(This post is about the SCA, a historical recreation group
with which I have been involved for many years—readers unfamiliar with it can
get some of the context from essays of mine in the Miscellany, a book my wife and I self-publish.)
Over the years, Pennsic has gotten both better and worse. There is an increasing amount of period mass entertainment such
as the shows put on by the commedia del
arte troupes, more interesting period work at the A&S exhibition and in
the university classes and, I think, a gradually rising ratio of period tents
to modern tents. But I think there is also a gradual increase in
the acceptance of strikingly out of period things at Pennsic, including
entirely unnecessary ones.
The clearest example of the latter this year was the sign,
shown below, outside the lost and found tent. It is a reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a
popular science-fiction book that not only has nothing to do with the middle ages
or the SCA but deals with subjects such as aliens, space travel, and the like,
strikingly inconsistent with what the SCA is about. There were other references
to the book scattered about the Pennsic pamphlet and elsewhere, all inspired by
the fact that this was Pennsic 42 and the number 42 has a special significance
in Hitchiker, but this one was
obvious even to someone who had never heard of the book. The population of the
world was not 6.8 billion at any point in SCA period and if it had been it
would not have been expressed in exponential notation.
My conclusion was that at least some of the people
responsible for running this year’s Pennsic viewed the SCA as part of science fiction fandom. It is, I suppose, an understandable
mistake for someone heavily involved in fandom—sf cons often have SCA demos at
them, after all. But it is still a mistake. There has always been a substantial
overlap between the two groups, but also many people in the SCA who have no
connection to fandom; my impression is that the fraction of such has increased
over time. Perhaps more important, the spirit of the two groups is very
different. The SCA centers on recreation of real world history, fandom on
fiction. Wearing elf ears at an sf con is entirely appropriate, clearly
inappropriate (which is not to say it does not happen) at an SCA event.
Discussions of modern science and technology fit into a con but not an SCA
event.
I found the sign particularly disturbing because it not only
clashed with the medieval ambiance, it implied that such clashing was not
merely tolerable but a good thing, part of what was being
presented by the people running the event. It is hard to see how members of the Pennsic staff can
object to elf ears or insist that “You
can keep a trailer in your encampment for storage or living space, but it must
be disguised to look period” (from the Pennsic web page) when they themselves are going
out of their way to present something strikingly out of period.
There is always a temptation, in the SCA context, to make a
joke out of the contrast between medieval and modern, as in songs about an SCA
knight in chain mail going through an airport metal detector. Such jokes might
have been funny the first ten or twenty times they were made, but that was decades
ago. And every such joke makes it that much harder for participants to imagine,
even for a little while, that they are
actually in the middle ages—something that is, I think, part of the attraction
of the SCA, what some people like to describe as the magic.
There are other ways in which the activities of the people
running Pennsic subverted the medieval ambiance and endorsed other people
ignoring or subverting it. There may be good reasons why some staff people
need walkie-talkies, but they ought to be used with a bad conscience, as
unobtrusively as possible. There may be reasons why golf carts must
occasionally be used for transportation but I find it hard to imagine any good
reason why they should be nearly as common as they are. Now that practically
everyone has a cell phone, all it takes is one security station somewhere,
preferably out of sight, with a couple of golf carts and a few people, to make
it possible to get security staff to any point at Pennsic where a problem
requiring them arises. As best I can tell, security at Pennsic mirrors in
miniature one problem of urban policing—that driving around in a police car is
pleasanter than walking a beat but does less to discourage crime. Riding around
in a golf cart is not only less work than walking, it marks you as a privileged
individual—and humans like status.
So far I have been talking about mundanity creeping in at
the top. The situation at the bottom, among ordinary participants, is more
complicated. On the one hand, an increasing fraction of participants who cannot
walk very far or up and down hill and so require some sort of transport make
the effort to pretend that their motorized wheelchairs and similar devices are
horses, with suitable modifications. It is not a very good solution, but it may
well be the best solution practical.
On the other hand, my impression is that ornamental
mundanity, things obviously inappropriate to the medieval ambiance done not for
convenience but for show, is becoming increasingly common. The picture shows
one example—an encampment one of whose structures was outlined in electric
lights.
Within the SCA, any attempt to maintain a medieval ambiance
is under pressure from two directions. One is the fact that doing things in a period way is often harder and less
convenient than doing them in a modern way—one reason why, outside the SCA,
modern technology exists. A Coleman stove is less trouble to turn on, turn off,
and cook over than a campfire. A flashlight is a more convenient device than a
candle lantern. If we insisted on doing everything in as completely period a
way as possible we would do very little and there would be very few of us doing
it—the mistake I think of as making the best the enemy of the good. The least unsatisfactory
response to that problem, in my view, is to regard mundane conveniences as a necessary
evil to be minimized but not eliminated—while at the same time using the
problem of how to minimize them, how to provide period alternatives, as a
valuable spur to learning more about how medieval people lived.
The second source of pressure is the attraction of the cheap
joke. Learning enough about past societies to make medieval or renaissance
humor—for example, commedia del arte
performances—requires some effort. Wearing elf ears or making jokes about
dragons does not. It is unfortunate but not, I think, surprising, that
individual participants often yield to to the temptation. It is disturbing when
the people running the event do so.