For some, the appeal of the Society for Creative Anachronism is easy to identify.
“I get to hit my friends with sticks, and I won’t go to jail for it,” Russell of Chelsea said Saturday, during the Vices and Virtues Festival at the Etowah County Fairgrounds.
Russell and Malinda – the names they go by in the SCA realm – set up tent for first festival of its kind in the Attalla-Gadsden area. The festival was hosted by the College of Phoenix Rising, a local and fairly news SCA chapter.
Malinda said she’s drawn more to the craft side of the gatherings, working in textiles. But she enjoys the atmosphere of the festivals.
“It’s like big-kid make believe,” she said – getting to dress up and play make believe without anyone making fun of you.
The SCA promotes learning and preserving many aspects of the medieval life. “We skip the bad parts, like the Black Plague,” Mike Little, autocrat of the gathering in Attalla, said.
He said the time period was from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 1600s.
Prince Sebastianos said much the same. SCA gatherings let people spend time with similar interests underneath a very broad umbrella.
He said there were “hundreds of hobbies” covered in SCA play. He said in the group – which has some 80,000 active members nationwide, there are two large festivals each where a king and queen are named.
Actually, he said, the king and queen serve as prince and princess for about four months – as public relations leaders of sorts for the organization – before serving as king and queen.
The prince said there were several kinds of martial arts represented at the festival, along with fencing, archery, axe-throwing, textile work, calligraphy, illumination and other crafts.
Different people have different fields of specialization – his is ancient Greece.
When he went inside one of the fairground buildings in search of water, he took time to talk to Jackson Blackwood, 7, and Stella Blackwood, 3, about ancient Greece.
The three-headed dog Cerebus (the same one in the Harry Potter movies), is from Greek mythology, he said. It’s name means spot or spotted in Greek.
“So the god of the underworld’s dog is named Spot,” he told the children.
Prince Sebastianos said the SCA world doesn’t harbor sexist or age-ism. He said his page started accompanying him when she was seven years old. She’s a teenager now, fighting as an adult, he said.
People can start young and become masters at fighting by the time they are adults and retain that level of ability into their 50s, sometimes their 60s.
His father – Duke John Madkilt – has been fighting for 44 years, he said, and taught him.
“I’m scared of him,” he said, but clearly that’s only on the field of battle.
“This if the family you get to chose,” Prince Sebastianos said, of the friends he’s made through the society.
“Education and relationships,” he said. “That’s what its all about.”
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