First Snow

         We’ve had our first snow of the season (more than just flurries, anyway), so here’s a block print to celebrate.  This one is by Abigail Rorer (USA, b. 1949) and is interesting in having a completely white foreground.  This is interesting firstly for the composition of making nearly half the piece simply empty white, and turning that negative space into the positive snow.  It’s also interesting because this is a wood engraving, and since engraving is done with finer tools it’s unusual for them to have so much pure white space instead of fine texture everywhere.

        I picked this piece today because of the beautifully detailed, snow-glazed branches all across the top.  Our snow was certainly not deep enough to give us huge areas of pure white, but it did highlight every twig in a filigree of sparkling white, which is one of my very favorite scenes.

[picture: Fresh Snow, wood engraving by Abigail Rorer (Image from The New Leaf Gallery).]

Deer That Know How to Fly

         “The Christmas Song,” aka “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” written in 1945 by Robert Wells and Mel Tormé famously asks “if reindeer really know how to fly.”  The popular idea of Santa Claus riding in a sled pulled by flying reindeer goes back to the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”  It’s unclear where credited author Clement Clark Moore came up with this concept - Santa Claus/St. Nicholas had been known to use goats, donkeys, and horses in various other traditions.  There is an illustration of the sleigh with one reindeer in an American children’s booklet from 1821, so perhaps publisher W.B. Gilley or his anonymous

writer made it up.  At the very least Moore certainly popularized the idea of flying reindeer.  To brush up on this enormously influential fantasy poem, revisit my prior post about “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”  Rudolph, by the way, didn’t join the team until 1939, the invention of the Montgomery Ward department store’s marketing team.

        The Christmas reindeer fly by purely magical levitation, since they don’t have wings or any other physical means of flight — but reindeer are not the only deer that know how to fly.  Let’s consider the peryton, a winged deer described by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (1957).  (You can read my review of The Book of Imaginary Beings in this post on Creature Collections.)  Borges claimed that the peryton was mentioned in a medieval manuscript, and you will occasionally find it listed in various sources as genuine medieval folklore.  There is a

fourteenth century depiction of a winged stag in an armorial list, but in fact, however, Borges seems to have made up the peryton himself, slyly slipping it in amongst the genuine mythical and metaphysical beasts he was discussing.

        If a peryton were simply a winged deer, however, that wouldn’t be anything too remarkable in the realm of fantasy creatures.  (Read my post on Flight to consider how slapping a pair of wings on any normally earthbound animals immediately makes them a fantasy marvel.)  Perhaps the strangest thing about the peryton is that despite being shaped like a bird-deer hybrid, its shadow is shaped like a human.  That is, until it kills a human, after which its shadow becomes a proper winged-deer-shape.  This makes it sound considerably more sinister,  and Borges claimed they were mortal foes of humans.  Many fantasy worlds, such as Dungeons & Dragons, have cast the peryton as a monster.  Much better to have reindeer than perytons landing on your roof in the night!

        The exact appearance of this species is somewhat in question, however.  Although many sources depict it looking like an ordinary deer with ordinary wings, some give it the front half of a stag and the back half (including wings) of a bird, like the hippalectryon.  Borges’s own description gives it the body of a bird, with wings and tail, but the head and all four legs of the stag.  I actually couldn’t find any illustrations that seemed exactly right to me.

        Finally, perytons’ original native habitat was Atlantis.  They escaped the destruction of Atlantis (about which you can read in this prior post) by flying, which makes me wonder what other flying Atlantean wonders might also have survived.

        Are there any other magical flying deer species in the Realms of Imagination?  I can’t think of any - except the 20th century (now retired) winged springbok* logo of South African Airways - but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to learn of some.  Can you think of any creatures that fit the category?  (*Yes, I know antelope and deer belong to different families, but I think they play similar ecological and cultural roles, so I’m counting them as the same broad category for purposes of fantasy!)

[Pictures: Santa with his reindeer, postcard from 1906 (Image from Sandra Lee’s Shoppe on ebay);

Santa and his reindeer, colored engraving by Arthur J Stansbury(?) from The Children’s Friend, Number III, 1821 (Image from Yale University Beineke Library);

Winged white stag of Charles VI, illumination from Songe du vieil pèlerin by Philippe de Mézières, c. 1390 (Image from La France pittoresque);

Perytons, image by BlueFrackle(?) (Image from Fandom);

Flying Springbok, South African Airways logo, 1948.]

