brainstorming for "the poet pleads with the elemental powers" first initial

The first initial for Elemental Powers can be seen in the last post, but these shots give you a closer look at it. This is another case of my hand just doing its own thing, andme finding out about it when the image was done. OK, so I wasn't that disconnected, but literally no planning was done here. My pencil knew what it wanted to do so I said, "have at it." The overall result is very pleasing. I am especially pleased that despite the distinct serpentine quality (largely due to the lack of a structured body mass) one can clearly see that the subject is a dragon. Yes I'm quite aware that the dragon is currently only in possession of two legs, but a solution for that will be found. The idea of adding the other two feet at the end of its wings is very tempting - if not anatomically impossible. However, between the mythical poetry, the alchemical references and philosophies, and the fantasy script; well, let's just say that I'm not too hung up on maintaining reality if it does not suit my aesthetic purposes.

brainstorming for "the poet pleads with the elemental powers"

Below are my notations and brainstorming for the this poem. This poem has proven to be rather complicated due to the appearance of all four elements in the poem (though I may be forcing the "Earth" connection). Not only do I need to figure out what role these elements play; but the philisophical and physical implications of each element could prove very important. I then have to learn to combine all these differnet elements so that they form some sort of cohesive vision though which the poem can be viewed. Stay tuned for further discussion on Elemental Powers.

brainstorming #3 for "withering of the boughs" first initial

Brainstorm #3 is rather imbalanced I think, however it has two features that I adore. I feel that the final initial will somehow be a happy medium between brainstorms 2 & 3.

Brainstorm #3's highlights are:
1) The "moon" is off center. This was a complete mistake but it give the initial a rather rakish air that I find quite attractive.
2) The golden chain wraps around the moon and then extends down the short carrier. This one element clearly binds the theta and the carrier together effectively and elegantly without overcrowding.
3) The leafy plant is off to the side of the carrier. It helps add balance without actually being a literal part of the initial itself.

The problem - the boughs! These seemed a great idea at the time but they are just .. well ... they are just there. There seems no rhyme or reason to their existence. The boughs would serve better as accent imagery throughout the text instead methinks. At this moment they make the initial look rather haphazard which is not a desirable effect.

brainstorming #2 for "withering of the boughs" first initial

Brainstorm #2 for Withering Boughs has a lot of good elements. It features a number of more abstract elements that are tied together in the poem, and is more free flowing due to lack of plotting out pre-drawing. In essence, the pencil went where it wanted to go without me telling it what to do. the chief issue that this initial has is that it suffers from being overworked.

The elements I like :
1) the moon in place of the "i" theta - it doesn't look so lonely this time and is more part of the image as opposed to existing as separate entity.
2) the witch's hat - this is more than cliche and most likely won't end up in the final initial, but I love the effect it has being draped over the top of the short carrier.
3) the chain wrapping around the letter
4) the leafy plant

brainstorming #1 for "withering of the boughs" first initial

This first brainstorm has two elements I like :
1) the moon in place of the "i" theta
2) the golden chain attached to the swan

I however feel that while the golden chain is a nice element, to attach it to the swan takes the poem far to literally. The image is stiff and far to static yet, that's why it is the first brainstorm and not the final.

brainstorming for "withering of the boughs"

I haven't gotten terribly far with Withering of the Boughs as of yet, but it looks like the poem holds a lot of promise. This afternoon over a cup of apple and spice tea I located what seemed to be the most obvious imagery and sketched a series of 3 first initials. None of the initials strike me as being "the one," but there are elements in the last two that I especially like. Those will be briefly broken down individually in the following posts. As you will note, there is a list underneath the poem called "actions." Withering Boughs seems to feature a series of phrases where one object is acting upon another. Clearly stated ones are listed in the hope that they will become the basis for a descent title page at least.

yeats and reoccurring words - an analyzation of "fire" and "air"

