Why Not a Bard?
Okay, time for the big question. Why Not a Bard? I’ve gone through all of my SCA career emphatically saying I was a minstrel. I had looked around the SCA a bit before joining and I decided my persona would be a wandering singer. Historically, bards were not generally wandering singers. Bards were “poet-singers,” especially of epic verse. Depending on your sources, bards may also have had clerkly duties or been historians and/or teachers. That didn’t sound at all like what I wanted to do so I looked further and found terms like minstrel, troubadour, or trouvere that seemed to more closely resemble the person I wanted to be in the SCA. Minstrel seemed to have the least baggage so I started telling folks I was a minstrel.
Now to most folk in the SCA singer=bard. It literally took years to convince some folks in Artemesia that what I was doing was different from the “bards” that are so common in the SCA. (I’m sure there are some that still refuse to see the difference.) However, I was furtunate that many people did make the distiction or at least decided to indulge my eccentricities.
The problem is I don’t live in Artemesia any more and everywhere I go I have to start the process all over. Oh well, that which does not kill us…
– Ciann
Not a Bard 