This is Loki my hammer - it is a Thor number 2 copper and raw hide mallet and is one of the hammers I always paw over when we go to the welding gas shop. I kind of wanted a hammer for the workshops I am preparing for the Aethelflaed Festival in June so it seemed like the right time to actually take the plunge and buy the thing.
This will be used for leather, metal and wood projects - the guy in the shop asked what I wanted it for and I started to explain about the impression work I have been doing - he suggested that I call the made things Loki Impressed which is kind of fun 🙂
Expect to see it a lot on the Salaric blogs 🙂
These hammers are awesome and have been used for all sorts of things including the Royal Engineers during the second world war as it meant they could assemble last minute bridges at night in enemy territory without making loud hammering sounds. They are the mainstay of engineers who need to be gentle whilst hammering their machines or miners who need to avoid sparks (well did graduate from the Royal School of Mines!) and of course jewellery makers love these things!
I wish I had the old one shown on the Wikipedia page - just look at it! Look at the mushroom wear on those hammer heads - this in an instrument that has made many things!
It is a bit of a faff but you can replace the heads when they get too worn so I am hoping that Loki is with me for life! I may well have hugged it all the way home whilst grinning - I think it disturbed Alaric slightly 🙂
You can even watch how they are made 🙂
This one has audio commentary 🙂
You can read up on the manufacturing history and techniques on their website too 🙂 Since our visit to Makers Central I have been interested in where my tools actually come from - so am very pleased I can trace my hammer like this.
This year marks the 1100 yr anniversary of the death of Queen Aethelflaed Lady of Mercia and Mother of England - a Warrior Queen lost from much of our visible and accessible history in this country. Finding out that Gloucester is where she was buried and that there was going to be a festival in honour of her in June - I decided to undertake an Aethelflaed Quest and Search for All Things Anglo-Saxon. I have since ended up on board and doing things for the festival - I am having a lot of fun and there is a new puppet - Aethelflaed herself once more resides in Gloucester.
Here is the weekly tweets 🙂
Today there is poetry in Worcester and a sneaky bit of the #AethelflaedQuest
Worcester contains many things - yesterday it contained me and @alaric on our #AethelflaedQuest, swans, lots of union jacks, me and the Food For Thoughts posse poeming at Heroes and people feeling they have to narrative my movements from black out window vans pic.twitter.com/RanZOSM80D
Aethelflaed Lady of Mercia is sporting her new cloak and golden hair ties - she is planning on having a little photo shoot around town today 🙂 #AethelflaedQuest and my search for all things Anglo-Saxon #cuddlysciencepic.twitter.com/L7uzvskjaE
And talking of #worcester and the #AethelflaedQuest we found her in the Cathedral gleaming with the sunlight - there is a whole history panorama in the windows - my camera was sadly running out of charge so I will have to go back again. I might also have bought more books. pic.twitter.com/lngjXAoGpM
Queen Aethelflaed the Puppet really likes this sculpture she found on her tour of #Gloucester - she has been informed that it was designed by students at Crypt and would like to know more about the art that has emerged in her jewel of a city in the last 1100 yrs #aethelflaedQuestpic.twitter.com/xj8boHTpXX
The Festival is all over the city - I am doing family fun drove in stuff actually at the ruins of St Oswolds - you can find out more about the whole thing here.
So this is a thing, I didn't know it was a thing - I probably did but then forgot :/ But get your fancy head gear out!
Today is #HatsforHeadway to raise awareness and cash for an absolutely brilliant charity who have helped so much with people like me who have sustained head injuries. This is the hat I knitted for the Science Showoff on Neurology and brainy things special that they did. It was a wonderful evening with Dr Carina Fearnley a fellow head injury sufferer and friend from my Geology undergraduate days. She has made a fantastic video about her experience:
The event was at the Star of Kings in London but I believe was raising money for the Bristol Headway and I made a paper mache brain and got gummy brain sweets. The hat has since appeared at various British Science Week Events, Cheltenham Science Festival and BBC Country File Live show/festival. It was an amazing night were I learnt about all sorts of things including the medical skeletons etc... lurking beneath London and what their skulls can tell us!
