Immortalizing Womba

 

Having not been home the last couple of days, I needed to get back into some of the 'heavy' work and managed to bash out this rather 'primitive' and 'amateur' rendering of the main character of the epic poem - evidently carved by a friend or colleague of hers, whether a fellow member of Greyfair clan or even one of the other characters mentioned in the text. I used a much wider chisel (in truth a ground-down screwdriver) and hammer, eschewing fine lines and going straight for the memorialization aspect, whilst encapsulating the essence of the character. Rustic, basic but inherently honest in its intentions - perhaps the essence of 'folk art'. I like how the thick, simple lines are also suggestive of the English chalk hill figures:

The Cerne Abbas Giant and the Wilmington Long Man - hill figures which have fascinated me for over 30 years

This was my first attempt at writing actual Gyldish runes, namely her name and title: "Womba Wislig" (Womba the Wise) and I really like how they compose themselves. I also came up with the convention of using two verticals to indicate the start of the text, and a single for the end (showing that they are read left-right and top to bottom, going back to what I wrote previously about the runes also serving divinatory purposes and being able to be flipped and read from different angles for different meanings. This Western convention of writing is of course not followed by Rockcat Sli'ith script, which is read right to left like Arabic; or Ulfish which can be read vertically as well as horizontally, or sometimes both, crossword-fashion). A nice simple detour from the finely details and more complex double figure piece of the lunar stone, which I'll probably go back to tomorrow - incorporating the Runic names of the two deities, I reckon..