Clothes make the king, queen

By Joe Brown (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Photos by Tiffany Brown / Las Vegas Sun

There’s a lot of talk about Las Vegas as a city of the future, a place that has forgotten or simply paved over history. But a surprising number of Vegas inhabitants are living in the past — about 450 years in the past to be exact. While the valley is marked by regions known as Paradise, Spring Valley and Summerlin, there is another, mostly hidden map, on which Las Vegas is divided into more than 20 kingdoms.

These kingdoms — among them the Kingdom of Albion, Knights of the Holy Land, the Archers of Ravenwood and the pirates of The Glass Eye — meet now and then for small wars and feasts, but they are all assembling this weekend for their main event of the year, the three-day Age of Chivalry Renaissance Festival at Sunset Park. Along with the traditional turkey legs and home-brewed mead, the festival features royal parades, one-act Shakespearean plays, jousting tournaments and gladiator battles, bawdy jesters and jugglers, strolling minstrels, a kids’ militia, a torture chamber and a trebuchet for hurling pumpkins at pirate ships on the lake. Military encampments representing 16th-century German, Italian, Ottoman Turk, French, Celtic, Polish and British forces will do battle on the Field of Honor.

There are thousands of historical reenactors in the Vegas area, and their private passion is for the period known as the English Renaissance, a time of intensity in all things: work, play, music and the arts, world exploration, war, crime and punishment, love, hate, religion and superstition. Channeling life in this period is a year-round pastime, a means of forging community, and for many, a creative way of retreating from a time of war, political intrigue and economic strife by creatively reenacting an era of ... war, political intrigue and economic strife.

One of these local kingdoms, the 50-member Kingdom of Coreathea, is ruled by Queen Kathryne Isabela DeGaulle and King Quinlan Moriarty (known in 2008 as Sheri Xander, 36, and her boyfriend, Dayton Ruff, 31). Coreathea is a hospitality guild, and as such it has the honor and duty of hosting the king and queen of the fair, who will stay overnight in the encampment and hold court in an elaborate throne tent bedecked in the Coreathea colors of black and gold.

Xander founded Coreathea four years ago, but mostly worked behind the scenes as a duchess. She was recently elevated to the throne and got to choose her king. Naturally, she chose Ruff, who has been on the Ren scene for more than 10 years as a combat fighter.

They are somewhat reluctant rulers. “People like us, who didn’t really want to be crowns to begin with — everyone else says they make better crowns because of it,” Ruff says. “We weren’t seeking power and recognition.”

But Xander and Ruff — by day she’s an in-home caregiver for an elderly woman and he’s the manager of a trailer parts warehouse — are finding that it’s good being the queen and king.

This is the 15th year of the Las Vegas fair, one of more than 150 Renaissance fairs across the country. Many local medieval enthusiasts (Xander calls them “Rennies”) obtain their custom-made garb and accessories from a “Renaissance superstore” called ZCastle, where store manager Bob Regon purveys helmets, shields and two-headed axes in a strip mall off Sahara. There’s even a dragon section and a pirate corner with skulls and rapiers.

The Las Vegas Sun invited Queen Kathryne and King Quinlan to travel through time and into the faraway land of Henderson to share with us how they got that medieval look.