Katherine Keenum

This reconstruction of a Viking house in Schleswig is from an article on Open Hearths, Ovens and Fireplaces. Among other topics, it reviews studies in how much wood it takes to heat reconstructed Viking dwellings. Conclusion? No one could have lived in the famous long houses during the winter. They required far too many tons of fuel for medieval woodcutting technology to meet. In contrast much smaller houses, like the one here, are bearable—for modern graduate students, at any rate.

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Although Lilias Trotter studied informally with John Ruskin, she probably thought of herself primarily as a missionary, not as an artist. Yet no one can paint with her flair without its meaning a lot to her. In other words, like many multi-talented people with strong callings, Trotter was complex. Personally, I dislike fictionalized biographies. Secondary and walk-on parts for real people in historical fiction? Of course. But it takes chutzpah to pretend to "bring them to life" as central characters. Still, if discovering someone like Lilias Trotter prompts a wholly fictional character to emerge in my imagination and demand that her story to be told, won't I be grateful!

Image via James Gurney. For a website devoted to her, click here.

 
Blog post alert: This 1777 eye-witness sketch of camp followers is a reminder that women participate in wars whether military commanders want them to or not. Wives, cooks, laundresses, and prostitutes—for writers of historical fiction, they can provide more than local color. A story could be told from their point of view. Also, of course, consider the artists and photographers who record wars. In this case, what would it have been like to be Swiss-born artist and coin collector, Pierre Eugène du Simitiére, during the Revolutionary War?
 

The Sverresborg Trøndelag Folkemuseum website has several items that could be helpful in conjuring up the setting for a fantasy or historical novel, including this visualization by K. P. Keller (about whom I could find nothing else on line).
 
I adore the way artists can translate archeological remains from holes in the ground into fully imagined places. Just look at the sweep of the bay in the background of this one, the texture of tiled roofs, the plowed field under the bluff on the right, the rockiness of the mound on which the castle is set. All these and more could supply either touches of realism or odd hinges for a plot point. For a good article on how it's done, click here.

As a follow-up to my previous post on a Corset sculptor, how about a Japonisme corset ad? In an e-mail, scholar Christine Guth immediately recognized these "Three Little Maids from School" from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Mikado, first performed in 1885. The Digital Commonwealth site where I found it has three other corset ads of the same period with Japonisme motifs. Which leads me to think the commercial artist I proposed as a fictional heroine might be a serious fine artist who has been influenced by Japanese art. As she struggles to find a footing in the world of galleries, she supports herself by supplying pictures to a printer who turns out calendars and advertising cards. If I decide to go with that idea, there's lots to explore!

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For my fantasy-novella-in-progress, I have a character visit a silver-mining town. It's not a long section, but to write about it well I needed to be able to visualize the setting so I gathered some images including the one shown here. This one of men in tunnels that are little more than holes in the ground isn't pertinent to my story, but I was fascinated when I spotted the two dowsers on the left. Dowsing for water I'm familiar with, but in mining? To avoid water, which is always a danger in mines? No! It turns out that people believed metals could also be located with a dowsing stick. A bit of trivia that goes straight into a notebook for future inspiration!

A Valentine's Day time sink: The 100 Ballads project and website! "Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials." For example, A Courtly new ballad of the Princely wooing of the/ fair Maid of London by King Edward shown here.

Imagine a group of internationally known, avant-garde artists building an amusement park together in 1987—attractions by Salvador Dali, David Hockney, Michael Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein (with music by Philip Glass, no less). An over the Big Top extravaganza. So delicious! So Tom Stoppard! So It-couldn't-happen now! Only wait: it can happen now, at least Luna Luna is being revived; and one day next year, you may be able to visit it in a city near you.

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This is a detail from a 16th C copy of Rogier van der Weyden's Saint Luke drawing the Madonna. For the religiously literal-minded today, it must seem silly to imagine that one of Jesus's disciples was around as an adult to sketch His mother when He was a baby; but to the more mythically minded Middle Ages and Renaissance, what mattered was not chronology, but devotion. Luke the Evangelist and presumed author of the third Gospel was also believed to be an artist, ergo … a lot of symbolism packed into one painting. Well, leaving aside all the whole, huge topic of belief, resonance, and levels of interpretation, I come down to loving this detail for its exactitude in portraying an artist at work. Even better for the historical novelist is a splendid website post, History and Usage of Metalpoint Drawing.

Website alert: For historical fiction writers, a new website called After the Plague provides a wealth of information on life, health, and death in Cambridge, England, in the period ca. A.D. 1000–1500. It takes findings derived from scientific investigations of a thousand skeletons of people who lived in and around Cambridge and uses them, not only to generalize, but to reconstruct individual lives. Sixteen essay-length profiles are included.

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