Notice that the poem below, just like other poems featured in previous posts, features a box of seemingly random words. These are words that I found to be repeated in at least one other poem I have chosen for this project. The purpose of this list has yet to be determined so for now it is merely a point of interest. If some viable connection can be made between the reoccurring words than perhaps it is something that can inform the imagery that is chosen the TTP (The Tengwar Project). For instance, some of the words like "fire/flame" and "air/wind" appear in almost every poem chosen. Now my reading on alchemical symbolism (which appears in most of the pieces I've chosen to use) tells me that fire and air were considered to "temper" (or exercise control over) each other as elements.

fire = Mastery of this element provided one with the ability to express divine love and it was the chief agent of transmutation in the alchemical process. Compared to the sun by alchemist Nicholas Flamel (fire heats furnace & vessels :: sun heats Earth), Alchemy itself appears to have been known as the art of fire. In New Light of Alchymie, Micheal Sendivogius described the element this way. "Fire is the purest, and most worthy Element of all, full of unctuous corrosivenesse adhereing to it, penetrating, digesting, corroding, and wonderfully adhereing, without visible, but within invisible, and most fixed, it is hot and dry and tempered with Aire." Make of that what you will. Oh yes, and for all you HP geeks out there, I was surprised to discover that Nicholas Flamel was once an actual human being as well.

air = Mastery of this element provided one with the brotherhood to all life. In a poetic sense, the most important thing about air seems to be that alchemists often referred to volatile spirits as being "airy." That reference seems to imply that the element of air was considered very difficult to master. Micheal Sendivogius had this to say about it. "The Aire is an entire Element, most worth of the three in its quality, without, light and invisible, but within, heavy, visible, and fixed, and when it is fixed it makes every body penetrable." Far more clear than his description of fire, the most important information seems to be that M.S. believed air to be of much higher value than all the other elements combined. Could this be due to it's difficulty to tame?

Since I am now operating on the (informed) assumption that the poetry is infused with alchemical symbolism, it only makes sense to start examining the reoccurring words under that type of microscope. At the moment I'm noticing a couple of things that could be important about fire and air.

1) Even though fire is at the heart of alchemy (the art of fire), it is air that M.S. claims to be of better quality. In a poetic sense, this bestows a sense of noblesse upon the usage of this word. (i.e. In The Song of Wandering Aengus Yeats notes that a "glimmering girl" fades through the "brightening air." On one level this is just a case of a feminine apparition. Could it be, however, that the manner in which this female figure disappeared speaks to the value this woman has in the poem? After all, the next stanza discusses exactly what the author would do should he ever find this woman again.)

2) It was believed that if one could master fire, perhaps more metaphysically than literally, than they would be capable of expressing divine love. Since alchemy was considered the art of fire, one can only assume that learning to control this element was not entirely impossible. On the other hand, air was considered volatile. The ability to master this element provided one with a gift far better than divine love - the brotherhood of all life. For those of you who don't know, one of the key goals of alchemy was the creation of the philosopher's stone. (Yes this was pre-existing as well - Rowling did not pull it out of her top hat.) It was believed that should one ever create this "stone" it would not only be able to turn base metals into pure gold, but that it would also possess the base metal to make all imperfect things perfect. Hey! That sounds a good bit like achieving "brotherhood of all life" doesn't it? Perhaps the mastery of air was just as elusive as the creation of the philosopher's stone. Just as the alchemists believed the two elements had the power to control the other, or at least balance the each other out, perhaps Yeats used them int eh same manner poetically. (i.e. In Wandering Aengus, which is the only poem I've fully dissected to date, the author states "I went to blow the fire-a-flame/ But something rustled on the floor." What was it that kept him from lighting a fire? None other than the girl who faded into "the brightening air." Again I could be nit picking, but it almost seems too much of a coincidence to ignore completely.)