What's New, OR How Is It December Already?

         I’ve got a couple more new pieces I'm excited about... except that they’re going to be illustrations in my upcoming book Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, so I’m saving the whole posts about them until spring when I’ll be promoting the new book…  (By the way, I’ll be turning off the Late Pledges feature on my Kickstarter campaign by the end of the month, so if you missed the campaign back in September you still have one last chance to check it out and get the various nifty pledge rewards.)

        This weekend I’ll be doing my once-a-year Holiday Sale schedule of two shows in two days: complete set-up, sale, and take-down two days in a row, with restocking all evening between.  It’s brutal, but the Holiday Sales are when they are, so if I’m going to participate I don’t have a choice.  On Saturday I’ll be at the Arts Wayland Holiday Marketplace, and on Sunday I’ll be at the Celebrate Newton Holiday Craft Fair.  Needless to say, I’d love to see you if you’re in the area!

        And of course I’ll be carving new blocks while sitting in my booth each day.  I’ve got one block half-carved from the last sale, plus another prepped, plus a small third which I was hoping to use as the demo at my Printmaking Workshop on Dec. 13…  But I fear that I’ll need to start it this weekend unless I get inspiration for another block TODAY.  Inspiration on demand is the hardest job in preparing for shows.  Yes, I make myself lists of ideas throughout the year in the hope of being able to grab an idea off the shelf when I need one… but sometimes nothing seems to entice me, and while I can brainstorm, I can’t force excitement.  So yeah, I hope I don’t run out of carving!  Any ideas for another block I should prepare to carve this weekend?

        December 13 will also be back-to-back events: first the aforementioned Block Printmaking Workshop at the library, after which I’ll rush home and jump right onto the Strong Women-Strange Worlds zoom for their annual Holiday Extravaganza.  It’s six whole hours of bookish fun with authors of speculative fiction.  There are MadLibs, Improv Storytelling, and more.  I’ll be participating once again in Speed-Date a Book, in which Bitterweetness & Light will try to win a date with readers.  It’s free, it’s available to anyone in the world with a zoom connection, and you can attend for as much or as little as you want.  Plus, the Digital Swag Bag includes a brand new Round Robin anthology, a new Small Bites collection of flash fiction, poetry, art, and recipes, and downloads including coupon codes, ebooks, postcards, and coloring pages…  And I’ve contributed to all of them!

        Meanwhile you should check out my most recent poem… which isn’t really my poem, because it’s crowd-sourced from contributions by 90 people in my town.  I took all the bits and pieces people contributed, came up with the organizing principle and some connective tissue, and wove everyone’s words together into another poem for the town: “The Sidewalks of Needham.”  You can read it here.

        And as soon as my December art activities are over, it will be time to clean the house for holiday guests!  But for now, one step at a time.  So I ask again: any ideas for another block I should prepare to carve this weekend?

Words of the Month - Gratitude

         Today will be a quick and belated Words of the Month to look at the roots of gratitude.  The adjective grate, meaning “agreeable, pleasant,” is now obsolete, but gave us quite a few words in which its spirit lives on.  First grateful, which now is used entirely for thankfulness, but you can see the earlier “pleasant” usage in Milton’s “Sweet the coming on of grateful ev’ning mild,” for example (1667).  Grateful is an unusual word because grate was already an adjective, so it didn’t need -ful to be turned into one.

        You can see it very clearly in ingrate, which was originally an adjective in the 14th century, and originally meant “unfriendly, unpleasant.”  The connection between pleasant feelings and thankfulness for the pleasantness is a recurring one, which I think is telling.  By around 1670 ingrate had come to mean the person with that quality of being unpleasant and simultaneously failing to be thankful for gifts.

        You can see the same Latin root that gave grate in congratulate, which essentially means  showing pleasure with someone.  Gratify comes from the idea of bestowing pleasure upon someone.

