Violet the Axe Breaker, Tyger's Cub

Since I'm getting myself ready to jump into the Eastern Crown Herald role I hadn't planned on doing any scrolls until I finished that next April. But then I got an assignment emailed to me for Ostgardr Investiture two weeks before the event. For Violet the Axe Breaker. Her parents are close friends of mine, I emailed Signet back saying I've known Violet since before she was born and I happened to have one last scroll blank. So yes, I'd take this one.

The scroll blank was weirdly spaced out and not good for most other awards. And there's very little space for text. The page itself is not very big as well.

So I figured out a short amount of words that got all the information across and sounded decent, 57 count.

A mischievous grin and a welcoming smile. A playful dance and helpful hands. Cracking aim and her joyful laugh. These are qualities that befit a growing person in Our Society. And so do We, King Culann and Queen Honig III induct Violet the Axe Breaker into the Order of the Tyger's Cub at Ostgardr Investiture, AS 61.

I also printed out various sizes for the order badge to trace into the square. The description on the back of the illumination only says "14c" so yay, doing textura quadrata. The practice page I quickly realized by usual line spacing of 3, 5, 3mm was too big, and shrunk it down to 2, 4, 2mm.

On the actual scroll I messed up one word, but managed to save it enough that nobody will notice unless I point it out. (Since I had to break up the word Investiture, I accidentally spelled it investititure, but managed to realize it after the second ti and fixed the spelling then scraped away the wrong ink.) 

And then I got out my little kit of paints and carefully painted in the order badge. One spot of the yellow was giving me problems, but I think each time I do a badge I get a little bit better with the paint.

No, this does not mean I want to start doing illumination. *shudder* 

After it dried I erased all the pencil lines except for the two spots for the King and Queen to sign, and went over the lines of the badge with a micron pen.

I'm not too upset with how this turned out! I hope Violet likes it. I'm not too concerned with delving into period-inspired words, but I think I'm also getting a little more confident with that as well.

And now for something completely different.

Mixing things up from my usual service or calligraphy postings, mostly because I just want to get my process and thoughts down in a somewhat organized manner.

When I was elevated to Pelican I was not prepped to give an oath of fealty to the crown. Towards the latter part of my being a protege I had started paying more attention to other people's ceremonies. I knew that a fealty speech was a thing, so I had started up a word document to poke at and adjust every so often. With the parade of people visiting me in my vigil I didn't even think about it until the ceremony itself. So I read the not polished thing I had on my phone. Also, I completely screwed it up and didn't put my hand on the sword of state. Oops.

So all that to say: Now that I've started taking an interest in developing an Egyptian persona, I thought about doing a persona-appropriate oath of fealty.

I found a link to a document: Oaths and Fealty in Ancient Egypt. "This document examines the use of oaths in ancient Egypt, including their function in legal and administrative procedures as well as ordinary life. The author analyzes oaths based on whether they assert truth or promise future action. Most examples come from the Late Empire period. Key terms for oaths include cnh ("to live"), w3h ("to endure"), and sdf3 tr ("to provide for homage"). The document divides oaths into juridical (related to law) and non-juridical contexts and analyzes examples under the categories of assertory and promissory oaths."

I went through it and found bits and pieces that seemed appropriate.

• The warrior Shu-Sebek claimed to have served King Sen-Usert III valiantly in battle and ended his claim with the words: “As Se(n)-Usert lives for me, I have spoken in truth!”
• A king’s claim to accomplishment was similarly affirmed with an oath by his divine father. Sen-Usert III ended a statement that he had defeated the Nubians with the words: “As my father lives for me, I speak in truth, without a word of boasting therein issuing from my mouth!”
• An empire noble recounted the honors which he had received from the king. “I do not speak a lie in these (matters); the Two Lands are my witnesses. As Ptah, the Lord of Truth, the Lord of Memphis, lives, I have said this in truth, as he did it for me. The reward for being loyal to him is a happy lifetime.”
• As King [Maat-ka-Re] (Hat shepsut) endures and her years are endowed with life, I acted in uprightness of heart for my lord every day, I provided my arms with his business, and I held to the principles [which] he laid upon me!”
• In the annals of Thut-mose III, the pharaoh insists that he has not exaggerated in telling what he did for the god. “As lives for me, as Re loves me, as my father Amon favors me, as my nostrils are rejuvenated with life and satisfaction, I have done these thing [‘in truth’!]”
• “As Amon endures and as the Ruler endures…”

