giddy up

Leonardo da Vinci. This man sketched…a lot of horses.

Horses standing.

Horses rearing.

Horses jumping.

Horse heads, horse legs, horse butts.

In the 2004 art book, “Leonardo da Vinci: Sketches and Drawings” there is an entire chapter dedicated to the subject, with 26 images of horses included¹. The 2019 Royal Collection Trust exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing” featured 22². In his chapter within the former, Johannes Nathan writes about the importance of horses in the Renaissance, including (or especially) due to their use in warfare. Leonardo was fascinated by exploring warfare, expecially its emotion³. The rendered battle between horsemen in the background of the Adoration of the Magi demonstrates his enthusiasm.

But this fascination is only part of the picture.

THE BACKGROUND

disegno

Let’s set the scene.

In 15th–16th century Italy there was an emphasis in draftsmanship, an approach which held that good drawing was the root—not only of all quality artistic endeavor, but of measuring the world⁴. In part, this emphasis existed due to the growth of Renaissance humanism, which looked to the ancient world for examples of how to live and how to reconcile religion with the changing world, and in so doing reorient humanity within the cosmos⁵. Humanism was a perspective through which artists would explore nature through their art, and draftsmanship (disegno in Italian) was the first step. (I have a lot more to say about Humanism in my post about Kolfinna’s scroll⁶.)

In his “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, noted artist, groupie, and early modern hype man Georgio Vasari writes “This disegno, when it brings forth a creative idea from our critical faculty, requires a hand ready and able, thanks to years of study and practice, to draw and to express well whatever thing Nature has created, with a pen, a stylus, a charcoal stick, a pencil. . . .⁷” In this atmosphere, Leonardo would have been well trained in disegno.

Studying the form with measurements and scientific principles was part of his and many others’ practices. The horse at right, drawn by Leonardo’s master Andrea del Verrocchio, possibly as preparation for a bronze equestrian statue, is a perfect example. (Compare it with a similar drawing of a horse in profile by Leonardo, below.)

When I started this project, I didn’t have the right context. Based on his modern reputation, I “knew” that Leonardo was as an artistic genius who combined art and science. I “knew” his legacy lie in observation, measurement, and technical expertise, and I “knew” that he drew to invent and discover his world. And due to the concept of disegno, I knew he would have made these explorations through drawing.

So when I first began researching this scroll, I assumed that the preponderance of horses was merely due to his study of the animals for anatomical purposes—for an exploration of truth, in the High Renaissance humanist vein. Exploration without intention. After all, this is a man who dissected cadavers to learn anatomy. I had bought hook, line, and sinker into the story of Leonardo-as-genius that has come down to us from Vasari through successive generations, all of whom put their own spin on his biography for their own reasons.

In the process of researching, however, I learned that this story is misleading.

In 1482 Leonardo was commissioned to create a monument in honor of the late Duke Francesco Sforza. It was intended to be greater than life size, and the technical logistics of potentially casting such a large figure in one piece with the lost wax method entranced Leonardo so much that the commission dragged on and on. He had gone so far as to make a twenty-four foot tall terracotta model, but…

The work was never finished⁸.

In 1505 Leonardo began “The Battle of Anghiari”, a huge wall painting (54 x 21 ft) in the Sala dei Cinquecento, used by the Medicis as a reception room. (His rival Michelangelo was supposed to paint the opposite wall, but since Leonardo’s side had better light, he didn’t want to be shown at a disadvantage.) According to his diary the weather turned when he was just beginning, ruining the cartoon (the full-size paper template used by wall- and fresco-painters to transfer their designs) and the conditions, so…

The work was never finished⁹.

In 1506 Leonardo returned to Milan to begin work on a commission by Sforza’s greatest rival, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, for an equestrian funerary monument, a commission secured largely on the back of renown from the unfinished Sforza monument listed above. This new monument was based on the initial drawings for the Sforza horse, but also included tomb decoration. We’re aware of the commission only through financial documents and sketches, because—whether through political machinations or personal issues, and…

The work was never finished¹⁰.

Even the treatise On Painting was a work in progress when his mortal clock ran out¹¹. Fundamentally, in spite of touting himself as a sculptor when he sold his services to elite patrons, we have zero uncontested proof of finished sculptures¹².

This knowledge granted me two gifts.

gift one: i’m not leonardo

First, I learned that my initial apprehension at using an exemplar by Leonardo was, perhaps, misplaced. Rather that having to beneficently grant myself grace for not emulating his results perfectly due to our vastly different training and situations—the “oh, but he’s Leonardo da Vinci, how could I ever match him” mindset—I developed a clearer picture of as Leonardo as a flawed and relatable human, and this allowed space for both of us to embody our own creative styles with equal validity.

For instance, as discussed above I learned that our friend Leonardo had a real lack of follow-through. The reasons for this are debated. Perhaps he preferred to research and prep and plan, in the Italian Renaissance distinction of “concetto” vs “mano”¹³ (which, as I settle into middle-age, I find relateable). Perhaps it was a result of stifling perfectionism (with his history as a recognized young talent, I wouldn’t be surprised #giftedkid). Or perhaps—as at least one art historian has suggested—he had ADHD¹⁴.

Whatever the reason, we are left with a lot of sketches of horses, a lost treatise on their anatomy, and no finished sculptures. The hype created by Vasari has developed into a fiction of perfection, of untouchability. But knowledge punctures this lionized myth.

gift two: context

And secondly, research uncovered the context of many of these horse sketches.

They weren’t created purely for artistic discovery, theoretical as some physics. I already mentioned briefly that Leonardo was fascinated by emotion and warfare and this translation through horses. But the context is pragmatic: they were made as preparatory drawings for further artwork like murals, paintings, and sculptures. They were created in pursuit of something more tangible.

(And they would have been. If he’d have finished them.)

And this makes a lot of sense to me, a 20th–21st century artist. After all, doing ample prep drawings was something I was taught in school, too. Counter to the popular notion of Leonardo exercising his artistic genius just for the sake of itself, he was doing it precisely for the same reason I would do it. Alongside the revelation that Leonardo was just as prone to dropping a project as any number of neurodivergent artists venting about executive dysfunction on TikTok, was the reminder that his training emphasized being prepared as well.

With these two new humanizing nuggets of knowledge buoying me, I could lean further into creation without feeling beholden to Leonardo’s legacy.

THE FIGURES

Human though we both might be, there are definitely some difference between us.

Leonardo da Vinci was surrounded by horses from birth.

I was not.

Leonardo da Vinci was working in the workshop of a master artist by the age of 14.

I was not.

Leonardo da Vinci was a master in a guild of artists and doctors by the age of 20.

I was not.

What I do have is 40-some-odd years’ of experience with dry media, and a pretty engrained sense of my own style. So I tried to respect Leonardo’s while being true to my own. Leonardo’s objective was an expression of equine form in preparation for a sculpture. Mine was an award. I’m not here to make copies; I’m here to make art in celebration of my friend.

neigh? yay!

At right is the primary sketch on which I based my scroll.

According to the museum record¹⁵, this horse was done as a preparatory drawing for Leo’s forthcoming mural of The Battle of Anghiari in the Great Council Chamber of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. As I listed above, whether due to melodramatic weather or his own proclivities he never finished it, and about 60 years later Georgio Vasari himself was commissioned to complete the painting¹⁶. Still, Leonardo’s prep work remains for us to explore.

Its rendering style is not quite the Mannerist art of a century later, a technique developed by followers of Michelangelo which exaggerated musculature toward unreality. (One artist said another’s Hercules looked like “a sack full of melons”¹⁷, which I find particularly entertaining; I’ve always described Michelangelo’s “anatomy” as a sack full of bowling balls. (Cellini? I’m with you on this.)) But Leonardo’s horse is definitely a progenitor of that style, with the rippling definition of its thighs and knobbliness of its joints. I did my best to communicate the same anatomy, but at some point the texture and color of the chalk and my deep dislike of trapped bowling balls got the best of me, and I declined to attempt a 1:1 replication in lieu of something more true to myself and the scroll I was creating.

so sketchy

Leonardo could not have drawn this figure, as it stands, from life¹⁸. Far from a static pose, the twist indicates motion and emotion, and could only have been assembled from separate elements. The rear legs are planted, but Leonardo is trialling various front legs to create the desired effect. He frequently worked this way; we have early examples of primary sketches in silverpoint made more solid with pen and ink, and later sketches of chalk followed by ink. Delicate alternates of position laid out in less-definitive media and finalized with permanence.

Then as now, these quick sketches were common. Called “primo pensiero” (first thought) or “scizzo” (quick) sketches¹⁹, in my experience they can function anywhere from a visual brainstorm, to a visual experiment, to a demonstration of a plan. Subsequent sketches can help build up toward increasingly final renders, as we see in situations where Leonardo switches medium from charcoal to ink.

His drawings for the Svorza monument, the greater-than-life-size bronze horse statue described above which he designed but never finished, likewise show an iterative style which relies upon small changes as well as large²⁰. Based on the similarity of the multi-legged sketches, it seems reasonable to deduce that his aim was to assemble a figure which met all of his needs. While these needs are naturally going to be different than those of a massive, single lost wax sculpture, still Leonardo was cognizant of the shape of the figure in space, as well as that space within the picture frame.

alert the media

Our pal Leo had access to a specific color of red chalk which I do not²¹. I’d wanted a chalk that matched the precise color he’d used (not pastels, since the museum record specified chalk—which is far more prevalent than pastels, especially at this early date²²—and I wanted to respect that) and which offered the contrast and clarity he developed. And when I couldn’t source one, instead I blended together a few different colors of chalk, aiming at a similar result.

But I could elevate the chalk rendering with a second layer—a common technique at this place and time.

There is a pair of drawings of his, a rendering dated to c.1510–12 and another on the reverse of that same folio dated to c.1517–18, which appear to be a preliminary plan for two separate equestrian monuments—neither of which he completed²³. Both drawings consist of a chalk base underneath a very loose sketch of a horse in ink. I really like how the first one in particular combines the definition of mass communicated by the chalk, with the energy and outline described by the ink.

My result is a layer of red-brown chalk beneath a dark brown ink sketch, a ghostly lancer mounted on an emerging animal, aimed toward a flash of gold.

sharp composition

A horse is a horse (of course of course), but this award required representation of what it is: a golden lance.

The sketchy indication of a rider from my exemplar could easily be armed. So I just needed an appropriate weapon. What I decided on is no invention; it’s a loose depiction of a 15th century lance currently held at The Met, indicated by light lines of ink and highlighted in gold. I think it does precisely what it needs to, without being overly rendered.

As a bonus, the diagonal line enhances the composition, drawing the eye down toward the signatures with a dramatic and definite slash, as if to say: it is done.

THE WORDS

could be verse

I’ve gotta be honest: I’m not a poet. My poetry experience is limited to an unusual amount of recreational sonnet-making and not much else. (Ask me sometime about all the ones I wrote as metatextual webcomic response back in the day, all of which have—for better or worse—been lost to time.)

But Epy isn’t only an equestrian, they’re also a musician. In fact, they play early music, and they’ve even arranged and recorded a multitrack/multi-instrumental song to perform with on their horse. So rather than write a simple scroll text, I wanted to write one and set their word fame to verse.

I chose a rispetto.

A rispetto is verse form from 15th century Tuscany consisting of two quatrains, with the rhyme scheme abab / ccdd²⁴. Descriptions of its meter vary; some sources say tetrameter, some say pentameter, and some say hendecasyllabic. As far as I can tell, this discrepancy appears to be related to language and time period, and can be somewhat unpicked by its development.

Originally, the Tuscan rispetto was poetry of the people, a verse form based upon the octave, whose cousin became the sonnet²⁵. Both of these are pentametric in English and hendecasyllabic in Italian²⁶. This descrepancy is logical; different meters lend themselves more easily to different languages due to their natural rhythms. With my limited Italian, I can easily see why the odd-numbered syllable at the end of a line might suit. And iambs apply easily to the rhythms of spoken English, which makes iambic pentameter a natural choice for its sonnets and octaves.

That being said, the earliest rispetto in English that I could find is George Gascoigne’s (1535-77) six stanza poem “The Lullabye of a Lover”, which uses tetrameter²⁷.

Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.

His verse that sounded to my ears less polished than an iambic pentametrical sonnet. Less studied, and more natural. More like the extemporaneous poems that the originals were said to be. (The original octaves could be performed by dueling poets, like early modern rap battles²⁸.) So when I wrote Epy’s poem, I chose a quadrameter. I think it’s fitting that when the verse was read in court, it sounded playful, skipping and light, sing-song like a child’s poem.

It didn’t sound like deep literature. It sounded like joy.

In terms of content, I found various sources which discussed the different forms of love which the rispetto might evoke, and different moods and environments the rispetti might describe. (Sometimes literal environments; nineteenth-century poet Augusta Webster wrote, among others, rispetti using imagery of rivers, the four seasons, and fisher folk on a beach.²⁹) But most inspiring to me in this situation was Theodore Watts Dunton’s 1881 sonnet—again, evolutionarily very similar to the rispetto—in which he “which presented the idea of the sonnet as being made up of two parts which are linked together like the flow and ebb of a wave. According to this model, the octave of the sonnet presents a thought and the sestet goes on to make a comment upon some aspect of this thought³⁰.

I liked this idea instinctively, because it allowed the form of the poem to be reflected in the meaning. As such, I constructed my verse in two parts. The first,

In Epy rides, and with a song
this Armiger, their effort rare,
Pengelly named, with skill so strong,
a Golden Lance we bid them bear.

sets up this theoretical moment. Epy approaches the scene or the court, riding in appropriately armed, laden with name and honoriffic. Then follows the second half, the ebbing of the wave:

So Ragnar King he sets our scene,
with Mary Isabel our Queen,
in Fifty Eight to great acclaim
here March the two and sing their name.

As the wave ebbs, it drops upon the sand the story of the king setting the scene, partnered by his queen. The requisite date of the scroll text is snuck in with doubled meaning, as “March the two” serves both as a verb-and-noun phrase as well as a date: the second of March, AS 58.

I have aeons of experience with pentameter, but one foot less in meter somehow equates to more than a foot of meaning. The constraints required me to be a bit acrobatic with the language, which was both fun to craft and elicted a more playful result, which rather matches the bouncing feel of the rhythm. I wouldn’t be surprised if I added rispettos to my repertoire in future. They’re quite fun to write.

script

The script is based on Leonardo’s famous “mirror writing”.

Ordinarily I select characters from exemplars myself to assemble a script (often using a visual research application called Tropy³¹), but Kolfinna offered her previously-extracted ductus compilation
so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel³². One upside to using a famous artist as an exemplar is that using someone’s ductus can save me a lot of time.

The big downside is that it meant I failed completely to take into consideration the proportions of Leonardo’s handwriting, the x-heights and ascenders and descenders and typical interlinear spacing. It changes the final look, but as I’ve previously mentioned: this is an homage, not a copy. And as I’ve also previously mentioned: I’m not a forger. Fundamentally this is my hand’s version of Leo’s hand.

For whatever reason, I find reading and writing backward quite easy, so I had fun with that part, too.

THE RESULT

why art history?

I entered into this project with the same overawed impression of Leonardo Da Vinci as lives in the popular consciousness. But it turned out there was a palpable gulf between what I thought I knew about Leonardo, and what researchers currently think. And doubtless if I continue to research him for this or other projects (which seems likely), I will learn even more and gain more context.

I’m neither Leonardo, nor a 19th century student on the Grand Tour. I’m a modern person with a specific goal. In attempting to copy one of his sketches 1:1, I would have done both myself and that goal a disservice. If i’ve learned anything over my decades of making art, it’s that each piece has its own objective, and no matter the goal of my reference, it’s best to keep the context of my own work in mind.

This proves the worth of researching the context of the art we emulate. If I hadn’t delved in, I would have tried to sublimate my style, diminishing myself. I would have simply tried to replicate a Leonardo horse sketch without asking why there were so many to choose from. And if I hadn’t asked why there were so many, I wouldn’t have learned about his intention to create his mural and his full-size sculpture. If I’d simply copied, I wouldn’t have this new picture of who Leonardo actually was as an artist, cleared slightly of the mythos created by Vasari, history, and Leonardo himself. I wouldn’t have learned about his lack of followthrough, or asked hard questions about reputation, self-advertisement, legacy, and “genius”.

And I wouldn’t have felt such relatability for someone with a cartoon turtle named after him.

above all

It was a particular pleasure to be asked to create this scroll for Epy, to honor my friend with artwork and words. I’ve known them for a number of years; we live in the same camp at Pennsic, and even before they moved in, we lived in the same neighborhood. So I’ve had ample opportunity to witness just how damn hard they work. The award—one of very few Golden Lances granted in Atlantia—was long in coming and is well-deserved.

NOTES

1. Frank Zöllner, ed., Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519: Sketches and Drawings (Taschen, 2000) 26–39. ︎
2. “Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing,” Royal Collection Trust, 2019, https://www.rct.uk/collection/exhibitions/leonardo-da-vinci-a-life-in-drawing. ︎
3. Johannes Nathan, “Studies for equestrian monuments and horses”, in Leonardo da Vinci: Sketches and Drawings, ed. Frank Zöllner (Taschen, 2004), 26. ︎
4. Noah Charney and Ingrid Rowland, The Collector of Lives (WW Norton, 2018), 42, Apple Books. ︎
5. Sharon Bailin, “Invenzione e Fantasia: The (Re)Birth of Imagination in Renaissance Art” Interchange 36, no. 3 (September 2005): 261. ︎
6. “Kolfinna’s Laurel”, posted February 19, 2023, https://mydwynterstudios.com/kolfinnas-laurel. ︎
7. Translated in Charney and Rowland, Collector, 46. ︎
8. Charney and Rowland, Collector, 197. ︎
9. Charney and Rowland, Collector, 5–6. ︎
10. Emily Hanson, “Inventing the Sculptor: Leonardo Da Vinci and the Persistence of Myth” (MA thesis, Washington University in St Louis, 2012), 50–51, https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/765. ︎
11. Robert Wallace, The World of Leonardo, 1452-1519 (Time-Life Books, 1975), 57, http://archive.org/details/worldofleonardo100wall. ︎
12. Hanson, “Inventing”, 1. The “Budapest Horse” is possibly his, though its attribution is still being debated. See Zoltán Kárpáti, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Budapest Horse and Rider. (Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, 2018), https://www.academia.edu/37830649/Leonardo_da_Vinci_and_the_Budapest_Horse_and_Rider. ︎
13. Hanson, “Inventing”, 47. ︎
14. Charney and Rowland, Collector, 192. ︎
15. “A Rearing Horse”, Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/31/collection/912336/a-rearing-horse. ︎
16. Charney and Rowland, Collector, 9. ︎
17. Charney and Rowland, Collector, 3–4. ︎
18. Nathan, “Studies”, 26. ︎
19. “Preparatory drawing during the Italian renaissance, an introduction”, Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/high-ren-florence-rome/beginners-guide-high-ren/a/preparatory-drawing-during-the-italian-renaissance-an-introduction. ︎
20. Hanson, “Inventing”, 35, as well as many visible examples. ︎
21. “Chalk”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/drawings-and-prints/materials-and-techniques/drawing/chalk. ︎
22. “The Eighteenth-Century Pastel Portrait”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 2010, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/papo/hd_papo.htm. ︎
23. “”Recto: A study for the Trivulzio monument. Verso: A study for an equestrian monument”, Royal Collection Trust, 2019, https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/41/collection/912356/recto-a-study-for-the-trivulzio-monument-verso-a-study-for-an-equestrian-monument. ︎
24. P. Caruana Dingli, “Rispetti and sonnets: the Anglo-Italian context of Augusta Webster’s later poetry (1881-1893).” Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 5 (1997): 127–128. ︎
25. Dingli, “Rispetti and sonnets”, 127–129. ︎
26. For the octave form, see Giovanni Kezich, “Extemporaneous Oral Poetry in Central Italy.” Folklore 93, no. 2 (1982): 194; for discussion of Chaucer’s first translation of a Romance language form to iambic pentameter in the late 1370s, see Martin J. Duffell, “‘The Craft So Long to Lerne’: Chaucer’s Invention of Iambic Pentameter.” The Chaucer Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 271. ︎
27. “The Lullaby of a Lover”, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56369/the-lullaby-of-a-lover. ︎
28. Kezich, “Extemporaneous Oral Poetry”, 195. ︎
29. Dingli, “Rispetti and sonnets”,131–133. ︎
30. Dingli, “Rispetti and sonnets”,134. ︎
31. “Tropy”, https://tropy.org. ︎
32. “Ffernfael of Carleon: Master of Defense Scroll”, Meisterin Kolfinna Valravn, June 3 2023, https://sites.google.com/view/kvalravn/scribe/2023/04-mod-ffernfael-of-carleon. ︎

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailin, Sharon. “Invenzione e Fantasia: The (Re)Birth of Imagination in Renaissance Art.” Interchange 36, no. 3 (September 2005): 257–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-005-6865-3.

