Free Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark Page A

Girl Scouts earn badges. In a larp, a lord character might bestow a title on another character, not because that player is good at fighting but because it’s politically expedient or because on some quest that character picked up a mystical sword of awesomeness that could be useful to the lord. In short, while the SCA is geared toward doing real-life things in the old-world way while in unusual outfits, larp is geared toward building an imaginary life, also in unusual outfits. The SCA is bound by history and medieval code, but larps are bound only by the rules of the game and the imagination of their players.
    The 1970s gave birth to an early larp called Dagorhir, an ongoing medieval fantasy game founded in Maryland in 1977 by Brian Wiese. Toward the end of high school, Wiese developed an obsession with everything medieval. He spent hours with his parents’ old books, poring over illustrations of medieval battles and of ancient Romans and Celts. He devoured the
Lord of the Rings
series and checked out numerous books on the medieval era from the library. He saw every medieval movie he could, including
The Lion in Winter
(1968) with Katharine Hepburn and
Robin and Marian
(1976) with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn.
    After his freshman year at Montgomery Community College in Maryland, Wiese acted in a play called
Hagar’s Children
that proved so successful that a New York producer decided to bring it and its cast to the Big Apple for a spring run of shows. Wiese went with the production, living with one of his fellow cast members in a tiny apartmenton the Lower East Side, next to a burned-out building they raided for scrap wood to burn in their fireplace. That spring in 1977, Wiese and his roommate spent their evenings drinking beer, smoking pot, and reading favorite passages out of
Lord of the Rings
by candlelight. They talked about the books’ epic battles and began to discuss how they might re-create similar fights. Brian decided to make the dream a reality—he’d have a pseudo-Lord
of the Rings
battle in the woods with some of his backpacker buddies, combining hunting orcs, acting, and capture the flag. From there, the idea snowballed.
    Brian dubbed his venture the Hobbit War and invited friends. When he returned to DC from New York, he met up with the interested parties, and they devised appropriate weaponry through experimentation. They sandwiched tree branches between couch cushion foam and secured it with glue and duct tape. They took children’s fiberglass bows and modified real wooden arrows by cutting off the metal tips and wrapping a cylinder of duct tape around them, about a half-inch in diameter, and then attached chunks of foam to that base with duct tape. The result was arrows tipped by foam and duct tape as big as a light bulb. Being hit with one felt like being pegged with a tennis ball.
    The first battle took place in October 1977 on a farm in Montgomery County, Maryland, that belonged to the parents of one of the boys who came to fight. It ended up sort of like a high school keg party; people who weren’t friends with Wiese showed up—about twenty-five boys and girls from the local high school in all, mostly ones who knew Wiese or his girlfriend’s younger sister from school. They divided the players into two armies, a red army and a blue army. Wiese and his friends had made extra weapons for people to fight with, but there weren’t enough for everyone. They’d invited people to bring their own combat-safe weapons to the battle, with the advice to test all weapons on themselves. The ad-hoc weapons included a foam-wrapped pool cue and a foam-wrapped fiberglass bicycle flagpole. One guy rolled up with a baseball bat wrapped in T-shirts and was sent packing. They came, they fought, they had fun.
    The following March, Brian decided to have another battle and recruit more people. After this one, he realized that local high schoolkids looking for a keg party