Tag: scroll

Work for Kolfinna Valravn’s Golden Dolphin, 2022

Photograph by Nicolo Santorio

Kolfinna Valravn is one of my favorite people, period. In addition to being an amazing artist, Kolfinna is unfailingly kind, thoughtful, and giving; she thinks of others, and then does something tangible with it. She is always working to make others’ lives better, even when “on a break”. Of course I had to help with her Golden Dolphin (GoA service award).

Ollamh Lanea gathered a dream team for this scroll: Bran Mydwynter was our designer, Aurri le Borgne was the “illuminator” (which, in this case, handled substrates, engraving, and assembly), Lanea wrote the beautiful words (of course!), and I was in charge of calligraphy… and spinning and weaving.

Yes. I got to spin and weave for a scroll. Even better: I got to spin and weave for a scroll for Kolfinna!

You see, Kolfinna loves the Bronze Age, especially the Egtved Girl. Bran knew this, and designed a scroll that incorporated the Egtved Girl’s spiky belt plaque, corded skirt, and a runic plaque (the research behind the runic translation ALONE is incredibly impressive, let alone the piece as a whole, so please go read about that now).

But first, let’s talk about the calligraphy.

Runic Calligraphy

Runic practice and color decisions

The plaque for the calligraphy was made by Aurri out of a piece of pergamenata attached to thin wood and then spraypainted, giving it an excellent metallic sheen. I had never done calligraphy for a scroll without tracing, so I was incredibly nervous (I hadn’t traced the calligraphy for the Apprentice’s Manuscript, but if I messed up with that I could scrape it or start a new folio if needed). I spot-tested to see if an eraser hurt the base paint, and it didn’t seem to, but I was worried enough about reducing the sheen that I decided to minimize erasing as much as possible. I really didn’t want to freehand this, though, as I was terrified I would mess up the spacing.

Bran’s runic layout

Thankfully, Bran had made a layout with the runes that was almost the exact size of the plaque. After discussing with Aurri, I resized it slightly in Procreate to increase the margins so she had more flexibility with attachments when assembling, and then I went old-school carbon-copy-transfer tech: I rubbed the entire back with a pencil, placed it carefully onto the plaque, and then traced over it with a mechanical pencil to transfer the design to the surface.

Since the original runes had fairly regular line weight, being incised, I tried several different tools to paint the runes, including about a dozen different paintbrushes and a tool only known as the dottifier. After some trial and error, I settled on using a crow quill with acrylic paint.

Finished plaque

This was incredibly satisfying to do, and I am quite smug about how well it turned out. I also don’t think I can call myself a baby calligrapher anymore.

The Skirt

Combed wool roving (blended grey) and black locks

I did the initial research and spinning for an Egtved skirt in 2020 (in fact, I kept bugging Kolfinna with info about it as I was researching and spinning for it), but I’ve been stalled on the actual creation process. However, because of this, I was immediately ready to make a small sampler for the scroll! Because I plan to weave a full skirt soon(ish), I’m not going to go particularly in depth in this section.

While I’ve spun a lot of wool in the last two years, I wanted to spin specially for this project, because I knew exactly the wool to use. Pre-pandemic, Kolfinna joined me at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival for her first ever visit, and she fell madly in love with Jacob sheep (and their two-to-six horns on both sexes). I had purchased a Jacob fleece in 2021, and while the fleece was predominately white (to my disappointment), I thought there may be enough to make the cords of the skirt black. Because I wasn’t quite sure how much yardage I would need, I decided to make the woven base out of white wool; it would be hidden anyway, and extend the amount of wool I had.