Caruana Dingli, P. “Rispetti and sonnets: the Anglo-Italian context of Augusta Webster’s later poetry (1881-1893).” _Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 5_ (1997): 125-142. https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/82677.

Charney, Noah, and Ingrid Rowland. The Collector of Lives. New York, NY: WW Norton, 2018. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-collector-of-lives-giorgio-vasari/id1215382287.

Duffell, Martin J. “‘The Craft So Long to Lerne’: Chaucer’s Invention of Iambic Pentameter.” The Chaucer Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 269–88.

Griswold, William, and Linda Wolk-Simon. Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings in the New York Collections. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

Hanson, Emily, “Inventing the Sculptor: Leonardo da Vinci and the Persistence of Myth”. MA thesis, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/765.

Kárpáti, Zoltán. Leonardo Da Vinci and the Budapest Horse and Rider. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2018. https://www.academia.edu/37830649/Leonardo_da_Vinci_and_the_Budapest_Horse_and_Rider.

Kezich, Giovanni. “Extemporaneous Oral Poetry in Central Italy.” Folklore 93, no. 2 (1982): 193–205.

Kemp, Martin. “From Mimesis to Fantasia: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts.” Viator 8 (January 1977): 347–98. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.301573.

Maurino, Ferdinando D. “Italian Popular Poetry: Origin and Definition.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 7, no. 1 (1970): 36–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/3814230.

“The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors & Architects, Volume IV. by Georgio Vasari.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28420/28420-h/28420-h.htm.

Tristano, Richard M. “‘In the Guise of History’: History and Poetry in Cinquecento Italy.” Viator 44, no. 3 (September 2013): 369–95. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103489.

da Vinci, Leonardo, and Jean Paul Richter. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Courier Corporation, 1970.

Wallace, Robert. The World of Leonardo, 1452-1519. Time-Life Books, 1975.

Zöllner, Frank, ed. Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519: Sketches and Drawings. Taschen, 2000.

Christoph King and Adelhait Queen had these runes carved to praise Skinna-Steinarr,
Þegn of strength and honor, warrior of the weapon-meeting.
Mark this day with a golden chain, and name him kappi.

Raise high his battle standard Or, a troll purpure on a chief embattled sable a sword Or.
So we say this 7th of September, AS LIX.

why art history?

This isn’t my first runestone rodeo. A few years ago I designed a piece¹ for Arnoddr’s Chiv scroll.
Nor is this my first transliteration piece. I’ve done a few, including Kolfinna’s Golden Dolphin³.
This was not my first time carving wood, or composing vocatives⁴.

But just because I had experience with these things didn’t mean it was going to be a retread.
The time frame of this scroll was different.
The language was different.
The materials were different.

And so, even though the subjects were familiar, I was going to have to do the reading.

One benefit of studying art history is being able to be specific. The more you know, the more context you have, and the more context you have, the better you can disambiguate between similar exemplars.

So. Let’s talk about exemplars.

stones

Like most collections, extant runestones can be sorted in myriad ways.

For at least a hundred years⁵, researchers have been sorting runestones, often to help shed light on the beginning of Christianity in the area by establishing their dates. During the twentieth century, they’d done this through careful, deep reading of linguistics and runes, but when these methods proved to be insufficient Anne-Sofie Gräslund published a method of characterization on stylistic grounds⁶.

The six categories, which overlap in time, and are pertinent throughout Sweden⁷, are:

Bird’s-eye-view (BEV)

Pr1

Pr2

Pr3

Pr4

Pr5

(BTW, if you’re looking for data on existing runestones, Runor is a great destination. There’s a wealth of searchable data on each scroll, including inscription texts. The site is in Swedish, but if you don’t know Swedish, Google Translate is your friend.)

It’s Gräslund’s method of sorting existing runestones into these six overlapping groups which tells us most about designing our own stone.

According to her system, the stylistic features of Pr1 include⁸:

• dense, compacted, slightly angular overall impression
• round eyes
• round ears on top of head, joined by other curls which make it look like a crown
• open mouth, with thick upper lip, sometimes crossed by a line that makes it look twisted⁹
• blunted lower lip
• often a rolled up tail
• no feet or extra snakes
• a curve to the overall ribbon which follows the line of the stone
• if two animals, they cross over. a single animal typically doesn’t
• presence of a union knot: generally
• presence of a cross: very frequent
• Good examples: U 32, U 160, U 201, U 276, U 324, U 430, U 611, U 785,
  U 964, U 1066.

Stylistically, these features as a whole occur so frequently together that when a broken piece of carving is found, researchers confidently assume the rest of the stone will follow the same format¹⁰. My overall design was taken directly from the stone designated U 328¹¹, chosen because its overall shape worked perfectly for my board and very little adjustment was necessary. But where change was required, I used the list above and the examples at below as a guide. Having the parameters as set by someone deeply knowledgeable about this subject area meant that I could be confident I knew what I was looking at, which then meant that I knew I was creating a runestone design that was consistent with its historical forerunners, head to tail.

head to tail

As you can see from the image of my original exemplar at right, its heads fit perfectly into the Pr1 classification with their round eyes, twisted upper and blunted lower lips, and their finger-like ears and crest. So even with the small adjustments I was making to the original designs, I wanted to make sure the result still fit within gamut.

An easy way to do that was to create an assemblage of heads from Pr1 runestones, and keep those within vision as I drew. If when I was done I cast my eyes over the assemblage and it seemed like mine would fit in, I knew the job was a good’n.

The tail was marginally easier. There seemed to be two main types with the Pr1 subset, a thumb-like C curve or a single roll, so I used one of each across the two ribbons.

buckle up

The original stone featured a large cross, as do many of this type. But since that was inappropriate for this context, I decided to take the opportunity to bring in a nod to knighthood by turning one of the ribbons into a white belt.

There were several examples of 10th–11th century buckles from Gotland (Sweden) at the British Museum. Each had a gentle outward bow at the sides, and two of three had a slight curve along the top, which provided a reliable type example. I kept the rendering abstract to fit the style; while these days we might be accustomed to art displaying realism and depth, it would be inappropriate to draw the tongue as if it rested on the outer edge, its tip eclipsing but not crossing. (It would have been something else entirely if I had chosen to treat the tongue like a snake and have it weave through other elements, but for various reasons, I decided not to do that.) The result is simple, with the appropriate visual legibility for a scroll.

And runestone legibility, evidence suggests, is helped with color.

pigment of your imagination

The runestones were originally painted¹².

A search in the Runor or Runedata¹³ rune text databases for the word “paint” comes up with a large handful of Viking Age references—and that’s only when searching that single, specific word. [link] Doubtless other textual evidence exists behind different language, such as that on Sö 206¹⁴: “Here shall these stones stand, reddened with runes”. Kitzler Åhfeldt describes how the runestones at Köpingsvik church, preserved by their reuse, still retain their original pigment¹⁵. Harrison and Svensson go one step further, telling us about their red lead, their chalk, their soot and their ochre¹⁶ and their imported cinnabar¹⁷, and more. The copy of the Jelling stone displayed at the 2013 Vikings! exhibit at the National Museum of Denmark was painted in bright colors, based on traces of pigment found in the originals¹⁸. And the repainted red, black, and white Urnes-style stone found at the Resmo church, currently located at the Swedish History Museum,¹⁹ is a striking example of the visual result when color contrast is prioritized.

All this is to say that I wasn’t going to leave the carvings blank.

The runestones are predominately the red, white, and black of red lead, chalk, and soot, as mentioned above. For the yellow, I was guided by the yellow on the Jelling Stone repaint above, which, lacking access to pigment analysis, is most likely yellow ochre, but based on its intensity could also be orpiment (arsenic sulfide). Orpiment was available and commonly used for pigment until the 19th century, so it’s plausible. But again, without a test I just can’t say. You can’t judge a pigment by its color, after all²⁰. And that’s likely even more true for runestones than it is for manuscripts.

A purple was necessary for SCA heraldic reasons, so I tried to make it as natural-pigment-y as possible by taking the saturation down. As long as it didn’t stick out too much, I was satisfied. (Just another one of those times when a historical truth has to yield to a SCAdian need.)

back to back

In fact, the heraldry side required creativity in a number of ways.

Our SCA heraldry is rooted in a very different time and style than the 10th-11th Scandinavia of this scroll. As such, it was necessary to find ways to check all the mandatory heraldic boxes, but do so within the correct world of the scroll. Sometimes when making this sort of translation it’s not hard at all to find a stylistic equivalent. And other times, it requires bending just a little bit, one way or the other.

Runestones are (usually) organically shaped. And so frequently, their carvings are too. In contrast, heraldry is designed to fit in a geometric space. So I compromised; I found a frame from an existing source, by tapping in largest of the Jellling stones.

The Jelling stones are superlative for several reasons. Among other things, the largest of the grouping features the oldest depiction of Jesus in Scandinavian art [Wood 2014 p21]. Around that stone is a frame, perfect for laying out the fields of our heraldry.

As suggested above, it may seem jarring to have decoration completely fill the side of a stone board edge to edge; on the preponderance of stones, the decorations only generally follow the shape of the stone’s face. But on the largest of the Jelling stones, it’s actually possible that difference a feature of the iconography program, not a bug. According to Egon Wamers (as reported by Rita Wood²¹, whose word I decided to trust since Wamers’ original paper²² is in German) the layout of this carving is a nod to the manuscripts from the Christian church of Ottonian Germany, the church responsible for the conversion of the Danes.

According to Wood²³, the frame could have been a direct reference to the popular religious diptychs of the time; it certainly seems as if the frame “hinges” on the corner. But due to the shape of the stone, the frame is three-cornered, whereas our heraldry needs four—both to fill the space, and also to create a legible heraldic device.

These sorts of translations are common for SCA scroll adaptations. Our needs are very different from those of the original, so it only makes sense that the forms would be different, as well. It would hardly make sense to cling slavishly to an exemplar but fail to fulfull the unique requirements of an SCA scroll…which is, or should be, our primary goal.

But this is just the framework. For its fill, I looked elsewhere.

down in trollberg

The frame wasn’t the only stylistic translation I needed to make. Both elements of heraldry, the sword and the troll, needed updates. (Or, to be more truthful, backdates.)

Rather than use a depiction of one of the monsters of Ancient and Medieval xenophobia, a Blemmye, I set out to find a good example of a Scandinavian troll. They exist throughout the literature, after all.

I chose a carving of Hyrrokkin from one of the picture stones, contemporary with our runestones.

Hyrrokkin is a female jötunn in Norse mythology. She was mentioned in several late-tenth-century poems²⁴, and included in a hypnotic chant of troll women by an anonymous 12th century skald²⁵:

Gjölp, Hyrrokkin | Hengikepta,
Gneip ok Gnepja | Geysa, Hála,
Hörn ok Hrúga | Harðgreip, Forað,
Hryðja, Hveðra | ok Hölgabrúðr.

Giantesses, or troll women, are more frequently and distinctly described than men in the fornaldarsögur (the literary sagas of the North)²⁶, yet in many stories men and women trolls were of similar—sometimes indistinguishable—monstrosity²⁷, both wearing shriveled skins for clothing²⁸ while threatening the heroes.

Hyrrokkin is depicted above riding a wolf with a snake in each hand. Her name is a compound word, a combination of hyr (fire) and hrokkinn (curly or wrinkled)²⁹. Together the linguistic and mythological features paint a picture of a dessicated creature, dried by fire to indistinguishability.

Given that I was adjusting the Medieval Western European troll iconography to better fit the earlier Scandinavian image of a troll, I feel like this is a successful translation. I don’t know what features of the troll inspired Stienarr to put one on his heraldry, but I hope this version fits the bill.

the point

The usual sword depicted in Medieval Heraldry doesn’t particularly stand out against 10th–11th Scandinavian style. (Actually, what really seems weirdest about it and the troll above is how they’re just floating in the middle of the field, not tied into the frame. That would have better suited runestone iconography, though it doesn’t fit the rules of Medieval Heraldry.) Regardless, I prefer elements to correspond to the correct place and time, so I’m willing to do the research.

My sword has the typical domed pommel and straight guard found on a lot of Viking swords of the mid- to late-10th century, as in this Petersen Type U sword³⁰ found in the river Lea³¹ and currently housed at the British Museum³².

words words words

I relish any chance to write scroll texts. Especially of the period before 1100CE.

The more you read through stone upon stone of text on Runor or Rundata[https://rundata.info/], the more a rhythm emerges:
the attribution,
the occasion,
the description.

Similarly, I had to convey my own who-what-when-why. But runestones aren’t generally…loquacious, so I had to be efficient. There were a few savory phrases I could borrow from the corpus to impart some flavor, such as “Þegn of strength”³³ and kennings like “weapon-meeting”³⁴ helped locate the poetry in a specific place and time. The word “kappi” is the equivalent of “knight” in the official list of SCA titles³⁵, and itself comes from Cleasby and Vigfússon’s 1958 Icelandic dictionary³⁶.

I’d hoped that when the herald read it out, all assembled could feel the echo of ages past. That’s part of the magic of the SCA.

transliteration game

Speaking of echoes of ages past, I was delighted to have a chance to once again³⁷ play³⁸ a happy³⁹ game of transliteration.

The language of 10th–11th century Sweden was Old Norse, the rune set of which was the Younger Futhark. Paradoxically, the 24-character Elder Futhark of Proto-Norse diminished to 16 letters with the evolution to Old Norse, just when its number of vowels was expanding. More sounds, fewer characters. Yet none of them have as many as English, and you know how messy English is. Some sounds don’t overlap going in either direction between Old Norse and modern English, which is where our game comes in.

Transliteration is notoriously tricky. But it’s a pleasing puzzle, especially if you have experience with languages and phonetics—I like to ground my sound-symbol associations in phonetics so there’s some logic. In languages where vowel associations are ambiguous, especially older languages where we aren’t 100% sure of the pronunciation, it makes sense to plan based on the target language’s sound production. Coincidentally, it’s a similar tactic as that on the site “Orðstírr”⁴⁰, whose specific thoughts on transliterating Old Norse into English I combined with Dr. Jackson Crawford’s pronunciation data and academic experience⁴¹ to create my map.

I divided vowel sounds based on their placement in the mouth. Runes weren’t doubled, so I didn’t, but diphthongs were occasionally used, so I used them when necessary. As for consonants, it was largely straightforward. I fudged “ch” to “ts”, reasoning that it would be audibly understandable in context. All “th” became Þ, whether voiced or not.

Generally the rule was simplification. I wasn’t trying to invent anything new; I was trying to efficiently use the 16 tools at my disposal.

(Yanno, efficiency. Because that’s how language and spelling always work. *cackles in Linguist*)

and so

Thank you to Mary Panesis of Tuatha for the generous donation of the live-edge reclaimed walnut board. It was beautiful to work with.

It’s always a joy to be given the opportunity to create a scroll that pushes the usual boundaries of Medieval Europe, and especially so when it can be created outside the traditional material set of SCA scrolls. Congratulations to Sir Skinna-Steinarr, and I hope when you see this on your wall, it reminds you of a wonderful day.

NOTES

1. “Arnoddr’s Chivalry Scroll,” Mydwynter Studios, https://mydwynterstudios.com/arundoors-chivalry-scroll/ ︎
2. (ignore this, wordpress is terrible) ︎
3. “Kolfinna’s Golden Dolphin,” Mydwynter Studios, https://mydwynterstudios.com/kolfinnas-golden-dolphin/ ︎
4. “Lanea’s Opal,” MydwynterStudios, https://mydwynterstudios.com/laneas-opal/ ︎
5. von Friesen 1909 ︎
6. Anne-Sofie Gräslund, “Dating the Swedish Viking-Age Rune Stones on Stylistic Grounds,” in Runes and Their Secrets: Studies in Runology, ed. M. Stoklund, M. Lerche Nielsen, B. Holmberg and G. Fellows-Jensen. (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 117–139, https://www.academia.edu/6107509/Dating_the_Swedish_Viking_Age_rune_stones_on_stylistic_grounds ︎
7. Gräslund, _Dating,_ 130. ︎
8. Gräslund, _Dating,_ 120. ︎
9. ︎
10. Gräslund, _Dating,_ 124. ︎
11. “U 328,” Runor, http://kulturarvsdata.se/uu/srdb/4c816f31-d3ac-4020-89da-d3c2466e83e4. ︎
12. “Rune Stones,” National Museum of Denmark, https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-viking-age/power-and-aristocracy/rune-stones/ ︎
13. “Rundata,” https://rundata.info/. Web client for ​​​Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base. ︎
14. “Sö 206,” Runor, http://kulturarvsdata.se/uu/srdb/a89dd45c-403c-4740-b5cb-9f1a631ac347 ︎
15. Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt, “The Rune Stone Fragments at Köpingsvik,” in From Ephesos to Dale- carlia. Reflections on Body, Space and Time in MedievaI and Early Modern Europe, ed. E. Regner, C. von Heine, L. Kitzler Ähfeldt, and A. Kjellström. (The Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm. Studies I1. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 48, 2009) 83. ︎
16. “Runestone#Colour,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified June 11, 2024, 17:41 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runestone#Colour. ︎
17. Kristina Ekero Eriksson and Dick Harrison, Vikingaliv (Natur & Kultur, 2017) 209. One page of which (in Swedish) can be read at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Vikingaliv/Pto2DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA209&printsec=frontcover. The pertinent passage translates via Google to, “chemists have been able to analyze traces of color: in one case, traces of bright red cinnabar, an exclusive import pigment, were found, but otherwise lead and iron oxide red dominate.” ︎
18. “Jelling_stones#Modern_copies_of_the_runestone_of_Harald_Bluetooth,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified May 18, 2024‎, 21:06 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jelling_stones#Modern_copies_of_the_runestone_of_Harald_Bluetooth. ︎
19. “Runestone,” Swedish History Museum. https://samlingar.shm.se/media/75FC0E39-DB58-4CAC-B4B4-9042784CA1C3. Also located on Runor with the signum Öl Fv1911;274B at http://kulturarvsdata.se/uu/srdb/e77158d7-b52b-43ec-a16e-aa083d768b30. ︎
20. Cheryl A. Porter, “You Can’t Tell a Pigment by Its Color,” in Making the Medieval Book. Techniques of Production, 1995, 111–16. ︎
21. Rita Wood, “The Pictures on the Greater Jelling Stone,” Danish Journal of Archaeology 3 (May 1, 2014): 19, https://doi.org/10.1080/21662282.2014.929882. ︎
22. Egon Wamers, … “… Ok Dani Gærði Kristna … Der Große Jellingstein Im Spiegel Ottonischer Kunst,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 34, no. 1 (2000), 132. ︎
23. Wood, Pictures, 27–28. ︎
24. John Lindow, Norse Mythology : A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs ( Oxford University Press, 2001) 196–197. ︎
25. Elena Gurevich, ‘”Anonymous, Trollkvenna heiti” in Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3, ed. K. E. Gade and E. Marold. (Brepols, 2017), 723. https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=3185. ︎
26. Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “Behind the Cloak, between the Lines: Trolls and the Symbolism of Their Clothing in Old Norse Tradition,” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, (January 1, 2017), 331, https://www.academia.edu/35257514/Behind_the_cloak_between_the_lines_Trolls_and_the_symbolism_of_their_clothing_in_Old_Norse_tradition. ︎
27. Guðmundsdóttir, _Cloak,_ 332, 334 ︎
28. Guðmundsdóttir, _Cloak,_ 332–336 ︎
29. Lindow, _Norse Mythology,_ 196 ︎
30. “Swords,” The Viking Age Compendium, https://www.vikingage.org/wiki/wiki/Swords. ︎
31. Bjørn, Anathon and Haakon Shetelig, Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland (H. Aschehoug, 1940), 60, https://archive.org/details/vikingantiquitie04scie/page/60/mode/1up. ︎
32. “Sword,” British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1915-0504-1. ︎
33. “Sö 90,” Runor, http://kulturarvsdata.se/uu/srdb/4794814b-0795-4892-92df-21d7abc4a473. ︎
34. Martin Chase (ed.), “Einarr Skúlason, Geisli 29″ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry on Christian Subjects. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7. (Brepols, 2007) 30-1, https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=verse&i=2059&v=i. ︎
35. “The List of Alternate Titles | Viking Icelandic,” SCA Heraldry, https://heraldry.sca.org/titles.html#Viking%20Icelandic. ︎
36. Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandr Vigfússon. An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Clarendon, 1957), http://www.germanic-lexicon-project.org/html/oi_cleasbyvigfusson/b0331.html. ︎
37. “Lanea’s Opal,” Mydwynter Studios, https://mydwynterstudios.com/laneas-opal/. ︎
38. “Kolfinna’s Golden Dolphin,” Mydwynter Studios, https://mydwynterstudios.com/kolfinnas-golden-dolphin/. ︎
39. “Suphunibal rabat bat Abdeshmun: Laurel,” Meisterin Kolfinna Valravn, https://sites.google.com/view/kvalravn/scribe/2022/08-laurel-suphunibal-rabat-bat-abdeshmun. ︎
40. “Younger Fuþark Vowels ᚢ u, ᛁ i, and ᛅ a,” Orðstírr, https://ordstirr.wordpress.com/runes/younger-futhark-vowels-%E1%9A%A2-u-%E1%9B%81-i-and-%E1%9B%85-a/ ︎
41. “Writing English in Runes,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A271ohcO7Yc. ︎
42. “All About The Futhark(s)”, Scandinavian Archaeology, https://www.scandinavianarchaeology.com/all-about-the-futharks/. ︎

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cleasby, Richard and Guðbrandr Vigfússon. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Clarendon, 1957. http://www.germanic-lexicon-project.org/html/oi_cleasbyvigfusson/b0331.html.

