Greetings from Baron Bruce Draconarius of Mistholme, Laurel King of Arms!

Herein are the Acceptances and Returns from the "January" Laurel meeting of 24 January 1993, 31 January 1993, and 14 February 1993. The following Letter of Intent were considered: West, 14 Sept 92; Outlands, 15 Sept 92; West, 22 Sept 92; An Tir, 25 Sept 92; Ansteorra, 28 Sept 92; Atenveldt, 30 Sept 92; West, 12 Oct 92; Middle, 16 Oct 92; Atlantia, 18 Oct 92; Calontir, 20 Oct 92; Caid, 20 Oct 92; Atenveldt, 20 Oct 92; Meridies, 20 Oct 92; Caid, 21 Oct 92; East, 23 Oct 92; and An Tir, 23 Oct 92.

Schedule

The March meeting was held on Sunday, 21 March 1993, and considered the following Letters of Intent: Middle, 31 Oct 92; Middle, 4 Nov 92; Atlantia, 8 Nov 92; Outlands, 14 Nov 92; West, 16 Nov 92; Calontir, 16 Nov 92; East, 18 Nov 92; An Tir, 19 Nov 92; Atenveldt, 25 Nov 92; and Meridies, 26 Nov 92.

The April meeting will be held on Sunday, 11 April 1993, and will consider the following Letters of Intent: Caid, 25 Nov 92; Meridies, 1 Dec 92, West, 8 Dec 93; Middle, 9 Dec 92; Atlantia, 15 Dec 92; Calontir, 18 Dec 92; An Tir, 22 Dec 92; Atenveldt, 23 Dec 92; and Caid, 26 Dec 92. Responses and rebuttals to commentary on these LOIs should be in my hands by 31 March 93.

The May meeting will be held on Sunday, 9 May 1993, and will consider the following Letters of Intent: West, 11 Jan 93; Middle, 11 Jan 93; Calontir, 15 Jan 93; Trimaris, 15 Jan 93; Atlantia, 18 Jan 93; An Tir, 20 Jan 93; East (Drachenwald), 23 Jan 93; Atenveldt, 24 Jan 93; and East, 27 Jan 93. Commentary on these LOIs should be in my hands by 31 March 93; responses and rebuttals to that commentary, by 30 April 93.

The June meeting will be held on Sunday, 13 June 1993, and will consider the following Letters of Intent: Outlands, 17 Jan 93; Caid, 30 Jan 93; Middle, 11 Feb 93; West, 14 Feb 93; An Tir, 15 Feb 93; Calontir, 16 Feb 93; Atlantia, 21 Feb 93; Meridies, 22 Feb 93. Commentary on these LOIs should be in my hands by 30 April 93; responses and rebuttals to that commentary, by 31 May 93.

Roster changes

After long and faithful service, Lady Una of Blackberry Hollow is retiring as Triskele Principal Herald of Trimaris. Please remove her from the roster and mailing list, and add the new Triskele: Serwyl ap Morgan (Charles Hack), P.O. Box 2447, Orange Park, FL 32067-2447; (904) 269-5415.

Later this summer, Siegfried Conrad Georg Heydrich will be retiring as Lymphad Herald of Trimaris. Please add to the roster, though not yet to the mailing list, his designated successor: Haakon Bjornsson (Michael Pelfrey), 545 Floral Drive, Kissimmee, FL 34743; (407) 348-2615.

The Pantheon Herald of the East has a new address: Katherine Stanhope (Karen Tatro), 164 Everest Road, Milton, VT 04568; (802) 893-6831.

Please remove from the mailing list the Bordure Herald of Ansteorra. Mundane commitments leave him with no time for commentary at present.

The West Kingdom roster is changing a tad. Juturna di Parma is resigning as Brachet Herald, after years of timely and insightful commentary. She is being replaced by Frederick of Holland, who is resigning as Leveret Pursuivant; and David le Casse (who lives at the same address as Juturna di Parma) is taking over as Leveret. In other words, the addresses on the mailing labels don't change, only the names above them. Got that?

An updated roster is included with this cover letter. Please check it thoroughly for errors of omission and commission.

An update on '93, and bidding on '94

Lady Irene von Schmetterling, the autocrat for the 1993 Known World Heraldic Symposium (25-27 June), has sent a flyer with finalized details for the event: site, fees, class titles, where to send symposium proceedings articles (hint, hint), and much more. I've enclosed it with this cover letter.

