I really ought to begin the project I thought about last year: writing opera characters in AD&D terms. Although it would probably be easier in HERO terms.
Here is some work I did awhile ago, but got permission to post. It is for a virtual card game for facebook, and the working title is Phaeton. I don't know how far along it is, or quite how it is played. But the core concept is based around some kind of school for teen supers, ala X-mansion.
My friend Steve Ellis was lead artist and art director on this one, and it was both fun and tough to work with the constraints and character concepts he had set up. Tough in that we have very different ways of working, especially when it comes to inking. So, I was trying to come close to his inking style. But that was fun too, because it pushed and prodded me to really think about how I do things and I learned a lot.
So here are a smattering of images that I done for the game.
There is no train of thought, no matter how deep or how important, that is not immediately interrupted by whacking one's elbow on the edge of the desk and delivering a stiff jolt to the funny bone.
Notice that Lindisfarne did not become a Viking outrage until the 12th Century writings of Simeon of Durham. Before that, one had the inconvenient problem that our sources were a letter from Alcuin to the effect that the monks of Lindisfarne had it coming to another abbot with issues with the See of York, and a reference to it happening in the first week of January in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. January is not, in the North Sea, the raiding month, and while Alcuin might have been a saintly churchman, he was also very much a man of the world and a proponent of York's oft-disputed authority over the monasteries of the northeast coast.
Now: Simeon of Durham, who first proposed to emend the Chronicle to read "June" (still a little early for raiding, which usually happened after the crops were brought in) instead of June. There is a great deal we do not know about Simeon, but we do know that he was a monk and member of the chapter of the Palatine Bishopric of Durham, the overmighty ecclesastical ministate that contested authority in the old Northumbrian lands with the men who sat at Bamburgh, whom we know to have been ancestors of Scotland's royal Dunkeld dynasty, and suspect to have been their ancestors in the line male, as well as of the Percys and perhaps Nevilles. (And, for that matter, the Armstrongs of Armstrong-Whitworth.)
Durham's claim to Palatine status, and to its lands, depends not on ancient charters, for no charters of this era exist for the northeast. (Yet another dog barking in the nighttime in this story.) Rather, it depends on Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English, which records the donation of vast estates to Lindisfarne by the early Northumbrian kings.
Now, you might detect a problem here. Lindisfarne is not Durham! Lindisfarne is a fortress-island only five miles from the great royal citadel of Bamburgh across the water, clearly under the gaze of its citadel, and formidably protected by a castle on its own mount that was probably the site of the Anglo-Saxon monastery. Durham is a port town on the river Wear, just down from Newcastle-on-Tyne, the kind of staples export town that became important in the world in the eleventh century. How did we come to confuse Durham with Lindisfarne?
Answer: the bishopric of St. Cuthbert, patron of Lindisfarne, was translated to Durham in the tenth century. We have the story:in 863, the Great Viking Army killed the two contesting kings of Northumbria and established themselves at the Archepiscopal city of York. As tolerant as they were of the Archbishop of York, these Vikings conceived a dislike of Lindisfarne, and, in good time (875), decided to sack it.
Forwarned of the Viking menace (which, in fact, never materialised), the monks of Lindisfarne fled their seat. Wandering here and there about the northlands, after 7 years, they came to the town of Chester-le-Street, where they lay in exile for a century. (By cleverly hiding on the main road north, they evaded Viking attentions. Who would think to look for them there?) Then, and the end of the 10th Century, they decided that Chester-le-Street was bad for the visceral humours, and relocated at Durham, burying the body of St. Cuthbert there. Although by that time they had misplaced the miraculous relics of the other numinous saints that were in the island, such as Aidan and Oswald, the latter ending up at Glastonbury amongst the booty of Edmund's raiding in Northumberland in the 930s.
So by this time, you might be detecting an ironic subtext in my historical gloss, and be wondering how it is that the body was that of Saint Cuthbert? Simple: in the presence of, amongst others, Simeon, the stone catafalque was opened in the middle of the 12th century, and found to contain, besides an incorrupt body (a fairly common miracle in the era, when there were a lot of dead saints, all of them miraculously incorrupt) and more importantly, a stole and prayer book of seventh century provenance.
Now, pause for a second to savour the image of heavily-thewed monks, fleeing in panic from the Holy Isle, with a stone catafalque on their shoulders. Slosh, slosh, slide thump comes the noise inside the catafalque, as the ancient book slides free with every step. "Father Abbot," says a monk, "Can we stop and put the relics of St. Cuthbert in something . . . more suitable?" "Flee, flee, like your lives depend upon it," answers the Father Abbot.
Well, here's another problem: if you say "book" and you say "Lindisfarne," chances are that you will think of the Lindisfarne Gospels, a beautiful text of the Eighth Century, but with a dedication, apparently two centuries later (that is, the 930s or so). That dedication is to the brothers of the Priory of Lindisfarne, and "to the saints that are in that isle."
"But wait!" You say. "You said that the Priory was abandoned!" And I did say that. But not really. Like the Holy Isle of Iona, Lindisfarne was abandoned in a way that didn't actually empty it of monks. Lindisfarne was still a holy place, a monastic place, in the Twelfth Century, when Simeon of Durham was writing. Specifically, it was a Benedictine house, subject to Durham. As far as we know, Simeon himelf was a novitiate there. (There's an argument about a charterbook that lists him, as to whether it gives novices from Lindisfarne or Monkswearmouth, but let that pass.) Simeon was eventually promoted --or something-- to Durham, arriving there just in time to see Cuthbert's miraculous remains excavated and revealed to the world.
So when I say, "abandoned," I mean it in an interesting sense. Many monasteries are known to have been abandoned in the 9th and 10th century, usually over competing claims to their endowments. Some of those monasteries were dissolved. Others were ... well, what's the word when an army arrives with fire and sword to make it clear that the monks have decided to re-enter the secular world, possibly as high-value slaves, leaving any mobile wealth behind them? Because while some would use the word "heathen" to describe such an army, we know very well that sometimes they obeyed good Christian kings.
By the twelfth century, that is, after the day of Canute and Harald Hardrada, attempts to explain the fading-away of many of the great monasteries mentioned in texts such as Bede's placed great emphasis on the role of Vikings, as opposed, say, to that of the ancestors of the kings and earls of England.
It is a truth universally admitted that when Mom finds you in the kitchen with a cookie in your hand and the cookie jar broken on the floor, the temptation to point at your brother is very strong.
Almost sounds too good to be true -- fusion rocket could cut Mars travel time to three months. Some sort of pulsed fusion, with a metal ring that gets vaporized and used for reaction mass. The team is working on a lab set-up as of now.
I once asked a friend what he'd bring if he found a way to Middle-earth. He said he'd probably take a machine gun. I said I'd rather introduce Broadway musicals. He told me I was evil.
A few months ago, I watched a new opera, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Before heading off to the opera house, I dined at a restaurant named Absinthe. I did have a glass of that liquor with dinner.
Maybe it was the drink or the heat of the opera house, but I had the strangest hallucinations during the first act. Notably, my peripheral vision kept interpreting the arch at the far wall as a large shadow person standing beside me.
I hate to think what my hallucinations would have been if I had been watching Mephistopheles.
tkdguy got a reaction from L. Marcus in A Thread for Random Musings
tkdguy got a reaction from Balabanto in Genre-crossover nightmares
tkdguy got a reaction from IndianaJoe3 in Genre-crossover nightmares
tkdguy got a reaction from bigbywolfe in A Thread for Random Musings
