the agreement kind of went with him for a while and then there were a couple of months there where he was in between jobs and we had to run the thing off of the mainframes at Kaiser in Berkeley, but we managed to keep things going but it was increasingly obvious that we were operating what was becoming a larger and larger organization, a more and more vital thing, on freebie computer time and that wasn't practical. So what we finally wanted to do was to buy a computer. At that point, this is 1983 and PC based machines are just... I'm talking about an 8088, right. With 640 K of memory that probably cost $15,000 and so on. But at least you can get them. Well, this was when we ran into the really interesting problem that most of the people who came to the Board meeting had violent beliefs about what you could and couldn't do. Nearly everybody knows that the SCA reserve is the amount of money that the SCA owes to its members in the form of unfulfilled subscriptions. OK? And that is the money that the SCA would have to pay back if it went out of business. Now in reality it wouldn't have to do that. What the SCA is required by law to do is to make sure that any of its assets go to another non-profit educational organization created for similar purposes if it can find one. That's what 501 c (3) corporations must do. Federal law. But, in fact, the SCA had always held that it was obligated to pay back...that it was obligated to have enough money in reserve to pay back the unfilled part of any subscriptions per se, so they wanted to hold that much money available. Well, that constitutes an asseted corporation and what we wanted to do was use part of that asset money to buy this machine and then depreciate it over a three, five year period. Well, we had hysterics from people who felt that was totally impossible. So we wound up leasing the machine. And I and one other guy wound up cosigning a $25,000 lease to lease this stupid little computer for the SCA at a cost of $1000 a month for two years because these folds couldn't see their way free to paying about half that amount of money. And the Board, frankly, should have said to hell with this. We know what we're doing. Out job, we know what the duty of a board of directors is. We know what the duty of care is, the duty of fiduciary responsibility, the other duties of a board. One of our duties is to get this done correctly and this is the right answer. But unfortunately the Board has never done really well at being confronted with unhappy people, and so they went that way. And if a couple of us hadn't been willing to cosign that note, I don't know what they would have done. Because almost before we got the files converted over, Guy's employer wasn't really willing to do that any more. We really sliced it tight.

And the other big thing that happened at that time was the removal of Woodford of Lorien from the Board of Directors. And that was another part of an Atenveldt mess. Woody was a really interesting guy. I don't know if you've ever met him, but he's a very bright man. He's disabled. I think he was in the Air Force and I don't know what happened to him, but he's on a long-term disability because he can't hold down a job and I think it has something to do with ----- changes he goes though when he's trying to do it. It's unclear to me at this point. I just know it's true. Woody found being on the BoD very important. He used to have a T-shirt that read "Member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc." That didn't bother me nearly as much as his wife's T-shirt which read "Wife of a member of the BoD etc." But Woody really got off on being a member of the Board. What Woody actually wanted to do was to get the Board to turn Steward into a job paying about 50 grand a year and then get the job. And that was his underlying goal in some of the changes as to how the SCA ought to work that Woody was proposing. But Woody walked smack into the middle of a huge political mess in Atenveldt having to do with the rights of the Crown versus the rights of a baron versus this and that and the other. And in the process it became painfully obvious that a member of the BoD was playing power politics on the local level. It also started to become obvious to the Board when they got together one day to discuss this when Woody... Board meetings were fairly contentious. And then one weekend we had the meeting, they were being held either every month or every other month at this point, and Woody was the only person coming from out of the immediate area. Woody couldn't come up. So we got together for the whole meeting and suddenly everybody found that it was rational meeting and they were all getting along with each other and agreeing and so on, and they all looked around and said, "What's different about today than any other day?" and they began to realize that what was happening was they had a canker in their midst. And then when this whole mess blew up about Atenveldt, the Board got rid of Woody. They voted to remove him. He, of course, voted not to remove himself and who can blame him. Well, that created a real enemy in Woody, of course, and Woody came back with his lawyer who was a character named Joseph. His Society name was Joseph Golden Dragon, and the name he went under when he first got into the SCA was Joseph the Greek except people kept calling Joseph the Geek which didn't do very much good either. So he was a lawyer by this time. He came up with Woody and basically told the Board he was going to sue their ass off and sue every one of the Board members individually for at least $50,000 apiece unless they reinstated Woody and in the process also, by the way, did away with the rulings to do with Atenveldt and do something else. And so the Board goes off into executive sessions and here are all these idiots sitting around saying, "Well, I guess we're going to have to do it because we don't want to be sued." And so I said, "Why don't you just tell him that you have to talk to your lawyer? He's a lawyer and he's not about to tell you, you don't need to talk to a lawyer." So they went back and said, "Well, these are serious charges and we need to consider this because we understand you don't say this is a threat, but, frankly, it kind of looks like that. And we feel our duty to the SCA is to consult with our lawyer." And Joe says, "Well, absolutely you should talk with your lawyer. Certainly. Go off and do that.' And so on. As soon as the pressure was off, they reverted back to normal human beings and said, "Really this is a pile of junk." And at that point they did talk to the lawyer and they found... Woody tried to sue the SCA for this whole thing. He actually brought suit against the SCA, against all of this, and then it turned out that Woody had let his membership lapse and he had no standing with the organization and couldn't legally bring a lawsuit against it.

