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

 Getting back into serious work has been hard the past few days, but last night and this afternoon saw progress on the Gyldland Runic alphabet. First, the usable alphabet had to be defined - no Q, V, X, J or Z; no P (many words starting with 'P' in OE are Latin loan-words, and I wanted each Rune's name to have the initial letter which it represented), with additional characters for the 'specials', namely 'ash', and 'eth/thorn'. I set the six prime deities as the first six characters in the 'alphabet', with the others more or less randomly ordered as follows: So some slight modifications there from the first rough draft, with a couple of alternatives as well for good measure. This Rune system is clearly showing its pictographic origins, with one of my favourites being the 'B' - boda , = 'messenger', i.e raven. The Germanic reference there for readers ought to be clear enough (cf. Hugin and Munin). Also began a basic numbering s...

 Recent family emergencies will impact my ability to keep this blog updated as often as I had planned, and work will likely be progressing slower as a result. But I'll continue to plod on and do the best I can. Since deep critical thinking is not really an option at the minute, today I mostly returned to the practicalities of engraving - this time on wood, which seems much easier to work with than even the rather soft (and at times, flaky) sandstone which I explored last week. The problems with the stone are not so much technique (which I basically picked up as I went along) but rather my own weaknesses to RSI - I used the lightest hammer I have for the purpose, but even that left my hands sore and stiff for the next day or so afterwards. I've prepared a number of experimental pieces of wood to explore the process of creating primitive figurations in this medium:   These long, thin sections (from surrounding farm gates, fences etc.), with vertical grain, impose limitations o...

 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...

 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...

  The latest addition to the library arrived earlier today. Even a cursory skim through this text reveals it to be like no other 'novel' I've ever encountered - if it can even truly fit that category, and I can see the connections to Borges straight away, as well as to what I'm trying to do with my own adventures in text and meta-textuality. What does a specific text say? What lies beyond the text - both directly alluded to, or indirectly (via the reader's own experiences and knowledge)? As few people in the West know much, if anything, of the Khazars, we are relying upon the author as an athority - although we can always choose to conduct our own research beyond the novel, in the 'real world'. My situation is different, in that I'm creating something pretty much from scratch (with only allusions to ideas, knowledge and events that exist outside these texts) and then presenting it - whether on a full platter, or only piece by piece, still remains to be ...

  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....