on every tree and in the dell:
It’s time to Return to the Mud
Mudthaw! When flowers start to bud
Our adroit Âine ingen Fháeláin
Denizen within Our domain
Of the great Eastern Lands receives
The Silver Wheel amongst new leaves
Exchequer! Service with the books
Has caused the royal heads to look
Ioannes and Ro Honig see
Âine working, busy as the bee
Imperator's’ will comes to pass
As muddy fields make way to grass
These accolades bestowed today
March 26th without delay
In Settmour Swamp’s great Barony
With Our Royal authority
Word count 99
The blossoms quickly spring and swell
on every tree and in the dell:
Mudthaw! When flowers start to bud
Denizen within Our domain
The Silver Wheel amongst new leaves
Has caused the royal heads to look
Âine working, busy as the bee
As muddy fields make way to grass
March 26th without delay
With Our Royal authority
HiiiI…..Iiigh above me…
Some quick thoughts of the modern aspect of this game.
Most of my sources are online. For a rhyming scroll such as this, I use Rhymezone.com. I use Thesaurus.com for all of them. Most of my research is online and I try to include most if not all the links.
I was looking up confirmation for the recipient to see if they needed an Arms to be included with their award. Their name brought up a new quirk: The recipient has a Circumflex Accent over the first letter, A, in their name. This made the computer unhappy. The carrot: ^, can’t be typed with a letter under it. To make it appear in such things as the header, or in my google docs where I write all my scrolls, I’d have to search to find the code for what the symbol  - which is by no means my area of expertise and probably a whole lot of extra work for one letter in a name that copies and pastes just fine. At least in the text of the blog. The accent does not appear in the header above. It is worth mentioning as it illustrates some of the strange little quirks and idiosyncrasies that anyone faces when using modern resources to work with past materials and techniques.
The persona of the recipient is listed as 12th century English which fits into the octosyllabic rhyme scheme very well. Instead of just diving into the rhymes, I took a bit of time to look for extant pieces, preferably translated into modern English. I quickly found The Owl and the Nightingale, “a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Middle English poem detailing a debate between an owl and a nightingale as overheard by the poem's narrator. It is the earliest example in Middle English of a literary form known as debate poetry, or verse contest.”
While I didn’t do this in the format of a debate poem, I have definitely tucked away this technique for future use - something I can get very wordy with! The translated bit of the poem I found inspired the first line of the scroll.
on every tree and in the dell:
Mudthaw! When flowers start to bud
I used a full couplet to describe the event. I was glad to be able to include the full title of the event in the limited syllable count.
Our adroit Âine ingen Fháeláin
Denizen within Our domain
I took a gamble that Fháeláin is pronounced Fae-lain, as every Google search I made seemed to indicate. This would make the rhyme of “domain” compatible.
The Silver Wheel amongst new leaves
I put our kingdom and the award in one couplet. It’s always a juggle with scrolls - what necessary pieces of information to put where.
Has caused the royal heads to look
This rhyme is a total cheat. I pluralized one word but not the other. The only saving grace is that look/book is such an excellent full hit rhyme (to steal a phrase from the Dróttkvætt metre) that it will hopefully not jar the listener out of the rhyme scheme.
Âine working, busy as the bee
As muddy fields make way to grass
Literally the only reason I used Imperators instead of Emperors was that it had an extra syllable.
I am very glad I got the opportunity to write this lovely scroll. The illuminator had put a call out on EK Scribes, Emma Makilmone let me take the job and away we went!
Calligraphy by Aleksei Dmitriev.
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