Hey, it’s Thursday so it’s time to post some Norse-themed art. Once again, this is in a different style from some of the stuff I have posted before. I can’t help it. Like Whitman said “I contain multitudes.” Except in my case it appears to be multitudes of artists who can’t decide on one way to draw things.
This stylized valkyrie was part of the background on the original cover for my book Valda & the Valkyries. I decided to polish her up and give her the spotlight treatment today.
Today we have a bit of a continuation from last week when I posted some artwork of the figurehead of a drekar or dragon-boat. There aren’t that many named ships in the Eddas, but these three are pretty memorable.
Skidbladnir
We are going to start with this ship because the Elder Eddas tell us it is… “without doubt the best and most artfully constructed of any (ship.)” The ship belongs to the god Frey and was constructed by the sons of Ivaldi – the Dwarven master craftsmen who also created Odin’s spear Gungnir and the golden hair of Sif. The ship is quite large and has enough room to hold all of the Aesir gods and goddesses and their weapons and war supplies as well. As soon as the sail is raised a favorable breeze springs up and leads the ship wherever you wish to go. To top it all off, the ship is so artfully constructed and so many cunning spells were used in her construction that you can actually fold the ship up like a piece of cloth until it is small enough to fit into your pocket.
Naglfar
When Ragnarok, the doom of the gods comes around, the ship Naglfar will finally be ready to set sail. When we were told that Skidbladnir was the best ship we were also informed that Naglfar was the biggest. The creepiest thing about Naglfar is that it is not made of wood, rather it is being built from the toenails and fingernails of all who have died. In Gylfaginning we are told to take great care not to die with untrimmed nails, for the longer your nails are the sooner the ship will be done. Loki is fated to be the helmsman on that dark day, using the ship to bring the enemies of the gods to the scene of the battle between good and evil.
Hringhorn
This was the ship of Balder. Sadly we only read about it at his funereal. At that time we are told it “passed for the largest in the world.” Now we had been told that Naglfar was biggest. Maybe the discrenpancy has something to do with the fact that Naglfar is still under construction. Hringhorn is so big that the gods can not push it out to sea and have to send for a giantess to push the ship for them.
Last Saturday I posted a graphic with a set of logos and emblems from various superheroes and challenged you to see how many of them you could name. Today I am providing you with the answers. First of all, let’s see the emblems one more time.
And now here are the answers:
First row
Captain Marvel (Shazam), Kevin Matchstick (Mage), Madman (Image), Kid Flash (DC), Flash (DC Golden Age)
Second Row
Professor Zoom (DC), Doc Samson (Marvel), Joe Phat (Mage), Flash (DC Silver Age), Thunderbolts (Marvel)
Third Row
Captain America (Marvel), Captain Marvel (Marvel), Captain Atom (DC), Jade (DC – Infinity, Inc), Astro City (Image)
Fourth Row
Superman (DC), Superman (DC – Kingdom Come), Superman (cartoon – Brave New Metropolis episode), Batman (DC), Robin (DC)
Fifth Row
Gold (DC – Metal Men), X-Men (Marvel), Deadpool (Marvel), The Mark (Dark Horse), Fantastic Four (Marvel)
Sixth Row
Kirby Hero (Mage), Thundercats (cartoon series), The Punisher (Marvel), Spawn (Image), Blackhawks (DC)
Seventh Row
Green Lantern (DC – Golden Age), Green Lantern (DC -Hal Jordan), Green Lantern (DC – Kyle Rayner), Prime (Malibu), Racer X (NOW Comics)
Eighth Row
Legion of Super Heroes (DC), Shadow Hawk (Image), Miracle Man (It’s complicated), The Atom (DC), Tom Strong (ABC Comics)
Ninth Row
Mon El Ultra Boy (DC – LSH), Samaritan (Image – Astro City), Wonder Woman (DC), Spiderman (Marvel), Dr. Midnite (DC)
So how did you do? There are 45 in total. Anyone get a perfect score?
When the Norse went raiding they did so in some of the most phenomenal ships to ever sail the seas. The ships were clinker-built, meaning they were made from overlapping boards. This was a tough, resilient design that could take the pounding of ocean waves. They were all built with shallow draft hulls. This means they rode relatively high in the water. This design allowed them a number of advantages: great speed; the ability to navigate in as little as three feet of water; the ability to be beached and easily re-floated back into the ocean. There are different categories of longship, though. If you want to read a detailed account of them all I would suggest the site Shipfans which has a thorough article here.
The class of longship I want to mention today is the Drekar, or dragon boat. These are the ones people picture when you say Viking ship because of the carvings of menacing beasts that they carried either at the front of the boat or at front and back. This is the ship Hollywood and artists love so much because it makes such a striking visual. Ironically, the best descriptions we have of them come from the sagas like the 13th century Göngu-Hrólfs Saga, and not archaeological finds. The sagas claim the carvings were there to protect the crew by frightening off the monsters of the deep. It is also likely the Vikings understood the power of a such an image to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. The most famous and best-preserved Viking ship of today is the Oseberg ship. It does feature some truly incredible carving, but sadly the prows of the ship are formed into a spiraling serpent and not a dragon.
