So over the past couple of weeks, I had been working on a project for the East Kingdom Artisanal Exchange. The victim, err, recipient was Mme Perronnelle de Croy from Quintavia. The theme of the exchange was Heraldry. For shame to my house, but I forgot until the mailing deadline that I had even signed up, and y’all know that the last couple of months have been a spoonful of fun for me. But I finally finished it and mailed it off, so I figured I would post a little thingerydo about it here
So I started, like you do, by coming up with a poem inspired by her heraldry. It has three crosses Or in chief, and two ravens facing each other in the main, so I took those elements and wove a story about a fair maiden off to meet and marry her lord, and given three golden crosses as presents – a shiny new one from her best friend, a family heirloom from her mother, and a cross from her grandmother that was given to her on her wedding day. The ravens became Huginn and Munnin, the mythical Norse ravens who carried with them memories and visions of the future.
“Three crosses of gold were gifted to me
To sail to my lord, I took to the sea
Ravens flew round me, one to each side
Visions and memories, left and right”
I had this poem, and then the question became what to do with it? I decided to write a little troubador-esque song using the words, and the opening stanza as a refrain. I recorded it (after singing it badly into my cell phone and doctoring the hell out of the audio file to make it sound halfway decent). And then for the final project, I took pen to vellum and scrolled it all out. Here are some of the shots that I took of the scroll in progress.
Now in absolute disclosure – this is a very “periodesque” piece. This type of music would almost never have been written down, so it was done imprecisely on purpose. You can follow the tune by looking at it, but you have to know it (and unless you have the audio file you don’t). The manuscript is ALSO very informal, on purpose, so while it was gussied up a lot with the dedication on the right and the heraldric image on the left, this is the sort of thing that would have been folded, spindled, mutilated and thrown in the bottom of a lutenists rucksack on his way to Florence from Languedoc. But it came out looking pretty, and is totally plausible for a late 13th C. piece of music – all the elements existed, but they were probably never combined in this way.
But it was fun! The first time I have done a scroll to give to someone. First time I have recorded one of my pieces of music and given it to someone here in the SCA, too. I learned A LOT by doing it, which was probably the most important aspect of it all.