        Another suite of words that come from the idea of giving thanks includes

gratis - meaning something done for thanks only, rather than payment

gratuitous - which originally meant the same as gratis, but by about 1690 (some 40 years later), meant “uncalled for, done without good reason.”

gratuity - the idea being that it’s money you didn’t have to give in payment, but rather bestowed in thanks

        And speaking of thanks, that’s from all the way back in Old English, and seems to be related to think.  Again, isn’t it suggestive that thinking of the things and relationships we have is so closely related to giving thanks for them?  That’s why it’s important to count our blessings, even when there’s also so much to be concerned about.

[Picture: Mexican Fruits, wood engraving by Leon Underwood, 1927 (Image from The New Woodcut, by Malcolm C. Salaman, 1930).]

Giving Poems

         One of my family’s most beloved Christmas traditions is that we write poems to give along with the gifts under the tree.  Here’s how it works.

        1. When you give a gift, you write a poem to go with it.  In theory the poems hint at the gifts, but since they always seem to give it away outright, the giver reads the poem aloud at the same time as the gift is being opened, so as not to spoil the surprise.

        2. While serious poems are certainly acceptable, they’re very rare – wonky rhythm and grammar are tolerated, ridiculous eccentric rhymes are applauded, and references to in-jokes and family lore are gleefully encouraged.  Gift poems can be as short as limericks or even haiku, they can spoof famous poems or song lyrics, and they’re most often just a few couplets of doggerel.

        3. Each giving unit writes one poem for each receiving unit.  In other words, even if you give someone more than one gift you don’t need to write more than one poem; you can just pick one gift to write a poem for.  If the gift is for 2 people together, it’s still just one poem, and likewise if you’re giving gifts jointly, only one poem is necessary.  (My husband is happy to leave all our poem-writing to me, while my brother and his girlfriend sit down and write their poems together, and my children divvy up their gift list and each write half the necessary poems.  Whatever method people are happiest with is the right way to do it.)

        4. All poems are gratefully accepted with cheering and acclaim, no matter how simple or silly.  Just have fun with it!  It’s not a competition, and nor is it to be taken seriously.  Does it add to the holiday stress?  Well, perhaps a little, because it is one more thing you have to find time to accomplish — but it definitely shouldn’t be adding anxiety.

        As I said, these holiday poems are never in competition, but it’s still the case that over the years I’ve written some I was more pleased with than others.  Here are just a few that have given me particular satisfaction to present (and which are actually intelligible to people who don’t know all our family in-jokes).

        A Bundt cake pan for my sister-in-law

Consider the circle, a wonderful thing.

Without it, no wheel – and no tire swing.

We need it for zero, without which: no math;

We need it for lids, and the drain of the bath.

We need it for hamster wheels, bagels, and bowls,

For Christmas wreaths, bracelets, and anything that rolls.

Without any circle there’d be no letter O,

Which we need for October, oolong, and oboe,

Not to mention Ohio, O’Keeffe, and o’clock.

Yes, losing the circle would be a bad shock.

Just image the losses sustained when we bake:

Without any circle there’d be no Bundt cake!

        A set of prints of a rooster and chicken for my father

I know an old man with some chickens,

Whose heart at the sight of them quickens.

       He demands with a scowl,

       “Who says chickens are foul?

“Such bigoted speech simply sickens!” 

        A pair of shorts for my mother

The Greeks performed athletic feats untroubled by attire.

They thought a dash of olive oil all that modesty required.

But our mother’s far more modest when she's working to perspire;

She considered all the angles and deduced what she desired.

 

She wanted something comfy: cotton fabric, stretchy waist;

And washable plus sturdy, as her regimen's fast-paced;

Yet nothing too revealing, as her fashion sense is chaste.

What could I find to clothe her in accordance with her taste?

 

In careful consultation I examined all reports,

Considered the demands of her activities and sports,

And contemplated what would be the best as she cavorts.

At last I settled on this gift.  Spoiler alert!  It's shorts.

        A bicycle rear view mirror for my brother

Philosophers are fond of stating

How terrible it is to focus

On things behind us, advocating

Our minds dwell on the current locus.

 

I disagree with the cognoscente;

It’s wise to look in each direction.

