Unto the members of the College of Arms,
from Baldwin of Erebor, Laurel King of Arms.
My lords and ladies,
Enclosed herewith is the letter of acceptances
and returns for the Laurel meeting of May 12. Submissions were
processed at this meeting for Middle (1/25), Ansteorra (1/28),
Atenveldt (2/12), West (2/13), and East (2/24). Dragon's letter
of 5/20 was also reviewed. There were 170 items approved, 28
returned, and 2 pending, for an 85% approval rate.
I'm also enclosing a second letter, dated
May 20, that consists entirely of corrections.
Schedule
The letters to be processed at the June
9 meeting are Laurel (3/31), Middle (2/24), Ansteorra (3/3).
Calontir (3/3), Caid (3/8), West (3/10), Atenveldt (3/13), and
Middle (3/17).
The July meeting is scheduled for the 14th.
The letters to be reviewed at this meeting are An Tir (3/26),
East (4/1), East (4/5), Caid (4/11), West (4/19), Atenveldt (4/20),
Middle (4/20), and Ansteorra (4/25). Letters of comment for
this meeting should arrive no later than July 6.
The August meeting has been scheduled for
the 25th. The letters to be processed during the month of August
are Ansteorra (5/8), Calontir (5/12), Atenveldt (5/16), Caid (5/16),
An Tir (5/23), West (5/26), East (5/28), and East (5/30). Letters
of comment for this meeting should arrive no later than August
17.
Mailing list
Please add Lord Edward of Effingham, Lymphad
Pursuivant of Trimaris, to the list of corresponding heralds.
His address is Anthony Bryant, 1562 SW 63rd Avenue #10, Gainesville,
FL 32608; (904) 3784554.
Master Gerstan Heah Leah has retired from
the office of Sea Wolf Herald of the Principality of the Mists.
His successor is Lady Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova (B. J. Gerth),
1370 Trower Avenue, Napa, CA 94558; (707) 2571533. She
will not be commenting at this time.
Brachet Herald has written to say that the
phone number given for Lord Thorfinn Hrolfsson, Crux Australis
Herald of Lochac, in last month's roster, is his Australian number.
The international number is 011/613/256348. She has asked me
to note that there is a considerable time difference between the
United States and Australia.
Checks
Checks sent to the Laurel office should
be made payable to College of Arms, SCA College of Arms, or
College of Arms, S.C.A. My bank has been honoring checks to
"Society for Creative Anachronism" and "S.C.A.,
Inc.," but I would prefer not to rely on this.
If you enclose a check with a packet of
submissions (which is the usual practice), please be sure to staple
or paperclip it (securely) to the top sheet of paper
in the envelope. There've been a couple of recent instances where
a loose check slipped down into the envelope, and didn't turn
up until the forms were separated and put into folders.
Appeals (and corrections)
As I use the term, a correction is
a change in the form of an approved name or blazon. Corrections
are usually made to fix typographical errors. An appeal,
on the other hand, is a request that a submission be reconsidered,
usually in the light of new information (or information that was
overlooked at the time of the original ruling).
An appeal involves a change to a previous
decision, which is something that should be done with care. If
you are writing an appeal, read the original ruling carefully,
and try to respond to each of the objections. Be concise -- the
more superfluous material you drag in, the harder it is for someone
else to follow your arguments. Be factual your purpose
is to present new information or reasoning. Above all, be polite
the objective is to get things right, not to win at any
cost. Rudeness sullies the whole process, promoting rudeness
in others, and making it very difficult for me (or anyone else)
to write a polite and helpful response.
If you are attempting to refute something
based on a source, please be sure that the source, or the relevant
part of it, is made available to the Laurel office. And please
make sure that the source supports your argument. It's embarrassing
to have an appeal returned on the basis of your own documentation.
The title "Laird"
In answer to Gold Falcon's question concerning
the appropriateness of the title Laird, it appears that
the style "Laird of [Household Name]," if not actually
a landed title, is enough like one to constitute assumption of
unearned honors. Corpora VII.B.1 states, "no form of any
title shall be taken or used which states or implies ownership
or control of any geographic, demographic or sociographic area."
By my reading, this includes households.
There is some informal precedent for the
use of Laird as a prenominal title equivalent to Lord (e.g., Laird
Robert MacIntosh); but as Brachet has pointed out, the Scots Gaelic
term formally approved by Laurel is Tighearn(a).* I do
not have enough information at this point to know if Laird is
also correct.
_______________________
* Wilhelm von Schlüssel and Cynthia
Fitz Colline. Alternative translations of SCA titles. In Proceedings
of the Caerthan Heraldic Symposium, pages 7681. 1981.