Crag: When did he write "Trends of Change"?

Siegfried: Right in the middle of all that.

Crag: In the middle of all that. Can you comment on that?

Siegfried: "Trends of Change" exists on two levels. On a societal level, it was Woody's attempt to go from the Magna Carta to Louis XIV in an overall sense, if you will. He wanted to change the whole nature of Society structure and get rid of the power of crowns and local authorities. Internally in governmental structure, he wanted to restructure the SCA to head towards building a paid Steward and so on. He was probably right about that, by the way, but he wasn't right about doing it so he could hold a job.

Crag: He also made some accusations about the nature of our organization that were pretty offensive.

Siegfried: Yes, he certainly did, and he's not the first one. Damon de Folo certainly did that about 10 years prior to Woody. It's not the first time.

END OF TAPE 4, SIDE 2

TAPE 5 ONLY SIDE (almost finished, yea!!!)

Portion deleted at the request of the interviewer :)

Siegfried: if you read "Trends of Change" you won't find it saying the things I just said, but that is my gut feeling of what Woody was after and I think it was pretty obvious. Woody was a little more open to the then Steward of the SCA which was Sandra, Aelflaed of Duckford, than he was to anybody else. And Sandra at the time was really being frustrated dealing with the Board because the Board was going through a particularly wishy-washy state and once I got back on the Board and got a couple of other people who weren't quite so wishy-washy, some of what was going on started to become more obvious, and we got some of it cleaned up. But I would say the big thing that happened out of that whole period other than getting finances back in order was probably the whole polling of the SCA on administrative procedural structure and things like that, and putting that in place and then I was marshal for a year as you guys here certainly know. And the only thing I really did as marshal was to make sure that all the reports got written which was almost a first except William had done it the year before me. And get the fighters handbook reissued and had the marshallate symposium in September of 76. And we got every Kingdom but one at that. As I recall the Midrealm didn't show. One Kingdom did not show to the marshal's symposium and I think it was the Middle, but I can't be sure. For a matter of that, back when the heraldic symposium, the first heraldic symposium, in 1979 or so on, the problem we had with the heralds, still have with the heralds for a matter of that, was whoever was Laurel started to fall further and further behind. Right? Clint Bigglestone was Laurel and the job didn't get done for a long time. And then it moved to Ioseph of Locksley down in Atenveldt, and the job didn't get done for a long time. And finally Clint said, "Look, if it isn't going to be done, we can not do it here as well we it's not being done there." So then it moved to Karina, Karina of the Far West, Karen Anderson, and she did fine for a long time, and then the job started to get not done because the job of being Laurel King or Queen of Arms is immensely complex, immensely tedious, and largely consists of things that nobody but a herald could remotely find enjoyable. And after a while it's not clear that even they do. So finally, in order to clear up the backlog which had reached monumental proportions, we called a heraldic symposium, and the Board paid at least half of the fees for the chief herald or delegate from each Kingdom to fly out to the West and have a three day convention which mostly spent its time going through all of the backlog and cleaning it up. Then they went through the heraldic practices and checked those through. Passed a few decisions and finally at the end of that, Karina passed the torch onto Wilhelm von Schlüssel, Bill Keyes. That was also the origin of one of the great phrases because Karina, at the end of her speech, said, "I want you all to remember that we are trying to recreate the SCA as it ought to be, not as it is." So then Wilhelm held the job for a long time and then he finally got to be so didactic and difficult that we sort of moved the job off to Baldwin of Erebor, and Baldwin held it. And then he had some, and then it went on, and you know how it goes. I think David still has it down in...

Thyri: Da'ud.

