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The good fight
Members of the Knightly Order of Fiat Lux demonstrate the weapons, armor and combat techniques of medieval times.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Playing along
Playtron Julia Ross (left) does her part to create a world of make-believe at the Myrtle Beach Mythical & Medieval Fest. Playtron is a term given to patrons (aka, guests) who come in full costume and interact with the performers at Renaissance fairs.
Photo by Mic Smith
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As red as the coals in the blacksmith’s forge
While most of the Mythical & Medieval Fest is family- and kid-friendly, it’s adults-only in the festival tavern, where the ladies of Chaste Treasure, an a cappella group, perform bawdy musical numbers—to the red-faced embarrassment of writer Hastings Hensel.
Two knights in chain mail armor clash on the battlefield, their longswords clanking. A black-bearded pirate shows off four silver dollars and his black powder pistol. A troupe of belly-dancers twirls in coin-belted pantaloons. Wizards and elves wander into a tavern where plume-hatted wenches sing bawdy sea shanties. A blacksmith hammers a steel knife on a forge. A hooded archer shoots an arrow into the bull’s eye on a hay bale. A ring of fairy children solemnly swears to defend the queen.
“Welcome to Shadow Bay!” Sir Kerrigan, The Lord High Sheriff and Queen’s Escort, bellows in an English accent. “What is our purpose here today?”
It is a question not uniformly answered by the more than 2,700 guests, entertainers, and “playtrons”—those patrons who play along, don the garb, talk the talk—arriving at the fifth annual Mythical & Medieval Fest in Shadow Bay (aka the RH Acres venue in Socastee). Some come to recreate the historical, some the storybook, and some the fantastic realm in between. But I, for one, came for their stories.
The nobility and the playtrons
I’m just through the gates and into Shadow Bay when a bearded gentleman in a tunic pardons my interruption to ask, “Good sir, how stands the hour?”
Sensing my confusion—I’m only wearing jeans and a T-shirt, after all—he translates: “What time is it?”
When I look down at my watch, he laughs. He wasn’t in search of a literal answer, per se. At Renaissance fairs like this, it’s quite fun to use 50 words when you only need five, as when I later hear a purple fairy ask, “May I capture your essence on my fairybox?” (“Can I take your picture?”). Instead, this is his way of getting me to play—to participate in this imaginative realm of make-believe.
“It’s a chance to step back in time,” says this man, this Captain of the Queen’s Royal Guard, Lord Seymour Thanue (aka Matthew Harlow of Myrtle Beach). “It’s a chance to come and let go and have a great time. We’ve created our own world.”
And what a fantastic and fantastical world it is. Like some daytime version of Halloween, or a kid’s fairy tale dream come true, this is a collection of characters straight out of Dungeons & Dragons, Braveheart, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Robin Hood, Cinderella, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Sword and the Stone—all participating in something like a real carnival of the Middle Ages, when peasants dined and danced like kings.
“People enjoy dressing up,” says Tracy Dallas Lummus, who’s sporting a Louis XIV tunic known as a tabard. “It’s an entirely different experience in costume. You become part of the show.”
Those who frequent Renaissance and medieval fairs, like Sir Kerrigan (aka Darren Jacelin of Baltimore, Maryland), appreciate seeing people shedding their outer adult for their inner child. “They leave present times behind, and the outside world tends to disappear,” he says. “Soon enough, they’ll ‘get it.’ I love to see a patron shifting to the inside.”
Erica Buffkin of Florence is one of those playtrons. She sits in the stands and wears a blue kirtle—a gown of the Middle Ages—and watches knights strike each other in armored combat. But when I ask her what makes these fairs so popular, she offers up a simpler, more practical answer: “There’s just a lot of things for kids to do that are free.”
Her son chimes in even more succinctly.
“It’s the food,” he says, gnawing on a turkey leg.
The pirates
The hour doesn’t stand yet at noon, but Edward Bright knocks back a dram of strong, brown liquid and steps out from the gang of pirates beneath his tent. He is burly and black-bearded, wielding 26 knives on his body, from the dagger in his boots to the short sword in the sheath on his side. As Quartermaster of the Charles Towne Few Pirates—a pirate reenactor group—he reminds people that he’s a disciplinarian amongst killers.