Also enclosed herein are the two bids for the 1994 Symposium -- a bit late, but still in good time. We've received bids from the Kingdom of Meridies, for the weekend of 8-10 July in New Orleans, LA; and from the Kingdom of Trimaris, for the weekend of 25-27 June in Orlando, FL. Please review them carefully, and give the College your preference by 1 June 93; we'll be announcing the choice at the Midrealm Symposium.

GENERIC. Synonyms include: general, non-specific, collective, non-proprietary

There have recently been some questions about Society branches registering badges to generic names: e.g. a badge for the Stonemarche Scribes' Guild, or for the Keeper of the Regalia of the Principality of the Sun. How are such generic names protected? Why do we register them?

To my mind, these are not names, not in the same style as Order names, household names, heraldic titles, and the like. A better term might be "job-description": a simple declaration of the intended use of the badge. As such, we haven't held these to the same standards of conflict as other group names: for instance, both Caid and An Tir have badges registered to the Office of the Lists, without any infringement. If every branch officer who may can register a badge, then no one Kingdom may claim sole use of the name of the office; otherwise, only the West could have a Constable. By extension, the same holds true for other branch functions: Baronial Guard, King's Champion, Brewers' Guild, etc. So long as the badge is associated with a purely functional name, it's neither checked for conflict during submission or protected from conflict afterwards.

The key is for the name to be unarguably generic. Lyondemere Baronial Guard is functional, generic, and thus not held to conflict standards. The Lyondemere Levy, a deliberately alliterative name, is not generic, and must meet the normal name submission standards; once registered, it is then protected equally with Order names. (Notice that there are no generic Order names.) Generic names may only be registered by SCA branches, for common branch functions; but such generic names need not be checked for conflict, any more than the names of officers.

Lingua franca? Shouldn't that be lingua anglica?

A few recent registrations have left some commenters wondering about the exact status of the College's lingua franca rules. Originally, these were simply the acknowledgement of a hard fact: that the grand majority of SCA folk speak modern English, not Russian, Saxon, Latin, Old Norse, or whatever. The principle was first expressed as a Board ruling (after they'd received correspondence written in medieval Latin!), and codified in the 1986 edition of the Rules for Submissions:

"The official language of the Society is and shall be correct modern English. ... Simple particles, such as 'of', may be used without necessarily increasing the counted number of languages contained in the name. The formula , whatever the original languages, is acceptable. This is the usual historian's manner, and therefore Otto of Freising is a familiar form, though he would have been Otto von Freising or some other more Geman or Latin version in most contemporary documents." [NR1]

Less codified, but of long practice, has been the translation of epithets into our lingua franca. Again, this follows a common historian's usage: Harald I of Norway, for instance, is far better known as Harald Fairhair than by the untranslated Harald Haarfagr. Eric the Red, Philip the Good, Charles the Fat, all are translations of the period names, not the period names themselves. SCA names are permitted a similar translation: a simple epithet, documented as a period form, may be translated into English. (We prefer to register the untranslated form, but I concede that such rigor doesn't always serve our clients' best interests.)

The use of lingua franca translation is extended only to single, simple descriptives. Given names, for instance, may not normally be translated into their putative meaning: e.g. Bear may not be used as a given name, even though it's the lingua franca translation of the given name Björn. Placenames, hereditary surnames, and bynames from different languages (e.g. French and German) likewise don't fall under the lingua franca allowance.

The English translation should be chosen to minimize any intrusive modernity: e.g. the Old Norse byname kunta is better translated as "wench" than as the intrusive "bimbo". (Well, actually, neither of those is exactly right, but there may be children reading.) Period terms are always preferable, but when necessary, we will translate documented period epithets into the Society's common tongue. That seems to be the best compromise between the needs of authenticity and ease of use.

Amending the List of Protected Armory, or, Open Appendix E

With the recent increase in the availability of ordinaries -- old and new, compiled both within and without the Society -- it may soon become necessary to update the List of Protected Armory. Currently, the Administrative Handbook (p.3) restricts protection of mundane armory to the sources found in Appendix E. Strictly speaking, no other mundane sources should be checked for conflict (which came as a surprise to me, and possibly to others).