Eriksson, Kristina Ekero, and Dick Harrison. Vikingaliv. Natur & Kultur, 2017.

Fuglesang, Signe Horn. Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style: A Phase of 11th Century Scandinavian Art. Odense University Press, 1980. http://archive.org/details/someaspectsofrin0000fugl.

Fuglesang, Signe Horn. “Swedish Runestones of the Eleventh Century: Ornament and Dating.” In Runeninschriften als Quellen interdisziplinärer Forschung: Abhandlungen des Vierten Internationalen Symposiums über Runen und Runeninschriften in Göttingen vom 4.-9. August 1995 / Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions in Göttingen, 4-9 August 1995, edited by Klaus Düwel, 197–218. De Gruyter, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110821901.197.

Gräslund, Anne-Sofie. “Dating the Swedish Viking-Age Rune Stones on Stylistic Grounds.” In Runes and Their Secrets: Studies in Runology, edited byEdited by Marie Stoklund, Michael Lerche Nielsen, Bente Holmberg, and Gillian Fellows-Jensen. Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006. https://www.academia.edu/6107509/Dating_the_Swedish_Viking_Age_rune_stones_on_stylistic_grounds

Graham-Campbell, James, Signe Horn Fuglesang, Ingmar Jansson, and Helen Clarke. “Viking Art.” In Oxford Art Online: Grove Art Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Gurevich, Elena. ‘”Anonymous, Trollkvenna heiti.” Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3, edited by Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold. Brepols, 2017. https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=3185.

Kitzler Åhfeldt, Laila. “The Rune Stone Fragments at Köpingsvik.” In From Ephesos to Dalecarlia. Reflections on Body, Space and Time in Medieva I and Early Modern Europe, edited by E. Regner, C. von Heine, L. Kitzler Ähfeldt, & A. Kjellström. The Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm. Studies I1. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 48, 2009. https://www.academia.edu/3445233/The_Rune_Stone_Fragments_at_K%C3%B6pingsvik.

Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Porter, Cheryl A. “You Can’t Tell a Pigment by Its Color.” In Making the Medieval Book. Techniques of Production, 1995.

Evighetsrunor.”Runor.” https://app.raa.se/open/runor/search.

Wilson, David M. “The Development of Viking Art.” In The Viking World. Edited by Stefan Brink with Neil Price, 323–338. London: Routledge, 2008.

Wood, Rita. “The Pictures on the Greater Jelling Stone.” Danish Journal of Archaeology 3 (May 1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1080/21662282.2014.929882.

This scroll is bit different from my usual, in myriad ways. Not least because I was actually there to see it presented in person for once (yay!), and because it was created on site, but—and most importantly—it’s an assemblage more about the recipient’s interests than a specific place-time.

This also means I don’t have much art historical to say about it, which I consider the meat and potatoes of my SCA efforts.

Still. Let’s…dig in.

the big dig

For a previous scroll, I had planned-but-not-enacted a shadow box of an archaeological dig, which means I already had the inspiration and a lot of exiting materials on hand. So when I was asked to help with Glaukos’s scroll, I knew immediately it was time to use them. No one else I know in the SCA more deserves a dig-in-a-box than he does. Providentially, it was as if the materials were just waiting for him.

Glaukos requested the Nebra Sky Disc in his ICOP (In Case of Peerage document), which sounded to me like a great idea for a focus. I began by researching options for other artifacts to place in association around it, items which made sense in terms of location and time. Because, as I said before, I really want my scrolls to hang together that way.

I considered fabricating a version of a dagger from another find from the Aunjetitzer/Únětice culture, the Leubingen tumulus (below, left), which looks remarkably similar to the bronze swords found alongside the Sky Disk (below, middle). I have pottery experience, so I was also planning to make some sherds of Corded Ware based on that found in another related site known as the grave of Helmsdorf (below, right). I also thought about resurrecting my very dusty knowledge of flintknapping, and making something that might, if my skill held true, have ended up more artifact than debitage.

And as for the words, the plan was to construct a plausible Balto-Slavic inscription in the way Kolfinna and I have both done previously—I with Kolfinna’s Golden Dolphin, and and the two of us together for Suphunibal’s Laurel.

However, partway through the ideation phase Suphunibal suggested that it might make more sense simply to add other things Glaukos is interested in, rather than intend to construct a realistic archaeological assemblage. I was unsure at first (again, keeping the art of a scroll to within the same plausible time and space is usually very important to me), but in the end, we went with the broader theme.

This had two benefits.

First, because in the beginning I thought the scroll was going to be a large group project, this new format would more easily allow multiple people to contribute items to the whole. Indeed, although the project ultimately shifted, alongside her words and transliteration Suphunibal did contribute the array of small items to plant in the ground with the disk and the scroll.

The second benefit concerned the setting of the words. If the artifact didn’t have to fit within the timeframe of the Disk, we had a lot more leeway. Clay tablets? Ingots¹? Gold amulet²? Papyrus? Papyrus seemed best within our constraints, so papyrus we did.

But more on that later. Right now, the disk.

the disk

The Nebra Sky Disk was found illegally in 1999 by “treasure hunters” looters, greatly disrupting its archaeological provenience. In spite of this, researchers generally agree that it was created in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1600 BCE)³. Testing has revealed that its materials come from as wide a spread as Austria, the Carpathian mountains, and Cornwall⁴.

Originally, the bronze disk was created in five stages⁵, wherein the bronze was carved, the gold sheets inlayed, and the bronze edges hammered over to secure the sheets in place⁶. My version is also bronze, but the gold was painted on top, textured in my best attempt to replicate the existing find. (Doing so was rather fun). And rather than rely on the chemical vagaries of real patina, this version is a more stable and reliable layer of paint. It’s also half the usual size, the better to fit in multiple items alongside it.

The result is a pleasing facsimile of an ancient find, its sky boat and Pleiades shining just as brightly out of the deep sky as in the original.

the assemblage

I was grateful that Suphunibal came prepared. On site we selected a range of “artifacts” to highlight Glaukos’s interests, including:

• a carnelian wreath
• an arrowhead
• many assorted beads of appropriate materials and shapes
• a sliver of “bone”
• a faience eye
• a bronze wire pin, previously made by S herself
• a lapiz bead
• and, in a nod to his heraldry, a golden owl surrounded by a purple feature in the dirt , and some strategically-placed stones dusted with gold. (Stones from Bow Street, as it happens. There be Pennsic in that there scroll.)

Added to the disk I’d made previously and the papyrus scroll to come, the gestalt felt like something that would resonate as Glaukos.

the matrix

My agéd archaeological experience was in the Northeastern United States, so before I embarked on this journey I researched what the soil would look like. Glaukos is Athenian, so based on a variety of photos of Northern Mediterranean digs I mixed up a color palette of ochres, pale reds, sands, and sepias. Gritty and heavy bodied acrylic media helped create texture, along with red clay powder from Suphunibal’s stash. Once I added lamp black and raw umber as subtle ash deposits, the illusion was complete.

I’m really quite proud of how it turned out—especially given the fact that I was creating this during one of the most rainy and humid Pennsics of my experience. If I forget what it’s made from, I can almost smell the petrichor and feel the dirt under my fingernails.

sing of him, muse

While Suphunibal composed and transliterated the words into Ancient Greek, I was putting the final touches on the big dig. And when she was done, she handed them off for me to make them material. I aged a piece of papyrus, and wrote the words in brown ink with a stylus. In the blank space at the bottom I painted his arms.

Our Society’s requirement to include arms on scrolls is complicated when the scrolls reflect places and times which lack them, and particularly so the further the world of the scroll gets from Late Middle Age Europe.

This scroll is thousands of years before that.

So while the body of the piece contains a nod to his arms, I did my best to fit that nod within the world of the scroll. It therefore doesn’t tick all the required heraldic boxes. By flipping the owl and changing it to reflect the Athenian style on pottery and coinage, and then adding the arms themselves to the bottom of the furled papyrus, I could include what was required without the (much more modern) arms knocking viewers out of the illusion.

And then, at the very end of the creation process, I called an audible. The physical papyrus scroll itself was originally intended to attach at the top so it could be unfurled if Glaukos took it out of the frame. But ultimately I decided that, given the way I’d carved the setting, it created the perfect nest for the scroll without it. This way Glaukos could literally remove a scroll from the dirt should he wish to.

This solution felt a lot cooler. Who wouldn’t want to take an item out of the place carved for it, play with it, and put it back? Countless children’s toys are based on this principle.

It’s a little extra detail of joy. It made me smile, and I hope it makes Glaukos smile, too.

thanks

I owe thanks to Suphunibal for the donations of small artifacts, papyrus, red clay, and tools. When I had to radically adjust my expectations, your extra supplies were a boon. I’m grateful for them.

Thanks also to Alasdair for free reign of the toolbox, for the trust and generosity alongside the ruler and cutting blade. Your timing was perfect.

Deepest thank you to Vee for letting me dominate the space behind Dancing Pig Pottery and turn it into a crafting den. Your (and Roan’s and Rahe’s) patience, spirit, and humor kept me and the work going. I honestly couldn’t have done it without you.

And thanks are also due to Kolfinna, Panda, and Indigo. Thanks for being you, while I was being this. Making a scroll on site is never my first choice, so your company was more helpful than you know.

Honestly, thanks to everyone in my extended Pennsic family who so much as sat with me or brought me a drink or joked about chocolate cake. This started out being a large group project, and then it wasn’t. And in the end, it kind of was.

One of the benefits to having been a maker and artist for most of my life is the trust in my own ability to improvise. When the plan changed, I knew that if I tapped into my forty years of experience and didn’t overthink it, I could get the job done. And hell: resilience and flexibility often turns up unlooked-for gems, and I suspected the result might even be better than planned. All I had to do was dive in, and swim with the current. (Easy to do, with such a wet Pennsic.)

In the end, I’m delighted with the result. I hope Glaukos is, too.

Congratulations, my friend.

notes

1. These Late Cypriot copper ingots would have been fun, if a bit complicated to replicate within the time allotted. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280727449_Miniature_Ingots_from_Cyprus ︎
2. I’ve done this before. See Lanea’s Opal for an example of the depths of research I’ve plumbed in the attempt. ︎
3. Ernst Pernicka et al, “Why the Nebra Sky Disc Dates to the Early Bronze Age. An overview of the Interdisciplinary Results.” In Archaeologia Austriaca 104, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften 2020, S. 89-122. https://doi.org/10.1553/archaeologia104s89 ︎
4. For the gold, see https://doi.org/10.1127/0935-1221/2011/0023-2140, and the for the tin of the bronze, see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2010.00515.x Thorough testing of the bronze was integral to its overall dating and verification. See above. ︎
5. https://www.landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.de/en/nebra-sky-disc/the-phases-of-the-sky-disc ︎
6. https://www.landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.de/en/nebra-sky-disc/from-copper-ore-to-celestial-image ︎

A GIFT

Whatever else, a scroll is fundamentally a gift.

I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Brynna, but I wanted the scroll to be specifically for her, so I gathered information. I was told that she particularly likes the Early English time period. I was told she likes the Morrigan (which matched well with the raven in her heraldry). I was also told she might better appreciate a scroll in a standard shallow frame (as opposed to an object, or a shadow box). It’s helpful to have these sorts of guardrails on a project; sometimes an open landscape is harder, because with no restriction you have to choose from a set of everything. In my experience, constraints can help drive creativity, since they clear space for problem solving.

As in this case. Scrolls for places and times without a strong book culture are always interesting, because they can’t simply be manuscript pages. Usually these places and times are conjured better with some manner of material culture, as with this scroll’s Migration Period/Early 7th century English. But the result had to be flat, so I had to make choices about how to portray the art within that constraint.

In past situations like this I’ve found it useful to create what I call a “museum scroll”. Artifacts are arranged within the frame to echo the storytelling of a museum display, as opposed to emulating an artifact in its entirety (as in the usual scroll), and a cohesive piece comes from the careful selection of items and style. In this museum scroll, the art—whether it be brooch or other metalwork—would fill the lower left of the frame, and the words would be carried on separate artifacts surrounding it.

It’s just as well that I’m not a master goldsmith. If I were to capture the specific art-feel of Early England in a flat form, I would have to transfigure the art into a new medium.

remediation, again

I’ve spoken before about remediation.

I won’t completely rehash that discussion, but previously I explored the affordances and benefits of bringing three-dimensional gold Scythian design to a flatter champlevé enamel brooch. I discussed the ways in which our work in the SCA both inhabits the definition of remediation set forth by Bolter and Grusin, but also the ways in which our work in the SCA takes it further.

Quoting my previous post:

“In their 2000 book “Remediation: Understanding New Media”, Bolter and Grusin argue that the term remediation describes “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another”¹. Rather than simply an extension of the word “remedy”—as in, bringing remedial studients up to scratch, or remediating a damaged ecosystem—their definition is one of medium as well as improvement. The DVD improved on the cassette tape; the MP3 improved on the DVD. Their remediation describes this process.”

This particular scroll remediates Migration Era English goldwork into a tooled and sculpted leather form. In this situation, the improvement is its alignment with the specific needs of the piece, which would not be served by a replication in gold and at jewelry scale. The translation improves the result through my adequate leatherworking skills and redresses my inadequate (read: missing) goldsmith skills, and it’s an improvement because the increase in scale increases the visibility at court or on a wall.

This scroll also remediates Migration Era English goldwork in its intent. Again, as discussed here, regardless what we know of our forerunners’ goals, doubtless they weren’t creating awards for the SCA. The means that no matter what we produce or how we produce it, there will always be a disconnect between our actions and the actions of the original creators. In my experience, this leaves us space to direct our creation more accurately for the SCA goals without feeling more beholden than necessary to the art of the past. A scroll is, after all, a gift. Not a reproduction.

ACCURATELY ABSTRACTED

By definition, the Germanic Animal Style art of the Migration Period is abstract. The degree and manner of abstraction have been typologically sorted (first by Bernhard Salin in the early 20th century²), and for our current 7th century purposes we’ll be talking about his Style II, which is associated with the metalwork of the second half of the 6th century through early 7th. In contrast to the animals-in-blender of the former style (his Style I), this Germanic Polychrome style³ involved whole beasts twisted and abstracted, often elongated, sometimes interlaced, a visual puzzle to compliment the Early English taste for riddles. Animals are almost always in profile, and sometimes it’s not even clear which class of animal is pictured, let alone number or species. There are times when it’s not even obvious an animal is being pictured—that it’s not an entangled collection of shapes.

The heraldic pelican from which this award gets its name, on the other hand, is anything but abstract. While the art of the High Middle Ages is not known for its true realism, it is nevertheless figurative. Though flawed, perspective still comes into play. Animals are portrayed from the front, in profile, in plan, and however the creator felt would best communicate their goal. When these illuminators or carvers or metalworkers created an animal, generally they wanted you to know what it was. In fact, because the primary goal of heraldry is to be recognizable in brief viewings and at distance, its goal is the antithesis of the riddling obfuscation of a lot of Early English art.

Which is to say: the later heraldic pelican bears certain characteristic features which would look quite out of place if pulled into the early-7th-century English art style of this scroll.

And arguably, one of the goals of a scroll is to be internally and externally consistent, even as it records the achievement, provides a gift, and makes the awardee feel seen. So given the charge to create an Early English scroll, first I had to create a pelican that suited the style.

But to our good fortune, birds abound in Early English goldwork. It was no struggle at all to find references that could become my pelican.

In fact, I found everything I needed in just a few artifacts.

birbs

My primary reference, a bird from the Sutton Hoo purse lid⁴, provided me the curved figure, the wings, the tail feather structure, and the border detailing (which was echoed both in the bird and the overall lid). I altered the beak to make it slightly more reminiscent of a pelican, including blood at its tip for the heraldic nod.

The head structure comes not only from the purse lid, but a such a broad number of early 7th century English metalwork finds that the structure becomes typological. These examples include—but are not limited to—a shield mount from the Sutton Hool burial (from which I also derived my claw), a pair of gold and garnet mounts from the Staffordshire Hoard, details tucked into the corners of the Sutton Hoo buckle (above), a pair of details tucked into the center of a mount showing two birds holding a fish, and even a gold filigree belt buckle. It could be said that an Early English bird requires this type of angled head structure.

bird heads

A garnet cloisonné stepped lozenge design provided me a great example of a body fill. It comes from a late 6th C–early 7th C shoulder clasp⁵—an item which wonderfully illustrates the twin tenets of Early English metalwork I described above: riddles, and abstraction.

The shoulder clasp, another Sutton Hoo burial find, features two abstract, interlaced boars. At first glance, the effect of the interlaced bodies gives the impression of a milling group of animals, doubtless a familiar sight to the intended viewer, a scrum in which it would be difficult to tell how many individuals are crowded together. The only way to tell is to count the heads. The abstract nature of the animals adds to this riddle, since this playful confusion would be much harder with a realistic figure.

Our abstracted animal headcount continues with the beasts in the lower, rectagular frame, and the snake-like gold filigree fills around the boars’ legs.

Overall, this shoulder clasp is a wonderful thesis exploring the greats of Early English metalwork. It’s an exemplar of riddles and abstraction. It features zoomorphic beasts, interlace, and geometric, repeating fills. And it contains millefiori, alongside gold and garnet: the most popular materials/finishes in Early English metalwork⁶.

material culture

Millefiori is an early glasswork technique, an example of which is this domed cap from the Staffordshire Hoard. Featuring red, white, and blue glass surrounded by gold and garnet, it’s theorized that this piece attached to a second piece of the hoard, though it’s uncertain what the larger item is. (Note: over time, the red glass has darkened. It would originally have been brighter.⁷)

For me and this scroll, it affords a few more extant colors and transparencies. The gold and garnet combo is seen in a wide number of very early English finds, but other colors are more rare—and usually brought in with millefiori, as in this cap and the clasp above.

Which meant I had a limited extant palette to apply to my scroll. Fortunately, the heraldic pelican is white with yellow (gold) beak and feet, with blood red the only other required color, so I didn’t have to search far for what materials would logically have been used to create a pelican in this style; opaque white and red glass, transparent garnet, and gold were right there for the taking. And they were relatively simple to replicate in more accessible materials of paint and leather. (As mentioned above, one implication of remediation is improvement. For these purposes, this change of materials is an improvement, because not only do they allow the scroll to better serve its needs through increased visibility at court, but they allowed its creation in the first place.)

The translation into leather wouldn’t even effect one of the most characteristic features of Early English gold and garnet metalwork.

Back in about 2011, I was fortunate to see the Staffordshire Hoard in person. One enduring memory from that exhibition is where they highlighted how the texture of the gold foil underneath the garnets would scatter the light, and the importance of the technique both physically and as an art historical feature.

So when Korrin, Lanea, and I were collaborating on Valdimárr’s Kraken scroll, I remembered the importance of this technique to the success of gold and garnet work from Early English workshops. The stamped pattern reminded me of the knurling on the most common leatherwork stamps, and with that scroll—as in this one—that texture plays the same role. While in this instance it’s gold paint rather than gold foil, at certain angles the patterned light nevertheless passes through the transparent garnet glaze and reflects back through, giving the result a depth it would not have had with glaze alone. (Gold is always hard to photograph, and this scroll is no exception. In my opinion, the photograph doesn’t do it justice.)

At any rate, even though it’s made of different materials and at a different scale, the construction of this scroll not only makes use of the material innovation of the original works, but benefits from them, too.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

a new song

I filled my head with a useful range of verse, starting with Cædmon’s Hymn¹⁰.

Cædmon’s Hymn is our earliest extant Old English poem, possibly composed between 658 and 680 CE. All extant versions are found among 21 copies of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, with slight textual variations across them. It’s not a hymn in the current meaning, but nevertheless it has the useful tenor of a praise poem, which set up my mind for the sort of feeling I wanted to establish with Brynna’s verse.