Siegfried: David has it again. And he was probably the best of the lot because he's a very pragmatic guy who is not particularly interested in finding ways of filling up all his time. The worst period of time was probably when Bambi had it because she didn't go anything with it after the first six months at the most. And that was really dreadful. I got back on the Board in October of '91 to October of '93. And that time... I got invited back on the Board because what had happened to them was the... in the period 1990-199, the Board lost six of its seven members. They had lost their entire corporate memory, they had almost nobody that even knew what the BoD was supposed to be doing. I wrote a letter to the chairman of the Board who was Liz Johnson, saying, "You know, what you really ought to do is something we tried once before which is go back to people who have been on the Board before and put them on for short terms to re-establish the rotation because otherwise they're all gonna come due at the same time again." And she wrote me back a letter that said, in effect, what a grand idea and thank you for volunteering. They actually sucked on other person back on the Board first which was Melinda Sherbring. And then they sucked me back on the Board, so I was back on for a couple of years, and the big issue the Board was facing then is the issue that the SCA has not found a way of addressing yet. And that is that the SCA has now grown to proportions, and its bigger Kingdoms have grown to proportions, where the jobs of administering those Kingdoms, like a couple of the jobs at the SCA level before, have grown too big for volunteers to reasonably do. Being seneschal of the East costs the incumbent a few thousand dollars a year because the Kingdom won't even fund it satisfactorily and costs 30 to 40 hours a week if you're really trying to do the job right. In other Kingdoms, it's somewhat less, but they are still massive jobs. The advent of computer technology has helped to some degree, but it has not helped as much as you might have wished. The corporate jobs seem to be doable only if you're a marshal who doesn't believe in writing in the first place or something. They cannot be done by default, but they can't be done well because of their size. We've been paying for the Steward's job to be done for the last 10 years. We've gotten to the point where it's a full time job for the Steward. We're not paying enough to make it an attractive job, or weren't at least the last time I looked. But at the time that we decided to fold that job up and got to another model, when Hilary stepped down being Steward, we were still paying a reasonable amount and that was like a 50 hour, 60 hours week job, and Hilary was flatly saying we cannot afford to have another Kingdom. Because the job grew not as the size of the SCA and populace grew, it grew as a function of the number of independent entities and especially the number of high level entities in the SCA grew. Just as the jobs in each Kingdom grow as not of the number of people, but of entities. Groups below it that require some kind of administration. Now the Board for years has, in theory at least, been trying to run a drill to make the processes work better and figure out how to get rid of stuff they don't need and so on, but you know how well that goes with volunteers that meet at most four times a year anyhow, even if the Board is getting along together and trying to communicate. And this Board no longer is, and has not been for about two and a half years. We'll get to that in a sec. Furthermore, at the time, I got back on, Hilary was showing obvious signs of burnout in the job of Steward. She was flatly saying that we couldn't have any more Kingdoms, yet what that was doing was moving the problem from the corporate level to the Kingdom level because we now had Kingdom level officers here going through burnout phases. It had been years since anyone, with the sole exception of Da'ud first time around, had actually completed a corporate level job for the whole duration of their warrant. And in Kingdom level jobs, it was becoming increasingly unlikely. The size of the job, the pressures of the job, the general thanklessness of most of these jobs, 'cause most of these jobs don't have a lot of why you joined the SCA in the first place. It was starting to overwhelm people. So that got the Board involved in a long discussion on how the devil can the SCA be packaged or managed so that we can move some of these jobs over to paid staff where appropriate, pay for it so the thing can keep growing and people can keep doing what the medieval SCA is without the organization standing in the way of its own growth. We have to find different ways of doing it. The model the Board ultimately came up with after talking to some external consultants on non-profits and so on, was to try to radically shift to an executive director sort of model, whether you call it Steward or executive director or whatever, put a full-time paid professional in that job, find a way to offload at least some of the dreary functions of the drearier jobs out of the Kingdoms and do them centrally and do them with paid staff if necessary, like maybe do the editorships and the printing of newsletters in a central location, and we were still fiddling with that kind of thing. In the midst of all that, that was the level of debate that the organization was going through at the time I got back off the Board in the fall of 1993, was trying to figure out how to go about implementing those things. Where that ultimately led to was a very interesting phenomenon that you probably almost know more about than I do. After I got off the Board, the first attempt to hire an executive director was a bit of a disaster. The guy that got hired, got hired in June, we met him in July and he, frankly, wasn't competent to do the job. I don't know why they hired the person they hired. I do know that they got a hundred and some odd resumes inside the SCA, and not one of them was from somebody that was actually competent to do the job as specified. We just don't happen to have a lot of really honest to God professional executive director types running around in the SCA for whatever reason. Probably because they don't have any time in their jobs either. But we don't have 'em. So we looked outside and we found somebody who looked good but turned out to be hopeless so they didn't renew his contract and found somebody else that looked like he might be good, but turned out to have a different set of problems.

Crag: The first one was only there for...

Siegfried: He was there for 90 days because that was what the trial period said.

Crag: But there was, what was the significance of the blank page in TI that looked so weird?

Siegfried: I can't begin to tell you. I don't even...

Crag: OK. In the TI there was a blank page that came out during that time in which he was suddenly fired, or let go or terminated and the blank page was to be his something, and there was a clamp that went down not to talk about it according to our Kingdom seneschal and there was a hush put all over it as if something totally bizarre had happened.

