Meandering Heraldic Thoughts.

.....I was reading the comments posted in the Beloved Tamm's poling this week on heraldry and thinking of my own history with the heralds. It took me over five years to get my name and device passed. If you look at my entry in the An Tir Order of Precedence you'll see a litany of names that failed along the way. It was a very frustrating process for me. Part of it was my own doing, the basis of the name I wanted started out as the name for a roll playing character. So I had handicapped myself from the start. But having lived through all the aspects of the heraldic process, I can certainly agree that it can be a marathon game of 'Chutes and Ladders' where every two or three steps forward invariably leads to a slide backwards at some points. The history of my base name and device is on the Dragon's Laire Baronial web-site. It's a useful tool in what not to do in heraldry.

.....But I would temper that to a degree. Once I started understanding heraldry I actually began to enjoy it. Not the bureaucratic nonsense that the SCA puts into the process, but the heraldry itself. The art of heraldry can be very beautiful. I also find myself drawn to the complexity involved in the legitimate rules process. It can make the process interesting and the final product that much more sacred to the user. Because it is an expression of the person, another variation of the name, it becomes something more that simply artwork or letters on a page. The device seen on my L.J. entries is not my primary device, it is a secondary. I ended up enjoying heraldry so much that I have two registered names, a device and two badges. I was the Dragon's Laire Book Herald for about four years and actually enjoyed quite a bit of it. But those are different topics. :-)

.....I think what makes the process the most frustrating in the SCA is the part that is the most difficult to correct, the human factor.

.....There is a certain amount of arbitrariness to what names and devices pass in one month as opposed to the next. The rules of heraldry are complex, on purpose. If you do any reading on the history of heraldry you quickly find out that heralds in period protected their profession because it was their livelihood, it was how they put food on their table. If any Lord Henry or Lady Anne could understand the rules behind what could and could not go into the creation of a device, why would anyone hire them? Over time that bred a certain amount of arrogance amongst those for whom heraldry was a profession.

.....If you look at the SCA heraldic community, it is a rather close knit one. They are geeks. And I say that with a smile as I count myself among them. In my world, that title is a compliment. But because of the geekiness involved, there is a certain amount of isolation that happens over time. They speak their own language, understandable only (for the most part) by those amongst their heraldic family. I think that this isolation makes it difficult at times for those on the outside to communicate well with them. Hence at least one factor in the frustration level in those for whom heraldry is not their hobby.

.....That isolation also helps foster at least a little bit of the arrogance that I mentioned earlier. In some cases it becomes a 'you could never understand the rules as well as I because you haven't studied them for as long as I'. I see this kind of arrogance at work a lot amongst the engineers who are degreed at the Shipyard. If you don't have that diploma, how can you be as smart as they? :-) This brand of arrogance is seen sometimes amongst the heraldic community. It also makes communication difficult.

.....I remember attending a meeting once of the An Tir heralds. It was a monthly meeting where all the submissions collected over the past month or so were reviewed. They either passed the review and put into a pile for submission to Society, or comments on why they shouldn't be passed on to Society were collected for the rejection letter. What struck me at the meeting was the arrogance. There were many occasions where individual items were ridiculed for bad form, bad artwork, bad use of rules. I really don't think that they realized what they were doing, or even how they sounded. They were a group of geeks that were geeking out on heraldry. But that one meeting really soured my taste for the process. It really reminded me of the Constabulary, whose arrogance and attitude brought it down in the end.

.....Of course I'm generalizing here, I know many, many incredibly nice and hard working heralds who would be horrified if they realized that there was a level of snarkiness involved in SCA heraldry. So take this all with a little caution. :-)

.....I'm not sure that there really is an easy fix to SCA heraldry. Like I mentioned earlier, heraldry is complicated on purpose. The Society itself makes it more so by allowing so many different cultures and such a wide span of time to inject itself into that process. I would hate to see the process 'dumbed down' any. I think in the end it would cheapen the results. The College of Heralds IS working on at least streamlining itself. I'm rather excited to see the online process come up to speed. Some day it could be just a few months of processing to have a registered name and device instead of many months.

.....I suppose another factor in this is the 'Victorian Era' aspect of the SCA. We continually talk about striving to make and do things from a 'period point-of-view', but in reality the things that really draw a large number of us to the SCA, i.e. the chivalry, honour, noblesse oblige, fealty, etc., really have very little to do with things 'in period', They are very Victorian views of the Middle Ages. I think that this applies to heraldry as well. Period heraldry is rather simple in nature. People in the SCA want their devices to really be aspects of themselves as well as tell a story. It is a deeply personal representation of who they are. This also creates a conflict. As a hobby herald without the years of training associated with the heralds of England, how do you negotiate the rules to help your client create something that both lives to a 'period' set of rules, but also appeals to the desires of the client? Very difficult at best.

.....I'm not sure that there is any real solution to relieving the frustration associated with heraldic submissions. Hope I didn't frustrate anyone with my meandering thoughts on a Saturday morning. :-)

.....Have a good day all. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.