Society for Creative Anachronism

What happened

On May Day 1966, Diana Paxson, a recent medieval-studies graduate of the University of California, held a party in her Berkeley backyard. It began with a "Grand Tournament": guests in helmets, fencing masks and improvised costume sparred with plywood swords, padded maces and fencing foils. It ended with a procession down Telegraph Avenue, everyone singing "Greensleeves." The Society for Creative Anachronism still counts its years from that afternoon, dating events Anno Societatis, "in the Year of the Society."

The Berkeley of 1966 was a good place for such an idea. The Renaissance Pleasure Faire had opened in Southern California three years earlier, the Lord of the Rings paperbacks were in every dorm (see "Frodo Lives!"), and the Bay Area science-fiction community was full of writers who knew their history. When the group needed an official name to reserve a park for a second tournament, the novelist Marion Zimmer Bradley supplied one: the Berkeley Society for Creative Anachronism. The "Berkeley" was soon dropped. Poul Anderson, whose Three Hearts and Three Lions and The Broken Sword were already modern fantasy classics, is counted among the founders along with his wife Karen and their daughter Astrid.

The idea spread through fandom. In 1968 Bradley and her husband moved to Staten Island and co-founded the Kingdom of the East. That September a tournament was staged at the World Science Fiction Convention, held in Berkeley that year, and the Society sold a how-to booklet, A Handbook for the Current Middle Ages, so that visitors could start chapters at home. In October 1968 the SCA incorporated as a non-profit; by the end of 1969 it had three kingdoms, the West, the East and the Middle, from which every later kingdom descends by division. There are now twenty, from Drachenwald (Europe, Africa and the Middle East) to Lochac (Australia and New Zealand).

Why it mattered

The SCA was never a strict reenactment society. Its own quip is that it recreates the Middle Ages "as they ought to have been," selecting what attracts members and quietly dropping plague and serfdom. Participants build a persona, a plausible person from before 1600 with a registered name and coat of arms, and wear an "attempt" at period clothing. Crowns are won in combat at Crown Tournament; heralds, scribes, brewers and dancers pursue "arts and sciences"; local groups are baronies, shires and cantons. The largest gathering, the annual Pennsic War between the East and Middle kingdoms, turns a Pennsylvania campground into a temporary medieval city.

That structure made the SCA one of the first places where adults deliberately stepped into a character and a Secondary world together. Armored fighters use rattan weapons and a code of honor to call their own hits; the resulting blend of sport, costume and improvised identity is recognizably a cousin of the tabletop roleplaying game that appeared in 1974 with Dungeons & Dragons. Both grew from the same impulse: to stop reading about knights and sorcerers and start deciding what they would do next.

Legacy

Historians of live-action roleplay list the SCA among the roots of Live-Action Roleplay (LARP), alongside childhood make-believe, improvisational theater and tabletop gaming. Its combat rules showed that padded weapons and an honor system could make full-contact fantasy battle safe enough for weekend play, a lesson taken further by Dagorhir, founded in 1977 by a player who, tellingly, had never heard of medieval reenactment. Convention culture owes the Society too: costumed fighters and heralds were fixtures of science-fiction and gaming gatherings such as Gen Con and Dragon Con.

The SCA also proved that a volunteer fantasy community could outlive its founding generation. Sixty years on it has groups on several continents, chapters that once met aboard an aircraft carrier, and quarterly publications (Tournaments Illuminated and The Compleat Anachronist) that range from armor construction to medieval cookery. In a culture now full of immersive fairs, LARPs and cosplay, the Berkeley backyard tournament of 1966 stands near the head of the line.