Heroic Dreams - All Things Medieval

Last weekend I was rummaging through a book sale and I ended up buying more than a few books. And the best find I had was a book called “Celtic Myths and Legends”. It is a reprint of a very old book by T.W. Rolleston. And evidently its been reprinted many times over the past hundred years.  Here is a quick look at some of the Table of Contents:

The Early Milesian Kings
Tales of the Ultonian Cycle
Tales of the Ossianic Cycle
The Voyage fo Maeldun
Myts and Tales of the Cymry

It looks to be just a wonderful book and although I haven’t started reading it yet I soon will be. 

The real point of this blogpost is the illustrations inside the book. The book calls it like this: “With Illustrations from Famous Drawings and Paintings”. And well, they are really great, all done in black and white, and they have a definite feel about them. Almost hard to describe and I want to say that a lot of them have a tarot card kind of feel to them. The frontispiece is entitled “Cuchulain and the Flaming Wheel” and it is by far my favorite art work in the book.

Earlier this week I was working at my sketch pad and thinking about what I should practice drawing with and the thought came to me about Cuchulain. I broke open the book and started drawing myself a nice replica of the painting. And it came out great - I may even frame it.

The story of the Cuchulain drawing continues -

Yesterday I was working on a new essay for the fantasy guide website. It is a summer reading list for fans of epic fantasy and I was thinking about adding some kind of an illustration to it when Cuchulain came to me again. I took a look at the picture and an idea popped. because of the unusual lighting in the drawing I thought it might be perfect to put a book right in there! So I did!  The Summer reading guide is here

It came out great and it just has that Epic Fantasy book kind of feel to it. I think I might be using this drawing a lot, or even as a banner on a site. It just gives the reading epic fantasy feel perfectly.

Amazon.com doesn’t have this exact copy of the book but they do have a nice reprint here: Celtic Myths and Legends
 

Popularity: 16% [?]

Going through some stuff I stumbled on this picture of some suits of armor in a medieval castle taken during a tour. The thing that struck me about these suits of armor was the size. You can tell by the couple in the picture that the suits are small. Being curious about this I did a little research on the subject and come to find out the average height of a man in Europe around 1735 was about 5 foot 5 (165 cm) This varied a bit by country and North Americans were even a bit taller.

A lot is made of this and the biggest factor was the difficulty in nourishment throughout much of the middle ages. (Maybe the dark ages were so dark because nobody was tall enough to reach the string for the light In todays world we have such an amazing abundance of food. (It’s really quite unprecedented in the total history of mankind).

Anyway, being a writer of epic fantasy stuff I imagined how a group of modern day warriors standing each over six feet tall would dominate the psychology of the battle field. They would strike fear into an opponent and maybe even be called giants! The opposing army would after all only stand as tall as their chins at best.  It would be the courageous opponent who would want to battle such a man in hand to hand combat. But then again, with their heads and shoulders sticking above the fray like that they would make for some great targets for opposing archers - quite vulnerable. - On second thought maybe I will put away the time machine and stick to basketball.

The picture above is inside a castle called Meersburg - It was built around 700 and it still remains in great shape. I have more pics and information about it on my medieval castle website here

Popularity: 7% [?]

Here is a nice paper castle project I have just completed. It is a full tutorial with lots of pics. You download and print up the sheets on your printer, affix them to cardboard, cut them out then fold them up. Nice project and not too hard, but it comes out great.

It is the famous Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria.

Make a paper Neuschwanstein Castle

Popularity: 6% [?]