Aiming for an 8″-wide sample, I estimated the amount of yarn I needed. I then processed an appropriate amount of wool using wool combs borrowed from Lanea (having washed the fleece last year), then spun up the yarn at ~10 WPI on my wheel. While I was worried about yarn chicken, I actually only used about half the yarn I spun for the skirt sample:

Estimate Total Spun Used
White (warp) 8 yards + 1 yard plied 32 yards (7.1 grams) 16 yards
Black (weft & cords) 101 yards 114 yards (127 grams) 62 yards
Grey (twining) 2 yards 14 yards (1.42 grams) <1 yard
The weaving: observe the three loops of black weft (six threads total) per pass of the warp.
The rigged inkle set-up

Time for weaving! The Egtved skirt has an interesting construction, where three loops of weft are pulled through and placed on a peg per pass of the warp; as the weaving progresses, two loops are twisted tightly and then plied together into cords. The amazing fiber artist who reconstructed the skirt originally used pegs clamped to a table instead of a loom (which you can see here), but I don’t have a table where I can set up for a long time. Thus, I rigged a semi-portable set-up. I put the warp on my inkle loom, turned my rigid heddle loom upside-down and clamped a peg to its crossbar, and then sat on the floor with my leg between the inkle and the rigid heddle loom. I kept a ruler nearby to make sure that the peg was always 15″ from the warp (especially important to check after taking a break!). As I progressed in the weaving, I plied the cords together using a hand-cranked plying tool to speed the process. As with the original, I tied the ends of each cord in a half-square knot before carrying on.

Pinning the rings out to equal length in preparation for twining

Once the eight inches were woven, it was time for finishing the bottom of the cords. In the Egtved skirt, the end of each cord has the ends overlapped into a ring, then wrapped with some lightly-felted wool. Instead of combing, I flicked a bunch of white locks, and then threaded the loose locks onto a yarn needle. Using the needle, I threaded the lock through the ends of the loops (to bind them together) before wrapping them around the cords. Instead of wet-felting or friction-felting the ends, I used a modern needle-felting needle (stabby stabby stabby!). Once this was completed, I twined the cords right above these rings with the grey yarn.

Then, I blocked the whole piece. Instead of soaking the piece, I pinned it to the correct length and sprayed it with a squirt bottle, sopping up the extra water with towels. Once it was dry, I wove in all the ends except one, which I left so Aurri could tell the front from the back (as much as there was one).

Finally, I wove in all the ends, and passed it off to Aurri with the calligraphed plaque for assembly.

All the pieces laid out and waiting for assembly (photo courtesy of Aurri)

It truly was a fantastic experience to work on this collaboration with Lanea, Bran, and Aurri; it truly was greater than the sum of its parts. The only thing better was Kolfinna’s reaction when she saw it!

Opal Scroll Text and Calligraphy for Ilhuicacihuatl de Xochimilco

Illumination by Aurri le Borgne, calligraphy and wordsmithing by yours truly

When Aurri le Borgne asked if I wanted to collaborate on an Opal scroll for Ilhuicacihuatl de Xochimilco, I lept at the chance! Ilhuicacihuatl is an incredibly giving person in both time and energy, an amazing teacher (I’ve learned so much from her classes), and a force to be reckoned with in New World studies in the SCA. In short: she’s awesome, and I wanted to be part of creating a scroll for her!

And then Aurri clarified that she wanted me to do both wordsmithing and calligraphy, and I went… okay. I was still considering myself a baby calligrapher, and I knew that whatever was out there was going to be far outside my wheelhouse, but it was worth it! (Also I don’t think I can call myself a baby calligrapher after this piece anymore!).

After convincing myself I couldn’t learn Nahuatl in less than a month and therefore an original language composition was out of the question (for now), I dived into research, looking for both a calligraphic hand and appropriate text. I quickly discovered Bernardino de Sahagún, a sixteenth-century friar and Nahuatl nerd who recorded both cultural and literary information regarding the Aztec people in a Western alphabet (score!). In the time I had, I couldn’t find both a literary text in translation and digitized manuscript, but I found two related pieces: The Florentine Codex, digitized by the Library of Congress and in Bernardino’s own hand, and Ballads of the Lords of New Spain: The Codex Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España, which was probably recorded by Bernardino, exists in one 17th-century manuscript, but available transcribed and translated by John Bierhorst and available for free online. Aurri had found a similar manuscript from Bernardino for the illumination, so we were good to go!