Siegfried: The problem was that the guy they had hired, they had hired him and they hired him on a 90 day trial basis. And it turned out that he not only wasn't competent to do the job, but had radically different points of view on what ought to be going on than the Board had, or indeed, anybody else had. And the Board after he had serious confrontations with virtually all the corporate officers and after a considerable amount of discussion, the Board voted not to confirm his appointment. They simply voted to not confirm it, and to let it go away again. I don't know about the blank page. I don't remember. If I saw that TI with the blank page, I might remember, but I don't recall that particular incident. But what happened was the guy didn't get confirmed. He went away again. There are some legal issues about publicity and public discussions of personnel issues that we get into and may have been what turned into your seneschal's comment at the time. I can't tell you. The second... that put them back looking for somebody and the second guy they found was Tony. And Tony might have been very very good, but Tony managed to get horribly off on the wrong foot at the first Board meeting he attended which was in Salt Lake City. Apparently, at least with people who were attending it. And then an incident happened thereafter that was really really bad. One of the real underlying problems that the SCA has always faced, one of its core issues has always been what does it mean to be a member of the SCA. Are you a member of the SCA if you show up at events and wear garb? Are you a member of the SCA if you actually pay your membership and receive the magazines, or are an associate member? What's a member of the SCA? This turns into a bigger issue when you start to realize that, if you assume for the moment that the SCA costs a certain amount to run, and for the moment we're going to disregard whether or not you want it to do all the things it does or not. That's not the issue under discussion. We're simply saying any organization does a certain number of functions for its existence and for its members. OK? The SCA does a lot of functions for its existence, for its members and for virtually everybody that attends events whether they're members or not. Some of those functions represent fixed costs that are more or less related to the size of the organization over all than the number of groups in the organization, and are not variable depending upon the number of people that are actually dues paying members, and others are variable. That is, if you collect from people for magazine subscriptions, you have to send them the magazine, so you have to publish that one, so that's a variable. But maintaining a corporate headquarters, filing the necessary legal papers, going through all those things, maintaining insurance, this, that and the other, are to some degree, fixed costs. There's overhead cost that represent about 50% of belonging to the SCA. The average membership, subscribing membership is about 50% administrative overhead, fixed cost and things like that, and about 50% rebate to TI and newsletters. Now if you look at most non-profits, you will find that ratio is pretty startling. Non-profits that publish publications, generally speaking, the ratios are very different: either, like the Smithsonian, you're mostly paying for the publication or in other non-profits you're paying for the 90% of your membership is going to all the administration and overhead and things like that 'cause that after all is what it's there for. One of the problems of the SCA is, remember the fixed costs of the SCA are being driven by the size of the organization as defined by the number of groups, number of events, number of baronies, number of this-es and that's-es and all that kind of thing largely. Well, surprise, that's being driven by the number of people that play SCA. The Board numbers internally have always been ---- that for every, depending upon the Kingdom, for every member in a group there is between one and four non-members active, or non-paying member active people. That's why the membership requirements for things like Kingdoms and principalities are set so low is because we assume the real variance is between two and four times as many people. The bottom line call was the SCA, in order to grow and do more of these functions in a more efficient fashion, was going to have to pay more things and it meant more money than it had. If you look at the SCA infrastructure, by the way, it's remarkably weak, the organization has managed to do more on volunteers and less on paid anything than any organization I've ever heard of in the world. So the bottom line the Board faced in late 1993 was we seemed to have two choices. We either raise the membership to $55, $60 a year, or we spread the burden across more of the people that actually play SCA on a regular basis. What are we going to do? Tony's advice to the BoD was, "What you probably ought to do to be fair was make it universal, but I don't recommend that because it looks as, from everything you've told me, that it is such a radical shift and you've backed off from it every time you've looked at it that you may have unintended consequences. So I would recommend simply raising the membership fee not all the way to 55 or 60 bucks, but certainly to 45 or 50 dollars, 'cause after all what are the other things you belong to and how much do you pay?" And so on. "And that way it's gonna cost you some money, but you're gonna recover more on the things you have to do and you can start doing these things." That's what the Board did. However one member of the Board appears to have gone into the Board meeting in January of 1994, or just before that, gotten pissed off and decided that screw it all, the only fair thing was to vote for a complete requirement of membership. That is everybody be required to be a member if they played more than six months. And became persuasive enough in that point of view and convinced enough Board members that that's what they voted to do, and they voted unanimously to do that at the January Board meeting in 1994. Now who was at the January Board meeting in 1994? Well, of the people at the January Board meeting in 1994 was Duke Frederick of Holland, Flieg. Now you remember Flieg. Flieg's the guy who made himself in his own image to be what he thought he wanted to be back in the 1960's and 1970's. And Flieg is the guy who firmly believes that what the SCA ought to be is a, it's almost like Cariadoc in a weird way. His belief is that if the SCA would just go away and vanish there would be no problem. That nobody should be required to be a member of the organization. There shouldn't be any membership dues. The right way to handle things is to take up voluntary contributions at most, but that really the most of these things that are requiring a national organization, if you just didn't have a national organization wouldn't be an issue. Probably because everybody would get together in the light of truth, justice and the American way, and do the right thing because the spirit moved them. Now the problem I have with that is that A) it ain't true, B) it ain't so, and C) it wouldn't work that way, and Flieg ought to know that because he's a grown up guy. But he has got a lot of his basic justification, self-worth and image tied up in not just the SCA, but the SCA the way he thinks it ought to have been, always should have been, and once was. And so Flieg went ballistic and went out onto the Rialto and essentially said, "they're going to destroy our SCA" and created a giant flame war across that, at the time, one to 1 - 4% of the members and active people in the SCA who actually had access to the Internet, many of whom were academics or worked for universities, and many of whom weren't necessarily in sympathy with some of the other folks in the SCA, but who managed to start a giant thing going. Now the net of it was that immense pressure started to come down on the members of the Board to change the vote. The Board had published something telling people exactly why they did it. The chairman at that time was Timothy Gaiachan O’Leitrim who is Tim Moran, he's from Michigan, flatly said, "I will resign if you change this vote, because if you change the vote, what you'll be telling people is that we lied to them when we told them we had to do it. Right? So I'm not going to be contravened by this thing." I don't have any insider information, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't say I did, but what I believe happened was that a little coalition formed of two of the people that didn't want to take the heat, and one of them was the person who had originally talked the rest of them into voting for the universal thing. And they convinced somebody else to vote to rescind the thing, and when they voted to rescind it, Tim resigned and Victoria resigned. She's from Trimaris. And the next day Karen from Meridies found out that she'd been conned and she resigned and that now left them with four Board members. Or actually three at the time or four at the most, so they had to build back up. So the next thing that they had a giant war going on there. They decided they were going to rescind that. Then they were going to have a Grand Council. The Committee to Save Our Society formed up on the general principle that now we should throw out all those old dastards and put ourselves in 'cause we're new dastards. And it went on and on and on. Meanwhile, look at what happened. They lost the opportunity to actually do something rational about trying to restructure and repackage the SCA so it could grow without burning out its most important resource which was the people that were willing to volunteer to keep it going. So that problem exists unchanged. It's probably even getting a little bit worse. They completely discredited the BoD for possibly the final time and then made it even worse when they put Lee on the BoD 'cause she's directly connected to Flieg and essentially tells him everything that going on in the Board meetings, and Flieg, of course, is directly connected to the C-SOS or it would appear to be, but he wasn't a member of it. So the net of it was, now this is the period of time, mind you, when the Kings got together wherever the hell it was...

