Silver Rapier scroll for Percival Michaelson

 

The theme of this piece seems to have been “Choices were made.” 

I’m not entirely pleased with some of the choices I made on this one (enough that I was debating entirely redoing the calligraphy before starting the illumination), but I think it came out well enough in the end.

Knowing that the recipient’s persona is (primarily) 13th century English made picking an exemplar easy - I had really enjoyed working from the Rugby-de Brailes bible on a previous project, which is 13th c. English, and was more than happy to go back to it for another try. Picking a source for the words, on the other hand, was harder than I expected or wanted, this time around. I just was having the devil of a time finding something appropriate for a fighting award, in 13th century England, that wasn’t thoroughly religious.

An offhand comment by Effingham led me down a rabbithole of hunting texts, and I landed on the 15th century Master of Game, based off an earlier work. Close enough! Digging through it, I found the following description of the qualities of hunting hounds:

A hound is true to his lord and his master, and of good love and true. A hound is of great understanding and of great knowledge, a hound hath great strength and great goodness, a hound is a wise beast and a kind (one). A hound has a great memory and great smelling, a hound has great diligence and great might, a hound is of great worthiness and of great subtlety, a hound is of great lightness and of great perseverance (?), a hound is of good obedience, for he will learn as a man all that a man will teach him. A hound is full of good sport; hounds are so good that there is scarcely a man that would not have of them, some for one craft, and some for another. Hounds are hardy, for a hound dare well keep his master's house, and his beasts, and also he will keep all his master's goods, and he would sooner die than anything be lost in his keeping.

This is perfect, thought I. I can change a couple of words here and there, besides changing every instance of “hound” to “fencer,” and that’s a nice straightforward praise scroll. Adding in the usual bracketing elements, we get the following:

Pray attend, East, to the words of King Matthew and Queen Fiamuin, and hear the qualities and manners a good fencer should have.

A fencer is true to his crown and his kingdom, and of good love and true. A fencer is of great understanding and of great knowledge; a fencer hath great strength and goodness; a fencer is a wise man and kind. A fencer has a great memory and great perception; a fencer has great diligence and great might; a fencer is of great worthiness and great subtlety. A fencer is of great lightness and of great perseverance; a fencer is of good obedience, for he will learn all that others will teach him. He is full of good sport, and hardy, and he would sooner die than that his honor be lost.

Percival Michaelson is of all these qualities, and it is for these and sundry other reasons that we award him entry into our Order of the Silver Rapier.

Done by Our hand at the Thawing of the Mud, Anno Societatis LIX.

The last time I worked from this exemplar, I paid very little attention to proportions, other than the very barest basics of line spacing, and looking at it this time, I realized that unless I use it for a peerage scroll, I am never going to want to put as much text in a scroll as is in this exemplar. The original is two columns of 52 lines each, which is so much text, and I am too much a court herald to want to take that much time in court for the reading of a scroll. I noticed that the last few scrolls I’ve written have been in the ballpark of 175 words, and figured aiming around there or possibly as many as 200 words, was about what I’d go for; this text turned out to be 176 words, so right on what I was looking for. 

So now to the creation of the physical document. Last time I was still working with Speedball nibs; this time I’ve got better ones to play with, and have been making my way through the various brands to see if I prefer any of them, so this time I used a Brause nib. The usual iterating process to see how big I could go and still fit all the text in left me with a 1.5mm nib, 4-ish nib-widths x-height, even spacing.

I felt a lot more confident this time in my ability to get the letterforms correct to the exemplar than I did last time, and part of that was that I spent more time scrolling through the massive amounts of text in the original. In addition to the simple “how is this letter shaped in this hand,” I was also looking for ligatures and variant forms to make sure I used properly: the half-r, whether there’s a long and a short s, how this hand handles double s, etc. I was surprised to not see a short s at the end of words, and that this hand just seems to use two long s together when necessary, rather than some variant form - this was relevant to my text, so I shrugged and just kept the long s. I initially didn’t think I had seen the half-r, but most of the way down the first column in the page I was mostly working from, I saw a very clear “doloris” with an equally clear half-r, and realized that I had seen it in several other places and not recognized it as such, so into the mix it goes!

Okay, so let’s talk about some of those choices I mentioned.

The exemplar I worked from is in Latin, and is rife with scribal abbreviations. I have a burning ambition to do the same, but that’s harder in English (though I did read a paper about abbreviations in 15th c English medical manuscripts, and may try it sometime on a scroll with more period spellings); I asked Gundormr his thoughts on just using one or two, especially since this text has one million instances of “and” and that would be a perfect place for the abbreviated “et”; he confirmed for me that maybe don’t half-ass it, but using the et is fine, so I did just that one and called it good.

