“For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May.” ~ Sir Thomas Malory

Happy First Day of Summer!

Wait, you say. It’s only May 1. Summer starts June 21.

But in Northern Europe, the first day of May traditionally marked the beginning of Summer, when you could reasonably expect the weather would be good enough for farming.

And that was all the excuse a body needed to get out and party. At first light, lads and lasses would head out into the woods to “gather the May,” making garlands of flowers and returning home at sunrise to hang their treasures over the doors of their sweethearts. Assuming they actually made it back to the village, the rest of the day was spent in feasting, singing, and dancing around the May pole on the village green.

For the ladies, another advantage of being out before dawn (other than running around in the shadowy woods unsupervised with a passel of young men) was the access to May dew, which was said to make a woman beautiful. Women continued to travel to the country well into the 19th century expressly to gather dew off the grass on May Day morn.

Some random facts about May Day:

Its roots go back to the Roman festival of Floralia, celebrating Flora, a goddess of flowers and Spring (And drinking. How can you not get behind celebrations for  a goddess of drinking?)

Bealtaine, the neopagan name for the holiday, is simply the Old Irish word for May Day. The month of May was Mí Bhealtaine, from a root meaning “bright fire” — which is why elebrations included bonfires on the hilltops, a tradition which survived well into the 20th century and which still can be found in some areas today.

The Old English name for May was “Þrimilci-mōnaþ,” or Trimilki,  The Month of Three Milkings, i.e. the time that farmers began to milk their cows three times a day.

May Day became associated with labor unions after the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions unanimously set May 1, 1886 as the date by which an eight-hour work day would become standard. On that date, an estimated 300,000-500,000 workers went on strike across the U.S. in various cities in support of this “radical” idea.

May Day’s mischief and magic play a key role in bringing not one, not two, but three couples together in Immortal Champion, including Lady Eleanor’s maid Lucy and the dashing Henry Percy of Alnwick. You’ll find a little taste of Lucy and Henry’s May Day dalliance after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m over at Wicked L’il Pixie today,  explaining

WHY VIKINGS?

Click on the button or the Why Vikings text above to pop over there to  join the party, where you can comment for a chance to win a signed copy of Immortal Champion.  Remember, comment there.

Not here. There.

I ran into this lovely video from the Theater Department at the University of Kansas (coincidentally where my birth father went to college, and my husband’s father worked — although we didn’t meet until 30 years later, some 3000 miles away).  It’s a scene from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, performed in Original Pronunciation. This is, more or less, how the audience at Wilton House would have heard the play in 1603, just 20 years after the time of my current work in progress, Immortal Defender. Defender is set in 1583, and features a cameo appearance by my heroine’s distant cousin, one William Shakeshafte of Stratford upon Avon. I hope you enjoy this little snippet of the past.

Everything, for me. As I’ve written before, I fuss and fume until I have the perfect name for my hero, heroine, secondary characters, the heroine’s lady’s maid…All those who speak must have the right name, or I don’t hear their true voices.

Unfortunately, that’s giving me fits in this series. First, I’m using characters from myth or history (or both), and for better or worse, those folks already have their names.

And a lot of them overlap. The Henrys, for instance. In writing Immortal Champion, which is the most history-based of the books so far, I had to deal with two Kings Henry (IV and V), and three Henrys Percy (grandfather, father, and son—and believe me, the Percys didn’t stop using the name there). There were also two Ralphs Neville (father and half-brother to my heroine), plus the family re-used a couple of names between the set of children from Ralph Sr.’s first wife and his second. Keeping them straight was a struggle, but by making up nicknames and calling folks by titles or last names, I think it all ended up clear.

Now I’m working on Immortal Defender, which takes place in the reign of Elizabeth I, where we bump up against the second part of the problem:  a tiny pool of historically correct names.

In the years right after the Conquest, there was a wide base of names to draw from. While Norman-French names quickly became popular, old Anglo-Saxon names like Godric, Tostig, Leofric, Waltheof, Godiva, Eadburgha, and Cynwise held on for generations, especially in the lower classes.  But by the time Elizabeth came along, most of those old English names had vanished. According to Janelle Lovelace, who compiled information provided by the Ashmolean Museum, there were only about forty names in common use for each gender, with another hundred or so in occasional use.

In fact, from 1530 to about 1700, 70% of men had one of five names (John, Thomas, William, Richard, Robert) — and a full 29% of all men (about 1 in 3.5!) were named John.  Women had it a little better, with nine names making up 70% of the population (Elizabeth, Joan, Margaret, Anne, Alice, Agnes, Mary, Jane, Katherine). And you thought Jacob and Emily were overdone…

The third problem arises from the number of characters I’m dealing with. Three books in, and I know I’ve already duplicated at least one name — I named a bad guy “Neville” in Immortal Warrior, not realizing Gunnar’s heroine in Immortal Champion, Eleanor, would be from a real family with the surname Neville. And with the quantity of secondary characters that appear in each book. I suspect there are several others. Some writers keep huge “bibles” of their series to ensure they never reuse a name. I figure that readers know that names recur and can keep everyone straight with a little help — just like in real life.

So I’m digging deep, looking for those one hundred less common names in use in Elizabeth’s England, and when I run into a truly unique name from that time during my research, I glom onto it. Still, I can hardly wait for my guys to live until an era when I have more names to choose from.

Every time I turn around, I see yet another Viking in a horned helmet. Movies, books, graphic novels, anime, football games, even Society for Creative Anachronism events and Renaissance Faire events, where the people should know better.  And every time I see one, I want to explode. So let me be clear.