Wings
A couple of this month's submissions prompted
us to look into the question of how one blazons a pair of conjoined
wings. We found the following:
Mundane usage
1) When the tips are turned downwards, the
wings are said to be conjoined in l(e)ure. The only contradiction
we found was in FoxDavies' Complete Guide to Heraldry
(P. 239), where the definition in the text disagreed with the
other sources we consulted (Parker, Woodward, BrookeLittle)
and with its own illustration.
2) When the tips are turned upwards, the
wings are simply said to be conjoined. In French heraldry,
this charge is termed a vol.
3) A hawk's lure is a specific type
of charge, usually depicted as shown in the margin, and not what
we normally think of as "a pair of wings."
SCA usage
1) All the examples of wings conjoined
we found in the files agree with mundane usage the tips
are upward.
2) Most (but not all) of the examples of
wings conjoined in lure have the tips upward, which is
contrary to mundane usage.
3) We also found the expressions a pair
of wings and two wings displayed being used to describe
two unconjoined wings, the tips of which were to chief.
My inclination is to reblazon the dozen
or so SCA coats in which wings conjoined in lure has been
used contrary to mundane practice. I dislike this approach, but
I think it will reduce confusion in the long run; and this strikes
me as a case where nobody bothered to check, rather than one in
which the SCA evolved its own convention. Any comments?
Nesselblatts
In my discussion of the submission of MILES
LONG (10 Mar 85, p. 8), I made the statement that I was unwilling
to alter the SCA definition of Nesselblatt (as registered
in the arms of Marten Jeros Bröker) without something to
corroborate the suggestion made in Neubecker's Heraldry: Sources,
Symbols and Meaning that the term describes the zigzag
bordure, not the shape in the center of the field. This drew
a protest from Virgule that Neubecker had been cited as the source
for Marten Bröker's submission as well.
The following explanation will, I hope,
shed some additional light on the matter:
Unfortunately, Marten Bröker's file
contains no information on the charge, or on the discussion surrounding
it. Neubecker doesn't include any examples of the term used in
blazon, and quite frankly, I find his discussion ambiguous. He
speaks of Nesselblatt as "the heraldic term for a
zigzag bordure," but he includes it with his discussion
of the plant world, and alludes to "fundamental misunderstandings"
and says that "already in the late Middle Ages [the term]
was becoming divorced from its original meaning." This suggests
to me that the definition has been inverted in mundane usage,
in which case the blazon of the arms of Marten Bröker may
be technically, if not logically, correct. It is this ambiguity
that makes me ask for a second source. (Had the submission I was
working on been the first instance, I'd have accepted [Baron Alfgar's]
interpretation in a shot, but I don't want to "correct"
something that's already been done until I can be fairly certain
that it is in fact wrong.)
Within a day or two of writing the foregoing,
I received a fourpage letter from Marten Bröker, complete
with illustrations, offering precisely the "enlightenment"
I had asked for in my LoAR. There is too much material for me
to include here (although I can copy Marten's letter for anyone
who is interested in pursuing the matter further); but among other
things, he found two modern German blazons in which the term Nesselblatt
describes the white center of the Holstein shield, not the red
edge. Unless the examples can be refuted, this seems to me sufficient
grounds to support the present SCA usage.
Name books
Several recent submissions have cited name
books by Alfred J. Kolatch (The Jonathan David Dictionary of
First Names) and Flora Gaines Loughead (Dictionary of Given
Names). You should be aware that these are babyname
books, and as such "should be regarded with deep suspicion,
and avoided wherever possible." Not all the information in
them is bad, but the books tend to be sloppily researched; and
of course they are concerned with modern usage, which means they
don't make some of the distinctions we do (such as a particular
given name having been used only as a surname during the Middle
Ages).
Et cetera
The authorstobe of the heraldry
issue of Compleat Anachronist, "Principles of Heraldic
Design," are Lord Arval Benicoeur and Herr Marten Bröker.
(see the 2 March cover letter, p. 2) The handbook is slated for
publication this Fall.
Speaking of heraldic publications, Master
Bruce Draconarius of Mistholme has just published the first edition
of The Roll of Arms of the Kingdom of Caid. Copies may
be obtained by writing Bruce Miller, 135301/2 Cerise Avenue,
Hawthorne, CA 90250. The cost is $10.00, plus $3.00 for postage.
Master Bruce has advised me that update pages (the roll is unbound)
will be made available later.
I pray you believe me to be,
Your servant,
Baldwin of Erebor
Laurel King of Arms
enclosures