For a moment, it’s hard to tell if he’s joking. After all, unlike most fair entertainers, he makes no distinction between his fair name and his real name. In “real life,” he has sailed on an icebreaker ship for the U.S. Coast Guard, around both the North and South Poles. He wasn’t just made for the part. He is the part.
No mere “polyester pirate” who mumbles in a drunken brogue, Bright prides himself on uncovering the real treasurable nuggets of history. Did I know, for instance, that pirates only wore boots when they were photographed donning their finery in town? Did I know that it’s considered bad manners to eat with your elbows on the table because pirates did it? That a mugging literally meant being hit by a mug? That the butt of his pistol is meant for cracking skulls?
Like the pirates of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Charles Towne Few travel up and down the coast, sharing their historical knowledge.
“History is a mystery,” he says. “There’s always some truth to the story. It’s just a matter of how much it’s been embellished. Our job is to entertain and to educate.”
The knights
Ricky Bell of Loris takes a break from slashing and jabbing and swinging his sword at his fellow reenactors of the Knightly Order of the Fiat Lux and removes his coif helmet. He is sweating profusely, out of breath, and he takes a sip of soda before he explains to me why someone from the 21st century chooses to become a medieval knight.
Unlike some of the more free-spirited types who flitter and float throughout this festival, Bell is drawn to the knightly virtues of the Middle Ages. To become a knight, he says, one must go through the secret squire process, trials of character and a feat of combat.
The rigid structure of the knightly order—how you can move up in the chivalric order—appeals to Bell, who practices around twice a month in full armor.
“I’ve always been a little geeky and interested in history, particularly in the medieval ages,” he says, laughing so that his armor—pauldrons, braces, cobs, chain mail—begins clanking. “Just like in the medieval ages, you have to become worthy of being called a Sir.”
But this knightly order makes it a point that while some men fight for riches and others for power, they fight for charity—specifically for veterans and autism awareness issues.
“My middle son, he’s autistic, and one of our knights, he’s a veteran,” says Bell. “We try to choose things that hit home so that we work harder for it.”
The authenticators
The pillar of this festival is a living history group known as the Society for Creative Anachronism. Like knights questing after some ever-elusive holy grail, these folks combat “Disneyfication” and search instead for something else entirely: historical authenticity.
Their unofficial motto is explained to me by Master Thylacinus Aquila of Dair Eidand (aka Alden Butler): “This is the Middle Ages as they ought to have been,” he says. “Without things like the plague and food poisoning.”
Members of the SCA do not recreate exact historical figures but create personas from the general nobility or peasant classes.
Of them, I meet Candace Musmeci of Conway, who darns wools on a drop spindle. And Briget O’Shay (Pamela Pace of Florence, a member of Santee Electric Cooperative), who makes a peasant bread of oats, barley and whole-grain flour that she cooks on an open fire that her young son sparked with flint and steel. And Mistress Aoh Adendra Marlan (aka Brenda Butler, an operating room nurse from Ridgeville), who explains, “It’s lifelong learning. It happens to be a hobby where you can always learn something new. It’s my creative outlet.”
But no one goes to such extremes as Getalio D’Amalfi (aka Benjamin Lanteigne of Charleston). I meet him over by his wool tent, which he’s sewn together with English wool and pitched with oak limbs exactly as a Crusader would have in 1187–1188—during the Battle of Hattin, which Lanteigne reenacted with other like-minded warriors in Israel last year.
He shows me his authentic leather shoes (soles replaced by a cobbler), his authentic helmet (painted with linseed oil) and his plywood shield (which is OK, but for his next shield he’ll cut down a tree).
An active-duty service member in “real life,” Lanteigne is lean and tall, with a hawkish face. It is not hard to imagine him as a swift, strong, serious soldier. And although he enjoys the hobbyist element—it took him nine days of straight sleeping and sewing, he says, to make this tent—but he also sees it as a chance to educate.
