The Tournament of the Golden Swan
Golden Swan is a female persona development challenge (a challenger does not need to identify as female to enter). There are several categories: Persona Creation, Everyday Life, Habitat, Food, Textiles, Costume, Correspondence, Games/Pasttimes, Performance, and Survival. Most are mandatory, but the last three on the list you can select two out of three. Full information on the Tournament of the Golden Swan can be found here, including the full evaluation rubric: https://www.goldenswan.org/
I visited the event with an SCA friend of mine in 2022, and we travelled with two other people who soon became friends as well. We rolled into Cawston at something like 3:30 am and walked into a dark, quiet, welcoming building that smelled of apples. It was the first time I experienced "hall camping". The whole weekend was amazing. I was so moved by the entire experience and the warm people I met that I decided to start working on my persona on the ride home, with a goal of doing at least a partial entry within 2-5 years.
I originally chose Switzerland for, although my family is Swiss, I knew little of the history of Switzerland. I was able to visualize the beautiful area where my father and aunt grew up - the mountains are etched into our souls. I experienced the way Swiss people are of my dad's generation, and could imagine that they were not so different in times gone by. Time moved slower, it seemed, in Switzerland. Family comes first, then the people of your town, and so on. The further away someone lived, the less reliable their intellect. It's an old place, with sad reminders of the anti-semitism and fear of foreigners that existed regrettably in history. It was also someplace that many had to travel through, particularily the Romans. The Swiss were reknown for their martial prowess and their staunch indivudualism, lack of noble oversight, and their neutrality. I found some things very difficult to research, due to a language barrier (Swiss German is frustratingly close to German but not close enough for Google translate). But overall, being able to draw on the experiences and personalities of my Swiss family as well as having first hand experience of the buildings, society, attitudes, and alpine beauty was a great starting point, and something I was happy to develop.
For the next year or so, I began thinking about Adelheid in terms of the categories - where she lived, how she got there, what did she eat, what did she do... and slowly Adelheid became less my creation and more of her own self-determining entity. I followed the research, such as I could find, and I knew "met" her (without sounding like an unhinged person) when I realized that she was not a merry widow, but she had recently lost her husband in a plague the year before. I'm not prone to emotional displays, but at that moment I burst into tears. Not only was Adelheid "alive" for me, but the process had created a great deal of empathy for her.
I use quotes to emphasize that I know she is not a real person. But she could have been.
This has been a profound experience and I'm grateful to have been surrounded by people who were as excited as me about the journey. I'm double grateful to my partner Neil, who took on a lot of extra responsibility so that I could be free to work on my entry.
