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

 With the editing/spellchecking of the text now almost complete and due to be sent to the printers at the end of the weekend (after the final round of edits and fine-tuning), biggest concerns have recently been turning to the display space. I've added a chair and cushion to invite a viewer experience of the book - the narrative text. The cushion, with its poetic Latin inscription, is revealed to be a sarcastic mirror of the poetic content of the book. The nature of the Latin text is actually pretty significant, as this blog post and translation shows. The idea that it is itself a 'deconstructed' (cut up/rearranged/repackaged) text about poetry and writing poetry is another layer of playfulness and rebuilding in this museum space, which is more like a space that looks a bit like a museum space - like the Latin text which looks like a Latin text but isn't really (it's corrupt, edited and faulty). In another sense, the Latin may be as obscure as some of the names and

 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

  While reading through N.K. Sandars' Prehistoric Art in Europe has so far been hugely stimulating, as previously posted, the above page in particular drew a number of things to my attention: considerations of different forms of representation, in this case, the geometric, even abstract, depiction of universality of form; but also the idea of finger-art, which may be the oldest form of sentient art imaginable, if we consider an appendage tracing hesitantly in sand, clay or snow - an action which is, in the poem, defined as the origin of the written form of the Rockcats' language, Sli'ith, and its cursive nature (which, visually, is suggestive of Arabic script): "Few men could write, but Rockcats long recorded words in their tongue, Sli'ith; and unlike rigid runes, their writing flowed in curling twists and tails, for once they wrote their words in sand, when on the coast of Kren they stood; a new-born people, elder tribe; those ancient days when all were one."

What's this all about? Basically, the documentation of my 2021 final project for my MFAAH Master's degree. “Myth is a type of speech” (R. Barthes, 'Myth Today' in Mythologies ). If my work has a narrative, then it is one of narrative itself – sometimes multiple narratives, sometimes competing, unreliable, questioning, contradictory, and ambiguous. At times, meta-narratives; stories within stories, inside re-tellings of tales perhaps familiar or else new. And one of my most cherished kinds of ambiguous narrative is myth. Myth, as an oral body of knowledge initially, is therefore speech. And in written form, embedded, it is capable of being analysed, quoted, paraphrased, interpreted, mis-interpreted, bastardized and corrupted. The language I use to disclose my myth-makings are related, though separate; at once distant and unknowable, yet simultaneously tangible and everyday: English, and its antecedent, Old English – in which copious amounts of our modern English (and Sco