“There’s a lot of misinformation spread about history that’s not quite right in movies, books, other sources,” he says. “I think it’s quite logical to set the record straight and improve people’s knowledge about history.”
The tavern-goers
For adults, no visit to the Mythical & Medieval Fest is complete without a stop at the tavern, where between the burlap walls and beneath stags’ heads and sigil banners, a merry band of fairgoers quaffs ciders and ales.
“I think I was born in the wrong century,” says the bartender, Shayla Thanue (aka Carli Harlow). “‘Tis much more fun to be a wench than a lady.”
We share a laugh, but she’s not kidding.
On a stage in the corner, a trio of ladies known as Chaste Treasure sing a cappella songs that are, well, unprintable and anything but chaste. Delighting in puns, innuendo and double entendre, the troupe performs a harmonious song-and-dance act that interacts with the audience and has the whole tavern doubling over in laughter.
As one does when huddled up with a cider, I begin to consider my place within the grand universe of this whole festival. I come to think that I’m some sort of scribe, and I imagine a similar soul at a real medieval carnival—someone going around and collecting stories to scrawl into a leather-bound tome that will sit for centuries on a dusty shelf. Then I realize I’m doing it—I’m imagining myself in the Middle Ages. I am, as Sir Kerrigan would say, moving to the inside. At my next fair, I’ll probably be wearing a doublet and scratching notes with a quill.
But then, as if noticing my idle barstool daydreaming, one of the ladies—the sultry Sultana Lyla—comes over and stands on a stool beside me. She puts the first layer of her dress over my head and belts out a raunchy verse I can’t quote here. All I hear is laughing.
When I emerge, someone jokes that my face is as red as the coals in the blacksmith’s forge.
The founder
No matter what spell they’re under, no matter what made them venture here, everyone agrees on the ultimate cause. To be at this festival is to support Caleb’s Dragonfly Dreams, a nonprofit charity that raises money for abused, abandoned and neglected children living in group homes along the Grand Strand area. Founded by Shellie Rabon, and named after her son, the charity uses the proceeds from the festival to take group-home kids on excursions that include apple-picking, cave mining, river rafting and snow tubing. Closer to home, the fair supports everyday adventures like making jewelry, tie-dying T-shirts, visiting water parks and baking cookies.
“Just normal, everyday family things,” says Rabon. “It sounds mundane, but they don’t have the families we have, so we try to step up and bridge that gap.”
Rabon says that she used to spend most of her time writing grants to support the charity, but then she attended a Renaissance fair while on a visit to see her cousin in Florida.
“On the way home, it just sort of clicked,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, Myrtle Beach has tons of festivals but nothing like a Renaissance festival.’”
After all, Myrtle Beach is a place known for its fantasy attractions like Medieval Times, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Pirates Voyage. Rabon also realized that her festival could embrace the mythical element—the mermaids, elves, fairies and dragons that float, flitter and fly around everywhere here.
“I love the mythical side,” she says. “When I started to research fairs, I won’t say it was frowned upon, but they really, really focused on the medieval part. And once again, this has to do with kids. So, I said, ‘You know what, I really want to add that mythical side for the young kids to enjoy.’”
And the kids from the group homes do come out to the festival, joining other children as they wander the Dark Forest Maze, dance around the Maypole and watch a fire-breathing show. It’s not hard to see that one day these kids will become playtrons themselves. And the bigger this festival grows, the more money and awareness Rabon will raise for Caleb’s Dragonfly Dreams.
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Get There
The 6th Annual Mythical and Medieval Fest will take place Nov. 9–10, 2019, at RH Acres in Myrtle Beach (3833 Socastee Blvd.) Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children. Advance purchase tickets are available through the event website: mythicalmedievalfest.com.
For more information on Caleb’s Dragonfly Dreams, visit calebsdragonflydreams.org.
Information about the Society for Creative Anachronism can be found at sca.org.
The Charles Towne Few Pirates and Knightly Order of the Fiat Lux can be reached via their Facebook pages: facebook.com/groups/CharlesTowneFewFriends and facebook.com/KOFLTriangle.