As the Society recognizes Queer Pride this month, I thought I would share a couple of images I created featuring the populace badges of the East Kingdom and the Crown Province of Østgarðr, which folks are free to use.
Click either image for a higher-resolution PNG file.
Back in 2018 I provided some support for the Canton of Northpass’s efforts to design and register a populace badge, but due to some other drama I somehow never got around to posting about it.
With the news that the Canton of Northpass will soon be reinstated, I thought it was fitting to dust off those emblazons and make them accessible again.
Continue reading “Populace Badge of Northpass”Newcomers and neighbors of the Crown Province inevitably run into a tricky question: how do you pronounce Østgarðr?
There are (at least) three potential pitfalls packed into this one word, and even many long-time residents habitually get one or two of them wrong.
I put together a page about #HeraldicLove for the spring issue of the Seahorse (aka the E-Horse), the provincial newsletter of Østgarðr.
Back in 2018 I created an image for the fiftieth anniversary of Østgarðr (and by extension, of the East Kingdom) that shows the arms of the viceroys and vicereines, the unique title held by the landed representatives of the Crown here in the only Crown Province of the Known World.
When I drew this five years ago, Suuder and Lada still wore the chains of state which serve the viceregents as the civil equivalent of the coronets one finds in the 185 baronies which follow us in the Armorial of Precedence. Tonight I’ve updated the chart to reflect the investiture last autumn of Angelica and Sofya, joint Viceréinas of Østgarðr. Long may they serve!
The Canton of Whyt Whey was founded in the late 1980s, with its name registration appearing on the January 1990 LoAR. In the decades since, the original population has moved out of our region and been replaced by a new generation of participants, for whom the old name didn’t have the same valence, and over the last few years an effort was undertaken to consider possible changes. Following a great deal of thought, the populace settled on Appleholm as its new name, for which the forms were submitted this month.
Appleholm is a constructed Middle English place name.
Apple is an English word for a variety of tree-borne fruit. The Middle English Dictionary (s.n. appel) provides an example from Boece (circa 1380), Chaucer’s translation of a work by Boethius: “And autumpne comith ayein hevy of apples.” The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Watts) provides examples of its use in compound place names such as Applby, Appleford, and Appleton.
Holm is an element of English place names meaning land rising from the water, such as islands in a harbor or a meadow by the side of a stream. The Middle English Dictionary (s.n. hōlm) provides an example from Promptorium Parvulorum (1440), Anglicus Galfridus’s Middle English-to-Latin dictionary: “Holm, of a sonde yn the see.” English Place-Name Elements (Smith, s.n. holmr) provides examples of its use in compound place names with varieties of plants such as Brackenholm, Bromholm, and Dockholm.
A petition of unanimous support from our branch officers is included with this submission.
There is no provision to maintain retired branch names as there is for “ancient and honorable” arms, so in order to preserve this remanent of the canton’s history, a parallel submission was made to register a household name using the same elements.
For context, the canton’s existing name is a reference to one of our most famous landmarks, the Great White Way, a modern name for a stretch of Broadway in Manhattan’s Theater District where bright outdoor lighting was first introduced at the start of the twentieth century.
When the canton’s name was submitted in the late 1980s, the branch’s founders wanted to name it the Canton of the Grate Whyt Whey but were advised by a local herald that the word Grate was unregistrable; many old-timers are still bitterly disappointed by this omission. The spelling of Whey was selected as an homage to the canton’s parent branch, Østgarðr, whose name might be read by a modern Scandanavian as Ostgård, the contemporary Swedish word for “cheese farm.”
As we prepare to change our canton’s name to reflect a new generation of participants, we would like to preserve the old name as part of our history, ideally in the form our founders originally intended. Including the word Great / Grate would help to communicate their intended theatrical reference while avoiding a potentially offensive misreading of the name as racially exclusionary.
Company is an English household designator found in SENA Appendix E.
“Company of <place name>” is an attested pattern for association names in English.
Companie is a period English spelling of company. The Middle English Dictionary (s.n. cǒmpaignīe) provides an example from De Re Militari around 1450: “Þe worþiest persone in þe companie.”
Great White Way is a constructed English place name for an area marked by a major thoroughfare with a pale appearance.
Great is an adjective that may appear before English place names, as documented in “Compound Placenames in English” by Juliana de Luna. http://medievalscotland.org/jes/EnglishCompoundPlacenames/
Grate is a period English spelling of great. The Middle English Dictionary (s.n. grēt) provides an example from Mallory dated around 1470: “They threste togedyrs and eythir gave other grate strokis.”
Whiteway is a place name in Dorset, derived from the highly-visible hillside road worn by centuries of traffic exposing the underlying bright white chalk. Period spellings include “Whyteweye” dated to 1329 in J. Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (3rd edition), ed. W. Shipp and J. W. Hodson, 1861-70. https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/Dorset/Church+Knowle/5328528cb47fc4099d000909
Whyt Whey is our current branch name, until the processing of the name change submitted simultaneously with this registration, and thus covered by the existing registration allowance.
Whyt is a period English spelling of white. The Oxford English Dictionary (s.n. white) provides an example from an inventory of 1568: “whyt reged cowe.”
Whey is an interpolated variant spelling of way, in the sense of road or path. Attested period spellings include waie, way, waye, wegh, wei, wey, weye, and whay. Given this diversity, we believe that whey would have been a plausible spelling of the word in period.
This illustration is a play on SCA geography shown as a medieval T-and-O map crossed with the classic New Yorker cover.
Manhattan is in the center of the world (rightly so), with the West at the top, Long Island in the bottom left, and New England in bottom right.
(Hat tip to Þorfinn for the original idea, Angelica for the New Yorker tie-in, Brían for a great first round of Latin corrections, and Maral for a Canadian vocabulary suggestion.)
Also available in a provincial version that highlights all four modern cantons.
A guide to the labels and placenames, written in Vulgar Latin:
For the first eight or nine years of Society activity on the East Coast, the Kings and Queens of the East lived within driving distance of New York City, and the Crown Province of Østgarðr was governed directly by the royalty.
However, in the winter of AS X the Crown Tourney was won by Sir Alaric of the Southern Region (now Atlantia) and this situation became untenable — in the spring, rule would pass to a king who lived too far away to visit the city regularly.
To prepare for this situation, at Twelfth Night in January 1976, King Aonghais (yes, that Aonghais) named Count Vardak Mirceavitch Basarabov of Iloi (yes, the only Court Count) to be a royal representative, tasked with overseeing the province on behalf of the Crown. Continue reading “An Unsubmitted Badge for the “Vicar-General” of Østgarðr”
As the herald of the Crown Province of Østgarðr, I am well aware that it is the only branch in the Society to bear that particular designator — a result of its distinctive history as the home territory of the earliest royalty of the East Kingdom — and I became curious as to what other unusual branch designators were to be found in the catacombs of the Society’s armorial database.
A bit of data extraction produced the following table: Continue reading “Frequency of Branch Designators”
The East Kingdom Order of Precedence site, generally referred to as “the EK OP”, records tens of thousands of kingdom and baronial awards issued over the East’s fifty-year history.
It’s an impressive feat of data collection, given the all-volunteer nature of our Society, but it is not flawless. The reporting process involves repeated transcription of unfamiliar names, and I am given to understand that the web interface used to enter and update data in the system is not particularly easy to use, so a number of errors and omissions have accumulated over time and it can take a while to correct them. Continue reading “Provincial Awards Missing From the Kingdom Order of Precedence”