Thyri: Estrella.

Siegfried: And had the manifesto and all the rest of that stuff. So that's all going on and that was happening over the spring that led up to the final Board decision to bail and Timothy resigning and all those things. So, what's happened? The Board has discredited itself completely. At least two of the Kingdoms started their own process to file as their own corporation, if necessary, to keep something going. And a couple of... the biggest King mixer in all this was probably Ansteorra, by the way. And the guy down in Ansteorra really wants to pull Ansteorra out of the whole thing and have his own show that he can run 'cause Ansteorra's got a track record of people popping, trying to run their own things and being big frogs in small ponds. Only he looked like he had a fairly good chance of pulling it off there for a while. So what happens? The BoD defaults and heaven only knows what the financial status of the organization is right now. I don't 'cause I haven't been involved with it since I got back off the BoD and this whole thing really started to boil over. So I don't really know what's going on now. I do know that the Board became totally factionalized and stayed that way. I know that they're continuing to do Board meetings and things like that but I have no idea whether or not they're having any success in trying to do what the BoD is supposed to be doing. They don't have o lot of authority or influence with the Kingdoms now because they've effectively said that we'll certainly back off of what our fiscal duty is as a legal duty as a member of a board if you just put some pressure on us. Now what's the next thing that is going to happen? The exercise is for the student because I think I know the answer. It's Balkanization. The Kingdoms have found out that there is no super-Kingdom authority that can hold them to account. The next thing that will happen is that the Kingdoms will start to drift further away from one another because monarchs will find that they can impose their will in ways they couldn't before, or civil servants will find that they can run things the way they want to. It will start to become a little bit harder to have wars because people's armor standards and fighting conventions will start to drift apart. Pretty soon we will start to have independent heraldic jurisdictions and people won't necessarily have common arms, and after that, why, the titles may start to vary. Or at least the relative ranks of things will vary from Kingdom to Kingdom. And groups will find it harder and harder to participate in one another's events because they're not speaking the same language. So the Kingdoms will drift further apart, and as that happens the principalities in the Kingdoms are going to start to drift further apart. The danger is that we'll drift down to the baronial level and at that point the SCA will largely disintegrate except for the strong local groups that are big enough to keep something growing and have some communication with other local groups that are near enough to keep it going until it goes through a renaissance some time in the first 15 years of the 21st century.

Ternon: The SCA will be neither holy, Roman or an empire.

Siegfried: That is correct. That is correct. And what happened? Charlemagne's kids took over. And that was the danger that was always there was that the Board, which never really had as much credibility as it should have had, mostly because of its own fault at one point or another, completely destroyed itself and was helped to do it by people who put their own particular interests and views ahead of the interests of the SCA as a whole, or who were unwilling to see necessities other than their own self-gratification. Consequently, there's a very real danger that the scenario I just described could occur. In that model, it's also quite possible that the SCA in the United States could be repopulated from the SCA in Drachenwald and history could recapitulate itself the way it once did, although Drachenwald is having its problems as well. So I don't really know. On the one hand, I don't really think that the organization is going to vanish completely. But there's a real possibility that the SCA, Inc will fail, will financially fail and that somebody will have to reconstitute... and it will either be reconstituted on an individual level as a regional organization that will then work towards some kind of separate confederation, or that somebody will have to restate, take the organization back out of bankruptcy and rebuild some kind of more credible national organization.

