The Heraldry of the Barony of the Southern Wastes (Incipient)

The Heraldry of

(Incipient)

We've had a longstanding uphill battle to get our group's name and device passed through the SCA College of Heralds. It's not that we think that Heralds are all a bunch of anal-retentive control freaks who take delight in rejecting people's submissions, and who get special jollies out of quoting mysteriously unprinted "rules" which contradict the published rules that people have taken great pains to follow... Quite the contrary! We think that every single Herald is a highly respected, sexually irresistible individual to whom we'd like to pay heaping amounts of tribute and worship. (Will you pass our freaking name and device now, please?)

First Attempt

Our first submission Proposed Name: Terra Australis Incognita
Proposed Arms: Argent, under a chief rayony azure, a snowflake proper fimbriated sable.

We thought Terra Australis Incognita was a great name for our incipient Shire (which is what we were at the time); it was the period name for Antarctica, and we could prove it. A lot of thought went into our arms, too: all you can see down here, apart from the buildings, is snow. And we put the the chief in there because we thought it looked a lot like icicles. Snow and icicles, icicles and snow. It was the perfect representation of the terrain. We even "fimbriated" the snowflake (drew a line around it) because we knew the Heralds would object to a white snowflake on a white field.

Alas, neither component of our submission was deemed acceptable. The Heralds, after about nine months, wrote us back, unctuously rejecting our submission:

             Regarding the proposed name of your group, you have failed to include a group
          designator (such as "Shire," "Canton," or "Riding").  Furthermore, as you have
          so kindly documented, Terra Australis Incognita was the name of a place
          which actually existed within the SCA period, therefore it is inadmissible as
          the name of an SCA group.  Even if it were permitted to register existing
          place-names as the name of a group, nobody lived in Antarctica during the SCA
          period, so to claim that there were would be contrary to historical fact.


             And as to the proposed device: you can call the snowflake "proper," and you
          can fimbriate it, but that doesn't make it any less of a white-on-white charge.
          Try again (and you might as well know in advance that a "polar bear in a
          snowstorm" isn't going to cut it either).
        

(Shows how much they know. The polar bear is an arctic animal, not a resident of Antarctica. And they think they're so smart.)

Second Attempt

Our second submission Proposed Name: Shire of Ultima Thulë
Proposed Arms: Argent, under a chief rayonny azure, a penguin in full aspect with head to dexter proper, beaked and membered Or.

This one had to pass. We thought. Ultima Thulë (pronounced "thoolee") was a fictional island mentioned by Virgil in the Georgics (although believed to be a real place by the exceptionally gullible Pliny). It was considered to be the most remote northern land ("Ultima" meaning "farthest"). We figured: Okay, there were men of the north (Norsemen) known to live in frigid climates. If you pointed north and went far enough, you'd eventually wrap around the globe and hit Antarctica. And Ultima Thulë wasn't a real place (even though the name "Middle Kingdom" was the name of both an Egyptian Dynasty and China, and that was considered legal!)

But once again, the Heralds didn't see things our way. Our best efforts mattered little, and they seem to have irritated the College. Thirteen months later, we received the reply:

             Although we commend your attempts to foresee and address our objections,
          we are also not in the habit of registering the names of places known in period to be
          fictional.  The successful registration of the Middle Kingdom's name is not applicable
          to this situation; it was registered before the current system of rules was developed;
          furthermore, the phrase "Middle Kingdom" is descriptive and (as you yourselves pointed
          out in your documentation) not unique to a single place and time.


             You have made progress in your device submission, but the new version is
          not without its own problems.  Although we do not contest the fact that the species
          probably existed within the SCA period, you have provided no evidence that the Antarctican
          penguin was known within western Europe before 1600.  Further­more, the word "penguin" was
          used until the 19th century to refer to the Great Auk of the North Atlantic, a species
          of bird which is now extinct.  As the penguin you have depicted is a modern (Antarctican)
          penguin, and not a Great Auk, we are forced to reject your device submission as well.
        

Whoops. Who knew? If only we'd had a biologist amongst us. Back to the drawing board...

Third Attempt

Our third submission Proposed Name: Barony of the Southern Wastes
Proposed Arms: Argent, a chief rayonny azure.

As Sam Gamgee's old gaffer always used to say, "Third time pays for all." For a long time, we gave up on trying to get a device passed. First, we lost a lot of people (usually, you're only down here for six months to a year, two years at the very most). But we've steadily been building our numbers up, to the point where we're several people over the minimum required to have a Barony; and our fighting practices and ArtSci classes are very well attended. So we decided to go for Baronial status. Our personal Waterloo: getting our name and device passed.

Why didn't it hit us before? Use the argent field and chief rayonny azure, representing snow and icicles, and nothing else! It's perfectly valid heraldry - in fact, if you go look at period examples, they often had just a field division without any things. So we went and checked the SCA Ordinary and Armorial, and discovered that there's exactly one person in the SCA with an argent field and a chief rayonny azure, and there are more than two major differences with our minimalist device. So, hopefully, we'll have our arms and name passed and can be on our way to taking "(Incipient)" off all our Web pages. In thirteen to sixteen months.

Now all we have to do is play the waiting game.

This game sucks. Let's play "Hungry Hungry Hippos."

This is the recognized Web Page for the Incipient Barony of the Southern Wastes of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. The maintainer of this page is Johannes Habernacher (mka John Havershaw). It is not a corporate publication of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. and does not delineate SCA policies. In cases of conflict with printed versions of material presented on this page, the conflict will be decided in favor of the printed version.