This gift gives hindsight 20-20

And the opportunity for reflection.

        You get the idea; now it’s your turn!  Everyone’s holiday traditions are different, of course, so by all means adapt these ideas to your own circumstances.  Whether your circle is large or small, whether you can be with people in person or have to use Zoom or mail, the important thing is to reach out to the friends and family for whom you’re most grateful, and show them that you spent a little extra time thinking about them - not to mention sharing a laugh!  Whether poetry sounds like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or like Hallmark, or like a mangled limerick, it can draw us together in shared appreciation of the gifts we give each other, our presence in each other’s lives, and what we mean to each other.

[Pictures: Festive Gift, digital collage of block print bits by AEGNydam, 2025;

Chanticleer and Hen & Chicks, rubber block prints by AEGNydam, 2009, (about which the limerick was written!)  Originals sold out.]

Japanese Radish

         It’s been another of those days when I had no time to put together a proper blog post, so here’s just a very pleasing and deceptively simple woodblock print by Kōno Bairei (Japan, 1844-1895).  Bairei was a master of depicting birds and flowers, and he opened an art school in 1880.  This delightful radish seems quite simple and straightforward, but remember that those seemingly spontaneous lines were carefully carved and those subtle washes of color had to be carefully inked and printed.  For whatever reason, I’m just finding this piece is making me very happy today!

[Picture: Japanese Radish, woodblock print by Kōno Bairei, 1868-95 (Image from Harvard Art Museums).]

The Lure of Sirens

         Throughout history artists seem to have struggled with a lot of confusion over the nature of sirens.  It’s enough to make you wonder how many of these artists had ever even seen a siren!  But let’s start with what we know: sirens sing so beautifully that sailors are lured to their deaths.

        That’s it.  That’s all that’s certain.  Everything else is a mishmash!

        How many sirens are there?  Homer said 2, other ancient writers suggested up to 8, later artists depicted whole bevies, and some writers suggested 0, either because they didn’t believe in sirens or because they thought that the sirens all killed themselves after Odysseus passed by them without succumbing.

        Where do sirens live?  Early writers said they were in flowery meadows, and only later did they come to live on cliffs by the sea.  Later still they were plunged right down into the ocean.

        What do sirens look like?  Homer didn’t describe their appearance - it was their song that mattered - and as for everyone else?  Whew, take your pick…  Sirens generally began as human-bird hybrids, but how much bird could range from everything-except-the-face, all the way to nothing-except-the-wings.  

At some point sirens began to gain piscine traits as well, generally in the form of a fish tail that could be either instead of or in addition to any avian traits.  And finally in the nineteenth century many artists made them look like straight-up sexy human women, because nineteenth century artists were always looking for excuses to paint sexy women.  So if you’d like to design your own siren, make your choices from this handy guide:

• Face - human, most often female, occasionally male, (or in the case of one medieval illuminator included here, with the addition of a beak)

• Limbs - choose any combination of the following

        wings - 0 or 2  (you can also choose whether to place wings at the shoulders or the hips)

        arms - 0 or 2

        legs - 0, or 2 human, or 2 bird, or 2 sort of beast-looking

        tail - 1 bird, or 1 fish, or 2 fish

• Accoutrements - choose from the following

        fish - 1 or 2

        mirror

        comb

        club (for beating sailors)

        musical instrument - most often lyre, kithara, aulos, or flute

        empty bottle - according to one (and only one) medieval author, if you throw a siren an empty bottle she will be distracted playing with it, thus giving you a chance to escape

• Apparel - choose nothing, OR a diaphanous scarf or 2, OR complete head to toe outfit

        I’ve selected a variety of siren depictions for you, including a couple from ancient Greece showing various proportions of bird vs human.  I had a tough time narrowing down my choices from the medieval era because they’re so diverse and often so amusing.  I’ve started with one that gives the story in two panels: the singing first, followed by the attack on the sailors once they’ve been lulled to sleep.  This artist has picked a surprisingly popular strategy of refusing to make a decision about the nature of sirens and showing one with bird parts and the other with fish parts.  I also picked an illumination in which the

sirens play musical instruments, and one that includes a male as well as a female siren.  I included one showing a double fish tailed siren, in which I especially like the way the man in the boat is gazing so adoringly at the temptress.  I’ve included one with a nice depiction of the transparent water (and more sleeping sailors), that funny beaked siren, and a throwback to the mostly-bird version, who’s looking quite scary.  I also include one who looks purely mermaid, complete with comb and mirror, but who is nevertheless living in a meadow like the earliest versions of sirens.  (By the way, the mermaids’ love of mirrors and combs originated with their siren cousins.)