All that is to say, that there is a whole lot going on behind the scenes as I try to pull these drawings together. Everywhere I turn there seems to be a new angle. While there is a danger of getting so caught up in the different angles that I lost in information overload, that doesn't seem like it will be too much of a problem. Things are clearly spelled out in my head, and the task really at hand is to assess any new information I'm faced with, pass it through the Irish myth/Alchemy filter and keep what is applicable. The risk to this method lies in the fact that I'm anything but an expert on either subject. To opportunity in the method is that TTP is turning out to be much more of an academic experience than I could have ever dreamed. How exciting!

iconography alert - "the song of wandering aengus"

While doing some research tonight for "To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire," I discovered that any reference to apple blossoms (in the hair of the "glimmering girl" from Wandering Aengus) should not be tied with alchemy. According to W.B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist by Heather C. Martin (1987, pg 75) apple blossoms from Aengus' (of the Tuatha Dé Danaan) "island of the young" (Tir na Nog ?) induce dreams of forgetfulness. These dreams of forgetfulness are appropriately referred to as Danaan dreams. I'm glad I stumbled across this because while it is clear that the apple trees are no stretch, any alchemical connection I mentally made with the apple blossoms just seemed somewhat contrived. Does the girl wearing these blossoms in her hair signify that the author wants to forget about her later in life, that he won't forget about her, or that the girl would have been forgotten by all others b/c she disappears in mist as if she had never existed? I will have to dwell on this for a bit.

possible alchemy connection notes "song of the wandering aengus"

This is where I began to notice some connections to alchemy. You can see a lot of circling and underlining and line drawing ... it ends up that there were even more connections than my brain as able to pick up on as I ate pizza and sketched (Do not try this at home, pizza sauce and sketches can be a devistating combination. Like the Mythbusters, I have years of experience to keep me safe ... sort of). I was up until 2am Friday night finding more connections and making notes about all the symbolism I could find. Since those scribblings span a good six pages I will only post the poem text for now in an effort to not overwhelm you with detail!

brainstorming for "the song of wandering aengus" first initial and title page

These drawings were made pre-Yeats/alchemy "discovery." The initial is another version of a previous brainstorm. For comparison's sake I have posted the brainstorm #1 for the initial first. It was drawn a little over a month ago, and you can tell that the idea has been developed some but not much. I want to keep the fish and the berry but everything else keeps changing on me and the whole concept simply needs to mature more than anything. I love the title page brainstorm sketch and think I will use something very similar on the final product.

brainstorming for "to some i have talked with by the fire" first initial

A proposed idea for the first initial and an image of the whole page that shows some notes I made post-drawing, in order to form some mental connections. The box in the top right corner lists words from this poem, that I had seen in at least one other poem that will be in the project.

yeats and alchemy

The Tengwar Project has just gained another layer. Yesterday as I yet again studied the chosen poems for imagery I could use, I discovered a whole new dimension to Yeats that I had never seen before. The last two lines of The Song of Wandering Aengus read "The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun." The connection between silver/moon and gold/sun in combination with apple trees simply reeks of alchemic imagery. Desperately trying to remember what I had read in A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery previously this year, all the poems for this project got spread on the table and I went to work. It turned out that there was alchemic imagery to some extent not only in Wandering Aengus, but in every other piece I had chosen as well. Since my knowledge of historic alchemy is fuzzy at best (something that will hopefully be rectified in the near future) it seemed quite feasible that the subject may have draw renewed interest during the Victorian Era as part of the Gothic Revival. It is well known that Yeats had a strong interest in the esoteric beliefs - something that led to him joining The Rosicrucians, The Theosophical Society, and (most importantly) The Order of the Golden Dawn. Some digging on my part has shown The Order deemed alchemy to be one of three parts of Wisdom of the Whole Universe. Further searching turned up a scholarly article published in 1971's The Review of English Studies/No. 85 entitled W.B. Yeats: Artist or Alchemist? by Robert M. Schuler. In the article , Mr. Schuler states that, "Although Richard Ellmann pointed out over twenty years ago [Yeats: The Man and The Masks, 1948] that Yeats was fascinated by the alchemical quest of self-transmutation and that alchemy was one of the subjects studied by The Adepts of the Order of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, no serious attempt has been made to eludicate the extended range of meaning contained in the poetic use of the symbols and doctrines of mystical alchemy as Yeats understood them." A lot has happened since 1971, and I would have to dig deeper in order to see if much else has been written on the matter of Yeats and alchemy since. The exciting thing though (I'm seriously giddy as I write this - it's like a connect-the-dot image with inumerable dots!) is that prior to yesterday I had never read anything that linked Yeats and the study of alchemy together. Not only was my "discovery" spot on, but now it has facts to back it up. Moreover, this is a huge breakthough in relation to the imagery that I design for The Tengwar Project. Instead of searching for arbitrary meaning within the poems to base the drawings on, I can now search for alchemic meanings. More importantly, this provides a window to include alchemical symbolism and iconography. For the past couple of years I have toyed on and off with the idea of creating a book of alchemy-informed pen and ink drawings. This revelation makes the latter null and void as that solo work can no be joined with the tengwar book already in progress.