First: wordsmithing. Nahuatl poetry is new to me, and so at this point the most historically accurate I could get would be by cobbling together bits of the translated Ballads and massaging them into something that works for an SCA scroll. I read through the entirety of the Ballads (which aren’t particularly long), and I was struck by both the beauty and cultural resonance of the pieces. Despite knowing very little about the culture, I could still see the significance of multiple items and images (such as gold, jade, and flowers — flowers abounded!); I was moved by how the poetry wedded joy in beauty and sadness at its transience. Because I’m a language nerd, I still had to do a little linguistic digging, so I used the online Nahuatl Dictionary to look up Ilhuicacihuatl de Xochimilco’s name. I giggled at how perfect the name was for her and decided to work it into the scroll text.

The final text uses lines from poems I, II, IX, X, XVIII, and XXXIII in the Ballads:

Friends, let us go sing in Marinus, in Atlantia, on the second Day of Love. Eckehard and Jane have come to string jewels, to adorn with flowers. They value as gold the good service of a heavenly woman from flower fields; her heart and works are jade. Let there be broad plumes and opals: let Ilhuicacihuatl de Xochimilco be inducted into the Order of the Opal. May all know her name, may her flowers not wither. Let’s drink—let’s eat—cacao flowers: our hearts are glad with flowers this February 26, A.S. LVI.

Because I knew Ilhuicacihuatl was making chocolates for the event where this would be received, I had to include “let’s drink—let’s eat—cacao flowers” directly from Poem IX. Also, since the translation by Bierhorst rendered the poetry in a visually prosaic form, I retained that for the scroll text.

Next, the calligraphy! I was really lucky that I had an exemplar from one person, right? Right? WRONG. Y’all, Bernardino couldn’t write an “a” the same way twice in The Florentine Codex. He also couldn’t write the same size twice. Or keep his slant consistent. That said, all of this was a boon to me: I struggle with slanting scripts, and this late-period hand was entirely new to me (and learned in less than a week), so any inconsistencies in my version actually make it more accurate! Ha! An additional benefit was that his handwriting was not too different from earlier batarde scripts, which I had practiced in the past, so all-in-all it was not too difficult a task to handle. My final version was still a little rounder than the original, but I’m still pleased with how it came out.

Ductus from Bernardino’s hand.

For the ductus, I tried to use mostly letter-forms from the Nahuatl part of the manuscript; however, I had to fill it out with letters from the Spanish part, as there are multiple letters used in English and Spanish that did not appear in the Nahuatl text. Even with that, there were some letters that are fairly common in English that I couldn’t find in the manuscript (especially K and W), so I had to hypothesize my own letter forms for that based on the original.

To make sure that I got the calligraphy right on the first try, I did a test piece on Bristol using the same nib and ink (I don’t remember the nib size, but the ink was Noodler’s Eel Black). This piece was fairly successful, with only a couple errors but good spacing, so I taped over the errors and simply traced it for the final product.

I think it came out all right!

The Apprentice’s Manuscript

So things kept happening to get in the way of my properly apprenticing to Ollam Lanea (rainstorms, commitments, a pandemic), so when we finally were able to set a firm date, I lost my mind a little and decided to make her a gift for The Occasion. I decided to make her a book. Not any book — a book that contained two of her pieces, two of mine, and some other important items. Since I chose poems that incorporated our languages, I decided they had to be properly glossed. This is literally my third piece of calligraphy ever, my second with a proper pen, and I learned to bookbind over the summer by half-watching a dozen random YouTube videos. And because I knew Lanea would get a kick out of it, instead of documentation, I wrote a library catalog entry. I told you I lost my mind.

