The First Days of Tor Brant

By Lord Duncan Gabh MacLeiod

In the very early days of Tor Brant, there were two of us, Lachlan Mc Mallfinn of Egg, and myself. He had been involved in the SCA out in An Tir. I had never heard of the group before meeting Lachlan. He thought there was a group in Ottawa and eventually we made contact and started attending meetings and fight practices. Word started getting around about us and a few friends and acquaintances started to gel. Long before we started on any kind of paper work, we needed a name. In a flash of inspiration, I grabbed the English-Norwegian dictionary and came up with Enfoldig Avgrunn. Please remember we were just on the military base at this time, so I thought that “Mindless Abyss” was quite appropriate. We started having irregular meetings and traveling to a few events. Word came back to us that our original name was a little too self degrading for the Dragon Herald. So some of the people knocked their heads together and came up with (sp?)Dalulian Dubh, or the valley of Black Wolves. This got bounced for being (a) too long and (b) sounds like somebody trying to talk with too much oatmeal in their mouth. The next name that was floated was Dun Claidheamh, but somebody pointed out that our nickname would be Dumb Clam Heads… so Tor Brant was chosen instead. By this time the group had put in the paperwork to become an official group. That is how the present name and arms for Tor Brant came to be.