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

 While this week has proved to be the most harrowing I've ever faced to date, yesterday I still managed to find time to sneak in a flying trip to Auchmithie on the coast to capture a piece of very impromptu 'cave art':  The whole operation took no more than 20 minutes, including actually finding a suitable cave spot on the beach (luckily the tide was out, as I hadn't had time to check beforehand). The painting, intended to resemble the ancient red ochre tradition, was simply ground sandstone powder ( prepared in a previous post ) applied with a wet brush (and finger) and, I think, looks actually OK. The painting is designed to resemble the head of the raven god Hrefni, who is lord of storms, and is therefore an invocation to him by fishermen for calm seas: As I forgot my sketchbook with the full-length figure of Hrefni and his shaman's drum, I would like to revisit the caves at Auchmithie and spend longer realising another piece of prehistoric cave art, which can th

 Apologies for the terrible title of today's post, but it made me smile. With the new chisel arriving this morning, I decided to get on straight away with the plan of making a first, tentative, small piece of inscription. I chose the schematic portrait of my storm-god Hrefni in his raven form: and sketched it onto a suitable sized piece of stone. Things began a bit heavy-handed as I've never handled a proper chisel in this way before, but it soon became clear that the relative softness of the stone (sandstone, I'm assuming, as it seems to be of a similar appearance to the local ancient monumental stones) allowed me to scratch quite heavily, using the edge of the chisel and no hammer, guidelines deep enough to allow the deeper hammered work to follow the correct path and not meander off on a journey of its own - which is what accounted for the very rough, jagged initial outlines:   I gave up on the double outline idea as there wasn't enough space (with a bigger stone an

With a new 6" x 1/2" stone chisel on its way to me, today I earmarked a few good, flat stones for practice. The plan is simply to trace and then inscribe a few basic example designs representative of the 'later period' of civilisation in my world:   namely, a couple of the simpler, less cursive designs, such as the raven forms of Hrefni: I should also start to think about the form of writing which might be in use as well - despite some vague ideas of how the Gyldland runes might differ from real-world Norse and Saxon types, I've yet to come up witjh something resembling a developed alphabet or set of characters. I wonder if they should differ much at all? After all, the various futharks exist in several forms, and I do use a plethora of words derived not only from OE sources but Norse as well. However, the opportunity is there to come up with something distinctive and suggestive of the people and their character, rather than just straight copying what is in effe

 Following on from my earlier post , this was delivered earlier today (48 hour service!): NK Sandars - Prehistoric Art in Europe and after a lunchtime's worth of browsing, it has already pushed the visual side of this project in a whole new direction. Sanders' scholarship might be 60+ years old but it covers so much more than processes of dating and archaeological musings - the clue is in the title, and she addresses the ideas of these works as art in their own right as well, citing the likes of Gombrich on the way, as well as several detailed comparisons of prehistoric figuration to so-called 'civilised' Greek artistic forms. In terms of visual interest, a few beast/human hybrids caught my attention straight away: especially the 'sorceror' (beast-shaman?) figure at bottom right. This straightaway inspired a more 'primitive' rendering of this depiction of Hrefni, the raven storm-god: as this, re-imagined in a much earlier style: Herein the difference is