Crag: Could you have an organization in which you had the Middle and its daughter Kingdoms, possibly including Calontir, being one unit...

Ternon: a confederation.

Crag: The confederation, and...

Siegfried; You could have any organization you wanted and you don't necessarily have to model the structure administration on either Byzantium or the Roman Empire, or that even more labyrinthine structure, the SCA. But the problem is you want to keep in mind what your goals are. My personal belief, the thing that made the SCA as successful as it was first of all was the fact that it was inclusive rather than exclusive. Instead of saying "This is what we do and if you don't do that, just go away." What it said was, "This is our primary focal point," and as you get closer to that focal point you're doing more of what we do, but we're pretty inclusive. You know, we're not going to say you can't have 1601 but you could be 1592. You can't be this or that. We're going to make it a lot easier to play. We're going to be very inclusive. All periods, all countries, this kind of thing. There are limits, but it's relatively fluid. The SCA has always been much more inclusive about including both the party animals and the stick jocks and the authenticists and the costume mavens and all those sorts of things, much to the frustration of those individual groups that want everybody else the hell out of the organization. So one of its strengths is inclusivity within the overall matrix of what it is. The second is that it's not really a historical recreation at all. It's sort of a giant mutual participation living theatre following a romantic, semi-historical model, and it's the new-Gothic medieval revivals, sort of, more than anything else.

Crag: Can you call it a celebration of the Middle Ages?

Siegfried: You could call it whatever you wanted. The bottom line is it's successful because it's inclusive, and it's successful because it touches all of those mythic and archetypal images. You know, the selection of Knights was a terrifically important thing because Knights are an external manifestation of the concepts of the chivalric ideal, and one of the things that we all kind of group up with that’s dear to our hearts. And that's one of the things that people like. And that doesn't mean that every Knights in the SCA is perfect, but most of the Knights in the SCA probably wish they were more perfect than they were, and most of the people in the SCA consciously ascribe to a set of ideals even if they don't always meet those ideals, and that's a helluva lot better track record then most people have. But the thing that made the SCA most successful was that unlike most historical recreation organizations, due to its inclusiveness, due to its set of conscious ideals as opposed to simply recreating some little phenomenon. And due to the breadth and the national scope of the organization, it deliberately had created something where there was a superstructure that was in place and firm enough for people to understand what the umbrella was, and to let a whole lot of different things grow up under it and start communication, growing together. So as you were saying earlier, the great growth spurt in the SCA happened when the infrastructure was there enough and the local groups started to intercommunicate enough to really grow, and when we finally had a set of practices and Corpora that permitted that growth. And the danger is that if you eliminate that infrastructure, it is not going to happen because everybody's just going to feel amongst themselves that it's the right way to do things. Anybody whose ever been in an interkingdom war, especially ones where they haven't worked out the drill in advance, knows what it's like to sit around for six hours while the monarchs bicker about whose rules are going to be used to count blows, or decide where the hell the reincarnation point is or any one of those things. If your SCA memory is more than 10 years old you remember those things because they used to happen all the time. And Pennsic wasn't known for getting of to a roaring start with no problems between the monarchs either. At least for a long while.

Ternon: I know exactly what you're talking about. I was warlord of Calontir when we were fighting a war with Ansteorra and I had the unenviable position to be saddled with, to some extent, an earl marshal of the Middle Kingdom who felt that the Midrealm fighting conventions were the acme of Western civilization's pre-16th...

Siegfried: Spell that with an N or an M, by the way?

Ternon: That's spelled with an... um, yes, exactly. And...

Siegfried: I'm being rude. I'm sorry.

Ternon: That's OK.

Siegfried: I might even be able to name the marshal but I won't try.

Ternon: His initials are Laurelin Darksbane. And so I found myself asking the King of Ansteorra to have all of his fighters authorize Middle Kingdom at the war. And that was the only alternative to having the event's sanction pulled.

Siegfried: And you can see... and that's with the super-national organization in place. One of the reasons that happened was the marshallate always did have its head up its arse a little bit from time to time. It never really figured out how to tell with that kind of thing. One of the reasons for that is that the marshallate, rather properly, as United Airlines flight attendants say, "Our primary concern is your safety." Which does not mean going to the lowest common denominator, general speaking. Especially as anybody who has ever been hurt fighting isn't going to go to the lowest common denominator happily. And sometimes the lowest common denominator's a lot lower than anybody knew, and if you start looking around at equipment you find out that some of that stuff hasn't been inspected in five years. But various places put varying levels of importance on things like proper authorization and proper equipment and all the rest of it, and all you can really do is try to fight it through as best you can. But the communication between the groups without... if it was that hard then, I can go back and remember wars that never got started fighting because the monarchs could never could agree on how to have a war. You know, what if they had a war and nobody came? What if they had a war, everybody came and nobody could fight? Wonderful. And that's happened once or twice. So that's just two people who let their egos get in the way of their people. The big danger is that the egos will get in the way of the people again, and that can cause the fragmentation. And ultimately, although I don't think the SCA's going to go to live weapons, you can sort of see where that led to in Sarajevo and places like that. That's why I call it Balkanization very deliberately. The best will in the world, the best thing that they could do is to try to keep the organization together and build up a super-national structure that had at least the teeth in it to define and enforce what interkingdom drill was intended to be there. Build up the organization again. But just doing that... the SCA will probably survive in one form or another, and the BoD will probably survive in one form or another, but it's made itself pretty irrelevant and it's going to take it a lot of years to get back to where it was before. And when all that gets done how then will we have resolved the jobs that are too big for our volunteers to do. Will we still be burning people out and losing them because they can't get those jobs done anymore. Will we have found at the Kingdom level a way to resolve issues that we couldn't resolve on the national level.

