The Glory of Gondor: Summer Camp 2014

So, summer camp happened. I told about the start earlier, that will now be continued. Sadly I missed the first three or four days, so could not put together all the details myself, but it turned out that added to the already mentioned goals we also wanted to find a mysterious sword for King Earnur. Who answered the challenge of the Witch-king and disappeared just while we stayed in "Thaliondor", our colony in Eregion. So, although we stole the sword from the local people, some kind of Dunlendings, we could not give it to the king. The Dunlendings kept the sword in a sanctuary, and their shaman was cursing us for quarter an hour without breathing when we got it from there in the middle of the night. Our task for the rest of the camp was to realise (mostly by transcripting tengwar texts received from NPCs) how dangerous and evil the sword was and try to deactivate it, while the Dunlendings threatened us with war because of the theft.

The other threatening thing was the weather: just after I arrived on Sunday, an exceptionally heavy rain followed me, including big pieces of ice. That was the part when I could not be too sorry that I ended up with such an indoor activity as writing. But organisers adapted professionally, one night we even had campfire-feeling with guitar and singing, but under a roof, without a fire. And although most of the days had some random showers of rain (sometimes with strong sunshine at the same time), it wasn't always like that, and the two necessarily outdoor programs, the big hike and the war-game, could happen all right. For the day of the hike everybody could choose for themselves how big they want it: the "baby tour" was only a walk of couple of hours, the "normal" version was of half a day, and the "real rangers" went up to the highest point of Hungary, which happened to be near.

Another striking characteristic of the camp was the increasing amount of the already mentioned babies (and complete families, for that: some people came with their children, some with their parents, and some with both, so we also had a grandmother of one of the babies in our team). When the teams had their performances, all but one could play the "cuteness factor" card, because they had at least one baby or very small child among their members. And the little ones also had the team-cloaks and all such thing in small size. Cuteness overload. I think, we also had the youngest tolkienist traveller of all times on board, as one of the babies came with his parents from the Czech Republic (his father, Petr, is an honorary member of ours, as he frequently visits our events for years).

 

The team performances happened on Monday. The only given thing about them was a bunch of costumes and other materials recommended to use: the first one we recognised was a nice dress, which somebody instantly wanted to be tried on one of the guys. It fitted nicely, so we created the story of the warrior of Lebennin who goes to the harem of a lord of Harad disguised as a beautiful woman, to free from the evil lord the stolen girls of his hometown. I think, it turned out well, though some people complained about seeing the oversized lord of Harad without a shirt. Éothéods presented a movie trailer; Dol Amroth was following Mithrellas all over Gondor; the Rangers' story was about an artefact of the frame-story, the Medallion of Bravery. The most modern show was presented by the people of Minas Tirith: the story of the kings of Gondor in rap and short movie clips.

 

Orders also could have their performances. We decided to write Dunlending stories, each of their own style and taste: history, legends, myths or children tales in prose or verse. We were a bit worried, as the showing of these were set in the frame-story of the camp and on that night we were decided enemies with the Dunlendings, but our leader explained to the audience our performance only being a show of how primitive the enemy is, so nobody called us traitors in the end. Why would anybody do that, anyway: on the other day everybody had to choose their sides and most of the camp decided to be a bit of a traitor, who wanted to get back the sword from the captain of the camp against his will. We did so, and buried the sword in the forest magically bounded (during the night, the faithful stalking around us in the dark), but Dunlendings still were not contented, so we had the war-game against them (which means half of the camp chosen to be in that team for the game), which they slightly won, so in the end we agreed on acceptable terms. Our team-heroes went to live with the Dunlendings as hostages, but nobody could really see the tragedy of this. After that, party.