But I didn’t want the Hymn to be my only reference, so it was also useful to know that it follows the same framework as the Old English poetry spanning the next three or four centuries¹¹. This knowledge allowed me to comfortably consider a wide range of extant poems in guiding my verse without fear I was mixing meters (so to speak).

Since the Pelican is a service award, it might seem more logical to have pulled from one of the less martial pieces, like one of the Elegies. But Brynna has spent a lot of her effort in service to the lists, and her heraldry bears a raven and a sword, so I felt that conjuring the battlefield with my language made a lot of sense. Both dating to the 10th/11th century, I found the Battle of Maldon¹² and Beowulf¹³ helpful for this. The line above is from the former, and it perfectly captures the sense of invocation I wanted for this piece, as well as conjuring the connection of individual to community (and vice versa). An integral part of service is the tie between server and populace, so it made sense to set the latter as a viewpoint character in the verse alongside the royalty. We, the group, are championing her elevation.

Riddles aren’t just popular in Early English visual art; it a characteristc of their poetry, too. (You might say it’s riddled with it.) “List-maker” has a double meaning. It could refer to the list field, or it could also refer to the reasonable assumption that service and organizing requires thorough planning. Requires lists. I was told that Brynna is also an artisan with a needle and thread, and so we have “linen-writer”. An “entangled field” could ambiguously refer to either the lists or her art.

The twists and constraints of Old English meter are exceedingly fun to navigate, but they also require flexibility. The SCA has a number of traditions which were formed when its focus was firmly in the European High Middle Ages, and these conventions aren’t easily transferred when the persona comes from outside those bounds. Heraldry is a big example of this. In our current example, my words had to fit within the Old English alliterative meter while still conveying relevant information. Traditional blazon doesn’t fit; in fact, it would throw us out of the magic the SCA strives for. Instead, I tried to conjure the accurate spell with appropriate language within the poetical framework, and so get the job done within the constraints of the form. (There is significant precedence for this. I am grateful for those in the past who have also recognized the need for flexibility in the embrace of a diverse range of personae.)

strip mining

The words on the scroll also needed to support the visual thesis of migration-style artwork. So parchment wouldn’t fly. (Bird pun.)

Unlike the Sutton Hoo burial, the Staffordshire Hoard looks to have been broken or misshapen before being discarded¹⁴. One of the mistreated items was a bent strip of metal, which reveals upon examination its importance. To history, to archaeology, to art history, and to us, here.

The strip is one of the few non-martial items in the Hoard, “believed to have originally been part of a cross¹⁵.” Made from gold-covered metal, perhaps silver (they were unable to pin in down more specifically in the lab through nondestructive testing¹⁶), it bears writing on both sides. Scribed into the end is a snake’s head, and the front bears a D-shaped fitting for a gemstone, now lost. The engraving has been inlaid with niello—a metallic alloy containing sulphur—to make the letters stand out more clearly.

The text contains two different versions from two different hands of the same inscription from Numbers. Each version has similar text, but not identical. Even the abbreviations varied. The line is both a curse and an invocation for backup: “Arise, O Lord, and may your enemies be torn apart and those who hate you will flee from your face¹⁷.”

The letterforms bear a strong relationship to that of the Phase 1 Insular half-uncial of the Cathach of Columcille¹⁸, with a few adaptations. Insular half-uncial is a higher grade than minuscule, and less the the more important majuscule/uncial¹⁹. Judging my the typical way scribes illustrated importance and weight through the use of certain levels of script, this suggests to me that both scribes placed a particular importance on this text. This is no quick note scrawled off in a quick, cursive-like minuscule. This was a script with compelling and resonant weight. The script was repeated by two scribes, and the one presumably deemed correct was inlaid with niello to make it final.

Writing on gold to compel your text to the deities is an ancient practice which spans huge swathes of the globe, largely (but not entirely) overlapping with the spread of the Roman Empire²⁰. The strip in the Staffordshire Hoard indicates that this practice didn’t leave the islands when the Roman management did; the two scribes took time with their inscriptions, choosing a higher grade script than the Insular minuscule used at the time for quicker, more perfunctory writing, or even the Early English minuscule that would be used for the Beowulf manuscript four centuries later. According to Michelle Brown, the manner of the writing, its lack of dexterity, suggests that it may have been the work of someone more used to writing on wax tablets²¹. However, one of them bothered to replicate a few of the ink-and-pen serifs within the limited form. They wouldn’t have done this if the inscription didn’t matter.

D. G. Charles-Edwards goes deeply into this interplay of stylus and pen with letterforms in his (fascinating—to me anyway) 2000 thesis²², and delving further might reveal even more in future.

The outlined treatment of the serifs on the outer side seems to indicate a scribe who was deeply aware of how the letterforms would have been shaped by ink on parchment, and the adaptations to the usual Insular half-uncial letterforms indicate someone who wanted to represent serifs in a monoline scenario, because they were an inherent feature of the script. Given the awareness of Insular scribes at this time that script hierarchies imply a greater or lesser holiness, alongside the possibility of the verse’s use for apotropaic purposes²³, I posit that the addition of serifs could signal the scribe’s hope for a better result.

layout

When I needed to display the text, I started from the script. But given that the text length was longer than a line, I needed to decide how to best to present it across a larger area.

Unlike modern typesetting conventions, Old English verse stretches across the page with little and sporadic indication as to its structure²⁴. As such, when I decided to turn the strip into a plaque, which would provide me ample room for text while keeping within the paradigm of a museum scroll, I filled the space with text. When I left spaces, they were for times when both semantic (meaning) and practical (breathing) pauses overlapped. O’Keeffe’s work with the development of text and layout over time neatly implies the validity of this tactic.

The text was both inked and inscribed, as an attempt to replicate the inlaid niello of the original strip. Without the ink the letters disappeared, and without the inscription the letters looked flat.

When all the lettering was done, that still left me with the problem of how to attach the plaques to the substrate. The original strip features a D-shaped setting for a gemstone, but that was hardly a practical solution. For one thing, I needed three attachment points. For another, I’m not a jeweller.

rivets

I found my solution(s) in this early 7th century brooch, commonly called the Sarre Brooch, found in Kent. One is of the four gems is missing, but the remaining three provide perfect examples—properly-scaled in terms of both size and physical possibility.

The catalogue text describes these features as, “a cabochon garnet in a tubular gold setting”, but my facsimile involved the same translucent garnet-colored glaze with which I created the main design, added to brass rivets. I think the result looks accurate enough and gets the job done.

As an aside, the color combinations of this piece provide further substantiation to my design decisions. While the white in this piece comes from shell, and the white I created was intended to replicate glass, the gold/garnet/white immediate says early 7th century English material culture. (And please note the empty cells at about 9:00, with the stamped pattern revealed by the missing garnets. Those are pretty characteristic, too.)

TO WRAP UP

I also hope I’ve demonstrated the benefit of applying art historical research to art practice.

When we have art historical knowledge, we have better contextual information about the art we’re looking at. And better context means we can more fluidly, accurately, and dexterously adapt historical art to our present needs.

With art historical knowledge in my pocket, I was aware how the art of this period related to the art of those later periods so central to the SCA. And that meant I had the resources to best curate artifacts and translate the design so the needs of the past align with the needs of the present, and the goals of the scroll are (joyously) met.

Not only did I have academic research to help me make accurate choices, but research helped me identify options and create a result that was so much better than it would have been without it.

Art history helped me tell a better story.

Thank you to Etienne for the opportunity to dive into late 6th–early 7th CE English material culture and transform it into a practical (and, hopefully, beautiful) award.

Congratulations, Brynna! I can’t wait to meet you.

NOTES

1. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 59. ︎
2. Bernhard Salin. “Die altgermanische Thierornamentik. Typologische Studie über germanische Metallgegenstände aus dem IV. bis IX: Jahrhundert, nebst einer Studie über die irische Ornamentik” (Stockholm 1904), 245-70. ︎
3. Michelle Brown, Art of the Islands – Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture (The Bodleian Library, 2016), 27. ︎
4. Sutton Hoo Purse. British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1939-1010-2-a-l ︎
5. Shoulder clasp. British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1939-1010-4-a ︎
6. Catherine E. Karkov. The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011) 99. ︎
7. https://web.archive.org/web/20211207055451/http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/explore-the-hoard/millefiori-stud#1 ︎
8. Francis P. Magoun, “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry.” Speculum 28 (1953): 446–67 ︎
9. I studied Old English at university back in the late 90s. It’s been a while, but it sticks with you. Since then, my professor has published an accessible textbook I invite you to explore: Robert J. Hasenfratz, and Thomas Jambeck. Reading Old English : A Primer and First Reader Rev. ed. (West Virginia: WVU Press, 2011). ︎
10. “”Cædmon’s Hymn”: the Seven West Saxon Versions” https://uw.digitalmappa.org/12. ︎
11. “All Old English poetry is of such uniformity in form and language that it is impossible to establish even relative dating with any certainty.” Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, 1st ed (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 57. ︎
12. “Battle of Maldon | Old English Poetry Project | Rutgers University”, https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/battle-of-maldon/. ︎
13. “Beowulf | Old English Poetry Project | Rutgers University”, https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/beowulf/. ︎
14. Caroline Alexander and National Geographic Society (U.S.), Lost Gold of the Dark Ages : War, Treasure, and the Mystery of the Saxons (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2011) 89. ︎
15. Brown, Lost. 12. ︎
16. Barbican Research Associates (2019) The Staffordshire Hoard: an Anglo-Saxon Treasure [data-set]. York: Archaeology Data Service [distributor] https://doi.org/10.5284/1041576 [strip: cat no 540] ︎
17. C. Breay and J. Story, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War (British Library, 2018) 88. ︎
18. Michelle P. Brown. “Southumbrian Book Culture: The Interface Between Insular and Anglo-Saxon.” In C. Hourihane, ed., Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art (Princeton University Press, 2011) 22. ︎
19. D. G. Charles-Edwards, “The Epigraphy of Wales 550–1000 Examined in a Wider Insular Context: The Interchange Between Written and Inscribed Letters,” M.Phil. thesis, (University of Wales College, Newport, 2000) 24, 40. ︎
20. Roy D. Kotansky, “Textual Amulets and Writing Traditions in the Ancient World,” in Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic (Brill, 2019) 507–508. ︎
21. https://web.archive.org/web/20120709214529/http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/staritems/the-biblical-inscription ︎
22. Charles-Edwards, “Epigraphy”. ︎
23. Brown, Lost. 122. ︎
24. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Orality and the Developing Text of Caedmon’s Hymn,” Speculum 62, no. 1 (1987): 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/2852564. ︎

FURTHER READING

Alexander, Caroline, and National Geographic Society (U.S.). Lost Gold of the Dark Ages : War, Treasure, and the Mystery of the Saxons. Washington, D.C: National Geographic Society. 2011.

Breay, C., and J. Story. Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. British Library, 2018.

Brown, Michelle. Art of the Islands – Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture. The Bodleian Library, 2016.

Charles-Edwards, D. G. “The Epigraphy of Wales 550–1000 Examined in a Wider Insular Context: The Interchange Between Written and Inscribed Letters,” 2000, https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/2145103/D._G._Charles_Edwards_2000_1802924.pdf.

Fulk, R. D. “Old English Meter and Oral Tradition: Three Issues Bearing on Poetic Chronology.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106, no. 3 (2007).

Godden, Malcolm, and Michael Lapidge. The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature. 1st ed. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press. 1991.

Hasenfratz, Robert J, and Thomas Jambeck. Reading Old English : A Primer and First Reader Rev. ed. West Virginia: WVU Press. 2011.

Hourihane, C ed. Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art. Princeton University Press, 2011

Karkov, Catherine E. The Art of Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011.

Kotansky, Roy D. “Textual Amulets and Writing Traditions in the Ancient World.” In Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, 507–54. Brill, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390751_020.

Magoun, Francis P. “Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry.” Speculum 28, no. 3 (July 1953): 446–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/2847021.

O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien (January 1987). “Orality and the Developing Text of Caedmon’s Hymn”. Speculum. 62 (1): 1–20. doi:10.2307/2852564. JSTOR 2852564. S2CID 161081164.

Pascual, Rafael J. “Oral Tradition and the History of English Alliterative Verse.” Studia Neophilologica 89, no. 2 (July 3, 2017): 250–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2017.1369360.

Salin, Bernhard “Die altgermanische Thierornamentik. Typologische Studie über germanische Metallgegenstände aus dem IV. bis IX: Jahrhundert, nebst einer Studie über die irische Ornamentik” (Stockholm 1904) 245-70.

Wamers, Egon. “Behind Animals, Plants and Interlace: Salin’s Style II on Christian Objects.” In Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations before the Vikings, edited by James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan, 0. British Academy, 2009. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197264508.003.0008.

Of jewels and stones I sing,
And dark bones of Earth dreaming
Sheltered from the baking sun
And awake in the ocean.
I know a woman, who weaves
Not spindle-spun. She retrieves
Stark stone from beneath the dew
Earth’s bones stretched into sinew.
She weaves with shimmering threads
Crowns glimmering on fine foreheads,
Bangles to brighten a wrist,
Her tangles shine when sun-kissed.
How could we such worth reward
With ought of earth? Henceforward
Let the sea surround her curls
All wound with precious pearls.

The brief for this scroll was 11th century Irish/Viking. For good or ill, there aren’t that many manuscripts of that time period remaining to us from which I could pull my references¹. That being said, it’s a timeframe/place I know fairly well having delved into it myself before, and having advised others in its exploration, so I already had a jumping off point ready.

The main reference is the Ricemarch Psalter, created in the back half of the 11th century in Wales.

—record scratch—

Wales? Didn’t I say the brief was Irish?

See, this is where knowing art historical context becomes necessary.

an inheritance

This psalter was one of two surviving books² created at the scriptorium of Llanbadarn Fawr in Wales. It was created by scribe Ithael, and decorated by Ievan (Ieuan), both sons of the Bishop Sulien, then presented to their brother Rhygyfarch/Ricemarch³. Sulien had studied in Ireland for some years before returning home to Wales, bringing with him an Irish artistic program instructed in part by referencing the best Irish manuscripts he could lay eyes on, both recent and older. It’s for this reason that the Ricemarch shares features with Irish manuscripts like the Southhampton Psalter (St John’s College MS C.9, created c1000 in Ireland, despite the name) and the Cotton MS. Vitellius F. XI (heavily damaged in the Ashburnum House fire of 1731)⁴, as well as the division of the text into “the three fifties”, common to all Irish psalters of the 11th–12th century.

Some of its initials also feature a little goat’s head terminals like those seen in the 9th century Book of Armagh (IE TCD MS 52). The Ricemarch also contains the page layout established in 8th-9th century Irish manuscripts of a full introductory page featuring a large initial. At the point in time at which the Ricemarch was being created, this particular layout was becoming obsolete in Ireland, but it held fast here in Llanbadarn Fawr.⁵

initials

The Ricemarch shares a distinctive feature with a number of manuscripts. The Southhampton and Cotton manuscripts mentioned above, as well as other Irish manuscripts especially of the 11th and 12th centuries like the Psalter of St Caimín (MS A 1) and the Liber Hymnorum (MS A 2), both at University College Dublin, and the Parker MS 199 discussed at length below, alongside a Scottish manuscript with Irish features at the University of Edinburgh (MS 56) all feature characteristic heavy black initials. Art historian Francoise Henry has described them as “knotted-wire” style initials⁶, which is especially fitting given Ailis weaves with wire.

The initials in these manuscripts are often of two types: colored ribbon animals with interlace, and knotted-wire. In earlier manuscripts (like the damaged Cotton Vitellius, mentioned above) these types alternated, and this alternation became the norm in the 12th century, but when creating the Ricemarch Ieuen ignored such a systematic program⁷. The latter consist of thick black ribbon, tightly woven such that in some places the path isn’t easily followed. Terminals can consist of animal heads, curled triangles, bulbs, 2/3 of a triskele, spirals, feather-shaped or vegetal lobes, or variations of this list. Sometimes they can be filled with pieced colored fills reminiscent of cloisonné or stained-glass, a motif which might have an English (Saxon) origin⁸. They are surrounded by a dotted line, a common feature of Insular manuscripts which Carol A. Farr calls “dotted contours”⁹.

The lobed terminals described can be interpreted as the influence of Viking Ringerike style, which demonstrates a proliferation of such lobes—a Scandinavian connection, although subtle. Ringerike style is defined by the British Museum as “Viking-age art style featuring large, drawn-out animals with spiral hip joints, snakes, plant ornament and acanthus buds, and tendrils with lobed ends, which cross and re-cross, often in clusters.¹⁰. It occurs in manuscripts and metalwork, such as the Liber Hymnorum (below left) and side panels of the Shrine of Miosach, both seen below¹¹.

As for our current main manuscript, apart from the initials there are even more pronounced Ringerike elements in the borders of some Incipit pages of the Ricemarch, as seen at left, where two lobed acanthus terminals sit at the very center of the image¹³.

Now, just because I didn’t use any of these Ringerike-inspired elements in this particular scroll doesn’t make this information extraneous. On the contrary, it paints a picture of stylistic syncretism across the islands, and further establishes the relevance of this specific manuscript for the brief. This is an Irish-Viking manuscript (Hiberno-Norse, to some) regardless what elements are or aren’t included.

visual transliteration

In his 2011 article “Writing in Tongues: Mixed Scripts and Style in Insular Art”¹⁴, Benjamin C. Tilghman discusses the use of alternate alphabets in the Incipit pages of Insular manuscripts, especially display scripts. He describes a flexibility in the use of alternate alphabets, using them as transliteration or translation or, sometimes, for their shape in the context of Roman-scripted language without regard to their original sound or meaning. Most relevantly, an Incipit page of the Ricemarch sometimes uses Delta-like variation on an Insular Uncial A, interspersed with the regular display capitals.

Tilghman includes runes or rune-like forms in this visual transliteration; there are numerous examples of runic characters within art otherwise featuring Roman-scripted language, as in the Franks Casket or the Lindesfarne Gospels, and while can’t know definitively why these alternate alphabets were used, but it’s been posited that they could have functioned to parade the scribe’s great learning, to obscure meaning, or to heighten the sanctity of the text.

It’s with all this in mind that I adapted a runic character to help solve a regular problem when using non-English exemplars to convey the English language, namely what to do with sounds that aren’t in the original language. In this case, I needed a J. With guidance from original Insular scribes to adapt and adopt orthography as needed, I rotated the runic L or a flipped Younger Futhark d, and created a straight-lined J letterform. As described above, I’m not alone in divorcing orthographic meaning from shape; Tilghman describes this phenomenon specifically. “Rather than thinking about these letters as equivalent phonetic forms, they are thinking of them as equivalent visual forms.¹⁵“

The inclusion of a rune had a supplemental benefit of introducing more Viking DNA into the scroll, which helped with my “11th century Irish or Viking” brief.

frameworks

The layout of this scroll is an adaptation from Ricemarch in response to the size of page, the amount of content, and my capabilities as an illuminator. (I am only a part-time scribe, after all, not a monk.)

Rather than soak a lot of real estate with the sort of borders seen on the large full page illustrations of Insular mss, full of interlace, key, and step patterns, I opted to slim them down to one of their sometimes overlooked but arguably most important features: the outlined border.

The geometric relationship between border and interior elements is important to Insular manuscripts. As Tilghman noted in 2017, “a concern with frames, both as a determinative compositional structure and as a dynamic foil against which letters and figures might act, is one of the distinctive features of Insular art.¹⁶” Or, if you like, “However coherent in themselves, the ornaments could not do without a fixed framework to rivet them, as it were, to the page. For this purpose the Hiberno-Saxon artists introduced yellow fillets whose brightness made for a clearly legible structure, divided largely into geometric compartments of different size and form.¹⁷“

(In fact, a strong border can be sufficient to support the feeling of Insular art—or “Celtic artwork”, in the popular consciousness—even in the absence of true historical reference. A forthcoming essay will explore this point.)

In the page from the Echternach Gospels seen at left, the layout consists solely of large geometric shapes formed by outlined borders. “Since the feet of the Lion cut into the borders, it is probable that they were intentionally left without a filling¹⁸.” And in the page from the Book of Deer seen at right, even with the empty or uncolored border fills the page’s layout remains legible. Strong. Additionally, the almond-shaped details in the corners echo a traditional lentoid (lens-shaped) La Tène ornament, which I also borrowed for this scroll.

The contrast between the intricate fill or letters and the bold and simple stripes of the border are what makes the page layout legible. And even in manuscripts which lack decorative fill—whether intentional or not—the geometric shapes formed by the border outlines are enough to support a strong layout.

With or without decorative fill, the borders make the page.

On our scroll, the deep yellow border, outlined in black, forms the majority, and the boldness of the red fill strengthens the smaller red details of the design.