I also found this bit, which explains one of the weirdnesses in phrasing:

• The difficulty lies in the alternative abbreviation nh n.i,  “As truly as lives for me” (a god or king whose name no longer needs to be expressed?). Two solutions are possible. (a) Both nh.i and nh n.i are abbreviations for the fuller formula, in which a god’s name had appeared; both of them implicitly invoke deity; and both “As I live” and “As lives for me” may legitimately be translated "I swear”. (b) the formula nh.i has come to mean “I swear” that is, “I invoke a deity” but the formula nh n.i belongs to the god who is first named in the context following: “As (the god) Re lives for me and loves me.” We shall here render rather narrowly: “As I live” and “As lives for me”.

This last part really amuses me as an SCA herald, since in the blazon for devices you don't actually say the color of a part if the following part(s) is also that color. So you only say it once.

So I thought about it, played around with picking from a few of the examples above, and came up with this as my personal oath of fealty to the Crown of the East Kingdom:

As <King> and <Consort> endure and their years are endowed with life, I act in uprightness of heart for my crown every day. I provide my arms with their business, and I held to the principles which they laid upon me. As lives for me, as Re loves me, as my father Amon favors me, as my nostrils are rejuvenated with life and satisfaction, I have said these things in truth.

I attended coronation yesterday and had the chance to swear my fealty to them. Honig was amused and said that any oath that mentions nostrils are awesome.

Fiona the Volatile Peerage boast

Aislinn really wanted to do some wordsmithing for Fiona's elevation, but the scroll was already claimed. So I asked if she wanted to do the boast, and she was happy to do that. Her original idea was to take one of the Hell's Belles (Fiona's long ago SCA bad bardic group) songs and do a play off on that. I wasn't keen on the idea, but wanted to see what she could come up with. Maybe I'd be surprised. She got a first draft of a thing, and I tried it out. Nope, that was not going to work. 1) I'm not a good singer. 2) I feel the joke of it fell flat. So she said she'd go back to the drawing board. 

About a week later I had an idea of a boast, and messaged her. She took the idea and the following day emailed me with a glorious boast. I absolutely loved it. It's full of alliterations and puns and inside jokes.

One of the things we wanted to do, just to be a little extra, was have Fiona's brother do a trumpet fanfare to start us off. Jenna had a heraldic trumpet/bugle thingy so when it was time for us to go up, he warned the people at the door to cover their ears. He tooted a short line and I started off the boast. It all seemed to be well received! 

The in-joke is that her sister Hugoline is one of the people who made the game "Red Dragon Inn", and one of the characters in that game is named after Fiona. So I wanted to make sure to mention that this Fiona is "the original". And her device is a manatee under some waves, a play on "Oh, the humanity!". Things written with the bullet point are stage directions.

Felicitations all! 

Now comes forth Fiona! 

Please prepare your cups! 

• Look at person I’m next to

Do you have mead? Have you had HER mead?

Drink to this Loquacious Lady, the Proprietor of these Plaudits: Silver Crescent, Silver Brooch, Golden Lyre, AND  Maunche. 

• Look at person across the room 

Don’t drink mead? That’s alright, she makes Libations without spirits most Liberally! 

• Looks at another person in other direction

Did you know? She's a Maven of Magnificent Manuscripts, Director of Doading Ducks, Fictionist of Filks so Fun they make one Fret and Flail 

• Looks at TRH

Done with your drink? She'll make more! 

She has more mottos than you can dispatch a dead donkey with. 

Oh! The huge manatee! 

I present to you: the one, the only, the ORIGINAL Fiona the Volatile.

Duck Micrography

I entered my barony's A&S competition. Knowing the level of art people here do, I did not expect to win. But this is a technique I've wanted to learn for a bit, and this was a good way to start. And I had fun with it! So here's the finished product, and my documentation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MOjBa5SctTBw9WV72IFdww8_uOyrOGTmTkFKJ3eOsSo/edit?usp=sharing
Words start at the chin, go up around the head, then once back to the chin jump over to the wing, and then continue as the waves.

(And no, I did not win. Osana's game board was amazingly beautiful and had much better documentation.)

