Measure Our folks worth in more than ounces
Seeking the best, not those that are craven:
Finding Wymarc of Dragonship Haven
As a fencer, she swashes and buckles,
She’s won contests! No skin off her knuckles!
She’s a volunteer and picks up a broom
Gives their hard won time making events bloom
These traits We value, for which Arms We give
For Wynmarc to wear, long as she may live
Done today in this Our ethereal court
The praises of Our Wynmarc all will purport
Word Count: 90
Blather:
Fiona the Volatile tapped me to write the words for this scroll. Neither of us knew the recipient and we didn’t get much more information than was in the original write up. This is not a hindrance, but a delightful challenge! An early idea was to put Roman references in the scroll to reflect our reigning Consuls. It didn’t really work out, though I explored a few wiki pages as an initial path to take. I will keep the idea for possible future scrolls. Fiona decided to go with murder-bunnies as the theme. This matched Chaucerian rhyming couplets, which are always fun, and both of us went to our respective drawing boards. When I am writing rhyming couplets, I write the first line, rhyme the end word, and write the next line of the couplet backwards. The hardest line in the text often becomes my favorite one and this scroll was no different. The favored couplet -
As a fencer, she swashes and buckles,
She’s won contests! No skin off her knuckles!
- originally was written as:
As a fencer, she can swash and buckle
She won Baronial Thrown Weapons, no trouble!
The couplet went through several revisions, because in the description I received she was listed as the Baronial Thrown Weapons Champ, but her primary focus was Rapier fighting. I wanted to mention both interests in the scroll. But given the requirements of Chaucerian English, I couldn’t fit it all in the line. I also wanted to refer to the swash and buckle of fencing without directly naming it, but "buckle" didn’t have as many rhymes as I thought it would.
The original near rhyme of "trouble" did not sit well, nor did the syllable count match up as that line was 12 syllables long. I went back to look at rhymes for buckle and focused on knuckle. I wasn’t particularly worried about the plural. I could easily change swash and buckle to swashes and buckles and still remain in my syllable count. So that left the body of the sentence to work on, and I simply couldn’t fit “baronial thrown weapons champ” in. So even though the contest Wynmarc won was for thrown weapons, not fencing, for the sake of the poetry I decided to shorten it to an unnamed contest. The information conveyed is technically correct - which, some would say, is the best kind of correct.
The rest of the words went together pretty easily. If a sentence had too many syllables I would winnow it down or switch phrases around until I got to the right amount. Arthur le Taverner helped me out as beta for a couple of the lines I needed to reshuffle to get the correct syllable count. It isn’t all quite iambic pentameter yet. I am still working on that. As much as I read about that meter, I am beginning to suspect that I need to attend or watch a class on it to truly grok it. I ended it with the couplet: Done today in this Our ethereal court The praises of Our Wynmarc all will purport This would normally have been where the date, event and location would go, but as it was an ethereal court I specifically did not to include the dates. I felt a little bad not being able to include them, but felt the ending couplet was sufficient to once again praise the recipient for this well deserved award. Sources used for this scroll were: Rhymezone, Thesaurus and some wiki entry browsing on Roman words and language. Went out at First Court of the Eastern Consules Tindal & Alberic at the 23:23 mark.