The rest of the page layout echoes the Incipit pages of the Ricemarch Psalter: initial top left, large display caps decreasing in size down the page, sometimes flattened and expanded at the bottom, with stretched letters when required, and sometimes a dot to hold the space. (See folio 35r at left for one example of letterform stretching and expansion. The dot occurs on every illustrated Incipit page.) The background alternates light/dark, the green fill alternating with substrate color, functioning like rows on a spreadsheet.

Our righthand page follows the form laid out by both the Ricemarch Psalter and Parker MS 199.

So let’s talk about Parker MS 199.

textual healing

As previously mentioned, there is no high-quality scan of the Ricemarch available. At present the only references are some scattered low-quality (and non-trustworthy) images on the internet, and a scan of a 1914 facsimile available on archive.org. Some day I will pay Trinity College Dublin for high quality photos, but in the meantime my best option is to extrapolate from what’s available: the blurry archive.org facsimile, and analogous manuscripts with full scans.

Enter Parker MS 199.

Manuscript shelfmark MS 199 in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge is a circa-1090
copy of St Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate. Like the Ricemarch, Ievan (Ieuan) was its scribe, and it’s thought he might also have been its illuminator. But unlike the Ricemarch, in Parker 199 we have its very nice high quality scan to reference.

So not only can adding this secondary manuscript help fill in the gaps left by Ricemarch’s nonexistent scan, it can help broaden my understanding of the work of this specific family of scribes. It adds even more accurate stylistic datapoints to the list of manuscripts mentioned above, since the Parker manuscript is not just of a similar style, but it’s literally by the same creator.

It’s like a second opinion, but for art history.

Excellent.

Because of the blurriness of Ricemarch’s images, it’s harder to tell if the Parker MS 199 is a finer ms, but it certainly is a fine one, and well cared for; the vellum is likely made in the thicker, suede-like Irish-insular style¹⁹ it looks smooth and uniformly colored, with nary a difference in hair and flesh sides. Holes are few and far between. And because it’s such a fine mss, I could easily pull details blurred or obscured in the Ricemarch. I could see details of the initial fills. I could more accurately follow the ductus, and make more accurate extrapolations about each letter.

Between the two of them I could draw examples to help lay out the verse form on the page, and follow how to set the body text tightly or widely with respect to the large initials.

I could parse out his abbreviations, which would be helpful when setting my own text. (Rather than traditional substitutions, because this is English and not Latin I abbreviated “ing” on certain lines, and replaced a few common words with a letter and a macron.) Unfortunately, I forgot that at this time the abbreviation for “and” was not yet the more familiar ampersand-inspiring “et” ligature, but looked more like a backward 7²⁰. Hopefully I won’t forget that in the future.

I also could see where Ieuan used diminuendo, the term for a common practice in Insular manuscripts where a line starts out with a larger initial and diminishes as it moves into the line.

And with the examples of both Parker 199 and the other manuscripts of this place and time, I could also make better judgements about color.

color

Based on J. J. G. Alexander’s 1978 survey of Insular manuscripts, the Ricemarch was done in red, yellow, and green²¹. That said, the analogous and contemporaneous manuscripts listed above display a wide range of color; we’ve long, long since left behind the stereotypical red, yellow, and green of early Insular books. Therefore I felt confident choosing colors based on heraldic and iconographic requirements.

Ailis’s arms are red and green, yellow/gold and white/silver, while the Pearl’s iconography is white and blue. I would need these five colors to represent all that needed representing, and it would be my job to mix up gouache to approximate the traditional pigments.

Cheryl Porter has warned us that “you can’t tell a pigment by its colour²²“. Heather Pulliam has described the insufficiency of gauging a manuscript’s true color from an online image²³. But since the Ricemarch Psalter lacks even a modern high quality scan, spectroscopic analysis of its pigments is out of the question. Fortunately, we have other relevant manuscripts from which I could derive an educated guess.

The Lindisfarne Gospels—created in early 8th century Northumberland by scribes in the Irish tradition, much as these Welsh scribes created in the Irish tradition—was verified by Raman spectroscopy to have been made entirely by a restricted palette of red/orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, and black, made from toasted lead, orpiment, verdigris or vergaut, woad or indigo, plant extracts like folium or ochil, chalk, and carbon, respectively. The wide variation in colors comes from the myriad techniques of the scribe²⁴.

(As for gold, according to Michelle Brown, “Gilding never seems to have been practiced by Irish scribes, perhaps because in Ireland what gold there was was so valued for use in the production of high-status metalwork”²⁵, or perhaps because gold was the province of goldsmiths only, in a society carefully divided by skill²⁶.)

This potential palette remained unchanged until the 14th century²⁷, so when I mixed my paints, I did so in emulation of orpiment (yellow), woad (blue, verdigris (green), toasted lead (red), with chalk white and carbon black.

As for the initials themselves, I chose an O which could be easily worked into a shell and pearl, and an A to represent her name. (The pair also had a bit of an “alpha and omega” thing going on, but that was accidental and not particularly pertinent.) When it came to their fills I made a slight adaptation; I divided up the spaces as usual, like cloisonné or stained glass, but because the left initial represented SCA Pearl heraldic iconography, I filled both of them entirely with blue so they would balance.

The caps in the referent manuscripts are filled with color. In European manuscripts both before this timeperiod and after, capitals alternate color, the contrast of which functions (as in the alternating background fields of our Incipit page) like the background shades of rows in a spreadsheet. In our scroll, this was done by fills of yellow and green, sometimes stacking, as was done in various source manuscripts. Green was chosen to balance out the green on the lefthand page, and yellow was chosen not just because extant fills often alternate a bright color with yellow, but because this is a really good strategy to make sure the alternation is easily legible at a glance.

As mentioned previously, the dotted contours are red (as is common in Insular manuscripts), and the initials are filled with blue.

And four of these five colors are pinned down in Ailis’s arms.

arms laid bare

Arms. Coins. Logos.

All are about communication.

If you’re not creating arms for a time and place that uses heraldry—which, given the depth and breadth of history, is a majority of the time—we need to get creative. Our hobby is played with a large dose of heraldry, and it can be helpful to have a strategy for this creativity.

Ailis’s arms contain a phoenix rising up out of flames—iconography I’d have to extrapolate from alternate sources, since a) as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a direct reference in a contemporaneous manuscript, and b) it likely wouldn’t fit the needs of arms on a small shield.

The key thing about adapting art for arms is that they were created for identification quickly, from far away or small. It is a logo. So the principles of good logo design—contrast of color, line, form—will stand you in good stead for inventing arms. Fortunately, contrast of color is built into the heraldic framework, while easy identification of form is implicit.

Well-designed coins need the same thing; even if you don’t know what the symbols mean, you should still be able to visually disambiguate the shapes from one another. This use of visual shorthand is what makes coins successful instruments of propaganda.

So I stretched back in time and looked to coins.

There is a coin with a phoenix—Roman, from the 4th century—but doesn’t do what our heraldic conception of a phoenix needs it to do. (Honestly, it looks more like a victorious chicken, which would be a fantastic band name.) Instead, I assembled a bird based on those from an assemblage of Celtic coins, since that’s the region our Irish manuscript style grew from.

The dots at the joints is a classic motif of animals on their coins, and the crest on its head is a nod to common heraldic examples. The line of its body, its upswept wings, its beak, all are derived from coin design. The result is a simple iconography which communicates “phoenix” without clashing too horribly with the overall style of the scroll.

opportunity

Every time I use these references I learn something new. This time I learned that a prominent art historian called the initial style “knotted-wire”, which not only offers a useful handle for talking about them, but also helps me see their nuances. And I got a chance to delve further into the historiography of Insular art, then follow it down the rabbit hole of Scandinavian/Viking influence, which I suspect will bear greater fruit down the road.

Ailis, congratulations. I was delighted to make this scroll for you, and I hope it makes you feel seen. Thanks for the opportunity.

notes

1. In fact, there are such holes in the record that Françoise Henry mentions that “By a strange chance the only manuscripts which have come down to us from the tenth and early eleventh-century period are all psalters, while no psalters of the eighth and ninth centuries have survived.” If more manuscripts have been discovered since 1967, that remains for me to discover in my future. Françoise Henry, Irish Art During the Viking Invasions (800-1020 A.D.) (York: Cornell University Press, 1967) 105. ︎
2. Michelle Brown, Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture (The Bodleian Library, 2016), 154. ︎
3. J. J. G. (Jonathan James Graham) Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century / by J. J. G. Alexander., Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles ; v. 1 (London: H. Miller, 1978), 89. ︎
4. Henry’s “Remarks” contains notes about about her efforts to access adequate images of the remains of the manuscript, some of which were included in her paper. Ironically, because of the recent hacking of the British Museum’s website, her hard-sought images were all I had to go on, too. Françoise Henry, “Remarks on the Decoration of Three Irish Psalters,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 61 (1960): 23. ︎
5. Henry, “Remarks”, 40. ︎
6. Henry, “Remarks,” 33. ︎
7. Henry, Irish Art, 108. ︎
8. Henry, “Remarks,” 33. ︎
9. Carol A. Farr, “Red-Handed in the Barberini Gospels: The Rubricator Did It,” in Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception, ed. Cynthia Thickpenny et al., (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020), 5. ︎
10. “Ringerike Style | British Museum,” accessed February 20, 2024, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/x95686. ︎
11. S H. Fuglesang, Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style: a Phase of 11th Century Scandinavian Art (Odense: Odense University Press, 1980), 52–54. ︎
12. Fuglesang, Some Aspects, 70–72, 75. ︎
13. Lee Boltin et al., Treasures of Early Irish Art 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. from the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin : Exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art [et al. 1977-1978], (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, 1977) 146. ︎
14. Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Writing in Tongues: Mixed Scripts and Style in Insular Art,” in Insular & Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, ed. Colum Hourihane, (Princeton N.J. University Park Pa: Index of Christian Art Dept. of Art and Archeology Princeton University ; in association with the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011) 93–108. ︎
15. Tilghman, “Tongues,” 98. ︎
16. Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process, and the Creation of Meaning in the Lindisfarne Gospels,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 24, no. 1 (March 2017): 10, https://doi.org/10.1086/693796. ︎
17. Carl Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting : Book Illumination in the British Isles 600-800 (New York: G. Braziller New York, 1977) 16. ︎
18. Nordenfalk, Painting, 52. ︎
19. In a lecture on the materiality of the Medieval book, Michelle Brown mentioned that up until the 12th century, even scribes on the continent who were nevertheless working in the Irish tradition would send away to Ireland for Irish-style vellum, in part due to its particular qualities such as these. Michelle Brown, “The Medieval Book,” London Rare Books School short course, Zoom, 6 March, 2024. ︎
20. Brown, “Medieval Book”, 2024. ︎
21. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, 89. ︎
22. Cheryl A. Porter, “You Can’t Tell a Pigment By its Color,” in Making The Medieval Book: Techniques of Production. Proceedings of the 4th Conference of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500 (Oxford, July 1992), ed. Linda L. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills, Calif. : Anderson-Lovelace ; London : Red Gull Press, 1995), 111–116. ︎
23. H. Pulliam, “Eyes of Light: Colour in the Lindisfarne Gospels,” in Newcastle and Northumberland: Roman and Medieval Architecture and Art vol. 36, BAA Conference Transactions_, ed. J Ashbee & DJ Luxford (Maney Publishing, 2013) 55. ︎
24. Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels : Society Spirituality and the Scribe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 281. ︎
25. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels, 280. ︎
26. Michelle Brown, Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture (The Bodleian Library, 2016) 75. Referencing MacLean, D., 1995b, “The Status of the Sculptor in Old Irish Law and the Evidence of the Grosses, Fertia 9, pp. 125-55. ︎
27. Brown, _Islands,_ 43. ︎

bibliography and further reading

Alexander, J. J. G. (Jonathan James Graham). Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century / by J. J. G. Alexander. Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles ; v. 1. London: H. Miller, 1978.

Boltin, Lee, Polly Cone, National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, and Trinity College (Dublin). Treasures of Early Irish Art 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. from the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin : Exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art [et al. 1977-1978]. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, 1977.

Brown, Michelle. Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture. The Bodleian Library, 2016.

Brown, Michelle P. The Lindisfarne Gospels : Society Spirituality and the Scribe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Brown, Michelle. “The Medieval Book.” London Rare Books School short course. (Zoom, 6 March, 2024).

Farr, Carol A. “Red-Handed in the Barberini Gospels: The Rubricator Did It,” in Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception, ed. Cynthia Thickpenny, Katherine Forsyth, Jane Geddes, and Kate Mathis, 3–12. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020.

Fuglesang, S H. Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style: a Phase of 11th Century Scandinavian Art. Odense: Odense University Press, 1980.

Henry, Françoise. Irish Art During the Viking Invasions (800-1020 A.D.). New York: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Henry, Françoise. “Remarks on the Decoration of Three Irish Psalters.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 61 (1960): 23–40.

Kershaw, Jane. “Viking-Age Scandinavian Art Styles and Their Appearance in the British Isles. Part 2: Late Viking-Age Art Styles. Finds Research Group Datasheet (2011).” Accessed February 25, 2024. https://www.academia.edu/1078280/Viking_Age_Scandinavian_art_styles_and_their_appearance_in_the_British_Isles_Part_2_Late_Viking_Age_art_styles_Finds_Research_Group_Datasheet_2011_.

Nordenfalk, Carl. Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting : Book Illumination in the British Isles 600-800. New York: G. Braziller New York, 1977.

Porter, C A., “You Can’t Tell a Pigment By its Color.” In Making The Medieval Book: Techniques of Production. Proceedings of the 4th Conference of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500 (Oxford, July 1992), edited by Linda L. Brownrigg, 111–116. Los Altos Hills : Anderson – Lovelace, The Red Gull Press, 1995.

Pulliam, H. “Eyes of Light: Colour in the Lindisfarne Gospels.” In Newcastle and Northumberland: Roman and Medieval Architecture and Art vol. 36, BAA Conference Transactions_ edited by J Ashbee & DJ Luxford, 54–72. Maney Publishing, 2013.

Tilghman, Benjamin C. “Pattern, Process, and the Creation of Meaning in the Lindisfarne Gospels.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 24, no. 1 (March 2017): 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1086/693796.

Tilghman, Benjamin C. “Writing in Tongues: Mixed Scripts and Style in Insular Art.” In Insular & Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, edited by Colum Hourihane, 94–108. Princeton N.J. University Park Pa: Index of Christian Art Dept. of Art and Archeology Princeton University; in association with the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

the needs of the design

Design is problem solving.

This piece had many distinct needs. It needed to:
• be produced in champlevé enamel
• portray a Pelican
• integrate laurel leaves
• represent a Scythian art style
• fit on a 2″ round blank
• coordinate with copper metal

I knew going in that Lanea really likes Scythian art. But Edgar would be creating a medallion using champlevé enameling, and the Scythian design sources I was looking at all were lost wax cast sculptures or chased/repoussé reliefs, which meant an change from three-dimensional to two-dimensional designs.

I needed to make some adjustments.

remediation

In their 2000 book “Remediation: Understanding New Media”, Bolter and Grusin argue that the term remediation describes “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another”¹. Rather than simply an extension of the word “remedy”—as in, bringing remedial studients up to scratch, or remediating a damaged ecosystem—their definition is one of medium as well as improvement. The DVD improved on the cassette tape; the MP3 improved on the DVD. Their remediation describes this process. (Further, there is a push-pull between the proliferation of the new media and its desire to both build upon and erase the fact of the previous incarnation, but that aspect is less relevant here.)

When I have heard the term crop up in discussions within the academic discipline of premodern art history, it’s been simply to describe the translation of an item, artwork, story (or something like that) from one form of media to another…improvement notwithstanding. When a book becomes a film, it has been remediated².

But.

When I use this term within an SCA context, I’m stretching even further beyond the definitions above, borrowing the terms Bolter and Grusin discuss to address the creative process as well as the experience of viewing. To my perspective and in my experience, SCAdian creative processes entangle the two as they remediate the artwork that came before—whether a matter of improvement, sources, intent, or a combination thereof. And they do so in three ways:

First, SCA works remediate by improvement. It can happen not only technologically (in minimizing danger, effort, etc), or materially (translating into a different medium for reasons including but not limited to cost, affordance, accessibility), but also structurally, because our context demands different things from our art—and sometimes very different things; a scroll is not a page from a book of hours—so we are required to change the previous work to suit us. The original is not fit for purposes. But our amendments make it so.

The second form of remediation is a matter of source.

In their book, Bolter and Grusin discuss three key theories. Remediation is one. Immediacy and hypermediacy are the others. Immediacy describes a viewer’s decreased awareness of the media (think of immersion), while hypermediacy describes a viewer’s active awareness of the media (think of an intentional frame/framework/veil between the viewer and the viewed)³. As creators, our art exists within that same paradigm; we have an unavoidable awareness of its orientation with regard to the past, even as (or whether) we use the item in the present.

This leads to us having a sort of double vision. When the artwork (or item) was made for the first time, its creator saw it with immediacy. They saw it once: that moment, at that time, in that context. They created the work using any number of known or unknown sources, and there are whole schools of research looking into the transmission of design and the evolution of style, but ultimately they were immersed in their own specific context of creation.

Which leads to our third form of remediation: intent.

They made their art/item to serve a purpose, whether that be sacred or fiscal or love or war. We may not know it (and some would say we can never know it; I’m reminded of a recent talk by Mary Beard in which she describes how the most frustrating but wonderful part of studying the Romans is that you will never, ever be able to put yourself perfectly into their perspective, but that gulf between us is what makes the study of them interesting⁴.) But when we make art, it’s never going to be the same intent. How could it? We are living right now, making art for the SCA. They…were not. Their intent was inextricably entangled with the immediacy of their artmaking. Ours is an attempted conversation with the art of the past, no matter if our final result is a gift or resource or contest entry or simple joy. This difference of intent will affect the artwork itself, often in multiple ways. Theirs was art. Ours is art about art. We’ve remediated by changing the direction of our intent.

so what?

So why this flight of philosophy?

It’s an interesting exploration, for one thing. Why do we make things? How do our activities in the SCA affect what and why we create? How does that relate backward to the past? How can our expectations be realistic? And obviously when I use the word remediation to discuss my process, I want folks not only to know what I mean by the term, but to have a broader understanding why I’m saying it.

But in a deeper sense, I borrow these terms because I hope they help me describe the layered and complex circumstances in which we find ourselves when we create within an SCA context. Absolute repetition is impossible. Our motivations matter. Even if our source is the past, it impacts the present. As such, I want to be acutely thoughtful about the nature of our work, with the hope that this awareness which might also aid us in being thoughtful about our impact in other trajectories, too.

in practice

In order to translate the reference art into an enamel medallion, I would need to collapse three-dimensional art into a fundamentally two-dimensional design. The design would be changed from the media of cast or chased/repoussé metal to the new media of champlevé enamel.

Remediation is “lossy”, however; when speech is converted to text, we lose audible cues such as intonation and volume. In this case it would be particularly so; any features we would have read in the depth are lost in the translation, which makes the placement of line even more important than it would have been originally.

The upside to this loss is the opened door to alternative interpretations. While a potential detriment for internet communication, in this case the freedom afforded by remediation allowed me to more easily integrate a version of the heraldic art required. If not for this translation, I could very well see it being more difficult to adapt.

scythian art

The Scythians were based on the northern shores of the Black Sea, from the seventh to about the third or second centuries BCE⁵.

Scythian art is fundamentally more abstract than realistic, so this medallion didn’t need to tell a tale of truth. Instead, I could consider the legibility of my intention (pelican, laurel leaves) and the overall aesthetics created by shape and line.

reading symbolism

A lot of the legibility is due to color and our heraldic understanding.

One of the reasons heraldry even exists was to quickly convey information, and this is one circumstance where heraldic frameworks are helpful—even if they’re out of period for our current art style. I could integrate the white body and yellow legs, and in this context could be reasonably confident it would read as a heraldic pelican.

I was also confident she wouldn’t mind if I dispensed with another diagnostic heraldic detail, however: the symbolism of bloodying her own breast in service. It neither suited the Scythian (read: non-Christian) source of the design nor Lanea herself.

Instead, I relocated the red into the pelican’s eye, which served as a bright focal point and a gem-like substitute for other materials. (Also it’s a little creepy. Which is a decided asset.)

cultural communication

The bedrock of Scythian territory lay north of the Black Sea, largely across what is now Ukraine. But we think their ancestral homeland was further east in the Altai Mountains, that Central Asian nexus of mountain, forest, and steppe which (much) later produced the Huns and the Mongols. They carried this cultural connection when they migrated westward⁷.

So when we look at their art in our target period of around the 6th–2nd centuries BCE, we see the ways in which many elements of its style were shared across the Eurasian continent: a demonstration of one way in which culture has been transcending political boundaries for thousands of years.

Take the coiled pose of our pelican.

