NORSE PAGANISM

Better to fight and fall than to live without hope. - Volsunga

It's the final culture! Like the Maya, I have little connection to Vikings and Norse Pagans. I had more of an understanding of their way of life and their religion, however; everyone knows the Norse pantheon to some degree, and I knew that Vikings were much more peaceful than some believe. They were mostly farmers and craftsmen, living off of what they made - not pillaging everyone around for their goods. While a decent amount of their artwork has survived, some materials simply couldn't stand the test of time. Their clothes, which they made themselves, are a prime example of this. Often made of "living" materials like animal skins, they deteriorated with age and have left us with little to work with. Perhaps this is why Viking runes - letters used not only to write messages, but also to provide protection - are such a famous part of their culture in the modern day. These runes, especially when associated with the Ringerike and Urnes styles, are possibly the most recognisable element of Viking culture. Surprisingly, due to how late they started popping up, most Viking runestones actually speak of Catholic beliefs. To be completely honest, though, a Norseman's religion didn't seem to have a massive effect on his life like the others we've studied. The Norse culture stayed much the same, and even later runestones - those from after Scandinavia was Catholicised - depicted popular Norse legends like Sigurd (or Sigfried) the Dragon Slayer.

Most runestones weren't religious at all, serving instead to commemorate the dead or celebrate achievements and works of construction work. They contain a decent amount of information through which we can learn about Norsemen and their lives. Unfortunately, though, I know that it'll turn out just like the first Maya piece if I try to design my own runestone. For this reason, I'm going to try something I have yet to try in this project: a landscape. I'm not a huge fan of this piece, so I'm gonna show you right now

rather than building up to it with all the work I did.

found one which I felt would work for this piece.

There are a few details which I want to point out, but I'll do that a little later. I spent more time than any other piece on the concept of this one, which was at least partially because I never, ever do landscapes. I did a lot of rough thumbnails before I eventually found one which I felt would work for this piece. Having found my rough composition, I took it onto a new canvas and did three more passes - one in greyscale simply to refine the roughed-out landscape, followed by two sketch layers.

I had decided by this point that I wanted this piece to be lineless. Lines would effectively remove any depth I worked to establish; they would be the same width from the far-off mountains to the much closer rocks due to how thin my linework is, destroying the illusion of atmosphere and simultaneously breaking up the image and tying it together far too much. I still decided to do a linework layer just as a guide, though, before colouring everything in (starting with the background and ending with the foreground, as always) by adding layers over top of the colour layer and merging them downwards when I was done. This was perhaps not the most efficient way to do it, but it worked for me. Due to my own incompetence, I didn't take screenshots of each stage. But what luck! I was streaming on Twitch for my friends as I did some of the colour, so I can show you each stage - perhaps in even more detail than I did for the other pieces.

I started out here; no colours, messy lines and a palette which I took from a photo of some mountains. The bottom two colours are mixtures of different palette colours, which I mostly used for shading (shadows typically look much better with a blue tint). My first move was to create the sky, which I did very roughly with only two colours and my beloved watercolour brush. I then laid the mountain over it, changing the shape slightly (which I did after the image below, you'll see it later) to fix the composition. The mountain has a grey base (obviously), but I added some green tones to denote foliage. It wasn't particularly effective but it would have looked worse if I'd gone more detailed. I used the yellow-green palette colour to add in some light cresting the hill, which became my main light source for the rest of the colour.

I had tried to make it a little misty near the bottom of the mountain, but it didn't work out. The pale patch you can see is where the forest goes. After working out all of the mountain colours and textures, I worked on the chalk part. This, as I'm sure you can tell, is based on Madonna's shine (which I didn't realise was a shrine until ridiculously late in the project), and is honestly there simply because I didn't get a chance to do a chalk figure in the Druidry piece. Vikings did come to Britain, so it kind of makes sense - although you do have to stretch the logic a little. I also hadn't done anything based on the shine and I thought that runestones and chalk figures were perfect for it.

In order to make it look properly etched into the ground, I referenced the Uffington White Horse (which is now open at this point in the project, but Avebury is still closed so I still can't visit). The only real "secret" to placing it convincingly in the scene was to add some shadows in the grass behind the chalk figure. I also added a slight

gradient, but not so much as to be distracting.

The forest isn't particularly interesting to talk about so I'll gloss over that, but it did take a few tries until I did some research into alpine forests. By the end of

the stream, the piece looked like this:

I then had to go to sleep, and carried on on the morning. After rendering the grass, I decided to do something interesting with the runestones. One of them was based on real Ringerike stones, so I wanted to put some actual runes on it. I found a poem written to Odin from something called the Voluspa or Song of the Sybil:

I know for certain Odin
Where you conceal your eye
In the famous Spring of Mimir
Mead he drinks
Every morning
From the Pledge of the Father of the Slain
Do you know any more or not?

Then, using a runic translator, I converted the poem into runes and started sketching these down in my sketchbook. I hated this. It got so bad that I eventually decided to skip the referencing phase and flick back and forth between Google Chrome and Clip Studio Paint in order to draw the runes directly onto the runestone. Because of the awkward shape and small surface, I wasn't able to put the whole poem there. Here's the

runestone compared to the rune-ified poem:

ᛁ ᚴᚾᛟᚹ ᚠᛟᚱ ᚲᛖᚱᛏᚨᛁᚾ ᛟᛞᛁᚾ
ᚹᚺᛖᚱᛖ ᚤᛟᚢ ᚲᛟᚾᚲᛖᚨᛚ ᚤᛟᚢᚱ ᛖᚤᛖ
ᛁᚾ ᛏᚺᛖ ᚠᚨᛗᛟᚢᛋ ᛋᛈᚱᛁᚾᚷ ᛟᚠ ᛗᛁᛗᛁᚱ
ᛗᛖᚨᛞ ᚺᛖ ᛞᚱᛁᚾᚴᛋ
ᛖᚡᛖᚱᚤ ᛗᛟᚱᚾᛁᚾᚷ
ᚠᚱᛟᛗ ᛏᚺᛖ ᛈᛚᛖᛞᚷᛖ ᛟᚠ ᛏᚺᛖ ᚠᚨᛏᚺᛖᚱ ᛟᚠ ᛏᚺᛖ ᛋᛚᚨᛁᚾ
ᛞᛟ ᚤᛟᚢ ᚴᚾᛟᚹ ᚨᚾᚤ ᛗᛟᚱᛖ ᛟᚱ ᚾᛟᛏ

The runes around the outside are simply randomised repetitions of the runes used in the poem. This was the longest and most arduous part of the entire project, if I'm completely honest. I've got terrible handwriting at the best of times, so having to write in a language with little connection to the Latin alphabet was absolute hell for me. I even had to do it twice, because the initial pass was too light and I had to go over it in a darker colour. Regardless, I eventually finished, drew on the figure and added an overlay

layer before finally considering the piece complete.

So, that's it! That's the final major piece of artwork in this project. I hope that it's felt like a journey, as I intended it to. I tried to string the cultures together in a cohesive way; Romans invaded and culled the Druids, the Renaissance artists were heavily inspired by Hellenic Paganism, the Mayan empire was a group of city-states just like the Greeks, both the Maya and Norsemen had their own alphabet through which we learn about their culture and finally, Vikings invaded Celtic Britain and both were eventually Catholicised by invading parties. It's been a journey for me, too, with plenty of problems to overcome. Not everything I did has been covered in these culture pages, so please take the time to read my page on the odds and ends which didn't quite fit in anywhere else. Other than that, thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

-nano.

MADONNA

a study on religion in art

NORSE PAGANISM