Keldor is given a Writ

Shortly after Crown Tourney this autumn Crown Prince Stigot asked Keldor if he could make some stamps, so they could make coins for their reign. Keldor happily agreed, Stigot sent a sketch of what they wanted, and Keldor set to work.  The stamps themselves are rather heavy, so rather than bringing them to 12th Night with us (we flew to the event with only carry-on luggage), Keldor used the stamps to make a handful of coins and brought those to the event. 



In addition he brought a gift…

 

One of Keldor’s friends is a hunter, who occasionally calls him up and says things like “I have a badger, do you want it?”, and Keldor picks it up, skins it, tanns the hide, and renders the fat to blend with wax for softening/water proofing leather. The last badger had a penis, and that species is one with a bone in that organ. Keldor extracted that bone, as one does. When he showed me the bone my first thought was “That looks just like a Viking Age ear spoon”, due to the scoop-shaped joint at one end.  Keldor agreed that it does, and set the bone aside to dry. The week before Coronation he polished up the bone and added a tiny hint of scrimshaw pattern lines, to make it clear that this was a worked object, and not just a random bit of bone (no further shaping was required to make an ear spoon out of it).


 

When the Herald announced “Come talk to me if you have business at Coronation Court” Keldor placed himself directly in front of the herald before the announcement was even complete, causing the Herald to say “I see we already have one taker”, which got a laugh from the room.  Then they stepped aside, and Keldor explained that he had the coins to present… and a gift.

After the Coronation ceremony itself, and the requisite swearing of fealty, the Herald summoned “Keldor Coinmaker” forward  to present the coins, after which Keldor told Stigot “I also have a personal gift”, and explained that a King needs to be able to hear his advisors so that he can make wise decisions, and “therefore I give you this ear spoon with which to clean your ears“, and he handed it over. Stigot lifted the spoon to his ear as Keldor continued “…but I didn’t make the ear spoon, it was made by a badger, with the help of another badger. It is the bone that they use when they are making a new badger“, and laughter rippled through the hall, as everyone realised what he was talking about, and Stigot lowered the spoon away from his ear.

Keldor rather expected that his friend, the King, would promptly invite him to leave the court after receiving such a gift. Instead, Stigot turned Keldor around to face the assembled people, as the Herald read out a writ, charging Keldor to stand vigil to contemplate admission to the order of the Laurel, at an event to be agreed upon with the Crown, and Keldor was truly and deeply surprised.

The Vigil (and presumably the elevation, assuming Keldor say yes after everyone advises him about the duties and responsibilities that go with the job at title of Laurel) will take place at Double Wars, and he hopes to see all of his friends there. The exact day for the Vigil has not yet been set. However, their Majesties will not be on site the first weekend, so it will be later in the the event than that.

In addition to the Vigil itself, Keldor plans to bring his forge to the event, and will host an Open Forge Day wherein anyone who wishes to try their hand at smithing can come by and he will help them forge something. This will also be an opportunity to engage in discussions on what it means to be a Laurel in our society, and how crafts such as smithing relate to our peerage structure, so please come by, even if you don’t wish to engage in smithing yourself, as there is potential for some interesting round table discussions on these topics, in addition to forge work.

 

Thank you to King Stigot for the photos of the coins and ear spoon (since we forgot to take photos before giving them away).
Thank you to Kytte of the Lake for the photo of Queen Lofnheiðr, Keldor, and King Stigot as the writ was read by the herald (not pictured).

The beautiful writ is the work of Ellisif Gydasdottir.

 

attending the 36th Nordic Geological Winter meeting

 When last I left off posting about the trip, I had explained about the problems we encountered trying to leave town. I didn't mention that missing that flight made Keldor tired and discouraged, and ready to just skip the event and go home to bed.  At the time I just said to Keldor that it would be ok, my conference presentation isn't till tomorrow, so taking a later flight will be fine. It was totally true, and he accepted the comment at face value.  It was also totally unrelated to my true motivation for getting him to site, which was knowing that TRM planned to give him a writ at the event. Indeed, when we arrived in Gothenburg and Aleydis met us at the bus stop I commented that I had briefly considered not traveling, but then decided that of course we need to go to the event, and she smiled and winked at me, which he totally missed at the time (she is also a Laurel, so knew of the plans for the writ).

Thursday morning Keldor walked with me to the conference, and then left his backpack with mine in the back of the room for my session and went to check out museums in the area.  I enjoyed the GeoArchaeology session, which included talks on:

• Aspects of geoarchaeology
  • This was the invited Keynote speech for the session. He shared information on three projects. The first was the analysis of carbonate deposits in the longest aqueduct of the ancient world, the second was a study of the carbonate deposits in a water mill, which record the timing of the invasion of the Gauls in the late 200's. The third was about a serious puzzle-project--people spent five years putting back together the broken marble decorative wall facing from a building in Turkey, did a geological analysis of the folds recorded in the rock, and even determined that two marble slabs from the sequence were missing, presumably broken before use, which resulted in a need to rearrange the order of the slabs, to still achieve the nearly mirror image patterns of the blocks on the wall.
• Digitally Reconstructing an Iron Production Landscape: The Spatiality and Chronology of Iron Production Sites within Northern Sweden
  • This is a Masters student project. I enjoyed his graph showing the number and timing of each of the iron production sites--there was already a fair bit of iron produced in Sweden during the Bronze Age, though the graphs really shoot up once the Iron Age arrived
• Complex Crack Formation in Metavolcanic Rocks Accommodating Tool Making
  • this one was looking at rhyolite outcrops in North Carolina, which had been used extensively in the Stone Age for tool making, and which also sometimes crack to sharp flakes in response to the weather. He didn't say it, but I expect that if they crack naturally to sharp flakes, that could have given people the first idea to do it on purpose. 
• Modeling the social process behind the selection of rocks and the positioning of rock art figures in Aspeberget during the Bronze Age
  • This one is part of a much larger rock art study--this portion focused on the different types of motifs that appear in the rock art, how many of each appear in each location, and what these clusters of patterns can tell us.
• Application of ultrasonic soundwave velocity for investigation and documentation of Bronze Age rock art in Tanum, Sweden
  • this part of the same project as the one above, and it is a more geologic study of rock art--it turns out that the act of carving in the stone changes the rate at which sound waves travel through the stone. She also mentioned the ways in which the microcracks that happen in the rocks in response to the release of pressure when the glacier melted makes a huge difference in how easy or difficult the stone is to carve, which likely made a huge difference as to which stone outcrops got used for rock art in the first place. She thinks that an experienced carver may have been able to hear the difference by thumping on the rock, since the stones that would be harder to carve were not carved.
• Paint it red – Investigating the impact of painting rock art in Sweden through thermal imaging 
  • Sadly, this talk didn't happen. It would have been the third of the set, and I had been looking forward to it.
• Subfossil trees as proxies for long-term climate dynamics and ecosystem changes
  • This one compares tree rings from lots of long-dead trees to learn about changes in the climate during the lifetime of the trees
• Stoneage site detected by high resolution seismic method
  • This guy had been doing seismic studies of ocean floor, and noticed that while the water above the ocean floor normally looks calm and flat in such studies, in a couple of areas there were disturbances that show clearly in the water column just above the ocean floor. The investigated, by sending down divers, and determined that it was a concentration of flint scrap from stone age settlement sites that are now submerged that were causing the disturbances. Indeed, they have even tested this, by dropping such scrap to the ocean floor on purpose, and then doing the seismic reading, and they see the same sort of disturbances in the water column. 
• Inventory and investigation of peatlands to reveal possible human settlements in south central Sweden
  • This one is a study of bits of not quite fossilised trees from peat bogs. The speaker really likes peat bogs.
• Micro-scale clues to transport-scale questions: How LA-ICP-MS trace element composition maps can reveal steatite’s hidden secrets
  • this was my talk. I think it went ok.
• Genesis of limonite ores in the “Röda Jorden” area from a hydrogeological perspective
  • this one focused on what factors are responsible for making the red earth area in central Sweden so rich in oxidized iron that it could be easily transformed into metal using early bloomery processes.

Assuming that these talks are a reasonable representation of what people are currently studying in the intersection of geology and archaeology, there are far more people interested in early iron production and Bronze Age rock art than there are people who want to use mineral geochemistry to figure out which quarry stone artefacts came from. I am not surprised--I rarely do things the way others do...

After the session ended it was time for lunch, and I was hungry, so I failed my "networking" roll, and went to get free food (which was surprisingly tasty), instead of trying to talk with any of the people who had attended or presented at the session. Then I walked over the museum Keldor was at, and had fun there (for that story, and the rest of the trip south, see the next blog post)

The rest of the trip to 12th Night

 After I finished my conference talk and listening to the other talks that session, I called Keldor, who had thought about spending the day at Universeum, which is very near the conference site. But he decided that since we had a flight to catch in the afternoon, perhaps there wouldn't be enough time for that adventure, so he was instead enjoying the displays at the World Culture Museum, which is only half a block further away from the conference site. So I checked our backpacks into the conference coat room and took my sewing project with me to the museum.  Keldor had already had a couple of hours to explore, so he guided me first to the cellar, where they have a display on games, lots and lots of games, from lots of different time periods and lots of different countries.  One of the displays was a board game we hadn't seen before, Chaturaji, first described in detail c. 1030 by Al-Biruni in his book India. They board (actually a table, with the board painted on top, and cups set in for the captured pieces), and instructions printed on the wall beside it. Of course we had to play.