Our pelican (and its foot) were inspired by the late 6th century BCE horse bridle ornament at left, found in Simferopol, Crimea (representing a Black Sea source). See also the 7th–6th century BCE coiled cat bridle ornament from the Tuvan republic (at middle, representing a Central Asian source), and this extremely similar coiled wolf from Northwest China, 5th-4th century BCE (at right, representing our East Asian source). Its pose was originally East Asian, then spread west to Central Asia and beyond¹¹. The coiled animal iconography ties the continent together.

For another example of shared iconography, compare the 1400–700 BCE Mongolian deerstone (at left) with this 4th century BCE pole finial buried in Pokrov, Ukraine (at right)¹².

The voluminous volutes (that is to say, spirals) that form the recumbent animal’s antlers draw a handy line across the continent.

In the 1999 exhibit catalog Scythian Gold, Esther Jacobson writes, “The recumbent deer, the crouched or coiled feline, and the bird or bird head compose what may be called the archaic triad of Scythian imagery”¹⁴. To this list, and especially for this two-dimensional purpose, I add the volute. Sometimes they form the terminals of appendages, sometimes they define a shoulder or a jaw (or both, as in the pole finial above), but they are frequent, and in spite of the lack of space I felt I really needed one. Fortunately the foot was right there, ready to bear my spiral and provide a counterpoint for the radial eye.

All of which is to say: being able to combine the coiled animal, the bird head (even if I made the decision to keep its beak straight rather than make it coiled, therefore keeping it from looking too much like a raptor), and a volute were all helpful for representing the Scythian style.

focal point

One aspect of Scythian style I was confident would work well in enamel was the striated, textural, rhythmic border of repeated lines.

These bridle ornaments at right are from the 4th century BCE, made in either Ukraine or Bulgaria, during either the Scythian or Thracian periods. The style can be seen repeatedly across both, a commonality not only understandable based on what we’ve already seen from art spanning Eurasia, but because they both take their places around the perimeter of the Black Sea¹⁵.

See also the borders on these harness ornaments from Bulgaria, in the Thracian period, below left and center.

The style is clearly the source of our eye. Radially engraved lines spread from a circular center, creating a compelling wide-eyed stare. (Don’t cross this bird.) Placed along the center line below the bail its treatment is intended to provide a focal point, and as you can tell even from a quick glance over these assemblage of artifacts, it provides a visual thesis statement for the style of the piece.

contours

The sideways eagle on the left side this quiver cover provides an ideal demonstration of what a bird should look like in this style. The two blocks of wing feathers and tail are divided by evenly-spaced inscribed lines, each of which follows the direction of the wing (or tail), and the ends of each feather are vaguely blunted.

Early on, I decided that due to the nature of the medium, in order for it to be produceable—and readable—I would need to compromise with the design of the feathers by limiting their number. Fortunately the final design still creates a similar clean and abstract look, and I’d rather have fewer than none at all.

being green

While laurel leaves are mostly self-explanatory and have their own heraldic standard, I could still reference two items: this 2nd–2st century BCE openwork belt plaque from Ningxia, and this 3rd–2nd century BCE belt plaque housed in the State Hermitage Museum. The former is a Xiongnu burial object, and its stylistic relationship to a belt plaque from Western Siberia suggests a western genesis of the Xiongnu, which furthers the narrative of a cross-Eurasian stylistic milieu²⁰.

strung out

Lanea requested that the necklace integrate with this torc—made by Roibeard mac Neill—in part because her usual style is firmly Celtic. Considerations included not only aesthetics, but also the logistics of placing it on her during the ceremony.

It would have been too unwieldy (or borderline impossible) to place the whole thing on her at once, so a two part, modular approach seemed most realistic. I decided that the easiest way to do that is to add hooks on the ends, reasoning that either she can be wearing the torc already at the beginning of the ceremony, and the necklace could be attached, or that the whole shebang can be presented and placed upon her at the necessary time. I owe Aelia Suphunibal SO many thanks for rushing me some wirework findings, saving me the wrangling and enabling me to ship the necklace with plenty of time to spare.

For the beadwork itself, my references only showed me modernly-strung options, but I knew I that needed to integrate the copper of the medallion with the silver of the torc alongside the colors of the enamel, and it needed to blend in spirit with the Celticness of her style, so I decided to just dive in with an assemblage that looked good and used likely beads (from my existing knowledge of ancient bead types, including below). I knew the necklaces she tends to make and wear are symmetrical, so I strung it symmetrically as well.

At left is a modern restringing of beads from many 6th–4th century BCE Scythian find spots, made from many materials including glass paste, onyx, agate, carnelian, bone, Baltic amber, sard, sardonyx. chalcedony, with one carnelian carved with honeycomb pattern and inlaid with white.

Lanea’s new necklace is a mix of glass (eye beads! stripes! melons!), butter amber, bone, shell, and metal, including a phalanx of copper amulets which she can attach things to if and when she wants to. I think it represents a decent span of place and time, exactly the way it was intended.

and finally

I am grateful to Edgar, not only for working with me on this extremely fun project, but for being willing to put a bail on the back, allowing me to design for the entire medallion surface without having to leave room for a hole. (With the leaves, it would have been…tricky.) Thanks to Sinn, for throwing in her lot in the medallion maker mines. And once again, thank you to Suphunibal for the gorgeous hooks. (She’s so good.)

It takes a village to decorate a Pelican.

And on that note, it only remains for me to express my delight that Lanea is being honored in this way. She works SO hard, and I’m incredibly glad that people have seen her for it. Congratulations, friend.

notes

[1] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 59.

[2] Ramey, among others. Lynn Ramey, “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and New Media in The Secret of Kells (Moore 2009),” Medieval Perspectives, January 2014: 2, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282909026_Immediacy_Hypermediacy_and_New_Media_in_The_Secret_of_Kells_Moore_2009.

[3] Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5–15.

[4] Mary Beard, “What Can We Learn from the Classics: A Piece of Cake,” filmed April 20, 2023 for Berlin Family Lectures, University of Chicago, video, 1:07:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syBsHD9fiAY.

[5] Ellen D. Reeder, Scythian Gold (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.1999), 23.

[6] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 164.

[7] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 37.

[8] Emma C. Bunker, Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), 24.

[9] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 25.

[10] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 45.

[11] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 24.

[12] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 140, 142.

[13] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 142.

[14] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 61.

[15] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 46–47, 49.

[16] Bunker, Nomadic Art,49.

[17] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 46.

[18] Bunker, Nomadic Art,47.

[19] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 160.

[20] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 31.

[21] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 33.

[22] Bunker, Nomadic Art, 32.

[23] Reeder, Scythian Gold, 170.

bibliography

Aruz, Joan and Ann Farkas, Elisabetta Valtz Fino, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Golden Deer of Eurasia; Perspectives on the Steppe Nomads of the Ancient World. New York, New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2006.

Bolter, J.D., and R. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.

Bunker, Emma C., Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002.

Ramey, Lynn. “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and New Media in The Secret of Kells (Moore 2009).” Medieval Perspectives, January 2014, 109–20. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282909026_Immediacy_Hypermediacy_and_New_Media_in_The_Secret_of_Kells_Moore_2009.

Reeder, Ellen D. Scythian Gold. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated,1999.

Well-come all in | and be warmed by the wisdom
of Anubh Na Preachain. | Let Pearls now anoint
her heart and hearth, | heralding the skill
of this coin-reader, | curiosity-currier,
tree-wearer, | weaving tapes and tales.
The egg nurtures knowledge.

Let word-fame fly her | this fourth of March
into Pearl’s Order, | granting personal arms
as the 57th winter | of our society wanes.
So say Abran and Anya, | most august of monarchs
where Atlantia salutes | its science and art.

when is a hat not a hat?

It is always a twofold blessing/challenge to create a scroll for a persona when and where there is no written culture to emulate. It requires creativity, knowledge of many techniques, flexibility, and understanding of a myriad of materials.

But if not making a page-based scroll, it is also not always appropriate—or desired, whether on behalf of maker or recipient—to create a whole-ass object either.

A scroll is foremost a gift, so while I wanted to create a scroll object, I knew Anubh would appreciate something low maintenance, nothing that needed dusting. Therefore I needed to keep the entire thing flat enough to be framed behind glass.

Anubh has done a magnificent job researching, experimenting with, and creating Iron Age birch bark hats, and I wanted to celebrate them. But I needed to do it…flatly. So instead of an actual hat, I began with a circle, echoing the appearance of a hat from above. A reference to a hat, rather than a hat itself.

Because this scroll replicates neither a manuscript nor an exact artifact, it was even more important that it have a “resonance of the spirit”, as it were. Resonance with the place and time period, and resonance with the recipient. And that started with the materials.

material culture

The circle is made of birch bark, flattened in the manner described in her research, with a few amendments for my specific workspace situation and resources.

(Have I since bought a garment steamer? Yes. Did I have one for this project? No. Did I wish I did? Many times. )

I used bronze wire to bind the edge instead of the cane she used, a substitution made to add a little bit of bling. Then the whole shebang was attached to the backing board using artificial sinew with the double needle technique I often use in leatherworking, reasoning that it would provide the required stability and even pull for which I use it with leather.

who’s the boss

Her OP entry listed no registered heraldry, which left me open to other personal iconography within the design.

The heraldic oyster shell wouldn’t come into being for centuries. As I learned in the research for Runa’s Pearl, the only native British oyster is Ostrea edulis, or the European flat oyster, therefore its natural shapes roughly dictate what was appropriate for a shell at this time. (Understanding, of course, that this was a period of widespread abstraction in art, so I had a little leeway.)

In addition, Anubh means “the egg” in Gaelic, and she has a tattoo and personal sigil representing a spiral-graced egg. This provided a perfect jumping off point; there is a lot of visual overlap between her sigil and a representation of an European flat oyster with a pearl, both in the outer shape and the inner ridges of detail.

Between the organic topography of the birch bark, the constraints of the (ornery, recalcitrant, and stubborn) clay, and the overarching need to keep the scroll as framable as possible, there were considerable design restrictions. So in lieu of the classic concave shell I chose to try carving downward—in effect making a gently domed egg-shaped and shell-like boss for the center of the circle.

But what to carve?

plastic style

The Plastic Style is a classification of La Tène art typified by high relief. When Jacobsthal first described the style in 1944, he highlighted how it elides the distinction between the ornament and the object. “Cut off the spirals and you cut into the flesh.”¹ Not simply laid overtop, the decoration is the item.

I consulted a number of Plastic Style artifacts in the design of this boss. The linchpin seen below at left seemed a particularly good reference, not only for its lentoid shape but for its shell-like, curvilinear decoration. The same treatment of the main three dimensional spiral—the spiral that looks like it would be a fun slide at a water park—can also be found on the Bulgarian chariot fitting seen at middle.

In addition, the guide ring gave me direction for the way to integrate the pearl, as did the Stanhope Armlet (at right). The latter in particular seems to form the shape of an eye…a visual riddle, so frequent in La Tène art.

masks

One of the wonderful things about La Tène art is its frequent sense of play, which often comes in the form of hidden—and abstract—beasts or faces.

The lentoid (or almond shaped) element on this guide ring looks like an eye, because it is an eye. If we flip it ninety decrees clockwise, we can trace a stylish half of a face with a slicked-back hairstyle.

And again, the same can be done with the chariot fitting shown above. Flip it upside down, and it’s clearly some sort of video game Princess Lea. She’s even got nostrils.

A sense of play within a design is a motif which carries forward for centuries to come. It’s this sense of play, this a doubled meaning, that made me aim to represent both Anubh’s egg and an oyster shell at the same time.

This was my first time trying to sculpt anything in the Plastic Style, let alone in this particular clay, and it won’t be the last. I look forward to refining the technique to explore more design possibilities

spirit through color

Blue, birch, and gold.

Woad blue seemed an obvious choice (although done in gouache, not woad). And the jeweler’s bronze wire looks more golden than the reddish bronze more typical of the metalwork of the period, so the boss needed to look like more like gold.

Alongside the main elements—golden wire, bark, blue letters—I also added gold dots to set off the names, taking a cue from the “dotted contours” which highlight initials and details in Insular manuscripts made several hundred years later. This decoration, this bright highlight, underscores how people are the most important elements of the award.

the words

As discussed in my writeup of Lanea’s Opal, we don’t have an accurate system of writing for this place and time. We could steal one from a different culture, but that would really not be in the correct spirit. So once again I used transliterated Ogham; it’s a few centuries too late for La Tène, but the spirit is truer.

The words themselves are loosely inspired by Old English poetry, both because I know she really likes using alliteration in her work and also because it’s a well-documented verse form which suits itself well to the sort of declarative and alliterative feel I wanted. (Since we don’t have accurate poetry to reference, I could have entirely invented the form, but I preferred some guide rails. Even if they’re not from the exact place and time.)

Using a riddle also gave me a chance to weave in some wordplay alongside the more serious job of telling who-what-when-where-why; the sense of play in Plastic Style art seems a cousin to the sense of play in Old English riddles. “Tree-wearer” refers to her birchbark hats, “weaving tapes and tales” refers to her belts and her bardic work.

“The egg nurtures knowledge” specifically reminded me of self-contained half lines like the one which begins riddle 47 from the Exeter book:

Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.

A moth ate words. That seemed to me
a curious happening, when I heard about that wonder,
that the worm, a thief in the darkness, swallowed
a certain man’s song, a glory-fast speech
and its strong foundation. The stealing guest was not
at all the wiser for that, for those words which he swallowed.

The introductory phrase, “moððe word fræt” translates to “a moth ate words” The brevity and of the statement, placed as it is among a sea of long phrases and clauses, make it feel intentionally clear, forceful, and important. “The egg nurtures knowledge”.

In our case, its placement at the end of a verse about her work makes it into a conclusion: Anubh’s teaching is woven throughout her work.

I was delighted to create this art for Anubh, and celebrate that she is now in the Order of the Pearl. Those of us who have been privileged to know her for decades, who have been witness to her passion for creativity, her skill at storytelling, and her facility with teaching, can only be chuffed to bits that finally others are seeing it all, too.

further reading

Cone, Polly. Treasures of Early Irish Art: 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977. Published following the travelling exhibition of the same name.

Farley, Julia and Fraser Hunter, eds. Celts, art and identity. London: The British Museum Press, 2015.

Harding, Dennis. The Archaeology of Celtic Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.

¹Jacobsthal, P. Early Celtic Art. v. 1. Clarendon Press, 1944.

Kruta, Vinceslas. Celts: History and Civilization. London: Hatchette Illustrated UK, 2005.

Megaw, Ruth and Vincent Megaw. Celtic Art. New York: Thames and Hudson Inc, 1989 and 2001.

Zaczek, Iain. The Art of the Celts. London: Parkgate Books Ltd, 1997.

Scroll for Kolfinna Valravn’s Laurel elevation. Wordified by Iselda de Narbonne and Ishmael Stedfast Reed, concept, design, and art by me.

Now buckle up your scroll wheel, this is a big boi.

•12″x36″
•Noodler’s Black ink
•Private Reserve “Sherwood” ink
•General’s white charcoal
•Strathmore Toned Tan 80lb paper
•countless episodes of Ted Lasso, on a loop

introduction

A scroll is, at its heart, a gift.

It’s my firm belief that there’s an art to gift-giving. One of my pure joys is to give a gift which acknowledges the soul of the recipient: who they are as a person, the feeling of them, the spirit I witness, the gist of our conversations. I love to capture that essence, and make them feel seen.

When it comes to scrolls, I relish the challenge as an artist to give a gift which captures who they are, while also celebrating their accomplishments and mastery.

Others have seen Kolfinna’s art. I wanted to produce a piece which sees her as a person, too.

the concept

The advantage to making a scroll for someone I’m good friends with is all the insider knowledge.

When I set to planning out this piece, I had a lot of details in my pocket. From previous conversations I knew she liked:

• gothic cathedrals
• the Cologna cathedral in particular
• the knobbly bits (crockets) on cathedrals
• monstrances
• skulls
• bats

I also knew she would be delighted by a concept which meandered off the well-trod path.

The theme for her elevation was the danse macabre, and so almost from the very first time she and I started our “theoretical Laurel scroll” discussions ages ago, I knew that I would be combining as many features from above, and adding in some skelly friends.

And thereby hangs a tale.

churchy

Kolfinna had at some point told me that her favorite cathedral is the Cologne Cathedral. We’d talked about her affinity for the proportions of Gothic architecture, as well as all the knobbly bits (by which I mean the crockets¹. Which is a humorous word in itself, but “knobbly bits” is even funnier), so those were features I needed to include.

I hadn’t heard of a monstrance before Kolfinna had sent me a link to a few, so I began researching. Immediately I was struck by how often they looked like cathedrals on stems, which made my overall mission clear.

To create the cathedral, I worked both from an engraving from 1911 as well as a photo from its wikipedia page. Both I simply snagged from the Cathedral’s Wikipedia page, but although that made the images low-hanging fruit (so to speak), they were still sufficient for my purpose:

Cologne Cathedral is 515 feet tall².

The scroll is three feet tall.

I would need…some edits.

(To say the least.)

So I began by creating a simplified representation, rather than a rendering.

My result is a curation of a cathedral. I planned carefully what to include and what to leave out, and did so at scale so it looked right at actual size.

In this early version of the scroll at left, the layout had text spaces stacked on top of each other. The spaces for the host became bubbles in which to house the text, and while the iteration of form was visually interesting, it wasn’t especially practical; I needed a lot more room for writing.

And because the empty space within the cathedral was essentially finite, it would be easier to make more space below.

supportive work

Monstrances were first created in the 13th century to house the consecrated host for display and during liturgical processions³. Once we (Ishmael and Iselda, who were writing the text, and I) decided I needed more space for text, the stem of the monstrance needed to play a larger part. But neither of my preferred objects would work on it’s own; I needed to combine two.

First, the ca. 1450 monstrance at left from Cologne, Germany provided the literal and figurative support. The clean lines of its stem allowed me the space and clean lines around which I could set all the text. It also offered me some natural settings for green gems, tying the architecture of the monstrance to the green of her arms.

And then the monstrance of the Santa Maria de Belém (Bethleham) gave me a graceful connection with the cathedral. A Dance Macabre would fit easily into the space where enamel figures originally danced, and from there on up the rest of the cathedral could flow.

The second monstrance also provided a space for a motto, more of which I’ll discuss later.

lawks what style

In one of her Pinterest boards, Kolfinna had linked to the engraving of a monstrance at the National Gallery of Art (left-most photo), which referenced a “Master W with the key”⁴. A bit of research found an engraving made by this same master printmaker of a Gothic canopy created as a demonstration for clients or students, seen at right⁵.

The concept of a demo sketch was immediately intriguing. Called a “modello”, to borrow from the Italian (not without some (entertaining) previous controversy about the term; feel free to get a handful of popcorn and read this review response⁶), these demo sketches provided clients or patrons or craftsmen the information either to put an item into production, or to communicate what the artist had in mind for a finished piece.

And so around 1495–1500, well-known German artist Albrecht Dürer created just such a modello⁷.

Below is his sketch of a table fountain, likely created as instruction for his father-in-law to produce it. Because it was neither a painting nor a study nor a prep drawing, its job was to convey information, which means—among other cues like color to indicate gilding and water flow—there are measurement lines on the reverse of the paper. (This has a certain resonance with her writ⁸. Flarms!)

Making a modello for Kolfinna’s scroll functioned as a wonderful metaphor: a reference to all the planning that goes on in the background to create a piece of art, and in a larger sense a model that represents the sheer amount of learning, practice, experimentation, and hard work that has gone on before we see a finished piece. I am reminded of a word that gets thrown around a lot in reference to skilled artists: talent. The concept of “talent” undermines that work, and makes opaque all that has gone into the art and artist before we see the final glorious product. As another artist who comes to the SCA with a lifetime of training behind them, I’m intensely aware of how what folks are witnessing is the now, and it’s not always easy to remember all the effort that has come before. This piece is a concrete nod to work.

Which is to say: I really liked the idea of, rather than a finished painting, creating a piece that witnesses the effort that leads into this achievement.

Dürer’s modello is in pen and brown ink, with added watercolor, touched with red chalk. But over the years he also worked up studies with other materials. Because Kolfinna’s elevation theme would ask skeletons of us, I knew going in that whatever materials I used for this scroll, I’d have to plan it so that our dancing friends wouldn’t be lost in the chaos. Fortunately, there were options.

In 1506, Durer created the study of hands at left, in ink and white chalk on toned paper.⁹ Less famous than his later study of praying hands¹⁰ (on blue toned paper at right), this work grabbed me for its contrast and clarity. If I was going to be modeling such a detailed—and potentially chaotic—form as a cathedral on top of a structured form of a monstrance’s stem, I was really going to need the information that deep contrast provides.

