Above: making stencils for The Exchange, No 10 in the Gawain series of prints
…
The wonderful Mary Bullington contacted me at Facebook offering this Anglo-Saxon riddle as a thrillingly mystical descriptive of what I do as an artist.
Riddle 40
I saw four things in beautiful fashion
journeying together. Dark were their tracks,
the path very black. Swift was its moving,
faster than birds it flew through the air,
dove under the wave. Labored unresting
the fighting warrior who showed them the way,
all of the four, over plated gold. / Ic seah wrætlice wuhte feower
samed siþian swearte · wæran lastas
swaþu swiþe blacu swift wæs on fore
fulgum framra fleotgan lyfte
deaf under yþe dreag unstille
winnende wiga se him wægas tæcneþ
ofer fæted gold feower eallū
The answer is Quill Pen, and the explanation is as follows.
The ‘four things’ are two fingers, a thumb, and quill, working as a unit. And while it can’t be said that the quill moves ‘faster than birds’, it’s forgivable hyperbole, or perhaps even a humorous reference to the slowness of scribes working with painstaking deliberation. (In which case it’s even more like me, because I crawl over the densely detailed stencils for the Gawain series like a snail on a mission to circumnavigate the globe!) The ‘fighting warrior’ is the guiding arm of the scribe. The ‘plated gold’ is more obscure, and is probably a reference to the gold mount of the ink-horn.
While inks may no longer be dipped from gold-mounted ink-horns, in my mission to create the series of fourteen images to illustrate the magnificent narrative poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I feel the connection across time with the anonymous practitioners celebrated in the riddle.
Above: completed stack of stencils ready to be sent to Dan Bugg at Penfold Press
…
Mary is a painter and a friend of Marly Youmans, and we know each other through Marly’s blog and through Facebook. I am so touched that she sent such a lovely thought to me, spurred by an appreciation of what I make. Thank you, Mary.
…
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 