What I didn't say at the time was that I was struggling with knitting due to the damage to my left hand side so this whole thing was create out of loom knitting (French knitting or knitting nancy/spool knitting are all mini looms). Also for me to actually make it to the gig my dad had to come and meet me at the station - which in your 30's is pretty embarrassing, but I have only recently been able to attempt travel on my own on that sort of scale and I was still unable to cook anything other than a microwave meal safely on my own (I've set fire to pans and tried to pick up boiling pots with my bare hands...).
There is currently an Art Exhibit and series of talks etc... at Kings College about head injury including a pice on Identity after the fact. I myself had to basically learn to draw again - I always drew with both hands but now... the pictures come out distorted - I have a blind spot in my left eye, and hand coordination was hard. Add in the crisis of everyone else knowing more about me than I myself did and I ended up producing Love: A Stranger Dream. It started as distinct pictures which people asked for as colouring sheets so I put them up for free download here. Then I realised there was a kind of non-linear narrative or themes running through the works and it became a book of visual poetry. I took refuge in art - something that is quiet important in developing coping mechanisms and reducing the amount of depression that head injury victims feel - it is like having everything that is you stripped away.
I even made audio.
And video of it.
Art that started as a way to just express myself when speech and writing where hard graft ended up as something that has helped friends, it explores lots of different aspects of identity and so has ended up at GLBT+ events, dis/different-ability events, music and art installations, two different events for International Women's Day, comic book conventions, poetry events, story telling and maze festivals. I've even made a dress from the art work 0.o - ok yeah I got carried away!
(can't find the photo - if I came across it I'll add it later! but it got compared to the stuff worn by the Welsh Eisteddfod singer/bardic peeps)
As I've probably bored everyone with - I have not long been discharged from the head injury unit including physio at Gloucester Royal - still under neurology but the main chunk of it is done. Charities like Headway - the brain injury association are an absolute life line and they have local branches but head injury sufferers often struggle to get the help that's needed especially as most of the time they still look "normal". I was being mistaken for being drunk and struggling with lots of things. So yeah - hats for headway 🙂
So I have been investigating the oral traditions of the Anglo-Saxons, this includes song, poetry and story telling and really how the three were once one thing - no ones really quiet sure what the music sounded like or how much of the stories where sung or spoken - there were probably variations like we have today - after all they were people just like us.
Replicas of the instruments much such beautiful haunting sounds that I have fallen in love with them and found myself falling down a rabbit whole of music history and theory. I am now reading up on the general history of the lyre or harp which has taken me back into the old testament of the bible and also into listening to Pirate Thrash Metal!
Stories where not just entertainment they were the history and identity of people but they were also the media of the time. You wanted to be remembered then you needed the bards to sing of you! Aethelflaed, her father Alfred the Great and her brother all knew how important stories could be.
We are lucky in that some of these stories still exist today - some even got written down in contemporary times ie more than a millennium ago! But even written stories struggle at being static and alter with the copying and in some cases purging of the words. Aethelflaed herself appears to have been purposefully written out of the Wessex or primary version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - by her brother for fear that the stories of her would encourage her Kingdom of Mercia to see itself as always distinct from Wessex. But she appears in later stories - romanticised and even turned into a virgin - though potentially that is due to exact meanings of words changing through time.
It is thought that the poem Judith is based on her - and maybe even commissioned by her - it casts parallels of the virtuous biblical female and the Lady of Mercia. I need to investigate it more - here's the [Wikipedia page](Anglo-Saxon poem Judith). I am struggling to find copies or it but I have found this 7 hr etc... video of another poem called The Wanderer - this is the one I have been quoting (in translation) at my poetry afternoons in Waterstones in Gloucester.
Of course the fact that I am having to read out translations is another fascinating warren of knowledge for me to investigate - I was taught in school about Old and Middle English but I kind of forgot about it all except when Alaric starts quoting Chuarcer at me. Due to character develop for my puppet of Aethelflaed I am also investigating the language - I love how languages split and merge and change and how you can trace human interactions along the lines of dialects and word exchange. But that shall be another blog post or two - back to Anglo-Saxon Music.
Youtube is filled with some brilliant pieces.