Since this is a four-person game I played blue and red, while he played yellow and green. While this is a variant on chess, the moves are determined by rolling the dice, which adds a random component to the game that I, who am terrible at planning long-term strategy for chess, really appreciated.  Just as we had finished the game, and set the board back up for the next player, our friend Daniel arrived. He'd just finished sitting an exam, and had the rest of the day available, so he decided to meet up with us. I was very surprised, as Keldor hadn't mentioned the plans to me, but it was super fun to see him.  Of course, we asked him if he'd seen the game before, and we hadn't, so we sat back down and the three of us played (I took blue, of course, and Daniel red, and Keldor, who had won the first game, got to play both yellow and green).  Due to the dice-rolling nature of the game, it is actually easier to play fair and have the two colours played by a single player attack one another, as it makes sense to capture a piece if the dice permit (since, in the variation of the game rules posted on the wall of the museum, the winner is the first to have captured 15 points worth of pieces, though the above linked wiki page says that you just keep going for the maximum number of points, and if you are lucky enough to get everyone else's king without losing your own you get bonus points). Daniel won that game, and then we went exploring through other parts of the museum, where I climbed onto and into things designed to be climbed into or onto like the small child I am. It was fun. 



While much of the museum content is modern, or last century, there were things of interest hidden here and there for we who enjoy best things from the Stone Age through to the Middle Ages, including swords, musical instruments, shoes, and even a fish-skin parka that Keldor wants to make a copy of.



After playing and looking at stuff for quite a while we went to the cafe, where I had some salted caramel cheesecake (which Keldor helped me eat), and they had some coffee. Then I worked on my sewing project and chatted with Keldor and Daniel till it was time to go get our bags and head to the stop for the airport bus.

The bus trip went pretty quickly, and soon we were through security and at our gate, where we had plenty of time to do a quest for something I would like for dinner and make more progress on my sewing. (Gothenburg airport is not a good place to be hungry for vegetables if you don't tolerate things that are pickled--after checking all the options and determining that 100% of the veg available has been contaminated with vinegar; I finally settled for a plain scone, which turned out to be too sweet. There is a reason I normally bring food with me when I travel!) 

More sewing was accomplished on the flight to Munich. However, our final "flight" of the day was a bus from Munich airport to Nuremberg airport. If I had known that when I was booking, I would have booked only as far as  Munich, and then gotten a rental car for the rest of the trip, but I didn't notice till after the purchase was complete. It took us a while to find the right bus stop, but when we did there was a young man waiting for the bus who lives in Nuremberg and could confirm that we were at the right place.  It was -5 C as we waited, so I was very glad that I had brought my fur-lined hood and muff (which I expected to need while watching the tournament, but which turned out to be perfect for waiting for public transit).  We chatted with the guy, who had just returned from a two week vacation in Majorca, where he very much enjoyed the warm weather and the ocean. The subject of where we live, and where all I have lived came up, which led to discussion of spur of the moment moves to new countries, which, of course, lead to telling the story of how my mother decided to marry my step dad before they had even met.  He was quite surprised to hear the story, and even more surprised when I told him there is a documentary about it that my step sister had produced, so I called up the link and he took a photo of it. I will never know if he saw it or not, but he sounded genuinely interested in seeing it.  

I continued sewing on the bus ride to Nuremberg, but the next day I looked at it, and took out the stitches from the last half hour of the trip--I was getting really tired by then.  We arrived a little before Midnight, and were picked up by Maggie, who had fetched Kytte from her flight a short time before, and we all went back to Maggie's cute little apartment, in a German village about a half an hour drive from the airport.  Her kids weren't with her this weekend, so Keldor and I took the bottom bunk of their bunk beds, and Kytte opted for the couch.  

After breakfast the next morning Maggie took us first to a grocery store, to buy snacks for the day and for the event (including soft pretzels from the sore bakery, and skyr! I love skyr, and one can no longer buy it at grocery stores in my area. Well, they have the kinds with sicky sweet fruit sauce blended in, but I don't like that, only the "natural" sort, which they quit carrying years ago), then she dropped us off at the National Museum in Nuremberg and went to meet Orianne to do the grocery shopping for the event.  I had sewing to do, so I took a table in the caffe, and some tea and a raspberry tart, and happily made sewing progress while Keldor borrowed my phone (his camera battery was nearly flat, as his charging cable wasn't working anymore) and he and Kytte went off to look at the exhibits.  I asked the cafe people if the gift shop sells chargers, and they said no, but they could loan me one, what size do I need? So when Keldor and Kytte decided to take a museum break and get some coffee I was able to give him a phone that works again, and get mine back. We had a nice visit, they showed me highlight photos, and then they resumed museum looking, and I sewed a bit more. Then I took a break for some lunch.  I asked the kitchen what was safe for me to eat (the waitress didn't have enough English to understand the part about wanting to avoid vinegar and wine).  Sadly, the barley soup, which sounded good, had white wine in it. He asked me if I eat meat, and I replied that I mostly eat vegetarian, but occasional meat is ok. He said that in that case I must have the sausage, which is a signature dish of the area. It normally has a side of potato salad, so I asked if that has vinegar. It does, but he offered instead mashed potatoes. Perfect!  Served it with a garnish of some pretty, tiny, green leafy vegetable, and freshly grated horseradish, and I enjoyed that meal.  The meal was finished and I had resumed sewing before Keldor and Kytte returned to say that Maggie was on the way back for us.

We arrived on site just as the previous group was finishing loading up their sound equipment etc into cars, so we helped unload the food and then set up tables and chairs in the main hall before finding our cabins and changing into tunics for the event.