Sunday, May 6, 2018

Pent Entry - Needlework 2003

This is documentation that I wrote for the 2003 Ice Dragon A&S Pentathlon. It is not complete as the original document was written in Lotus WordPro and I am having trouble finding a way to open that format in Windows 10.

-------------------------------------------------------------

SCA belt favor.




At the assembly of knights,

each one wanted to be first,
to do well, if he could,
in order to please the lady.
They all considered her their love,
all carried her token,
a ring, or sleeve, or banner
   The Lay of Lanval


Ray Lischner wrote on the Rialto, in 1992, a wonderful article on the history of favors:
The historical evidence for the use of favors in tournaments is not always clear. Most historical sources do not mention favors at all, leaving the modern researcher in a quandary. In general, it seems that favors were occasionally used since the early days of the tournament, but were never very popular. Gifts and largesse, given as a token of esteem and respect, rather than love, appear to have been more common.

However, in the Society, most gentles wear a favor of one sort or another. We have fully adopted this practice and it is part of the Current Middle Ages; one which we show off when we do demos for the outside world. The idea of the favor as spread in the Society, from ladies in the 14th and 15th centuries untying their sleeves and offering them to the knight of their choice before a jousting tourney to one that has transcended all temporal and geographic boundaries.

Although it is unlikely that a Celt in ancient Briton would have embroidered a spiral in such a fashion, we have embraced all time periods and we would think nothing of one with an ancient Celtic persona wearing 14th century style leg armor, so should we embrace the cross culture intermix of art.

This is my fourth attempt at needlework, and I chose a slightly more complicated method. The key pattern is a common Celtic design, I used that as the body of a zooamorphic dragon head, breathing fire. The dragon head was inspired by two pieces of similar artwork found in The Book of Kells. The two examples are the line drawings of the original pieces.

{Missing artwork and an entire page of text}


Sources:

Bain, Iain, Celtic Key Patterns. Sterling Publishing, New York. 1994.

Brown, Peter,  The Book of Kells. Thames and Hudson, New York. 1980.

Green, Miranda J., Editor, The Celtic World. Routledge, London. 1995.

Ker, W. P. ,  The Dark Ages. Nelson, London. 1955.

Ray Lischner, Message posted to The Rialto; 5 Jan. 1992, Archived in Stefan's Florilegium: p-favors-art - 9/21/94

Sullivan, Sir Edward, The Book of Kells. Studio Editions, London. 1920.

Baroness TSivia, Message posted to The Rialto, Archived in Stefan's Florilegium: favors-msg - 4/13/99

Tuchman, Barbara W., A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1978

 -------------------------------------------------------------

Observations from 2018:

I stopped doing cross stitch years ago due to arthritis. I just wasn't able to hold the needle without pain. I image that the missing text was about why I made this using modern cross stitch (that was my skill level) and how I made the backing: the piece that the needlework is attached to.

I found this favor while organizing my basement and spent the day trying to open the documentation.



No comments:

Post a Comment