Dürer was a printmaker,¹¹ which no doubt contributed to his markmaking style. And in the particular nature of artist lineages, those who studied with them and those who followed after tended toward the same style. The piece at left, by his student Hans Baldung Grien,¹² has a similar printmaking-esque linework even if done in other materials. And the piece at right, by an anonymous artist after Grien,¹³ does the same thing.

But other artists rendering at this time had other styles.

These studies (top, left) by an anonymous German artist in 1450–1460¹⁴ used pen and washes, highlighted with white, on prepared paper, and their linework is smooth and simple. In 1506, Albrecht Altdorfer drew Samson and Delilah¹⁵ (top, right) with many fine strokes, some shaping the form in a similar way to Dürer, but with far, far less structure. (The handling of light reminds me of the 10th century’s Benedictional of St Æthelwold,¹⁶ actually, (bottom, right) and the way white becomes a more of a method of highlighting contour than a way of depicting how the light is falling. And working in 1492, the Primary Master of the Strassburg Chronicle created the portrait of the Duke of Austria¹⁷ (bottom, left), and they used whatever linework they thought would get the job done. I studied the work of Dürer’s contemporaries for a commonality of pen and ink technique—for instance, direction of stroke, combinations, evenness—but there was great variety, so I felt confident to simply use my own style. (A distinct pleasure.)

There is so much detail in the cathedral, instinct (rooted in experience) told me that that ink washes would be the best way to develop the depth, and sculpt the fall of light with literal fluidity. It also allowed a freedom of line that I felt added some spirit into what could have seemed a very technical drawing, as seen in this ca. 1470–1475 mix of line and wash from the Paduan school of either Maso Finiguerra or Baccio Baldini.¹⁸

It was also not uncommon to use washes to help add shape and guide the eye of the patron, as discussed by Ainsworth in the discussion of the function of chiaroscuro underdrawings as preparatory work, or to help explicated future work to patrons¹⁹. The depth of contrast gives striking form to the figures, very important for giving this scroll a visual shape from far away, even as the detail would give it life when close up.

The contrast was heightened by the use of white chalk, as seen above in various pieces as a method of shaping figures. In addition, the chalk helped the skeletons pop from the background; important, when the Danse Macabre was such an key ingredient to Kolfinna’s elevation.

you can dance if you want to

Both the Danse Macabre and Memento Mori bloomed as a reaction to the tumult of the 14th–15th centuries.²⁰ There’s an accessible introduction to the Danse Macabre here at Atlas Obscura, but suffice it to say that the imagery of the dancing skeletons, the reminder of mortality inherent in the Memento Mori philosophy, and then the Northern European fascination with the vanitas style of artwork which developed just after the period of this scroll (example at left) are all related in tone and intent:

Be cognizant of your mortality.

The version of the Danse Macabre used in this scroll features the wood engravings done (possibly by Pierre La Rouge²¹) for Guy Marchant’s play The Dance of Death. Originally printed in 1485, the play went through several versions, with additions including a version specifically for women (included here), and more with additional art. Many examples still exist, but for these illustrations I consulted the 1486 codex entitled “Miroir salutaire. La Danse macabre historiée. Les Trois morts et les trois vifs. La Danse macabre des femmes. Le Débat du corps et de l’âme. La Complainte de l’âme damnée” (BnF RES-YE-189).²²

Find more about this text, including links to other copies, modern translations, and a bibliography for further reading at The Medieval Literature Archive (ARLIMA).

words, words, words

Very few things carry the feel of a design as efficiently as its script.

While the later-time-period verses Iselda and Ishmael wrote were inspired by a manuscript from the middle of the 15th century in Austria, making it an appropriate time and place for the artwork, the script in that manuscript (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library) Codex 2777, top right) was rounded.²⁴ Consequently the words looked a bit too friendly—especially true when contrasted with the pointier and sharper script of Add MS 35290 (bottom right),²⁵ a late 15th century–16th century version of the York Mystery Plays, a manuscript with which I was already familiar and therefore knew would fit so much better with the Gothic cathedral being built above the text. You can see how the construction of many of the letterforms is similar, but the York manuscript is crisper, more upright, less joined-up, and somehow both sleeker and more angular. I needed the script to help tie the lower half of the scroll with the upper, so the York manuscript was elected.

And having decided to use Add MS 35290, I needed a streamlined way to consult the script as I worked.

Enter Tropy.

Tropy is a new app for researchers,²⁶ an open-source project between a group of historians and developers, a collaboration of multiple institutions. I recently attended an introductory walkthrough with one of its creators through the University of London, and it’s since become an invaluable resource for my art history research and art practice alike. Rather than trying to look through a folder of screenshots all at once, or needing to create a separate document into which I had to place every single writing sample I wanted to look at, instead I only needed to create a project in Tropy and let the app display it all for me at once. Pen in hand, award scroll on one side, laptop scroll on the other. (This isn’t a commercial; I just really appreciate good technological aids for our modern practices. If you’re interested, feel free to ask me about it.)

At right is a waterfall within the Tropy app of a collection of words pulled from Add MS 35290, from which I could assemble my letterforms. As you might be able to see, there is variation even within from word to word, never mind from scribe to scribe.

So I chose the letterforms which worked better for my particular hand, all the while hoping to maintain the spiky feel I was aiming for.

Another consideration was color. Her device consists of white and green, and while the white would be carried up throughout the artwork, I didn’t want the green to be localized either. So I took a cue from the rubrication of both Add MS 35290 and Cod. 2777, but replaced the red ink with green. (Making it…verdination, rather than rubrication? No? I’ll keep workshopping it.)

inscription

Speaking of workshopping…

The base of the Bethlehem Monstrance is inscribed with words, so I needed something fitting for our base. We needed something that would work as a summing-up of the scroll, Kolfinna’s elevation, and perhaps even her artistic philosophy. No pressure.

My Latin scholarship is so old it could drink. After some research with my old textbook, the internet, and a chatbot for the lulz, I was fortunate to gain the help of Latin scholar and teacher Andrixos Seljukroctonis. He kindly helped me with the translation I was looking for, including nuances I didn’t know enough to know. This inscription wouldn’t have been nearly as great without his insight.

Together we developed the phrase “ARTEM FACIAMUS, QUONIAM MOX MORIEMUR”, which means “let us make art, for soon we will die”.

Yes. Let’s.

a change of art

This method of construction felt perfectly contemporary.

To set the scene:

Down in Italy over the course of the Quattrocento (Italian 15th century), art was evolving. The nature of artistic production, an artists role, place, and individuality, the place of imagination… All were in flux.

Artists began the century with the social status of manual laborers. Craftspeople, rather than “creatives” in our modern definition. These makers might have been painters, but they might also have taken up other arts such as goldsmithing, sculpture, and architecture. Artists operated within workshops and/or guilds, and names were rarely noted.²⁷

Art was formal and codified, where iconography and symbolism were the mechanisms of idealism and spiritual meaning. Back in Ancient Greece, Plato had written that perspective was a form of deceit, and that philosophy continued to have impact even a millennium later.²⁸

But Europe was changing rapidly, and with religious, economic, and therefore societal shifts, the role of the artist shifted as well. Starting up north in the fifteenth century with Jan van Eyck, the personality and education of an artist allowed greater social mobility.²⁹ And down in Italy, Filippo Brunelleshi was first a goldsmith and sculptor, but then went on to become the foremost Renaissance architect. His friend Donatello (not the turtle) joined him on his journey and became a famous sculptor, also known by name.³⁰ Self-promotion eventually became not only available as a method of career advancement, but welcomed. In Northern Europe, Dürer, creator of our scroll’s modello, was a master of the self-promotional self-portrait (seen at right).³¹ Artists were signing their work. Artists were getting their own hype men, like famous patrons or artist-biographer Georgio Vasari. Artists were becoming artists, as we think of them today.

And this rise of individualism coincided with the development of humanism. Not to be confused with today’s secular humanism, Renaissance humanism was defined by looking toward the ancient world for examples of how to live and how to reconcile religion with the changing world, and in doing so reoriented the place of humans in the cosmos.³²

memesis

Into this changing landscape stepped (wrote?) Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo Da Vinci.

As part of the effort toward elevating the visual arts to the social level of poets, it was not uncommon for artists to write on the nature of art. And it’s in these writings where we can witness various redefinitions of vocabulary—sometimes convergent, sometimes contrasting, but all of them insights into the evolution of artistic thought in the first person. New definitions of imitation, invention, fantasy, genius, and talent were explored, as well as the nature of personal style.³³

We see that even once artists gained individualization after the Middle Ages, the goal still wasn’t individual creativity in the post-Romantic sense in which we conceive it now.³⁴ Instead, the goal was something they called memesis.

Memesis is an Ancient Greek word, used at first in ancient writings on philosophy and art to mean imitation.³⁵ But by this point in the 15th century, it had come to mean the imitation of nature, ancient Greece or Rome, or both.³⁶

This became a lodestone, an orienting principle to which all art should aspire. It led to the rising need for naturalism in art, was facilitated by new materials like oil paint, and was both driven and made easier by new techniques like the (re)discovery of perspective and proportion first explored in antiquity.

In this way, they were both looking backward, as well as aiming to improve upon preexisting work; picking up the torch from their forebears, and carrying it further. Which is where invenzione comes in.

invenzione

The Renaissance idea of invenzione (invention) was twofold.

One version held that invenzione was about concept, rather than form, and was limited to the choice of theme. For much of the 15th century invenzione was limited to poets, and only when visual artists had finally gained social status on their par were they too allowed this control. (Until then, the patrons were still in charge.)

But more notably for this scroll was the second definition, invenzione’s connection with the verb excogitare, meaning to discover and devise.³⁷

It might be easier to think of this definition as the “discovery of truth”. This sort of invenzione aligns the humanist perspective of the role of an artist, with the humanist perspective of the role of humanity itself.

The thought process held that God had, in creating humanity, instilled inherent abilities. For example, Dürer “was utterly committed to the view that there is a particular power planted in the true artist by the divine forces”³⁸ through which a person could become human. This latitude therefore extended to artists a further degree of innovation beyond the constraints of the Middle Ages, but with the core idea that it was humanity’s job to complete God’s creation.³⁹

And here is where memesis comes in: if the goal is to imitate nature or Antiquity—or better yet, to build upon either (or both)—then invenzione has to have guard rails.

The constraints of truth are those guard rails.

In practice, Renaissance scholars took Cicero’s statement that “Inventio est excogitatio rerum verarum aut verisimilium (invention is the discovery of things true or probable)” and applied it to subjects like art and architecture. For example, architects could use the proportions of the human body to devise rules about column measurements and declare them a natural harmony.⁴⁰

We might hold these two concepts in our minds at the same time: the idea that Antiquity/nature were places to build upon, and the idea that God had intended humanity to improve on creation, and we could understand implicitly how truth is the operative word here. The search for truth, its identification, its construction, its capture.

In practice, these constraints would be integral not only to the choice of topic, or the construction of the layout, but also the implementation of the artwork itself. (Which is why oil paint was so helpful; it helped artists depict nature with so much greater verisimilitude than egg tempera.) Different artists swallowed this pill to a greater or lesser extent, even over their lifetimes, trying to find the balance for themselves between imagination, style, and truth. Our friend Leonardo was no exception; he wrote about the usefulness of finding subject and form in random stains on the wall,⁴¹ which involved imagination, but at other points wrote about various techniques to ensure the artist is capturing absolute truth in their art, such as looking at one’s work in the mirror to help the brain spot errors. “Leonardo was just as concerned as Alberti that the painter avoid errors caused by working solely from his own judgment.”⁴²

This is relevant for us as makers in an SCA context.

His and Alberti’s concern was chiefly about flaws introduced in accuracy (of presenting nature, chiefly meaning laws of light, proportion, etc) caused by the over-reliance on personal whim or style—in other words, the recording of truth—but in an SCA context “truth” could be easily translated as “historical accuracy”. We will reasonably have other goals for our work, but this accuracy is often an important one. So while our aims (ours and Quattrocento artists) may not be precisely congruent, the intention for truth is the same.

But we are all making art, and each piece of art is made to act on the world differently.
It needs to speak to different audiences.
It needs to highlight different episodes.
It needs to urge different emotions.
It needs to herald different ideas.

So how did they balance the need for truth and the need to meet all these different goals? How do we?

semplici

I was inspired by the writings of Leonardo once again, with his efforts to reconcile the need to accomplish the goals of his art with the necessary guardrails that the need for truth creates. In his writings, repeatedly explored the concept that nature can create the building blocks, but we as humans can only make things from those building blocks, and our divinity stems from our ability to use those building blocks to create infinite forms.

I was inspired by the writings of Leonardo once again, with his efforts to reconcile the need to accomplish the goals of his art with the necessary guardrails that the need for truth creates. In his writings, he repeatedly explored the concept that nature can create the building blocks, but we as humans can only make things from those building blocks, and our divinity stems from our ability to use those building blocks to create infinite forms.

"Nature is concerned only with the production [produtione] of elementary things [semplici] but man from these elementary things (semplici] produces an infinite number of compounds, though he has no power to create (creare) any elementary thing except another like himself, that is his children."43

And further, Leonardo “…cites as an example of man’s inability to produce semplici the inevitable failure of alchemists to “create” gold; while as an instance of man’s ability to compose infinite things from the basic semplici he discusses the enormously diverse sounds and languages which arise from the combined actions of the lips, tongue and windpipe.”⁴⁴

Even beyond my usual inclination to serve the needs of a scroll by combining elements which balance both art history and art-in-practice, creating this piece in this particular way felt especially eloquent:

Like Leonardo’s elementary things, the historical building blocks of cathedral and monstrance combine into a new form, one which capitalizes on their separate resonant vocabularies to create a whole new verse.

the exquisite dance of experience

There came a point where I was getting closer and closer to finished, and had to be on my toes not to push it too far in the stretch for some undefinable perfection.

This piece was a labor of profound inspiration, a work of joy, and a celebration of the practice of art. Long may it remind Kolfinna of our love.

notes

[1] John Henry Parker, A Manual of Gothic Stonecarving (Corn-Market, Oxford: Messr. Parker, 1855), p61.

[2] “Cologne Cathedral,” Wikipedia, accessed February 13, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php title=Cologne_Cathedral&oldid=1144417390.

[3] “Monstrance | German,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed February 26, 2023, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/467485.

[4] “A Gothic Monstrance, c. 1480”, The National Gallery of Art, accessed December 10, 2023, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.3380.html.

[5] “Een gotisch baldakijn, Meester W met de Sleutel, ca. 1480 – ca. 1490.”, Rijksmuseum, accessed March 22, 2023, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-1097.

[6] Michael Hirst and Carmen Bambach Cappel, “A Note on the Word Modello,” The Art Bulletin 74, no. 1 (1992): 172–73.

[7] “Drawing | British Museum.”, The British Museum, accessed January 20, 2023, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_SL-5218-83.

[8] “Lady Jill Dýravörður – Scribal.” Accessed March 22, 2023, https://sites.google.com/view/jill-dyravorthur/scribal.

[9] “Study of Hands, 1506 – Albrecht Durer – WikiArt.Org.” Accessed February 22, 2023. https://www.wikiart.org/en/albrecht-durer/study-of-hands-1506. I’m usually reticent to link to a site like this, but since the artwork is in a private collection, my options are limited.

[10] “Zeichnung & Druckgrafik,” Albertina Museum Wien, accessed February 23, 2023, https://www.albertina.at/sammlungen/zeichnung-druckgrafik/. No direct link or collection page was easily found, so this is the Albertina’s “Drawing and Printmaking” collection.

[11] “Albrecht Dürer | British Museum.” The British Museum, accessed February 10, 2023, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG24299.

[12] “The Lamentation”, The National Gallery of Art, accessed January 21, 2023, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.73843.html.

[13] “The Virgin and St John, c. 1600”, The National Gallery of Art, accessed January 21, 2023,
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.53146.html.

[14] “Studies for Six Figures (sheet from a model book) [recto], c. 1450/1460”, The National Gallery of Art, accessed January 21, 2023, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.54194.html.

[15] “Albrecht Altdorfer | Samson and Delilah”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed January 21, 2023, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/334769.

[16] “The Benedictional of St Æthelwold,” British Library, accessed March 06, 2023, https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=add_ms_49598.

[17] “Maximilian, Duke of Austria, on Horseback, 1492”, The National Gallery of Art, accessed January 21, 2023, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.75812.html.

[18] “Album; Drawing | British Museum”, The British Museum, accessed January 22, 2023, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1889-0527-40.

[19] Maryan W. Ainsworth “Northern Renaissance Drawings and Underdrawings: A Proposed Method of Study.” Master Drawings 27, no. 1 (1989): 16.

[20] S. Oosterwijk, “Fro Paris to Inglond’? The danse macabre in text and image
in late-medieval England” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2009). For more about the Dance of Death, including the interplay between image and action, see Elina Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntynge: Performing the Dance of Death,” Studies in Iconography 27 (2006): 1–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23923692.

[21] “Dance of Death,” Library of Congress, accessed January 10, 2023, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667030/.

[22] “Miroir Salutaire. La Danse Macabre Historiée. Les Trois Morts et Les Trois Vifs. La Danse Macabre Des Femmes. Le Débat Du Corps et de l’âme. La Complainte de l’âme Damnée, 1486,” accessed December 26, 2022, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8615802z.

[23] “LA DANSE MACABRE,” The Medieval Literature Archive (ARLIMA), accessed March 07, 2023, https://https://arlima.net/no/995.

[24] “Sammelhandschrift Mit Geistlichen Und Weltlichen Liedern,” Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, accessed January 12, 2023. https://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_6671236.

[25] “York Mystery Plays,” British Library, accessed January 12, 2023, https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_35290.

[26] https://tropy.org/ Tropy not only helps you display by folder, but it lets you organize by tags, set a folder to automatically import, and more. Aside from looking at scripts, I also have an ongoing research project which I’ve just started using this app for, and I can tell it’s going to be incredibly helpful. Sorry, I’ll stop gushing over this thing now. (I won’t.)

[27] Noah Charney and Ingrid Rowland, The Collector of Lives (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2018), 27, https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-collector-of-lives-giorgio-vasari/id1215382287.

[28] Sharon Bailin, “Invenzione e Fantasia: The (Re)Birth of Imagination in Renaissance Art” Interchange 36, no. 3 (September 2005): 259.

[29] Charney and Rowland, The Collector of Lives, 27.

[30] Charney and Rowland, The Collector of Lives, 98.

[31] Bailin, “Invenzione e Fantasia”, 266.

[32] Bailin, “Invenzione e Fantasia”, 261.

[33] For wide discussion on the myriad changes, see Martin Kemp, “‘Equal Excellences’: Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts.” Renaissance Studies 1, no. 1 (1987); Kemp, “From Mimesis to Fantasia: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts.” Viator 8 (January 1977), as well as pretty much any other item in the bibliography.

[34] Bailin, “Invenzione e Fantasia”, 271.

[35] Caroline Anthérieu-Yagbasan, “THE RENAISSANCE AND MIMESIS : A NEW PARADIGM FOR PAINTING ?” in SGEM Florence: The Magic of the Renaissance (Florence, Italy, 2018), 1.

[36] Kemp, “Memesis to Fantasia”, 347.

[37] Kemp, “Memesis to Fantasia”, 347–349.

[38] Kemp, “Equal Excellences”, 12.

[39] Bailin, “Invenzione e Fantasia”, 262.

[40] Kemp, “Memesis to Fantasia”, 349–350.

[41] Kemp, “Memesis to Fantasia”, 377.

[42] Andrea Bolland. “From the Workshop to the Academy: The Emergence of the Artist in Renaissance Florence” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 467.

[43] Leonardo Da Vinci ca. 1510. Trans. E. MacCurdy, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols. (London 1954) 1.137, quoted in Kemp, “Memesis to Fantasia”, 377–378.

[44] Kemp, “Memesis to Fantasia”, 382.

bibliography

Ainsworth, Maryan W. “Northern Renaissance Drawings and Underdrawings: A Proposed Method of Study.” Master Drawings 27, no. 1 (1989): 5–38.

Anthérieu-Yagbasan, Caroline. “THE RENAISSANCE AND MIMESIS : A NEW PARADIGM FOR PAINTING ?” In SGEM Florence: The Magic of the Renaissance. (Florence, Italy, 2018). https://hal.science/hal-01911739.

Bailin, Sharon. “Invenzione e Fantasia: The (Re)Birth of Imagination in Renaissance Art.” Interchange 36, no. 3 (September 2005): 257–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-005-6865-3.

Bambach, Authors: Carmen. “Renaissance Drawings: Material and Function | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Accessed February 7, 2023. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/drwg/hd_drwg.htm.

Charney, Noah, and Ingrid Rowland. The Collector of Lives. New York, NY: WW Norton, 2018. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-collector-of-lives-giorgio-vasari/id1215382287.

