Rank
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(Needed: a description of what "rank" is)
(A "keeper" posting from the Steps, Feb 2006.)
(Origins of the SCA Ranking System)
[...] our system of ranks is not particularly closely related to any actual historical model. We do play at using historical models for certain purposes, but our system of rank was put into place long before the SCA got serious about historical models, and it's probably far too deeply entrenched to do anything about it at this late date.
[...] the original inspiration for SCA culture was tournaments. Not real life, not even medieval real life, but the play of manners and gentilesse surrounding the fighters' competitions and the Court of Love shenanigans that got the ladies involved. Our sovereigns are sovereigns only because they fight to crown their consorts Queen (or King) of Love and Beauty - and a good part of our Society's culture, the way we do it, has deliberately been filtered through the idealism of the Victorian Gothic Revival which attached to certain medieval and pre-medieval legends and then modified by the idealism of modern sensibilities and certain 20th c. medievaloid fantasy, notably Tolkein.
That's not the limit of what we do nowadays, but it is still at the base of it all the structure to which we have attached everything else in our cock-eyed counter-culture. We've pruned away the elves - officially - and the other non-humans, but they still hang on at the edges.
[...] And [remember] that origin of the SCA dates back to the mid-sixties of the last century! The mundane culture was rather different then, and our founders were just playing; they had no idea that the SCA would outlast them or expand as enormously as it has.
Sister Guineth, playing this sometimes silly game since AS XIII.