Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 Yesterday, I collected the 5 copies of the printed, bound Gyldlandsaga books from the printers and examined them...it's always nerve-wracking to open up that first copy and peer inside at how it's turned out. But the books look very fine - they have good, solid (even monumental) weight and physicality, and the steel spine adds excellent durability. The lack of "real book" textualities such as copyright bibliographical data, page numbering, ISBN etc., I think, help to enforce the 'art object' aspect of them and take away the 'mass production' aspects of cataloguing and data storage: as far as the international records are concerned, this book does not exist as such (cf Hannah Arendt's idea of refugees with no identity papers etc. being classed as 'non-people by 'the authorities' - i.e those whose rules constitute being or non-being). All the Old English texts on which this is based exist only in unique manuscripts, allowing these very

Whilst editing of the text continues (the early chapters, having been derived from a long-abandoned prose work, need special amounts of attention), I also spent some time editing some of the design pieces for submission to the Masters showcase for this year. I doubt very much any of them will be accepted, but they will come in handy for the online degree show, which will be a very different form of presentation to the physical space:  I also decided to check with the art school print shop their options for binding hardback books - the 'thesis' style which I initially deemed "not quite what I'm looking for" some months ago, but which now seems wholly appropriate - being the traditional form of binding for academic, authoritative texts, an assumed status which is offset by the interior text in all its ambiguity and ambivalence. The print team also offered a choice of gold or silver lettering/design for the covers, which I found very interesting. I've never liked

 Yesterday's first tentative step into defining the Gyldland Runic alphabet - now literally carved in stone - got me motivated to scribble down the foundations for a full set. (Of course the set need not be complete and accurate, given that researchers and archaeologists - of fictional civilizations as well as real ones - can only analyze what they have found to date, and so different inscriptions from different times will no doubt have variations on the 'basic' set). Because so much quasi-mystical nonsense has been written about Runes in recent times, I actually have very few texts pertaining to them specifically, but drew inspiration from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem (in 'Anglo-Saxon Mythology, Migration and Magic' by Tony Linsell), Rudolf Koch's 'The Book of Signs' and Maria Carmela Betro's 'Hieroglyphics: the Writings of Ancient Egypt' in creating a rough selection of individual symbols - some of which clearly still resemble their earlier, p