The Book

The Catalog Entry

Teach Folcadáin Bó Caitlin MS Ripton A.i

Date Inconsistently dated to both ~800 and 2021 (?)
Title The Apprentice’s Manuscript
Content The present volume contains 4 poems and some additional back matter (a short verse and a single sentence). Two poems, On Kings (ff. 2r-8v) and Song of Amergin (ff. 24r-29v) have been glossed by the original scribe. The glossing of On Kings indicates that the scribe was familiar with the language and attempted to keep a poetic translation in the gloss. However, they also excluded words that were the same in both texts, making it difficult to reconstruct the gloss’s original form. Inaccuracies in the glossing of Song of Amergin indicate that the scribe was not familiar with the language; E. Meredith (2021) has suggested that the scribe was attempting to combine two texts with only the vaguest understanding of Celtic languages.

Contents:
ff. 2r-8v: On Kings
ff. 9r-15r: On Returning Home
ff. 18r-22v: You Call Yourselves Bards?
ff. 24r-29v: Song of Amergin
f. 31r: Gawain and the Green Knight (?) excerpt
f. 32v: Back matter

Decoration: 5 illuminations, of a horse between three lozenges (f. 1r), a bird (f. 16r), a raven on a pall between three Brigid’s crosses (f. 17r), a great black dog (f. 23r), and a golden winged shoe (f. 30r). There are additional small decorations throughout, most significantly a decorated O on f. 18v.
Languages English, Modern
English, Old
Irish, Old (?)
Physical Description Materials: Pergamenata, Noodler’s Eel Black, Koh-I-Noor watercolor, FineTec gold and silver.

Dimensions: approximately 90 x 70 mm. No indication of trimming.

Foliation: ff. 32. There is one modern foliation sequence in the manuscript in pencil.

Layout: written in one column of four or eight lines to a page. All four-line pages contain glosses in a different language.

Script: Half-uncial. While the hand has similarities to the Book of Kells, as do some of the illuminations, the number of errors and uneven lines indicate an inexperienced scribe deeply in over their head.

Binding: Rebound in the first quarter of the 21st century by an enthusiastic amateur using green silk thread, cardboard, linen, leather, and PVA glue.
Origin, provenance Unknown; bears indicators of both 8th/9th-century Hiberno-Saxon traditions (especially Northumbrian) and 21st-century Nacirema techniques from Piscataway Nation territory.

Progress Pictures

Calligraphy in progress: printed text above with a page drying, ductus and practice below, and perg placed on top of the lined practice sheet.
Finished pages kept in order, with other pages drying and the text I was working from to the right.
Punching holes for binding into the folios with a guide. This page also has one of my favorite corrections.
Finished binding, with the first folio visible.
Binding glamour shot.

First Calligraphy

Layout and practice

I was so excited to do calligraphy for the first time! I calligraphed a beautiful scroll blank by Adelaide Halfpint inspired by the Ormesby Psalter (1250-1330).
While I had practiced a similar script (Batarde), I practiced the script from the Ormesby Psalter for this scroll, meaning that I learned a new hand for my first calligraphy! I used standard scroll text, as I didn’t want to hyperfocus on my own words the first time I calligraphed something.

 

Scroll being presented in court. Photograph by Kolfinna Valravn.

 

A Poem and a Card

Wrote a poem! Did my first calligraphy! Threw in some illumination from the Book of Kells!

I was sick so the poem wasn’t as dramatic as I wanted it to be and the whole thing was late!

Text:

To Cuan, king of      considerable worth:
Your bard begs you     a brief moment
of time, attention,     tolerance, and reprieve.
A report of a birthday     reached my ears–
so a chronicle I conceive     for the King of Atlantia,
a poem of his prowess,     praising his might
with words of wisdom     to warn and advise,
extolling the integrity     of one .viii. times a king.
But unbidden, an illness     attacked my form,
muddled my mind     and mystified my pen.
Now my reason returns,     revived and hale,
But the moment is missed!     Mournfully thus
I weakly write     a wish, with all goodwill
of a belated birthday     from your King’s Bard.

