Comedy/Tragedy in a Borre style

I was sent an assignment, and I haven't gotten one yet that I've turned down. I knew I would be able to accept this, and it only got better when I read who it was for- someone I know who is deeply deserving of the honor of the Order of Troubadour.

I also knew that for this I needed the absolute right words, so I went to Nicol mac Donnchaidh, because he has the best way with words and because he knows the recipient. He was overjoyed to get the assignment and thus the scroll was born.

With Viking personas it gets tricky to get the right look, the right feel. In our case we got lucky - Cedar has a Wiki page. They laid out exactly where and when they're from, what they do and how. It made our job easier to a point. That point being that most of what still exists from their time period is metalwork.

So how do you take a medallion in the Borre style and make it a painted page? Well, you look at other works, find your period color palette, and then start sketching. This is an award for a Skald, a bard, an artist. Cedar has immense talent. I needed this scroll to pay honor to that.

I did some searching and found a medallion that jumped out at me. This is Borre style, found at Upland, Sweden. The link goes to the item catalog entry.

To me, this little face was smiling. That, in concert with the fact that this is a bardic award, lent me to think that perhaps what I needed was a Borre style Comedy/Tragedy mask medallion.

Then was the drawing, making sure each part fit together and reworking the knot in the center to be a four pointed knot instead of a triskele. It meant redrawing the face to include a mouth, and then redrawing it to both smile and frown.

What stumped me the most was how to do the text. I struggled a lot with this, and ultimately enlisted three people to help sort this out - Nicol, Christiana, and Alayne. Ultimately I followed their suggestion to do the text in red around the outside like dots. I think I got close, but in retrospect I should have gone down a nib side to really get closer to the red dots so often seen in the Kells and Lindisfarne manuscripts. As it is I'm happy because the calligraphy is fairly easy to read, even if you do have to turn the scroll 360 degrees (twice) to read it all. This was also my first time doing circular text - that was interesting. I need more work on getting that style of text layout cleaner, but I am happy with the results.


The scroll is on pergamenata with gouache and Winsor Newton red ink by a Mitchell nib. Final size of the scroll is 9x11 on an 11x14 page.

Cedar, receiving their scroll in Court at Mudthaw, photo courtesy of Dayna Tarabar: