[ANSTHRLD] Viking household

[tmcd at panix.com]

Lord Chandranath <chandra at plumes.org> forwarded the following question
to the Ansteorran Heralds' list.  People replying to the list should
be careful to CC mytherus at cs.com, and they should keep this paragraph
at the top so that people see it and know to CC mytherus at cs.com.

> Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 21:36:54 -0500
> From: mytherus at cs.com
> To: estencele at ansteorra.org
> Subject: Question
>
>  Esteemed Estencele Herald,
>   I have recently moved to Ansteorra from Lough Devnaree in Drachenwald.
>   Some companions of mine here in the Shire of Rosenfeld are interested
>   in creating a Viking Household/order. . The Household of the Oak, or
>   something similar. How would we go about officially doing this? If you
>   could send me a reply, I would greatly appreciate it.
>  Thankyou,
>   Ragendall V'Ragnarok

The short answer is that "the Household of the Oak" is not
registerable.  Under our registration rules, the deisgnator (here,
"Household") is ignored for conflict, as are prepositions ("of") and
articles ("the"), so it conflicts with the Order of the Oak, the
service order for the Barony of the Steppes, Dallas.  (Since that's
just up the road from Rosenfeld, people would notice).

To register anything, you have to have a registered personal name to
register it to.  "Ragendall V'Ragnarok" is not registered.  I don't
know what "V'" means, but if it is a preposition like "of" or "from"
or "up to", "Ragnarok" is not a place you can be from.  I have no
sources at the moment about "Ragendall".

About the group itself, there's a couple of questions that I'd like to
ask first to guide consultation.  It's like getting a question "Should
I buy a 1953 Studebaker?" -- I can't really answer without knowing
what you need a vehicle for.

Is there a period example of the kind of group you are?  Are you a
group of people who go a-viking?  Are you a lord and people on his
stead?  Are you a group of merchants?  Are you relatives? (For Norse,
it's hard to distinguish those four cases -- they switched between
them depending on the wind direction and how well-armed people were --
but bear with me.)  Something else?

Fairly frequently in the SCA, people form a household based just on
unrelated people sharing a persona and common interests.  There aren't
that much period examples of that sort of thing, so there'd have to be
more discussion of various period group types.

But if you did have a particular kind of group in mind, then we can
consider naming practices for that particular type of group: merchants
groups were named differently from farms from war bands from
relatives from ...

Daniel de Lincolia
--
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com; tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work address