From: tabron@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (That's RAEDWYNN, dammit!)
Subject: The Pennsic Snit
Reply-To: tabron@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Organization: Brandeis University
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 01:48:01 GMT

here's two cents from a member of the unwashed masses:

I go to Pennsic because it's Pennsic. Whether or not it's a war or a
tourney or a fair, it's still going to be Pennsic. I don't for a second
believe that the name is going to affect tempers of combatants one tiny
bit. People who are boneheaded enough to get nasty over an SCA event are
going to be boneheaded no matter what the thing's called.

But I am tired of people who stomp all over tradition just because they can.

Just who are these kings and queens to think that they have the right
to mess with twenty years of history? Five years from now, who will remember
their names? (I know I won't -- I'm terrible at keeping track of kingdomer
royalty.) But who will ever forget the Pennsic War?

Of course it's not actually a war. The battles we hold at events aren't
really battles, either. The tourneys we hold aren't really tourneys. Basic-
ally, we're a bunch of schmoes in foam padding whacking hell out of each
other with sticks. Or we're giving each other classes and calling it
a "university". Or we serve dinner at campsites by firelight and call it
a "feast."

It is the twentieth century, good gentles, for another few years at least.
These are the _Current_ Middle Ages. Twenty years is nothing compared
to the thousand we attempt to recreate, and yet it is _because_ of that,
because the history of the society is so small and frail and therefore
relatively precious, that we should be immensely careful about what tradi-
tion we toss away for the sake of an even more short-lived good intention.

Pennsic's big, Pennsic's damp, It's hard to find a place to camp, BurmaShave.

What with all the bitching about crowding, and the actual crowding, and the
heavy-metal elves and the con geeks and the rules and restrictions and
impoliteness and cliquishness of the War, I doubt I'll be going much longer
anyway. I don't have enough money to compete with wage-earners for land,
being only a poor graduate student, and even though this last Pennsic
was the best I've had in the last three or four, it's not what it was.
I couldn't even take my newbies to the Runestone this year -- some
yokels were camping around it, and were keeping people away from it while
some knight did his "vigil." I'm just a Mongol, I can't compete with knights,
so I guess there isn't a share of Pennsic magic left for me.

I'll be squeezed out soon and spend my money and time on other wars --
at least, that's the feeling I have.

But before I'll give up my vision of Pennsic I'll lay right down in the 
dirt in front of any pageant wagons or other fofery I see employed to
further this farcical idea of a Pennsic "fair." If the SCA did RenFaires,
I'd leave. And Pennsic will be a RenFaire over my dead body.

I'm just as enthusiastic a student of city pageants and renaissance
literature as the next person. I'm just wild about thomas middleton.
(I really am.) but as far as I'm concerned, it's bad enough to have all
sorts of Elizabethan types tromping through my Middle Ages all the time--
I can't stomach them turning Pennsic into their own little "faire".

So please, can't we all just put away these delusions of grandeur for
good and just get on with making Pennsic the best war it can be?

				------Raedwynn of the
					Large and Forthright Mouth

Judith L. Tabron		Raedwynn aet thaem Grene Wudu
Dept. of English Lit.		Yasun Bogeleku
Brandeis University		Household of the Great Dark Horde
Waltham, MA			(currently scouti-- LIVING in Carolingia)
	SAXON MONGOLS UNITE!
Darwin's Law -- If you're Dumb, you Die!