Mushrooms and an Axe

It’s as if the mushrooms' folded world has its own colour spectrum, warm and dark; brown, orange, red and yellow, a shiver of green in the darkness of a decaying log. Trees curve over the steep valley, grey barked, zigzagging the distant sky. This is a house of trees, earth walls rise steep on either side of the stoney floor, thick with moss. Branches are everywhere, the branches have mushrooms growing on them.


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Dark Hollow

The forest king’s son hides in plain sight, the colour of dry spruce bark and fallen needles. How long must the spruce tree and frog have lived side by side to match each other’s skins? 

Down by the dry August riverbed, in the dark hollow, tree stumps watch with implacable empty eyes. Boreal chickadees swoop around me to land on dead branches like the notes of an insistent living song.

 

 

High on the hillside big old maples and moss-trunked beech listen to the young trees shush and dapple light. This part of the forest is quiet and brooding in high summer, shaded by leaves. The ground is wound with roots, like the woven fingers of old people, waiting. 

Here in the deep woods and at its edge with the sparse grassed field, the summer ebbs. 

The plants put forth their seed-down, ready to let go, to release next years hope into the wind.

 

Between Deep Water and Dark Forest

"Turning tides, their regularities!

What is the heart, that it ever was afraid,

Knowing as it must know spring's release,

Shining heart, heart constant as the tide?"

                                     - Seamus Heany

[from the dutch of J.C. Bloem (1887-1966)]

High wind cut cold North Atlantic water in tattered edged waves, curving and crashing, and then sucking smooth pebbles in foam froth.

On the abrupt coast, spruce trees leaned over cliffs in sharp edged late winter sun.

The liminal space between deep water and dark forest was protected by a coastal ridge from the wind; but the sea was tossed, turbulent, humped in white edged rollers, coming in from the bay, carrying the smells of salt and sandstone.

Gulls curved along the rocky shore, past the stacked ghosts of pebble beaches a hundred million years old, exposed by the gnawing ocean.

Walking along the water I found the sun fallen in shards and captured it to bring it here to this strange place and show it to you.

Galdrgrimm

The sun cuts low through winter trees, woodsmoke hangs in the air.  Walking through the forest one day I find what's left of a raven dance, the steps clear in the snow. I can see where a raven has scratched it's beak back and forth drawing concentric lines.

As part of a project I have been drawing too, exploring Viking Age ornamentation with pencil and paint, I interpret the knotwork that was inlayed long ago on the blade of an axe that was found in a place called Mammen in Denmark.


If you look closely you can see that this is a beast tangled in it's own horns and body, head thrown back.  Viking Age ornamentation is expressive with a narrative purpose that forcefully shines from the arcane lines. Strange and beautiful, what must a Viking artist's dreams have looked like. These were the shapes of their fierce spirit allies; the heath monsters that they drew on their weapons to frighten their enemies.  Perhaps they believed that by tying them up in this way they where harnessing their power.

I have been exploring Mammen ornamentation for a sword I have recently completed. I've shown many of the steps of it's creation on this blog. Here is the finished product - Galdrgrimm.

This blade exemplifies the ancient European tradition of pattern welding. A mastery of this time consuming and challenging process produces a swirling star like pattern running down the center of the blade and a keen edge which has been folded and refined to produce a shimmering subtle effect in the steel. Galdrgrimm is forged of contrasting layers of carbon steel and has a subtle blue sheen from the tempering process. Two narrow fullers run down one side of the blade and a wide single fuller graces the other. 

The hilt and scabbard are carved in the Mammen style; a popular form of narrative ornamentation in Denmark and elsewhere during the Viking Age. It features looping intertwined figures of dragon-beasts and human forms. 

The figured maple wood of the scabbard seems to shift and ripple when turned in the light, adding a mysterious glamour to the complex knotwork. The high layer edge steel refracts light in a similar way to the maple, so that there are dimensions to this sword which can only be experienced in person.

"Galdrgrimm" is a combination of the old Norse word 'galdr' which was a sung incantation and the word 'grimm' which comes from an Indo-European root word that is cognate with the word thunder. Therefore "Galdrgrimm" roughly translates to "thunder-song".

hilt - bronze, blackwood 

blade -pattern welded 1075/8670m

scabbard - quilted maple wood lined with 

sheered sheep fleece, hand cast silicon bronze.

blade length - 26 3/4" 

hilt length - 6 1/4"

overall length - 33" 

weight - 2 lb : 7.0 oz

 Smoke curls from the chimney, winter ages, the setting sun glints on the ice bordered river.

Scabbard, Snow, Lichen Stone

I rise before the sun, the scratchy radio voices catalog what bad things have happened in the world while I slept.  But the world tells a different story-- out the old farmhouse window the dawn blooms impossible colours against the somnabulant landscape.