Anglo-Saxon poem "Deor" with Lyre
One of the reasons I have got myself a lyre is because they appear in the art works of Anglo-Saxon England and remnants have been found both in Britain on in Europe, culturally the Anglo-Saxons where from northern Europe including what is now Germany and those pesky Vikings they were fighting, they had once been themselves. So you can through Danes into the mix not to mention the "Celtic" and Britons who were lurking around since before Roman times, we always tend to think of history in simple A to B narratives but it very much isn't and there are influences from all over the place. The lyre itself is a very ancient instrument and may well have come to Europe from the Middle East - as in the harp that David plays in the bible.
But the lyre is not the only instrument that the Anglo-Saxons used - drums and flutes are featured in their artworks - I simply do not have the budget to explore these other instruments at the moment but it is on the to-do list. It is thought that they would often have been played in conjunction with each other - here is an example.
Anglo-Saxon Folk Music - "Wælheall"
Music isn't as clear cut a thing as I was initially taught at school with 8 notes and nothing in-between, musical tuning and what counts as a note has changed quiet drastically. I see this as an amazing diversity and am happy because having grown up with folk and gospel singing I also struggled with the classical definition of music. Rock and pop tend to mix it all up which I think is also fab! But this can mean that people perceive older types of music or say those from India etc... as being out of tune. This isn't the case but it is due to how the instruments are tuned. They are in tune with themselves and not necessarily with other surrounding instruments, you have to work at finding what fits together and as a vocalist adapt to the instruments you are singing along with. In choir I did a lot of singing without instrument backing - sometime the song sound fab - we were all in tune with each other and the music was full and vibrating the rafters but when the piano was dinged at the end to see if we had maintained our tuning - we... hadn't. We were off doing our own thing. I think that this is kind of how older music would have worked - you had natural materials which would affect what sounds the finished instrument would be suited too ie the grain of the wood and the shape in which it carved, the diet of the animal the sinue came from to string it... so many little factors. The classical music that we are taught as Music in schools has very specific parameters and if and instrument can't meet those it is considered defective - I think there is no coincidence that the emergence of such strict musicality came about as technology and science began to be a thing throughout Europe.
This is complete guess work on my part I can't even read music (well not with out looking the notes up and then pinging them on my guitar! I've always worked things out by watching or just playing around with the instrument), I am certainly no music theorist and I'm not even a historian! If I am wrong - tell me how I am wrong - I am investigating this stuff - searching and learning and others input is always appreciated!
What's that? I digressed? Yeah ok you have a point....
I will finish off with this video I found of The Classic - the first piece of European Literature (if you take the Mediterranean as not being Europe) - the Epic Poem of BeoWulf sung and played on the hardy-gurdy (now there's an instrument I would like to get my hands on! But I believe it was a later dated instrument - more high medieval than the low medieval of Saxon England - I could be wrong as I have a hell of a lot more reading to do!).
I think this is this guy - anyway I better get back to trying to work out how to play my lyre - twinkle twinkle little star.... ok so they are the tunes I knew the best ok!
It is 1100 yrs since Warrior Queen Aethelflaed was buried in Gloucester - one of the new minsters she founded, Gloucester is therefore having an epic festival to highlight this forgotten woman of history - I have somehow ended up involved - I am very excited and have even designed and with my parents made a new puppet and workshop materials for Cuddly Science/Cuddly History.
I have a runic impression kit from @TandyLeatherUK and a book on anglo-saxon dress... plus a few booklets on metal work history..... I am enjoying this far too much! #AethelflaedQuest
Lyra the Lyre is not sure she likes her new stream lined look but I'm like "well... you where 10 strings and I wanted you to be 6 - plus I've already broken 1" Lyra responds by making sure her bottom string wants to be a C so I have to faff. #aethelflaedquest#cuddlyscience
A bit of a longer write up on Lyra the Lyre https://t.co/lwhM8FfpqE part of my #aethelflaedquest and falling down a delicious rabbit whole of music history! (and not so good music theory!)
Today also involved playing with Lyra the lyre & being very happy about @getdotmesh plectrums!!!! I've been plucking the strings with one hand & strumming with the other & playing at deadening some strings whilst playing - one string keeps going out of tune :/ #Aethelflaedquestpic.twitter.com/RVgFaopUzz
Aethelflaed and All things Anglo-Saxon, Art and Craft, Metalworking, Sarah, Video, Work | sarah | 
Sun 27th May 2018 10:28 am | 
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