Lessac Rogaczewski Silver Tyger

I hadn't done any calligraphy in a couple of months, so in December I sent a request for a scroll assignment. I got a response to do a Silver Tyger for a person I didn't know. I chose one of the two scroll blanks I had left, and asked Vetra to do the wordsmithing. It was a bar and ivy illumination, so I went with straight Textura Quadrata, not trying to research if there were any weirdnesses with the letters. The words I got fit perfectly. 

I don't have a template for the rampant tyger, so I printed the badge out in various sizes and traced it onto the page. The first one I tried was too small, the details of Sparky's fur tufts were getting lost, so I went up one size. That worked much better and still fit the area fine.

I remembered Fiona's bit of advice and thinned the paint out a little with some water and painted the badge on. It was ok. I remembered something Vettorio had said about using the micron pen to like "tighten up" the image, so I did that. And yes, it looked much better. It's not great, but it's not terrible. And I believe this entitles me to join Team Blue Square.

The recipient has no online presence that I can tell, and is not in my barony, so I hope he liked it.

Illumination by Lorita deSiena, words by Vetra Trys Kaukoles, calligraphy and badge by Violet Hughes.

Pennsic A&S award scrolls

At the beginning of July Ibrahim, the EK A&S general, posted around that he was looking for scribes to some simple small scrolls for the A&S competition at Pennsic. I decided sure, I can help with that. So a few of us who volunteered were given the wording and told in previous years the scrolls were half the size of a 8x11 page.

So I mapped out how much room I had to put the words and figured out I could nestle the A&S badge at the top, only needed to nestle it into the first two lines. I had even bought a simple goache paint set and a could small brushes at Michaels so I didn't have to rely on anybody else to do that. I can trace a badge and do a simple coloring book style paint job, nobody's going to critique that.

Simple (for me) textura quadrata, and my first attempt at "illumination". I just dabbed a little paint from the tube onto the brush and slapped it on the scroll. Discussing it later with Fiona she said it's best to mix a bit of paint with some water, put it onto the scroll and kind of nudge it to the edge of where I wanted it. OK, so next time I have a badge to do I'll try that.

Rollant de Blois AoA

This was a nice and simple scroll. Brigit asked me to do the calligraphy on her scroll and she came up with the words, word count was just over 100. The exemplar was mostly picture with only 8 words, The Flight into Egypt; Master of the Harvard Hannibal (1420-1430). 

So it was definitely Textura Quadrata, but there wasn't enough words for me to really tell if there were any deviations from the standard alphabet. And Brigit gave me a nice big area to put the text, she's doing all the viney stuff and leaving the people out. So I measured out the lines and penciled in the words. They fit pretty much perfectly.

The pen and nib gave me no problem, the ink gave me no issues, doing my favored script/hand, and no smudges or smears when I went to erase a few pencil marks. All scrolls should be this easy!!

Markus Silver Crescent

I had offered to Hugoline to do calligraphy for a Silver Crescent scroll she was doing, since she was going to try for an early period scroll, but couldn't do the roundy-type hand (uncial). I said I loved doing that.

She couldn't find an illumination exemplar that she liked and felt was within her skills, but she did find something else that was pretty cool. She sent me the exemplar, Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, 729 Opera (Hugo de Sancto Victore)

It looked like early gothic, which is not my favorite to do, but I can do it. It had a spot with all Lomardic capitals which I've never done. I couldn't figure out a good way to integrate those into the words, so I left them out entirely. Comparing it to my books it was a cross between early gothic and foundational, which made it SOOO much easier for me to do. The text was not long, I'm sure Aislinn has a write up on her research for that. But I got the line spacing to a point I liked and got it done fairly quickly. I'm satisfied with how it came out, and the recipient seemed to like the scroll as well.

Aislinn Silver Brooch

 This is the second silver brooch I've calligraphed for an Aislinn. This time I don't know the gentle, but I was asked by a friend to do calligraphy on her first kingdom level scroll.

I got a picture of the exemplar, an early 16th century page. I had a hard time comparing it to my calligraphy books figuring out what hand it was, but eventually landed on batarde, with more than a couple different letters. I'm not upset at these letters as they're much easier for me to write.

I did the practice sheet and it came out much shorter than the allowed for space. Looking at the exemplar again, decided there was more space between each line than I had, so I re-wrote it with 2 lines of space. The new scribe was also the wordsmith and she had put the fully complete event name, which was quite long. "Brennan and Caoilfhionn's Ducal Challenges & Settmour Swamp Day of Champions". But shortening it down to simply "Ducal Challenge" made it fit just about perfectly. I know the King has a vertical signature and I wasn't certain if that allowed for enough room, but I also then looked at photos of a few scrolls that were just given out at Pennsic, and for some of them he split his signature into a 2x2 block of kanji instead of the 4 all vertical. So, either he'll split them again, or there will end up being enough room for it.