Ternon: this may in fact be an opportunity for one small silver lining in your scenario is that if corporate structure, discreet corporate structure is moved to the Kingdom level, this may force Kingdoms to examine volunteerism, the nature of volunteerism at the Kingdom level and what jobs might be at least partially compensated for and moved from the sphere of voluntary activities to those of quasi-professional nature.

Siegfried: It might. It's a little hard to say because the Kingdoms themselves differ radically in things like what the Kingdom treasury is like. Who's in charge of the Kingdom. Who has the money. There are Kingdoms where the Kingdom essentially has no money whatsoever because the money is retained entirely at the baronial level. And the Kingdom itself is nothing more but a loose confederation that exists so that there can be something for the King and Queen to be King and Queen of. There are other Kingdoms that are the reverse model where there is no strength in the local organizations at all and the treasury and most of the power resides at the Kingdom level. And they aren't necessarily the big ones and the small ones either. It's just differences in customs and structure, those are things the SCA never found necessary to dictate, and probably wouldn't have. And you probably wouldn't want to anyway. It's one of the amusing things about the SCA is seeing how many different ways people have of spelling the word yes. It's just astonishing to build a parallel there. I really don't know. I really don't think the thing will fail, but I think it's a delicate time because I think the signs of that kind of Balkanization, and certainly the signs of the overwork are out there, and it's not real clear that any good answers have started to spring up yet. And the corporation has not so much failed but it is now in a position where people are essentially choosing whether or not they're going to do what the corporation says they ought to do. That puts them in the very delicate position of contravening the law. And the financial practices in some of the Kingdoms are simply illegal and people can go to jail for it if somebody wanted to make an issue out of it because they're playing fast and loose with thousands of dollars which by federal law belongs to a federally sanctioned corporation. I don't think it's going to come to that unless somebody does something like trying to steal it because nobody has a vested int--... nobody, I think with the possible exception of the C-SOS folks, has a vested interest in destroying the SCA as it now exists. Although there are people out there that seem to me to be setting out deliberately with the intent of trying to destroy the SCA, Inc. Probably because they feel that something better can be put in its place. That makes me a trifle nervous because there is no way of telling whether the action of eliminating the SCA, Inc. may not cause unintended consequences far more than you think, and may leave you with nothing to rebuild. Or more importantly you'll be in the position of perhaps folks saying, "Well, who are you to then say what should be there instead? You're a destroyer. You're not a creator."

Susannah: Can I ask a question about the financial difficulties and you say that it's a continuing problem. What is the sacredness of having the corporate offices in California where we all know that everything costs more: salaries, rent, equipment.

Siegfried: There's no particular sacredness in that other than the fact that that is where the corporate office and staff have been for years. Now the actual difference in cost is not necessarily as large if you think it may be, but the organization, at least the last time I was on the board, was looking very seriously at the possibility of putting the corporate headquarters elsewhere and moving some of those functions. Whether it would have made enough of a difference to truly help is uncertain. I mean, for one thing it turns out that the minimum wage is about the same everywhere. Right? And most of the people that work for the SCA are paid minimum wage, or not very much more than that. Nobody in the corporate office was paid more than about 9 bucks an hour, at least the last time I knew the figures. It may be more now. I don't even think the Steward made more than about 12 or 13. And furthermore if you were trying to have something like an executive director model, you probably can't find somebody like that that's going to go to work for less than 30-35 grand anywhere, and maybe more than that. So now you have a problem of does that person have to be where the corporate office is? Because if they don't, then maybe that's a draw. They could do it out of the home, but on the other hand are another set of issues. The bottom line is it's more expensive to do things in California than in some other places by some delta, but that is unfortunately more than made up for by the number of things that the SCA has never bother to do at all versus what ought to be being done to have any particular kind of infrastructure. The folks in the corporate office don't have desks. Didn't have desks. They sat in hard chairs and worked at tables. And we were seeing things like carpal tunnel syndrome and so on starting up because of improper working conditions. The SCA has always been so miserly about itself that it never occurred to anybody in the Corporate office that we might be willing to pay for desks. Never used desks. It seemed to be a frivolous request. So the hitch is you would almost have to go in and redefine an environment in which you could then look for savings in order to do it. There's a lot to be fixed. The hitch is the organization is precarious. In the corporate office most of the employees are housewives, and I'm not being sexist about that, they just happen to be ladies that don't hold down full-time jobs that also have kids and they can do the job part-time. They live in the local area. They are not members of the SCA. That's one of the rules. We do not want a member of the SCA that decides to be fussy and assume that he or she really would like to be doing this rather than that. We just want people for whom this is the job that they do. The only reason the registrar of the SCA is a member of the SCA is because the rules say that officer has to be one, and although she's been to a few SCA events, she doesn't think of herself in quite, in that particular role. That's not what she'd be doing in and of her own time.