My Norse-themed art for this week is what the prow of a drekar might have looked like. I created the base design with the knotwork in Adobe Illustrator and used Photoshop to add effects.
If you’re looking for a good, adventure-filled read, you should give the saga of Sturlaug the Industrious a try. It is one of the sagas of ancient times or fornaldarsögur. I first came across it through the Norse sagas page on this site which has a nice collection of the legendary sagas translated into English. This 14th century story tells the adventures of Sturlaug, the son of a Norwegian hersir. (A hersir is roughly equivalent to an English lord. He would rule over the local area but owed allegiance to the king.)
In a bit of a twist on the usual order of things, Sturlaug starts off by marrying the beautiful princess – Asa the Fair. He demands her hand in marriage as payment for fighting a duel against Kola the Crafty. Asa is fine with this and even sends Sturlaug to her foster-mother Vefreyja for help in defeating Kola. The saga has magic weapons, sorcery, shape-shifters, battles and a quest for the horn of the auroch and then the story behind the Horn’s creation. The treasure is “fair as gold to look at” but must be handled with care since it is “full of poison and sorcery.” You should definitely check it out.
It is Saturday, which is superhero day around here. I’m still in a bit of a costume mode so let’s talk about superhero costumes. More often than not, cool superhero costumes have cool logos plastered front and center. Whether it is a stylized graphic or just the first letter of the hero’s name, these icons serve as a visual shorthand, something that instantly makes you think of the character in question.
Given that, how many heroes can you identify out of the ones pictured below? Some are easy, some are obscure, but all of them are pretty darn cool. I’ll post the answers for these later in the week. Good luck!
Looking for the answers? Click here.
I have a lot going on this week and the Norse-themed art I am working on is not yet 100%. But I will share a little sneak peek of what you can expect next Thursday.
Just a little something to go with today’s spooky mood. This goblin-ish character is part creepy and part cute, although I recognize part of the creepiness is do to my lame sculpting skills. 😎 But we never improve at anything unless we try and try again so I still break out the clay every now and then.
My ideas of the holiday are inextricably tied up with my Dad since October 31 is also his birthday. He passed away many years ago and I prefer to think of him on the anniversary of his birth rather than the anniversary of his death. He is still greatly missed and I will be thinking of him even more than usual today and sharing some stories with my own son about the grandfather he never got the chance to meet. One of the things I love about stories, and, by extension, writing, is that ability to introduce you to people you never could have met otherwise. Stories can connect us to these people so that they live and breathe in our minds and our hearts. Creating stories like that is not a bad way at all to spend one’s time.
Have a happy and safe Halloween everyone!
Kennings are a kind of word-play that originated back in Old English, Old Norse and Germanic poetry. Kennings create a new compound word or phrase that replaces another one. The best kennings are creative and make you think about something in a new way. Probably the most famous kenning from the olden days was using the phrase whale-road to talk about the sea. (Since a whale travels through the sea in the same sense that a man travels along a road.) Blood became slaughter-dew or battle-sweat, the sun becomes a sky-candle and a king is giver-of-gold. These were poetical phrases and we’ve lost some of the alliteration as the words are translated, but you can still see the beauty of the imagery in many of the old phrases. You can find a list of more Norse kennings here.
When I first read about these I thought they were the neatest thing. I’ve been writing a long time and I love witty word-play and that is what kennings are all about. I was a little bummed that we don’t have modern day kennings. This wouldn’t be the first time that my first impression was wrong because while I was looking for more kennings I came across this page from one Dr. Wheeler of Carson-Newman College and I saw that there are more kennings around us than we may first realize. Have you ever told a rug-rat to shut their pie-hole? Then you’ve used a kenning. Some other modern ones are beer-goggles, gas-guzzler, boob-tube, tramp-stamp, eye-candy, cancer-stick, fat-cat and wall-flower
Try making up some of your own and add them into the comments, but please, keep them clean, we don’t allow potty-mouths on the blog.
Alright this week we have another space-faring comic character – Marvel Comics’ Nova! Whenever I do one of these pictures I always cruise the web to see what kind of reference material I can find. It is a lot easier than digging through the hundreds of comics I own to find a particular issue. During that research I invariably end up spending way too much time reading web page accounts of the character. I know this character but I pretty much know the 1970s version of the character – that makes for a few decades of backstory to catch up on. I’m not just doing the old-school costume to be a hipster. I’m doing the costume that looks right to me because that’s the one I remember.
I’m not sure about his lower body in this pic. I’m still experimenting with the style for drawing these, trying to find my own balance of classic kawaii proportions. See you next time!
Mark Neumayer 