Photographs of some notes created yesterday, as well as some drawings made pre-alchemy connection will be uploaded on the morrow.

brainstorming for "the stolen child" first initial

From about a month ago ...

sample pages in the proofing process

The first has not been proofed,
the second has been proofed once,
and the third has been proofed twice.

transcription - the method to my madness

Note: tengwa = consonant, theta = vowel
A basic table of the alphabet and letter names

There is a bit of debate that exists within the Tolkien linguistic community concerning the proper manner in which English should be properly transcribed. Tolkien appears to have used two different methods, which are sometimes referred to as orthographic and phonemic, but even inconsistencies became apparent within his own work as, one would assume, the tengwar refined itself over time. While some tengwa only appear in one of the significant examples that we have at our disposal [1], others we never see used at all despite the fact that Tolkien did ascribe them with letter values , thus making their usage purely theoretical. Tolkien’s son Christopher further confuses the situation with his own efforts to expand upon the works of his father [3]. As a result he has introduced new tengwa, reassigned the values of others, introduced a series of (urë) + theta to diphthong combinations, and even began placing a combination of theta above and below a short carrier in order to depict various vowel combinations. Yet, even like his father’s work, C. Tolkien’s pieces change over time as well. The transcription into English is then even further complicated by what Chris McKay calles the Common Mode [4]. McKay explains that the ever evolving Common Mode has developed in recent years because people learning tengwar have taken samples from both JRR Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien’s transcriptions, and have in effect created a hybrid mode of sorts while not wrong per say, it is not always accepted as being correct either. There are also further complications that arise under further scrutiny of JRR Tolkien’s lesser known transcriptions, but the point is that the proper way to transcribe English into tengwar (tengwa and theta) is anything but straight forward.

After a good amount of digging, and a number of years to sort through the valid and invalid information to be found on the subject, I eventually settled on a form that suited me best. Using what Christ McKay calls “Original Mode,” a slightly rough mode which he drew from Appendix E of The Lord of the Ring and the Hugh Brogan Letter, as my base I have also added a few elements from Måns Björkman’s [6] assessment of the orthographic mode. All text in this book was transcribed by me with “trouble words” double checked using Björkman’s Tengwar Scribe[7] computer application. Since I am unsure of the transcription mode the Tengwar Scribe uses for English texts, any tengwa discrepancies were over ruled by McKay’s Original Mode, with one key exception. The key differences between the Original Mode and Björkman’s assessment of the orthographic mode is McKay’s inclusion of Theoretical tengwa - key among them being (arda) and (alda) McKay also includes a number of tengwa that represent unconventional letter combinations (usually aspirated). I made the executive decision to not use these, save for the common “of” “the” “of the” “and” symbols, since they are not represented on the “The Tengwar” table found in Appendix E under “The Fëanorian Letters” section. In an effort to artistically make the alphabet my own so that it would be visually more appealing I have also made a number of decisions that are not explicitly listed in either of my base sources, but are either supported by the Tengwar Scribe or side notes on Björkman’s website as alternate forms. In order to fully account for any debatable choices, I have attempted to list them in full below. The list also includes a number of rules that do not necessarily apply to just the Original Mode, but are correct form on all accounts as far as I know.

