[Ansteorra] history of SCA placenames - wne / why the second "r"

[Marc Carlson]

>Diane Rudin serena1570 at yahoo.com
>>Well, I was really thinking about was the "rr"s thing, rather than dark,
>>grumpy past.  While I do think that an objective historical exploration of 
>>iit might be valuable and interesting, I'd be out of my mi--, er, 
>>reluctant to suggest that it be done on a discussion list.
>Or practically any other forum.
>Occasionally I have considered taking on the project of writing a
>history of the SCA, giving it the warts-and-all professional
>historian's treatment--interviews of all sides available, exhaustive
>documentary research, tough analysis, etc.
>It would then be locked in a vault, to be published after my death.

Go ahead and write it up and stick it in an archive to wait for some future 
historian to come along and study it.

I was working on one for Northkeep for a while, but life intervened to stall 
it out - I intend to get back to it someday.  But as long as I was fairly 
objective I got a lot of cooperation from people who present.  What's 
important though is to try to get the same stories from as many people who 
were actually present as possible.  Where one person might misremember, or 
have their own agenda or interpretation of the facts (note that even at this 
point, I'm not talking about people intentionally altering the facts) , if 
you can get the stories of the same events the better your chances of 
getting something that actually resembles what happened.

I'm not sure that there's anyone who can give an accurate "warts and all" 
history of the SCA at this point, mostly because it's all too recent.  The 
West has done a really good job of trying to do this, and it's about as 
accurate as can be managed.  Mostly because the old timers were willing to 
actually contribute and talk about their versions of the unpleasant things.  
And from taht they were willing to draw a consensus history.

I'd love to see something like that for Ansteorra.

Marc/Diarmaid