Creeping Mundanity at Pennsic

(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.