Coral Branch Scroll Text for Tóth Éva

In June 2019, I wrote the scroll text for Lady Tóth Éva’s Coral Branch, which was calligraphed and illuminated by Lady Kaaren Valravn. See her site for the full scroll.

Scroll text: 

Hear, Atlantia, the words of Christoph and Adelhait,
your König and Königin by right of arms.
We delight in the Arts and the Sciences,
but cooking is an alchemy that blends both,
nourishing and strengthening the populace.
Tóth Éva is one who has distinguished herself in the arts and sciences.
So do We choose to induct Tóth Éva into Our Order for the Coral Branch.
Moreover do We raise Tóth Éva to the ranks of nobility and Award Arms
that shall be devised by Tóth Éva and Our heralds to be her own forevermore.
Done this thirteenth day of July Anno Societatis LIV, at Our King’s Assessment
in Our Barony of Black Diamond.

Coral Branch Scroll Text for Noble Sarah la Malade

In June of 2019, I had the honor of writing the scroll text for my friend Sarah la Malade’s Coral Branch, their first award in the SCA. The art was done by my friend Kaaren Valravn. For more on the scroll, see Lady Kaaren’s site.

Scroll Text: Let all know that We, Christoph and Adelheit, King and Queen of Atlantia, love the beauty of Coral. Coral takes many forms and colors, a rainbow that enriches the populace. Like the Coral, Sarah la Malade has enriched their Shire in diverse ways, through music, poetry, and research. Their work is known and admired; the hands that perform the work are beloved. Thus do we see fit to induct Sarah into Our Order of the Coral Branch. So too do We raise them to the ranks of nobility and Award Arms, directing Noble Sarah to consult with Our heralds in the creation of arms that befit them alone. Done by Our hand this day, June 29, A.S. LIV, being 2019 in modern reckoning, at Storvik Novice in the Barony of Storvik.

Unawarded AoA Scroll Text

In May 2019, I collaborated with Lady Kaaren Valravn to write scroll text for an AoA. For the scroll, see Lady Kaaren’s site.

Scroll text: 

Listen, Atlantia, to the words of Christoph, King by right of arms, and Adelheit, Our radiant Queen.

It delights Us when one commits to learning both the arts of heavy combat and thrown weapons, for Our Kingdom shall be protected on many fields. It is a boon to the Kingdom when those skills are demonstrated to others, so that Atlantia’s populace may increase, and someday, too, Her armies. Yet one of the greatest delights is when such dedication and service is done by one raised amongst Us.

It is with joy that We have watched one such person grow and serve. Thus do We Award Arms to **********************, and charge him to consult with Our Heralds to develop appropriate arms, should he see fit.

Done by Our hands this 8th day of June, AS LIV, at Journey Through the Nine Realms in Our Barony of Raven’s Cove.

Coral Branch Scroll Text for Lord Ishmael Reed

In 2019, I had the honor to write the scroll text for my friend Ishmael Reed in a fantastic collaboration with Lady Adelaide Half Pint (illumination) and Lady Kaaren Valravn (calligraphy). Of course, I had to write a Shakespearean sonnet for Lord Ishmael:

From Ragnarr King and gracious Queen Lynette:
Hail and heed our words, Atlantia fair!
For poetry written and many a doublet
A Coral Branch for Ishmael Reed declare.

He toils with sharp and pointy things each night:
A quill, a pen, a needle, sometimes wit.
His laborious toil makes Atlantian arts shine bright
and keeps the lantern of arts well-tended and lit.

He calls forth words from both the brave and afraid
By easing others’ fears of meter and rhyme.
And oh! diverse doublets he helped be made,
Manifold shirefolk dressing now sublime.

Thus have we with royal power decreed:
Present this Coral Branch to Ishmael Reed.”

 

To see the scroll, visit Lady Kaaren’s site.