Sister Guineth's First Event

My First Event

No kidding, there I was ....

In November 1978 I got to talking about medieval music with a clerk at my then-favorite bookstore, and she invited me to her home for a “medieval music jam session.” I went, had fun, and went back again the first weekend in December. There was no January session, but it started up again in February and I went then and again in March. And at the March meeting, our hostess got to talking with one of the other attendees about a “Baron’s Birthday Party”, discussing who would be going.

I perked up my ears. “Baron? What baron?” I asked.

“Our baron – the Baron of Adiantum,” came the answer. “It’s kind of a medieval costume party. Would you like to come?”

I hesitated. “I don’t have anything to wear.”

“Oh, I know a lady who can loan you something,” saith Janet, the hostess. And she wrote down a name and phone number for me.

I called the next day, and met with Chimene des Cinq Tours and borrowed a gown and got directions. And on Saturday, March 10, AS XIII, I found myself dressed in a borrowed gown, knocking on the back door of a private home (“Make sure you go around to the back, they don’t use the front door,” Chimene had told me) a long block from the railroad yards.

A slender, sandy-haired, bearded gentleman peered out at me. “Come in, come in!” he cried out welcomingly. He introduced himself as Ulfheddin in Vegfarandi, and escorted me from the back porch through the kitchen, to a small dining alcove, where we paused to admire the birthday cake, a subtlety crafted in the shape of a castle.

It seemed that no sooner had I arrived than Janet bustled into the adjoining living room. “Oh good, you’re here!” she said. She hustled me into a back bedroom with several others and handed out sheet music, and then and there she taught us the Mongol Birthday Song. We had just time to go through it completely a couple of times when someone called out, “The Baron’s here!” and we all piled out into the living room.

A brown-haired, bespectacled young man of medium height, who was wearing a tunic and a simple circlet, was just coming through the doorway between the kitchen and the dining alcove, his pretty dark-haired lady on his arm. That, I later discovered, was the founding Baron of Adiantum, Michael of Dragonswood. He grinned when he saw the castle subtlety.

Janet gestured to us, and we burst into song. The baron nearly fell over laughing. And when the song was done, it was time to serve up the cake. Baron Michael cut the cake and the rest of us formed up a line. I discovered when I got to the table that the walls of the castle were of white cake and the towers of the best brownies I had ever tasted.

Sometime later, I was standing in front of the wall of books in the living room and talking to Ulfheddin. He was bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet as he told me about a wonderful group called “the Society for Creative Anachronism”. I had never heard of it before that night; somehow Janet (Janet of Arden, OL) had never mentioned it at music nights. I went home with half a dozen issues of the Elf Hill Times.

Even though I had previously met only two of the SCAdians present, I felt as though I had stumbled through a time warp to find a previously unknown branch of my family tree.

By
Sister Guineth the White
Copyright © 2005, Emily S D Thompson