Or so I thought. Until I got into the first column and realized that I was having a harder time than expected planning out the length of my words, and was running into the margin more than I wanted. I split the word “manners” on the fifth line and still managed to squish the letters because I didn’t want to leave just two letters orphaned on one line. Then on the tenth line, I got to the end of “understanding” and realized that I had three letters left in the word, but room on the line for only two of them, and that there wasn’t a good option for skipping just one of those letters; I opted for the squiggly abbreviation that in Latin can mean one of several common word endings, and figured that “-ing” is a common enough English ending, especially one that has shapes in it that are more-or-less implied by this particular squiggle, that it was a reasonable choice. Similarly, three lines later I ran out of space for the e at the end of “wise,” and chose to use a superscript e instead of any other option.

So abbreviations where I hadn’t intended them, but that seem maybe reasonable. Okay, fine. Another problem showed up, however, when I went back to write in Their Majesties’ names in red, in the spaces I’d left for them, and it became clear that I had not, in fact, left enough space for “Matthew” (though I think it might have been enough had I not gotten complacent at the end of “King” and left too much space between words), and had no room for the w at the end, without running into the et I’d left behind in black. On this one, I used the curlicue that generally elides “-us” in Latin, because it’s all I felt I had space for (though I suppose I could have used the horizontal line above the letters that means “letter(s) missing here”); it would not be used this way, makes the name look more like “Matthes” (or Matthias, as a friend thought when they first looked at this), and I would like to not have put myself in a position where I felt that was my only option.

(I also realized two words late that in “he is full of good sport,” I had fallen into the rhythm of “a fencer is of great x” and completely skipped the word “full,” and I deeply regret that but had no good way to fix it. Thanks, Titivillus.)

Other than that, my primary remaining criticism is that the exemplar does not have any gaps in the text column the way I do between “Silver Rapier” and “Done by Our hand”; I’m still not entirely sure how I should have addressed that (start the next line right away and let the illuminated capital be assumed for where it goes? put some marginal/commentary text in red in that line? this exemplar doesn’t go in for the line-fillers that so many other 13th and 14th c works do). I also wish I’d had enough space to write out “Anno Societatis” instead of abbreviating it, but it was more important to me that the columns match exactly, and I was just barely able to make that fit. (I love how well I managed the capital S in “AS”, though - it’s much better than the one in Silver.)

I struggled a lot with ink flow on this, as I have on the last few I’ve done, and I think I’m coming to the conclusion that either Noodler’s Black just really hates this paper (so maybe I’ll try a different ink), or I’m not leaving enough ink in the nib after I dip it - I had no struggles at all with the red ink, which tells me it’s not the paper/nib combo. I am annoyed by that struggle, though, because I’m much more pleased with my calligraphy practice in my sketchbook (which is Canson mixed-media paper), where I didn’t have these issues, than I am with this work on hot-press Arches watercolor paper.

I don’t have much to say about the illumination, besides that I’m delighted to have finally started to figure out how to make the One True Brush (Princeton Velvetouch round #1) work for me - all of the painting on this piece was done with that one brush, and I’m honestly shocked by how fine a line I can get with it. I do think I need to pick up some more colors of paint - as usual, I’m using all Archangel Arts paints; this piece has cadmium red deep, ultramarine, yellow ochre, malachite, black and titanium white, and a little bit of venetian red (just on the dragon) that I should have just started with from the beginning.

I’m very pleased with the illumination overall; this time the dragon is an amalgamation of a couple dragons in the exemplar, rather than just an attempt at copying one precisely, and I went with yellow instead of the blue and red that’s more common because I wanted a little more variety and really love that yellow ochre, and there is some yellow in this manuscript. (And I remembered the teeth on the dragon this time!  And fixed the proportions on the sidebar!) I'm also pleased that I remembered to leave space in the left margin for the curls that extend outside the main block, and maybe next time I'll leave even more space for them.

The D capital is copied wholesale, except that its interior is taken from the P that became the Silver Rapier badge, and I accidentally swapped a couple of colors in the very center of that (the north and south petals of the center flower should be green, and the center circle should be blue, instead of the other way around). My whitework will get better the more I work on it; this is already better than it has been in the past, and while it’s still a little wobbly and blobby, I think it’s still serviceable.

I did also deliberately choose not to outline the orle in the Silver Rapier badge with black, the way everything else in the exemplar is, because I had gotten really clean lines just with the blue and white, and was certain I would mess it up if I tried outlining it.

On a side note, I’m really loving working from this manuscript and trying to get ever closer to text that looks like the original, but I don’t know that I see other scribes working constantly from the same exemplar, and I don’t know if that’s just that there are so many good manuscripts out there and people want to play with all of them, or if there’s a worry that scroll recipients won’t think their piece is as unique if there are other similar ones out there, or what. I’m going to try not to just have all my scrolls be “some text and a ridiculous derpy dragon,” or at least not all the same ridiculous derpy dragon, but I’m having fun, so maybe it’s fine.