Hundreds of people gathered in Grandview this past weekend for a regional event that only happens twice a year. The SCA, or the Society for Creative Anachronism, hosted its May Crown event. Rylee Fitzgerald reports.
GRANDVIEW, Wash. — Hundreds of people gathered in Grandview this past weekend for a regional event that only happens twice a year. The SCA, or the Society for Creative Anachronism , hosted its May Crown event. The SCA is an internationally-known living-history non-profit, with the aim to study and recreate history before the 17th century.
Around 700 people attended on Saturday of the three-day event for May Crown, all in full-garb. There’s a lot that goes down at these events, so I got a tour around the festivities with Kevin Garvey, or Caemgen mac Garbith as he’s known within the SCA, as a master host, or ‘briugu,’ within the Order of the Pelican .
May Crown is where SCA members in the Kingdom of An Tir , or the Pacific Northwest, get together in the Barony of Wastekeep , or the Tri-Cities region. They meet and host a combat tournament to determine who its sovereigns will be for the next six months. The winner and their partner become the ceremonial and figurative leadership. The focal point for the leadership is to send praise, recognition, and ensure the community gets back what they have put in, according to Garvey.
“Because it's a kingdom level event, there's always lots going on. This is an event where we saw almost everything,” said Garvey. He first pointed out one of the main features of the event, the heavy combat tournament to determine the sovereigns. 91 people were signed up to compete in heavy combat. “We also saw some rapier fighting, which is another one of the martial activities. There was the archery range. We have equestrian activities here. Throughout the weekend, people will be doing different performances or storytelling or singing, especially once we get into night and the campfires start up. We have some people teaching Arts and Sciences classes.”
“As a group overall, the SCA is a non-profit educational group, where our goal is to try to learn as much as we can by doing, about pre-Renaissance history, anywhere from the world, really anywhere back into where we start losing documentation, and then to turn around and teach it, right? To find as many people as we can, who can find that same passion for this really obscure skill, or this really particular, like, niche period of history in this one country where something wild happened, and we don't know why. Or maybe we do, but we don't know how it works. So, then we find out by doing it,” said Garvey.
This is the 59th year the SCA has been around. It has spread out to 20 kingdoms across the world, with as many as 3,000 to 5,000 people in each kingdom.
One of the things the SCA works very hard at is making people feel welcomed. At any event, there are people whose role it is to make sure it is an inclusive environment. That means helping new people get garb, or practice-weapons, hosting events and practices and more.
There are two types of people who join the SCA, Garvey said: “Really brave people, or people who had somebody who was really kind and really welcoming and inclusive and removed a lot of barriers.”
While he explained the concept can seem scary or intimidating, he said it’s a group of people who are excited to make new friends; people who are excited to share, and excited to give.
“Sometimes I say that if you can think of something that somebody did 1,000 years ago, we'll find somebody who spends all weekend talking to you about it, and then they'll probably give you a bunch of stuff to take home and practice with it,” said Garvey. He calls it a ‘community at its whole.’
The Kingdom of An Tir covers British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and some of northern Idaho. Find the list of events happening in An Tir here .
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