For practical conflict-checking purposes, the important sources in Appendix E are Fabulous Heraldry, the Lyon Ordinary I, Parker, Papworth, Woodward (or the Ordinary compiled therefrom for SCA use), and the Military Ordinary. Master Da'ud added Renesse (the ordinary to Rietstap) and Public Heraldry to the List.

The other sources listed in Appendix E -- e.g. Neubecker, Siebmacher, Foster, Whitney Smith's Flags -- contain armory that is likewise protected, at least in theory. In practice, since these sources aren't organized as ordinaries, conflict checking from them has been sporadic. However, the compilation of ordinaries has been a cottage industry in the College of Arms for many years now. Examples of ordinaries compiled by our heralds include: Hateful Heraldry (in the '81 Symposium Proceedings), Heraldry of the Manesse (in the '83 Symposium Proceedings), An Ordinary of Irish Arms (in Aspilogia Pennsica, '84), and the Ordinaries of Australian Corporate and Personal Heraldry compiled by the Lochac College. I have no doubt, then, that the other sources in Appendix E could spawn ordinaries in the near future.

There's some overlap of our sources: for example, most of the items in Siebmacher are also found in Rietstap. If only the latter is checked for conflict, that should suffice. But the armory in the above-mentioned Australian Ordinaries is too recent to be found in most of our other sources; ditto for the Canadian armory that's recently been compiled. Given the ability to check them for conflict, should we do so? The same logic that would have us protect the items in Papworth should lead us to protect these items as well; and yet the task of conflict-checking should not be allowed to grow exponentially.

The question parallels the Rules discussion that Lord Palimpsest recently announced; and yet, to some degree it's independent of that discussion. Even if no change were made to our current policy, we'd still need to decide which (if any) of the new ordinaries should be added to List of Protected Armory. For now, I propose to add those items that are readily available, lead to meaningful conflict calls (for the purposes of our re-creation), and which have been cited in recent months.

I therefore propose to add the following references to Appendix E:

• Heraldic Badges by A.C. Fox-Davies, as edited for CoA use by Star and Triton;
• Lyon Ordinary II;
• Combined Ordinary I, published by Lady Triton; the only new items it contains that aren't already protected are the four Ordinaries listed above (Hateful, Manesse, Irish, and Australian);
• The Dictionary of British Arms vol.I, by Chesshyre and Woodcock; sometimes called "the New Papworth".

What about the ordinary of Canadian armory ("The Great White Ordinary")? Or the Ordinary to Luftwaffe badges, compiled by Lord Star? Our goal is not to protect every armory in the space-time continuum, but only those whose infringement would be detrimental to the Society's medieval re-creation. Arguments can be made for either including those sources ("If we protect Australian and British, we should protect Canadian"), or ignoring them ("How many people would even recognize a Luftwaffe badge?"). For the moment, I don't intend to add them to Appendix E; but I would like to hear your opinions as to whether they should be added in the near future. Please present your thoughts (possibly concurrent with the Rules discussion) over the next few months.

And now a word from your friendly Laurel Office Administrator:

Mistress Astra has asked to add a few words to this cover letter....

RE: General Remarks (Obelisk 12/15/92): Regarding the inclusion of "accounting totals" at the end of LOI's: Please note that all LOI's are addressed first to Laurel, and then the College of Arms. Although the "accounting totals" are of no interest to the commenting members of the College, they are of great use to the Laurel staff. We must verify for each LOI received that we have also received the correct funds; unfortunately errors do occur and the accounting information in the LOI's makes it easier for us to determine why and so notify the submitting herald. We are grateful, therefore, to those submitting heralds who include this information; bored commenters may feel free to ignore this portion of the LOI. *

And now, back to our regularly scheduled cover letter, which is already in progress...

A quick reminder about forms

All the submission forms sent to Laurel -- the name forms, the device forms, the archive copies -- should include the submitter's name as it appears on the LOI. We've recently received several sets of archive copies (done in understandable haste) that had no names whatsoever. This makes them hard to file in alphabetical order. And, of course, if the name is different on the forms and the LOI, we become terribly confused. Please, please, make sure the name is on all the forms, and that it matches that on the LOI.

Miscellany

We received the enclosed letter in the mail, addressed to the SCA College of Arms, and we couldn't resist sharing it with you. We figure we can use the luck.

In service to the Society, I remain, Yours, Bruce Draconarius of Mistholme, Laurel King of Arms.

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