Lots of bits about my Aethelflaed Quest are ending up on social media but are being a bit slower to get onto the blog and also I pick up bits and bobs that others are saying - so I am collecting the tweets together in a kind of weekly round up thing and I have started using the hashtag #AethelfleadQuest 🙂
My mum & dad do a lot of the work on the puppets for #cuddlyscience here are some of the in process of the puppet being made #AethelflaedQuest overlockers and straight stitching sewing machines are used along with hand sewing, braiding & sometimes show making! #salariccraftpic.twitter.com/RwMXFm2kWM
Lyra the Lyre would by lying if she said she was Anglo-Saxon but she knows how she is different and is very similar - so she will do.
Basically she is 10 strings and modern built "Celtic" style and the Saxon era ones were 5-8 strings. However culturally the music and things would be close to the Danes/viking stuff were they range from 2 strings (or t least this is my understanding form all the readingI've been doing). The style of harp/lyre used is basically the same as that used in Israel and the Middle East - stretching way back in time. Anglo-Saxon harps are rare finds though and we are lucky to have found the fragments at Sutton Hoo. Gaps in our knowledge are filled in from other parts of Europe - ie places in and around Germany where the Angles and other associated tribes came from.
Finding myself falling down a lovely rabbit whole of music history - and finding myself trying to understand music theory when I can't read music!
So... pentatonic scales are kinds of an ancient thing hidden in British music especially the folk stuff - this is not the 8 note thingy we are taught at school and kind of explains why folk stuff from other places sounds so hauntingly familiar to me. I struggle a bit with the restrictions of conventional music that tries to tell me sounds I can hear don't exist or can't sound good. These I've found are called Demi-tones - but that is another tale and arches back to the end of the nineties and my choir master being awesome in explaining stuff and encouraging people to experiment with music.
Anyway obv. Lyra has the wrong number and type of strings and has a key for turning the pegs for tuning but she is still really really similar to the harps the anglo-saxons used.
I have a book on Lyre history, making and tuning coming - for now I just sort of tightened the strings until they sounded ok to me. At some point I will be making a Sutton Hoo replica but not before the summer festival for Queen Aethelflaed!
This year is the 1100 yr anniversary of Aethelflaed, the Lady of Mercia and Warrior Queen's death - living in the city she was buried in means that of course I have become involved with the celebrations to mark the occasion!
Here. is a little summary - though it does not yet mention everything that is happening 🙂
There is so much AWESOME going on for this event - I'm taking Cuddly Science's Histories to the event and have been researching and amassing much stuff for workshops including metallurgy, textiles, music, a new puppet, mud squishing, art history, wood work and more!
I have been privileged to work with the people at the Museum of Gloucester and have been pestering historians everywhere - I might also have high jacked the family holiday and various story telling gigs to slip in some extra research. I've reached the stage of trying to track down copies of various Chronicles (in translation) and have revived my interest in Viking/Saxon et al poetry.
Last year I decided it was time to move Cuddly Science onto phase 2 - Cuddly Histories and so found myself at the Archaeology Festival and even at some digs <3 Being a geologist by training this reminded me of my love for archaeology and history - I went on to take part in the History festival with a talk on Cave Art and so on...
I'd already decided to make the Aethelflaed puppet for this year when the chance of being involved in the festival came up and so my Quest for Aethelflaed and Search for All Things Anglo-Saxon started - I have taken photos of rocks and statues and medallions and fallen down rabbit holes of Norse language roots, I am using my science, technology, art, and craft skills, I am researching and learning and this makes me very happy - I am also meeting lots of interesting people on the way.
I am also learning so much about the city I live in - things I just didn't know.
With only about a month or so to go before the festival it's time to turn the heat up on my Quest - can you work out what I am up to with this little piece of kit?
Pretty much since I first got onto twitter I have been using it as a medium to compose, create and share poetry - recently they have increased the character count which I am finding it hard to adjust too! However this did make me think that I should probably extract/copy those poems off of twitter - this is going to be a little tricky as initially there were no hashtags and then the hashtags were not consistent and twitter is still not the most searchable of platforms though a hell of a lot better than Facebook for this sort of thing!
As it is National Poetry Writing Month this month I shall endeavour to share these little treasures that I extract from my twitter feed!
Here is the first and is part of another project that started over on my Patreon account - called the Neons.
As part of Mothers Day Alaric took me for a walk around the ruins of St Oswald's Priory here in Gloucester - I realised that I had not explored it properly and he decided that that needed to change - in general I like exploring old buildings and plan to do it a bit more this year including more Cuddly Histories as well as the science. This was only part of our walk which also included the industrial run down bits but I've separated them out for now. These photos are not meant to be academic though I really do want to study them more as being a geologist I kind of want to know the full story of each and every stone!
If you want to know more about the history then go here (actually the lovely website I was going to link to seems to have disappeared so I will try and do a write up on the blog at some point), also this year is really important for the Priory and there are going to be all sorts of things happening in and around it this summer due to one of the founders Aethelflaed!
Serious check this woman out - warrior queen and all sorts!
Now to the photos - I am putting them up here as I know several people want to use them for art projects (me included), you are welcome to use them to draw from - if you use the actual photos this is fine for non profit works (though please still credit me) but could you please talk to me for anything else. 🙂
You can see larger version of the photos by just clicking on them - there will also be a prose-poem type thing at some point but for now this is the photo dump for us artists to be getting on with 🙂
p.s. it kept raining hence the title!
Form more images to draw from you can look through the archive on this blog or check out some of the stuff on my photo and images blog, or look at my Flickr.
Aethelflaed and All things Anglo-Saxon, Archeology, Art and Craft, Events and Outings | sarah | 
Sat 5th May 2018 8:59 am | 
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