Two ravens sit warily in the orchard on the lower slopes of the hill, the world is pink as the ravens talk to each other and fly off.

Under the front porch two feral buck cats vie for territory, sleek and well fed, there are few mice to be found around the old farm.

In the shop I am working on a pattern welded viking sword with carvings in the Mammen Style. This is a type of ornamentation from 10th century Denmark which combines gripping beasts with spiral hips and wings which loop and intertwine with decorative dots.

 This is the second sword I will finish from the batch of pattern welding which I have cataloged on this blog since last winter.

 Here you can see the pattern in the steel created by the process of pattern welding. The edge is seven hundred layers of folded steel and the center is constructed from two bars of nine layer steel which have been twisted to mirror each other.

 

Before constructing the hilt and scabbard I start by drawing a full scale concept design of the sword and work out the details of how it will be suspended from the belt and what design motifs I will explore.

 the grip is carved from black wood in a series of vertebrate like rings with spaces for ferrules where it meets the upper and lower guards

 The scabbard is shaped and fit to the blade with a sheep skin lining, and now I draw the pattern I have designed onto it.  This pattern is inspired by a stone which I photographed at the Victoria and Albert museum in London.

 I begin to carve by cutting the pattern in with a scew chisel, shaped like a sharp triangle with an acute point; I cut the lines in for a touch-mark on the back of the scabbard.

 I carve the background out and begin to round the lines of the spirals and cords. slowly the pattern emerges over eight days of carving.

Finally I rub it with warm linseed oil and the figure in the beautiful rock maple jumps into relief adding an extra dimension to the carving which shimmers and changes when moved in the light.

...

I walk up the old hill behind the farm. The landscape is skewbald with snow, a white and brown patchwork, dusk already in the afternoon. Winters smell hangs on the air, crisp, bittersweet.

Dead branches form mouth-like winter dens in the undergrowth.

 

Tangled spruce, saplings and brambles, black red grey, bone white.

Lichen moss and snow are the stones winter clothes.

The beech trees hold their leaves all winter, they rattle in the wind.  Yellow grass against the dark forest. The hillside is full of grim beauty. Now it is time to light a fire in the kitchen, cast bronze in the foundry and write winter stories in the dim light.

Dagfinnr - Day finder

He goes to the ancient stones on the wild hilltop under the cold starlight and sits in silent contemplation over his sword, to ready his mind and prepare to travel into the other lands where the dragon hoards its power.  The sword is long; long enough to pass through the thick body of the immense wyrm.  The blade is wrought in the ancient way when smiths would weave the magic of serpent and blood and river into their patterned steel blades.  No one knows the significance or meaning of the writhing pattern or why the light glints in ripples along the many-layered edge, but he can feel the ancient power in it as it rests on his hand. Sharp enough to slice the callused skin, it rings with a soft high note when he runs his palm along the blade and lifts it into the air.

  The grip and hilt are marked with strange symbols and runes. He looks upon them as he thinks of the coming battle. The letters are strange -- like, yet unlike the runes he is familiar with.  All travellers know the common rune letters; they write notes to one another on stones or wood when they are far away from their own lands and need to communicate to someone following days behind on the trail or current.  But these letters are different, they have strange dots and some of them are unfamiliar, and they seem to be written backwards.  This is the way the ancient ones, the old runeworkers, used to write warnings to the spirits and ancestors. He knows this -- some of the ward stones under the dark jagged mountains to the west are written with backwards runes, so that they have power in the other world, the world that can be glimpsed peering out from puddles and tarns in the deep woods sometimes.
These words written on the hilt, then, are not for him to read, but to protect him when he passes into the dragon's realm.  The smith has looked deeply into the old stories, and found the names of the first things from before men walked the earth, when there was only a gap of nothing bordered by ice and fire. Sparks melted the ice and a yeasty rime yielded the first life, then the olden gods gave it breath and the world began. These first things are written in the ancient language on the guard of the sword - Ice, fire, yeast, breath - isa, brisingr, jouster, orindi.

He runs his thumb over the grip ferule. There is written in the same hidden text the kenning of the first dragon and his slayer. Just below the pommel, the smith has carved a finding spell that will take the slayer to the dragon's world - Nidr ok nordr liggr helvegr.
The grip of the sword is carved of hard unyielding wood, black and smooth. It is whispered that the smith traded a great many fine things to acquire it from a forest stunted by dragon fire so that the wood grew black from the venom. The touch of this wood protects the warrior from the same venom and will give him a slim advantage when facing the beast.

Carved into the grip are the same symbols that adorn the guard and pommel, and which run over the scabbard. Looping under and over and twisting around into three lobes, the dragon slayer knows these well. They represent the sacred goal of every dragon slayer - the dragon's heart.

For more information about this sword visit its page on my website -Dagfinnr - Day Finder