Cohen, Charles E. “The ‘Modello’ for a Lost Work by Lorenzo Lotto.” Master Drawings 13, no. 2 (1975): 131–86.

Hirst, Michael, and Carmen Bambach Cappel. “A Note on the Word Modello.” The Art Bulletin 74, no. 1 (1992): 172–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/3045860.

Holmes, G. “Renaissance Florence: A Social History.” The English Historical Review CXXII, no. 499 (December 21, 2007): 1389–91. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem361.

Kemp, Martin. “‘Equal Excellences’: Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts.” Renaissance Studies 1, no. 1 (1987): 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24410006.

———. “From Mimesis to Fantasia: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts.” Viator 8 (January 1977): 347–98. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.301573.

“Methods and Materials of Northern European Painting in the National Gallery, 1400-1550.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 18 (1997): 6–55.

Oosterwijk, S. “Fro Paris to Inglond’? The danse macabre in text and image in late-medieval England” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2009) Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13873.

Parker, John Henry. A Manual of Gothic Stonecarving. Corn-Market, Oxford: Messr. Parker, 1855.

Intended to coordinate with the scroll object I’d made for her with its use of red translucent glass, (faux) opal melon beads, and bronze metal, I’ve called this necklace a “stealth opal” because traditionally this award is celebrated with a medallion attached to a necklace. Instead, this version integrates the stone within the necklace itself, as she once did for my Coral Branch.

(It’s a thing.)

Alongside the shinier red, opal, and bronze, the volcanic rock has the same feeling as the black aging of the mirror I’d made for her, and juxtaposed with the formality of the layout I thought the roughness provided a dichotomy she’d appreciate.

My necklace designs aren’t usually intended to be a historical as much as surface detail for an outfit, and this is no exception. They remind me of sandcastles made by dripping wet sand between your fingers: organic and structured both at once.

A memorandum to Bríg, she of the threefold aspect,
from those who bear witness to
the fierce capacity, ability, and generosity of

Lanea inghean Uí Chiaragáin

We ask that in your wisdom you lift her up,
as We do here, to the Order of the Opal.

Pray lend her your fire,
as she champions those who help.

Pray lend her your healing,
as she soothes those who aid.

Pray lend her your poetry,
as she inspires those who serve.

Just as this metal shines and its gem glows from within,
so let her gleam and light be recognized.

Read here on the twenty seventh of August,
Anno Societatis LVII.

Awarded and inscribed by
Cuan and Adelheit
Rex and Regina

Presented with permission by
John West and Graçia Esperança de Sevilla
Baron and Baroness

If you’ve ever watched or visited British gardening programme like The Chelsea Flower Show, you’ll know that the designers of competition gardens submit to the judges a document which includes, among other things, what’s basically a “story” of their garden, setting out who who precisely it was designed for and how that dictated their choices.

For a scroll like this one, I found myself composing the same thing: a story of this design, a object biography of its “creator” and why “they” created what they made.

This scroll is a story of rebellion. It’s a story of endurance, of championship, of strength.

It’s a story of magic.

the concept

As soon as I accepted this assignment, I immediately thought of the funny-sad concept of being “cursed with competence”. It nestled easily in my head alongside the aphorism “no good deed goes unpunished”, and together they sparked an idea.

Let’s be brutally honest: Although the SCA is a volunteer organization, it would disingenuous to say that these concepts never hold relevance. Even with the best of intentions, service can be a many-edged sword. My first thought was that it might be entertaining to create a curse tablet or related magical item to protect Lanea against frustrating situations.

I was positive she would appreciate the warm regard and humor behind the idea, so I started researching Romano-British curse tablets. Yet as I thought more about it, no matter that I knew she would find it funny, a curse didn’t feel right for a scroll text. Even if it were intended for her benefit, it was too negative for a positive occasion.

Further research opened up to me the larger world of lamellae and amulets, upon which the Romans and others in the Mediterranean world also inscribed prayers. Lanea’s work is driven by passion, so perhaps an impassioned prayer might be fitting?

At the same time, I had been researching Iron Age British mirrors, and I found some research that referred to their potential magic use¹.

And with those two ideas in my pocket, I was off.

object biography

The term “object biography” is used in academic fields like art history and museum studies, and encompasses a mindset in which an artifact’s provenance is more than simply about where or when it was made; its fuller life story is important, from creation to who used it and when and where it travelled, and this greater context leads to greater (and more interesting) understanding.

With these two ideas in mind, the lamella and the mirror, almost without trying I began to develop their object biographies. As I researched, I imagined how these two pieces came about and how they might have become interred together.

I imagined about a woman in the early days of the Roman occupation, feeling Ways about the work a friend was doing. I thought about her feelings of protectiveness, and her feelings of pride, about her feelings of support.

I thought about how she might have decided to craft a spell both to help the friend in her work and to protect her friend from being used ill. She would have petitioned a certain deity, someone important to her who she thought might be willing and able to help. She might have used a lamella to convey her words to the deity, and she might have used a mirror to focus her will, and she might have used a precious gem to gain the deity’s attention and as recompense for her aid.

In doing so, this imaginary Romano-British woman would have combined the British use of the mirror with the Roman/Mediterranean use of lamellae, and British art with Roman use of language. The tools of the colonizer deployed alongside her own native tools, pushing back against an oppressive force while working within it. We have all sorts of examples of blending of the two cultures within the Romano-British world, including the integration of British and Roman deities, and I love the idea that this synthesis can reclaim power.

The combination of the two, lamella and mirror, used to work a spell to aid a friend’s service and protect her against those who might use those efforts against her, is an object biography that captures my imagination, and I wanted to make it real. I thought it would be a fitting honor for Lanea’s interest in the British Iron Age, her support of her friends, her passion for justice, and her unending service of those who need it. I’ve been friends with Lanea for almost twenty years, and for her I was willing to be a little (a lot) extra with this scroll. If anyone would appreciate everything that went into this project, she would.

THE LAMELLA

a prayer

Lanea’s fav is the goddess Brigid, so she was my first (and only) choice of deity. (Although Brigid is known as a Very Irish Goddess, she appears on lists of Native British deities, so I went with it.)

While I was indeed writing a prayer, I ended up borrowing some of the language of Romano-British curse tablets from Bath. Specifically, I borrowed the introductory phrase “a memorandum” ², and the petition “we ask that you” ³. 

The simile about material sympathy—that the glow and gleam of the objects’ material is a testament to and an enhancement of Lanea’s service—was inspired by this paper from 2019 ⁴, which talks about sympathetic magic in Greek and Latin curse tablets.

And of course, three is the theme of this whole thing. My research suggested many things that the goddess Brigid is known for (the internet didn’t always agree with itself, can you believe it?), but the commonalities were inspiration/poetry, fire and smithing, and healing/sacred wells. Integrating those with the different ways she was described as a triple goddess, I had the triad of my sacred litany.

researching lamellae

I read a lot of papers and looked at a lot of extant lamellae to get an idea of their overarching physical commonalities. Curse tablets like those in Bath were usually made from lead, but taking into account the principle of “material sympathy” mentioned above, I wanted something more rich and glowing. So I decided to slide over to the golden lamella side of the equation. (But because I’m not made of dollars, I used brass instead of gold.)

While the tradition of incantations on lamellae throughout the Roman period is strong and covers a wide range of motivations, my most helpful visual references for this project were two gold lamellae in the Getty, both shown at right and described by Roy Kotansky ^{5 6} (in whose niche I seemed to be playing, based on how much his name came up while researching), which are prayers for healing.

In spite of the change in alphabet, I decided to stick with the key layout features of the original texts, as I saw them: left aligned, scripta continua, fill the line.

Not all lamellae come to us folded, but for an object of this size it made sense for the imaginary supplicant to fold it for internment alongside a mirror.

The result is not the cleanest lamella extant, but let’s (imagine) assume the (fictional) museum decided it was too dangerous to try cleaning it any further, and is displaying it as is.

alif beth gamma

In a coincidental burst of convergent evolution, Kolfinna Valravn and I happened to be planning out similar scrolls at the same time. 

This meant we could bounce ideas off each other, and resulted in, among other things, a night of Extreme Transliteration Hilarity which resulted in the two of us acting like the kids at summer camp who are giggling to the point of tears long after everyone else has gone to bed. It was madness. It was amazing. It was necessary.

I mention this because:

a) friends are great

and

b) having a laugh made my orthographic problem-solving feel a whole lot easier.

The problem?

So ideally, there would be a non-Roman language I could translate the text into—or, rather, have translated—because part of the inspiration for this scroll’s object biography is a woman taking the magic of the colonizers and turning it toward a distinctly native goddess, and it would make more sense if the writing were a part of that.

But if I wanted to use Irish, (which would have been a nice way to integrate a bit more Ireland into this scroll), my research suggested the furthest back I could trace the language was to Primitive Irish in about the 4th century. Meh.

However, after a lot of deliberation and the aforementioned laughter session with Kolfinna, in the end I decided to transliterate English into Ogham. That made the alphabet several centuries too late, but the spirit would be a lot more visually resonant than anything using Roman letters, and that was important to me.

It was extremely common to mix languages, transliterate, and include magical symbols in lamellae ⁷. Typically the languages of magic in the Roman Empire were Greek or Latin ⁸, but a few curse tablets from Bath and Uley may have been transliterated Celtic ⁹, and some Jewish lamellae contain Hebrew phrases rendered with Greek letters ¹⁰.

On the whole, it seems like the magical intention of the writing was the important part, more than the local accuracy of the writing itself. I like the idea that our theoretical supplicant thought eschewing the alphabet of the occupying force when speaking to Brigid would get a better, more magical result.

THE MIRROR

designing spirals

Since the prayer was dedicated to Bríd and her triple aspects, and indeed included a litany of three within it, I decided a “tri-roundel” ¹¹ layout would be most appropriate. That way, the rhythm of the form would echo the rhythm of the prayer.

Judy Joy has done a lot of work with what scholars have come to call “mirror-style”, referring to the specific ornamentation on mirrors and some other artefacts such as scabbards. In doing so, she acknowledges the basic individual motifs set out by 20^th century scholars while being critical of and re-assessing their typological judgements based, among other things, upon “aesthetic taste” ¹². Her work aligns with my personal feelings on the overwhelming efforts of 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th century art historians to assign worthiness judgements based on shaky subjective parameters, so I found it particularly relevant.

In order to describe “mirror style” with less subjectivity, she has developed criteria to describe not simply its overall appearance but its rules of construction ¹³. That made it possible to design an ornament for the face and be assured that while the overall result was original, it would fit easily among extant artifacts.

Beyond the larger silhouette, in studying the hashmarks in the Desborough mirror I noticed that their median angle flips on the midline of its face. Which makes sense, since mirrors broadly display vertical symmetry on the whole ¹⁴. So even a mirror’s general layout might not easily lend itself to vertical symmetry, the hashmarks might.

I also noticed that toward each point of the fields in which they were placed, the hashmarks were perpendicular to the point, rather than leading toward it. 

These details seemed to carry over through a number of mirrors, indicating to me that it’s an integral part of the style.

(There are, of course, variations. The mirrors were carved over a spread of time and area, so naturally there are variations. They were also made by real people with a variety of skill and attention to detail. The Aston Mirror has been described as being carved by “a craftsman of limited technical ability–and perhaps with unsatisfactory tools-whose chief aim in this piece was to achieve the greatest economy of time consistent with his powers.” ¹⁵ As in, with limited ability and maximum efficiency. Hardly the description of a masterwork to suggest a type specimen.)

Both of these facts meant that the hatchmarks needed to be placed with care. Each teeny line was assessed and its location approved. The result is a pattern fill which provides texture for each positive field type, contrasting with the shine of the negative fields, lending a further disorientation to the wavering play of light and shadow in the polished bronze. There is an otherworldliness to the world seen in the mirror.

Unsurprising that British Iron Age mirrors fit within a broader tradition of magic, transformation, focus of power. ¹⁶

the handle

The handle combines aspects of several mirrors. Not simply for aesthetic reasons, but for function as well.

On one hand, I needed a good place to seat the opal. The Desborough Mirror has a nice round recess in the top of the handle which I felt could be easily developed to contain the opal I’d purchased, so that went into the pot.

I also needed a problem-solve a way to elegantly the backing at the midpoint of the mirror. The Dorton Mirror has three solid roundels with a sharp lip. I thought they’d be the perfect strong location through which I could thread a wire, one side of which to be anchored at the back and the other to be integrated into the red bead decoration. So I placed two on my hand, one at either side.

(The arch which sweeps over the opal and connects the two roundels is also taken from the Desborough Mirror.)

The loop for the bottom is common, to the point of being diagnostic for British Iron Age mirrors; in fact, it’s so important to the use and design of these objects that there is evidence that this is how the mirror was toted around or hung up for display. ¹⁷. And the raised moulding gathering the loops is quite like that of the St. Keverne Mirror, but honestly it’s such a common design feature of these mirrors it really could have come from any number of them. After all, it functioned for them much as it functions for me: to visually gather together the strands of the handle, if not physically gather them as well. (It also provided me another attachment point for the back.)

the construction

To call myself a novice bronzeworker would be an insult to bronzeworkers.

This was my first project, and my resources were also limited. As such, I didn’t feel capable of engraving a mirror face, nor do I have the space to cast a handle. (For more details of mirror construction see Rook, Lowery, Savage, and Wilkens (1982) ¹⁸ and Giles and Joy (2007) ¹⁹. Therefore I intended to go another way with my production techniques.

But this being such a new medium for me meant it took very little “oh dear, things have certainly gone awry” to force me into yet another completely different direction altogether. I’m grateful for all my experience with many other media, because it helped me roll with the punches when Plan A became Plan B and then Plan C. In the end, I employed modern technology to give me a leg up (a pen plotter fitted with a metal engraving point, which was its own separate journey), as well as my beadwork, wire wrapping, and sculpting skills.

The process wasn’t entirely divorced from period construction techniques, however; when sculpting the handle, I could almost imagine I was carving a wax from which I would cast it later (in my spacious and well-stocked imaginary workshop), and when I set the opal, I did in fact use the same bezel technique I would have used if I were setting it in a ring.

This piece involved even more problem-solving and strategizing than usual; it’s been a while since I’ve had a project that I kept rehearsing in my head when I was meant to be falling asleep.

But in the end, necessity was the mother of invention, and I think it came out way more interesting than what I’d originally planned.

the colors

The sheet bronze I received from my supplier was beautiful but a little more coppery than the jeweller’s bronze wire I received a different vendor, stock which I had intended to use for the handle. However, one upshot to my plans being upended and my subsequent need to use metal coating from a bottle is that its color far better matched the plate than the wire did.

In fact, it matched perfectly.

Sometimes the universe provides.

It was also important to me to include a red accent to go along with the bronze. I might have used any number of other magical stones as an accent (carnelian was a popular option ²⁰) but red alongside bronze is a color scheme which conveys at a glance the region we’re aiming for. The Holcomb Mirror itself features red glass on its handle, and Mary Davis writes ²¹, “The use of traditionally native colours employed with the use of bronze and bright red glass symbolised a strongly native British culture in opposition to Roman conquest and influence, one which later had a distinct impact on the future production of enamelled work that flourished in Roman Britain.”

If you simply look at enough relevant artifacts, the regularity of the palette becomes obvious.

exhibitionist

In my scroll design classes, I’ve been calling a layout like this a “museum scroll”. (My degree is in museum design. It’s how my brain works.) Usually when doing so, however, I’m referring to a 2D rendering of an artifact alongside some scroll text.

Being an 3D object scroll makes this even more of a “museum scroll” than usual.

We’re also going to pretend that a well-funded museum would have better cleaned their artifacts. Maybe it’s not a well-funded museum? Maybe it’s a small and scrappy upstart of an establishment? It would certainly explain why its furniture is made of wire; if this really were a museum display, I’d have used plexiglass mounting brackets or something that made it clear (no pun intended) that the attachment points were exhibit furniture, not part of the artifact.

But I was acutely aware that this was going to be hoisted around and shifted and tilted, and again my resources were limited, so I had to concoct something more stable. Therefore the boss in the center the mirror was a concession to mounting, the wire going around the handle was a concession to mounting, and the wire brackets in the corners of the lamella were a concession to mounting.

Needs must. Museums need funding.

The lamella was placed on the left solely in deference to our English reading order, and the mirror was placed plate side up (rather than handle-side-up) because the orientation instinctively felt more active, like a tool for working magic, rather than hanging or at rest.

(It was also clear that framing is not my core competency. After twenty minutes of patiently and meticulously fighting the dust inside and outside the frame, I gave up. Sisyphus himself would have said fuck it. I know when I’ve been bested. Dust is part of the exhibit now. So mote it be.)

to wit:

I owe so many thanks to Jill G, who graciously volunteered to courier this award to the event and helped set some things to rights after a stressful journey through the USPS. I’m very, very grateful.

On a related note, for me this piece on the whole was an exercise in embracing imperfection. Almost none of my plans survived contact with reality. BUT. But the result has an organic energy and a realism that I wouldn’t have planned. (And as for the above, I also made a new friend.) In the end, it was all to the good.

Like art, service is never easy. It is never clean and breezy and unmarred. Nor should it be: if it were, it would not be as necessary. Or as valued.

Lanea’s contributions are necessary, valued, hard-fought, and generous, even beyond her peerage.

And that’s why she deserves this Opal.

references

[1] Giles, Melanie and Judy Joy. “Mirrors in the British Iron Age: performance, revelation and power.” _The Book of the Mirror. An Interdisciplinary Collection Exploring the Cultural Story of the Mirror._ Ed. M. Anderson. Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. pp8-11

[2] “Uley 2,” Curse Tablets From Roman Britain, last accessed 28 August 2022, http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk/4DLINK2/4DACTION/WebRequestCurseTabletSearch?searchType=latin-index&searchField=CSAD_ID&thisListPosition=0&displayImage=1&displayLatin=1&displayEnglish=1&searchTerm=uley-2.

[3] “Uley 43,” Curse Tablets From Roman Britain, last accessed 28 August 2022, http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk/4DLINK2/4DACTION/WebRequestCurseTabletSearch?searchType=latin-index&searchField=CSAD_ID&thisListPosition=0&displayImage=1&displayLatin=1&displayEnglish=1&searchTerm=uley-43

[4] Juraj Franek and Daniela Urbanová. “As Isis Loved Osiris, So Let Matrona Love Theodoros…: Sympathetic Magic and Similia Similibus Formulae in Greek and Latin Curse Tablets (Part 2)” _Philologia Classica_ 14, no. 2 (2019): pp. 198-199

[5] Roy Kotansky. “Two Amulets in the Getty Museum: A Gold Amulet for Aurelia’s Epilepsy, An Inscribed Magical-Stone for Fever, “Chills,” and Headache,” _The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal_ Vol. 8 (1980): pp. 181-188

[6] Roy Kotansky. “Incantations and Prayers for Salvation on Inscribed Greek Amulets”, in _Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion_, ed. D. Obbink & C. A. Faraone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 107-137, 

[7] Roy Kotansky, “Greek Magical Amulets: the inscribed gold, silver, copper and bronze lamellae (Part I: Published Texts of Known Provenance)”, _Papyrologica Coloniensia_ Vol. 22 no 1, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994.

[8] Andrea Barta, “Some Remarks on the Latin Curse Tablets from Pannonia” _Acta Antiqua_ 59 (1–4) (September 2020): pp561–564 http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/068.2019.59.1-4.49

[9] “Cursing and Cursive: languages”, Curse Tablets From Roman Britain, last accessed 28 August 2022, http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk/beginners/cursive-languages.shtml

[10] Kotansky, “Greek Magical Amulets,” 7.

[11] Jody Joy, _Iron Age Mirrors: A Biographical Approach_ BAR British Series 518 (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 2010), 30.

[12] Joy, _Iron Age Mirrors_, 24.

[13] Joy, _Iron Age Mirrors_, 25–38.

[14] Giles and Joy, “Mirrors in the British Iron Age”, 7.

[15] Tony Rook, P.R. Lowery, R.D.A. Savage, and R.L. Wilkins, F.S.A. “An Iron Age Bronze Mirror From Aston, Hertfordshire.” _The Antiquaries Journal_ 62, No.1 (March 1982); 27.

[16] Giles and Joy, “Mirrors in the British Iron Age”, 8–11.

[17] Giles and Joy, “Mirrors in the British Iron Age”, 8.

[18] Tony Rook et al., “Iron Age Mirror”, 23–33.

[19] Giles and Joy, “Mirrors in the British Iron Age”, 4–5.

[20] Roy D. Kotansky, “Textual Amulets and Writing Traditions in the Ancient World,” in _Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic_, ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 516.

[21] Mary Davis, “‘Sealing wax’ red glass in Late Iron Age Britain”, _PAST: The Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society_ 86 (Summer 2017): 5–7.