[Sca-cooks] Eric, was feast organization/service question

lilinah@earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Fri Aug 18 22:36:29 PDT 2006


Margarite wrote:
>  > There have been events with pot-luck feasts on the Eric
>
>what do you mean by Eric? I've seen this used before but I don't know what
>it means. (I'm in Ansteorra)

I get the digest and someone else may well have answered by now, but 
in case not...

My limited understanding is as follows:

The Kingdom of the West is the very first kingdom of all.

I gather that for the first few tourneys, there was nothing in 
particular to separate the fighting area from the spectator area. It 
was decided that there needed to be something for safety. So someone 
(and i'm sure an old-timer knows who) made streamers or flags to hang 
from a rope that would surround the tourney field. These were red. 
And so the set of warning markers came to be known as "Eric the Red". 
Eventually that was shortened to "Eric", and the warning flags were 
no longer red. And eventually that was applied to the tourney field.

So there had been a tradition in The West, a tradition possibly older 
than any other kingdom (although the East did come along fairly soon 
after the West), of calling the tourney field "the Eric."

IIRC, there's another kingdom that continued this traditions (our 
former Principality of An Tir?), but i imagine that it is being 
replaced there by more "appropriate" terminology.

While most people here call the people who collect money at the 
entrance to an event "The Gate", i gather that in some places they 
still call it "Troll". We no longer do this. But i suspect that the 
Tourney Field will remain "The Eric" for a long time to come.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita
Kingdom of the West
Principality of the Mists


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