jducoeur

I am still gradually unpacking -- no longer the frantic "Must get it all out of the living room!" crisis of a few months ago, but there are a couple dozen boxes in the basement still to unpack. (Not to mention a couple hundred in the storage units -- I'm going to be working on this for years.) So I've adopted a gentle pace of unpacking one box a day, while cooling down from my morning run on the elliptical.

The past few weeks have mostly been focused on The Boxes Full of Random Files. In the beginning of the packing process I was being terribly meticulous, organizing and weeding as I put things into boxes. Then I realized that, at that rate, I'd be moving sometime in 2016, so I sped up. Then we actually *scheduled* the move, and it turned into a madness of, "Throw it all in boxes, and God will know his own!" Pack in haste, repent at leisure, as they say.

As a result, I'm throwing away a *lot* of what I am unpacking -- some of these boxes have turned out to be 90% recycling. (Why, yes, Jane and I *did* still have all of our bank statements from 1989. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem except that they have our social security numbers all over them, so those need to get shredded. *Sigh*.)

But there are a few gems. The box I hit today turned out to be about 50% made up of printouts of the original SCA Digests -- apparently, I printed out most of the first 100 issues. *That* is a rather cool little historical artifact.

Context, for those who hadn't been born at the time: in the beginning, there was the original SCA Mailing list; I believe it was sca@a.lcs.mit.edu; as far as I know, that was the Society's first-ever presence online. That died in May '88, not long after I joined it, due to technical difficulties, and was replaced by sca@mc.lcs.mit.edu, a more modern mailing list available in digest form. I was heavily active there, and (being me) apparently printed out much of the first year.

At some point, I'm going to have to dig through that for treats. A little quick skimming turns up fun details here and there -- for example, I had entirely forgotten that my original name for the Rolls Ethereal, before I put out the first edition, was "The Crystal Domesday Book". (I am amused that the Rolls were the *less* tritsy name.)

I'm curious whether this exists online anywhere. A quick search hasn't turned it up. The content is *similar* to that of the early days of the alt.sca newsgroup -- they were theoretically gatewayed to each other, but the gateway was notoriously unreliable in the early days, and much of what I have seems to be missing from Google's archive. At some point, I may need to scan this in, for the historical record...

And this is what makes having all that history to hand so cool. Here's the official invitation to Crown Tourney for May 1973, printed in color on parchment, tipped into Pikestaff Vol II, Issue 2:
Click to see it full-size...

Thanks to sca_today, which posted a link to this page from Mistress Therasia von Tux. After the introductions there, you'll find some very long scans of the original court scroll from 12th Night in 1968. (Be warned: it takes a long time to download.)

This is an amazing historical artifact, because this scroll represents the original establishment of many of the Society's deepest traditions: it creates the Order of Chivalry (both the Knights and Masters); it creates the concept of Dukes and Ducal Prerogative; it creates the Order of the Laurel; and it establishes many key customs, including the regalia of these ranks, titles, and a few customs that have fallen by the wayside (like the ability of Dukes to make a Knight, and the taking a new name upon Knighting).

It was certainly the most important court in SCA history -- until now, I had no idea that it had been so completely scripted, and that the script was so intact. Well worth the time to read through, and many thanks to Tux for putting it up online!