- the letter “x” is represented by a (quessë + s-curl) instead the (quessë + silmë) combination.

- “s” is represented by (silmë)while “soft c” is represented by (silmë nuquerna) with only a couple exceptions where “s” had to use the latter symbol for practical purposes

- Instances of “oo”, “ee”, “uu”, and “ii” are represented with double theta above the following tengwa. For artistic purposes “oo” has been adapted to look like__, “uu” looks like __, and “ee” looks like __

- The R-rule is followed concerning the use of (rómen) and (orë)

- Since the text are transcribed orthographically, long vowel carriers are not used.

- The use of a modifying bar above (tinco) and (ando) when preceded by (númen) and above (parma) when preceded by (malta) (as a replacement for [númen] and [malta]) is permitted.

- No more than two modifiers, excepting a double theta preceding a double consonant, is permitted. Should a tengwa call for a theta, a “silent e” modifier, and an s-curl then only the theta remains, and the silent e and s-curl are instead represented by (slime) and the “e” theta following the preceding tengwa.

- Diverging from the Original Mode, but in keeping with Tengwar Scribe, ("o" theta + üre) is used to represent the o+w combination instead of ("o" theta + vala) for visual aesthetic reasons.

- Concerning punctuation
o The symbols , : and – have been replaced by the “comma” symbol ·
o The symbols . and ; have been replaced by the “period” symbol :
o All proper symbols that replace English punctuation, as directed by JRR Tolkien are observed
o For clarity sake, the common English punctuation for ( ) [ ] / # and ‘ have been retained.

_______________________________________________

[1] Like the the k+h compound from the Hugh Brogan Letter

[2] Example – arda (-rd)or alda (-ld)

[3] As found in the Histories of Middle Earth Series

[4] Of Tolkien Script Publishing (http://www.geocities.com/tengwar2001/)

[5] TSP’s Tengwar Textbook edition 4, version 2.00, copyright April 2004

[6] Amanye Tenceli - http://at.mansbjorkman.net/

[7]Tengwar Scribe 1.1 - http://at.mansbjorkman.net/tengscribe.htm

what is "the tengwar project"?

For nearly a year and a half I have wanted to do create a book in tengwar via calligraphy and some illumination. This is an ongoing piece that will not be finished right away due to me having other things I need to do in my daily life, but I felt it was time I started tracking it's progress. (For those who are unfamiliar with tengwar, you may recognize it as the "elvish writing" from The Lord of the Ring series by J.R.R Tolkien. Keep in mind that by itself it is not a language, merely a script for writing.) In planning, the project has gone through a number of mutations but has recently found its final conceptual form. After choosing groups of text, transcribing them into tengwar only to scrap it in its entirety and start over ... I have finally settled on a number of William Butler Yeats poems mostly from his earlier years. I originally sought out poems that had a common foundation in Irish myth, legend, or at least Yeat's interpretation it. A couple of my final choices do not meet this criteria but their spirit is the same. All texts have then been hand transcribed (no computer programs here!), proof read, proof read again, and ultimately will end up in their final form. A lot of thought has gone into the transcription method. To explain the method to my madness, as well as to keep myself in line, the English mode used and my sources have all been written up into a document that will be posted after this.

Texts (order still to be decided):

The Rose of the World
The Song of the Wandering Aengus
The Stolen Child
To Some I have Talked with by Fire
The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers
The Withering of the Boughs

Media and Tools for the text block:

-French Paper, Parchetone "Natural" #1046, 80lb text
-Walnut Ink/Stain (brand yet to be determined)
-Speedball Super Black Waterproof India Ink-
-Windsor & Newton Drawing Inks
-Dr. PH. Martin's Bombay India Inks
-Speedball Nibs:
#100 Artist Nib
#102 Crow Quill Nib
#103 Mapping
C-3, 4, & 5
-Staedler Pigment Liner 0.1
-Staedler Mars technico pencil
-Staedler 2mm HB Mars carbon leads
-Brushes
5 round
20/0 round
3/0 round