Silver Wheel for Demetrio

I was notified that my protege was going to be receiving a Silver Wheel. When I was arranging which event he'd get it at, I sent a quick email to Tyger Signet asking for the assignment. Which I got, so I decided which of the scroll blanks to use and started researching. The illuminator, Lorita DeSiena, helpfully wrote on the back what her inspiration piece was. A French hunting bible, Le Livre de la Chasse. I found some photos online although I don't think I found the exact piece she used. But it seemed to have 2 hands: early gothic, which I learned from doing Ryan's Mark scroll that I severely dislike that one, but it also had Textura Quadrata on some parts. 

 

So I took out the 2 calligraphy books I had and compared them to the exemplar. I usually go with the one from the David Harris book, but the exemplar was a little more flowy, so I looked at the  Marc Drogin book and it was a bit closer. 

Some specific letters and nuances that are different. I traced the practice area onto a sheet, marked some lines (3mm, 5mm, 3mm) and made notes on top of the letters that were different in the exemplar from the book.

I had to decide where to put the order badge on the page. I kind of like putting it right in the middle so the words flow around it. I like that idea, but I wasn't 100% thrilled with how it looked where I had it. Maybe I could move it up to the lines that have less words so it all blocks out more evenly. But I went back to looking at pages from the hunting bible and saw that many of them had a puzzle letter in the upper left of text. I'm not doing that exactly, but what if I put the badge there instead? Ultimately I decided that the badge wouldn't look right there either, so I put it at the bottom under the text. I used a micropen and a circle template.

Words:

Ryouko'jin, Demon-King of Heavens Three 

And Indrakshi, Horned Queen have come forward 

Together, Monarchs East have reached an accord 

There is one whose acts need acclaim, by decree

He has surpassed every measure, all agree 

Demetrio Antelini da Lucca 

His ardent dedication has struck a chord 

With Varied positions in his repartee 

In those roles he exceeds all expectations 

Displaying his intense commitment and zeal 

For now to receive official citation  

His merits are such that they cause bells to peal! 

Today exalted by these great orations 

Do We present Demetrio the Silver Wheel 

Done this Pennsic War, Anno Societatis LX 

Sometimes they just don't go according to plan.

I got an assignment for a person I don't know, and didn't find much information on him. The recommendation was fine, pretty standard for a Silver Tyger. But still, off I went to my wonderful wordsmith and Aislinn came back to me pretty quickly with words. She said it was a hidden acrostic, meaning instead of the letters going down the side spelling out something, it was specific words within the text that spelled out "silver tyger". So I had the idea to do the letters in a red ink, the rest of the text in black. 

I got out one of the blanks Lorita made for me, and figured my standard Gothic hand would match it.

My pen... ugh, I need a better pen I think. The inkwell slip-on thingy was a little wonky, and my size 2.5 nibs are old, so the points didn't line up right. (I have since ordered new nibs) It mostly worked, but it felt like it was fighting me, and in a few spots it just splooged. Plus I missed writing one of the letters in red, so when I tried scraping the letter and redoing it in red it really did not work and still looked black. Plus the red ink I used was really dark, so those letters did not stand out like I'd intended. Not even subtly. Just like, if you know to look for it, you can find it (except the one letter), but I was cursing this page out and put it in time out.

I asked Vettorio to paint on the Silver Tyger badge, so a few days later when I got it back from him and looked at the calligraphy again I didn't absolutely hate it, but I was still not satisfied. But it was due soon, so I took it to the post office and mailed it out, since I was not going to the event.

After all that fighting, I cursed and yelled at my pen and beat the inkwell into proper(ish) position and started in on the next scroll.

Words:

Solomon of Acre has found
A home in Our esteemed ground. 

We’ll take this time to iterate
Laud and expound his martial plate

Verily to all those present 
Examples of practice well spent 

Raising others to much success  
Yet still gives time and praise not less

Today the Eastern Majesty
Of Ryouko’jin and Indrakshi

At Malagentia to confer
This, Solomon’s Silver Tyger 

Done at this Great Northeastern War
Anno Societatis 60