        Moving on to the Romantic era, I’ve got three depictions of Ulysses’s encounter with the sirens.  Etty’s 1837 sirens are among the first to be pure human, but they’re kneeling among the corpses of their victims.  Waterhouse’s 1891 painting bucks the modern trend for naked maidens to depict the sirens much like that original Green vase painting from about 475 BCE.  And in 1909 Draper has used the medieval trick of including different forms of siren rather than picking just one - although in his case it’s fish and pure human rather than fish and bird.

        When I went to make my own version, I rejected the fish tail outright, because we have mermaids for that.  I initially tried to make my siren with more of an avian back half and the legs and feet of a bird, but my artistic skills just couldn’t pull off a bird behind looking alluringly yearning as she gazes over the sea.  So I fell back on copying the Romantics’ version of a nubile young woman, but gave her wings (and feathers in her hair, although that’s not as clear as I’d hoped).  I also considered adding a more modern boat to take her out of ancient myth, but since the story this piece will be illustrating talks about the first time sailors heard her, I figured I’d better stick with the historical view.

        Although I find the confusion of form amusing, one of the things I find most interesting about the depiction of sirens is their degree of physical beauty.  The earliest depictions were quite clear that the temptation was purely auditory and the appearance of the sirens was irrelevant.  Certainly there was nothing alluring about their looks.  During the medieval era artists seemed to be torn between making their sirens beautiful to emphasize the dangers of worldly temptation, and making them downright ugly to emphasize their evil nature.

        One last note: the word siren came into English from French in the mid-14th century.  (The Greek word seiren from the Odyssey might come from roots meaning “binder, entangler,” but then again, maybe not.)  The devices that make warning sounds were first called sirens in 1879, starting with the klaxons on steamboats and later extended to refer to air raids, emergency vehicles, and so forth.  It is not at all clear to me why a blaring alarm would seem suggestive of a sea nymph, unless it’s just the idea of a sound that indicates danger in some way.  But whatever the reason, it does give rise to one of my absolute favorite examples of faulty Google Translate: In case of volcanic eruption, you will hear mermaids.  Do not ignore the mermaids; they are there for your safety.  Oh no; while it’s wise to pay heed to the singing of mermaids, children, always remember that you should absolutely most definitely ignore the sirens!

[Pictures: Odysseus and the sirens, red figure stamnos by the “Siren Painter,” ca. 475-470 BCE (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Pentelic marble funerary statue of a siren, ancient Greece, 370 BCE (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Sirens attack a boat, illumination from the Queen Mary Psalter, 1310-20 (Image from the British Library);

Sirens, illumination from Bestiary, ca. 1225-50 (Image from Bodleian Libraries);

Sirens and a boat, illumination from psalter, 1303-08 (Image from Münchener Digitalisierungs Zentrum);

Siren and sailor, illumination from De physionomia liber, Franciscus Asculanus, 14th century (Image from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana);

Sirens, illumination from Bestiary, 1226-1250 (Image from Bodleian Libraries);

Siren, illumination from Livre des proprietés des choses by Barthélemy l’Anglais, 15th century (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Siren, illumination from Rothschild canticles, ca. 1300 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

Siren/Harpy, wood block print from Ortus sanitatis by Johann Prüss, 1499 (Image from Boston Public Library);

Siren, illumination from Bestiary, ca. 1275-99 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

The Sirens and Ulysses, painting by William Etty, 1837 (Image from Manchester Art Gallery);

Ulysses and the Sirens, oil painting by John William Waterhouse, 1891 (Image from National Gallery of Victoria);

Ulysses and the Sirens, painting by H.J. Draper, ca. 1909 (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Siren Song, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]