Crag: It's about 7.20.

Siegfried: OK.

Crag: We haven't had supper yet. We have some swimming to do and stuff tonight. I would like to move over for one last set of discussions back into the mythic part which is where my heart is. I think we've... I feel like the problems you're out lining in terms of the corporate structure of the SCA are something that we've all spent thousands of hours discussing.

Siegfried: I don't want to be discouraging about those things either. I just think there are some very very serious problems there and what happened a couple of years ago in 1994, well a year and a half ago, didn't solve them. What it did was brush them back under the rug and create some other problems, and devalue parts of the organization without providing anything good to replace it. And I think ultimately somebody's going to pay that piper and I don't know what the currency will be.

Crag: The discussion that we had driving over here that I thought was really interesting. I'd like to kick around a little bit was the interactions of the SCA with the myth of the Knights and the myth of the King. We've touched a lot on that already, but can you talk a little bit on the phenomenon of culture. Within a...

Siegfried: The discussion that we were having when we came over here was what was the SCA when it started up and why was it attractive. And I made the following proposition. In effect from a period starting after the Second World War, in the late 1940's through the 1950's and into the 1960's, American culture, at least, largely shifted from industrial to a post-industrial society. Which had a couple of very particular characteristics to it. One of which was that people were highly mobile. They tended not to know the people they lived around. They tended not to know the people they worked with. They tended not to know much of anybody sometime. Very frequently they didn't know, or at least they were not close to and saw much of their own families on either the father's or the mother's side 'cause they probably lived somewhere different. And increasingly they didn't even know who they were. We had a culture that in fact had gotten to the point where the average person wasn't really acculturated because they didn't know what they were acculturated to. Nobody knew what the rules of society were. It wasn't a very human society. The things that you did were you went out to your job and earned the money to feed your face and have a home and all of those things. And you had a family with whom you were more or less on good terms. But a lot of what the trapping of human culture were had vanished from that. Thinks like rites of passage as you were alluding to have vanished from a society that is not only largely secular, but has lost the extended family around you and the tribe that would support those phenomena. In that model, we've also got a society for the first time where the average member of society wasn't on a more or less survival level, in that they had a lot of spare time even as if they didn't have anybody they wanted to do much of anything with or much of anything they wanted to do. What started to happen at least in the early to middle 60's, David's opinion, is the creation of what I would tend to term valid subcultures. And that is cultures that have the attributes of a real human culture and that you can live your whole life in them. You can do almost anything in them in the sense your friends are there, they are the people you spend time. What you do on your off time

END OF TAPE

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5/30/98 corrections Pavel,

Page 53 of 97

We need to remove the discussions about Tedric and Audeen, or she might get leaglly cranky about it. This is right before a tape change. I put the material to remove in itlalics

Crag: No, we didn't.

Siegfried: We were just down to the third 12th Night revels and the significant thing about that one really is that's when the first arms scrolls were presented. On of the reasons for that is, you'll notice that by now, Randall of Hightower is active in the Kingdom.

Crag: That name was triggering with me quite a while earlier and he finally reminded me of where it was. Do you all remember an of the Lord Darcy novels?

Thyri: Yes.

Crag: Science fiction. That's Randall of Hightower.

Thyri: Oh.

Siegfried: Randall Garrett.

Thyri: Is he dead?

Siegfried: Yes. He had... he suffered a severe attack of what I guess would have been called brain fever back in the early 70's. He lived through it but it really pretty well ruined him after that. On a really good day, he knew that he was Randall Garrett and he knew that he had written those books, but he couldn't write. On a bad day, he didn't even remember that much.

Crag: Remember Tedric's wife had much the same...

Thyri: Audeen.

Crag: Audeen.

Siegfried: But Randall was...

Susannah: She's better now.

Crag: Yeah, but she's not the same person she was before. She had to learn to be a new person 'cause the old one was cooked.

Siegfried; He never really recovered and finally did die.

Thyri: Anyway.

Siegfried: The significant thing about the third 12th Night revels really was the beginning of the establishment of an order of armory. Grants and Awards of Arms happened at that event, too, and the first court baron. So that event was significant for those items. And we also found a nifty way to completely clear a feast hall in record time. There was this young lady named Alison of Rohan and she stood up and started to declaim an epic. And it worked miraculously. However I do not remember what the Kingdom's arms almost were, and I am going to have to find that.

Crag: Nowadays we would get lectured for being rude to performers to do that.

Siegfried: Oh, nobody was rude to her, they just left.

Crag: Let's see... That's...

Thyri: Side A.

Crag: Side A.

Siegfried: You need to flip?

Crag: yes, I need to run this one.