Vikings did not wear horned helmets. Ever.  

According to contemporary artwork and archeological findings, they went into battle either bareheaded or with the simple dome or cone helms that were common at the time (with or without nasal). Even their great chieftains/kings were buried with the same kind of simple helmets — some highly decorated and trimmed with precious metal. The helmet in the photo is that of a lesser chieftain, but shows the common shape (Photo credit:  John Erling Blad, from Wikipedia Commons)

However, back in the 1800s, a thousand years after the fact, some fellow in Sweden illustrated a translation of an Icelandic saga and decorated the characters’ helmets with cow horns.  And at about the same time, the image really took off in productions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen.  At least the image is justified for those operas: there is good evidence that pre-Viking era* Germanic and Celtic peoples used winged or horned helmets in rituals, and since Tristan is based on an ancient Celtic legend and Der Ring comes from equally ancient Germanic legends, wings or horns are fine.  They belong there. Unfortunately, the combination of illustrations + operatic Valkyries fused horned helmets and Vikings in European and  American imaginations

Horns do not belong on the Immortal Brotherhood or on any other Viking. Ever.

No horned Vikings.

Horny Vikings, though? Now that’s an entirely different matter….

* The Viking era runs 793-1066 A.D., or Lindisfarne to Hastings (when they conquered England — Norman = Northmen = Vikings — and settled down forever)

For more photos of Viking helmets, visit Hurstwic Viking Reenactors. There’s other terrific info in their history section, accessible from the bottom of their Home page.

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Sorry I’ve been so delinquent about continuing our travels through Nottinghamshire. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, what with driving Child1 to college nine hours away, then turning around 24 hours after I got home to make the ten hour round trip to a signing in Portland. I barely got back from that in time to attend Child2′s acting debut, literally walking in just as the play began. And then two days after that, I started running a character workshop for the FF&P Chapter of RWA. Whew!

But things have settled down now, sort of, so we’re off again, backtracking, as Steinarr and Marian did, from Haworth toward Sudwell, stopping off at the Retford market. This is the market where Ari sat in the tavern and spun the story that inadvertently started the rumors about Robin Hood.

Retford, which lies on the River Idle about 30 miles north of Nottingham, has long been the prinicipal market town in an area known as the Hundred* of Bassetlaw. Ret-, or Red- (the town appears in the Domesday Book as Reddeforde), is a reference to Read the rest of this entry »

From the time I started IMMORTAL OUTLAW, I intended to take you all on a tour of the locations  in the book and reveal the fact and fiction in the story.  However, I didn’t want to post too much too soon and end up with spoilers.

The book has been out about 6 weeks now, so I think it’s safe to begin our trek. First though, a bit about a question I’ve gotten over and over during the past couple of months:

Why Robin Hood?

Well, why not? It’s a story that has been around for at least 600 years, so it clearly resonates: A good man outlawed for either an unfortunate mistake (accidentally killing a forester) or for standing up to tyranny (refusing to do homage to a usurper trying to steal the throne) depending on the version you’re reading, making his way in the wilds, gathering a band of like-minded men around him to redress the wrongs of society by robbing only the rich to aid the poorest around them. Bows and arrows, horses, great chase scenes through the woods, comic relief, and a love for the ages. Great stuff, even if it’s likely based on the romanticized story of a tax-evading scofflaw.

But really why are these two:

That’s Bernadette O’Farrell as Marion and Richard Green as  Robin from The Adventures of Robin Hood, an ITV series rebroadcast in the US on CBS. I grew up on these two (and Patricia Driscoll, who took over the role of Marion, as they spelled it, in seasons 3 and 4). [Photo used without permission.]

I watched TARH in syndicated re-runs, and I loved it from the first. I fantasized about being Marian, who in the series was brave and bold and every bit as good with a bow as Robin. No victimized Olivia de Haviland here. She was a tough cookie (and even tougher after pixie-like Driscoll took over), and she fought the bad guys alongside the men. This was probably because the producer was Hannah Weinstein, one tough cookie herself (she hired blacklisted writers like Ring Lardner to write episodes under psuedonyms, which explains the solid, socially conscious storylines).

As a bonus, bits of the series were shot on location in the meadow at Runnymede where the English barons—including a descendant of the real Ivo from Immortal Warrior—forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. The production values on TARH were pretty high for the time (it was shot on 35 mm film), so even now, some 50+ years later, the images are crisp. You can find the DVDs at Amazon (all four seasons/143 episodes for under $25).

So, yeah, Robin Hood, and not for the first time. My first published romance, Hostage Heart, was totally Robin Hood gone cowboy, a straightforward western version of the legend complete with robber-cattle-barons and unsavory sheriffs—unlike this one, which is my fantasy about how such a story might have come about if our boy Ari had been around.

I hope you’ll follow along as we retrace Steinarr and Marian’s zig-zag route through Nottinghamshire. You’ll be able to see their path on the interactive map available from my Extras page or at GoogleMaps. Invite a few friends to come along. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

So, what was your favorite version of Robin Hood (book, movie, or tv)? Did you ever dream of going outlaw for the sake of justice? Were you a fan of Little John, Alan-a-Dale, or Will Scarlet?

UP NEXT: The Road to Maltby

Ah, the joys of summer. Lazy days, hammocks under the maple tree,  corn on the cob, poison ivy…

Wait. I live in southern Oregon. We have poison oak, not poison ivy. Everyone knows that. Well, everyone except the bird that apparently flew in with a gut full of poison ivy seeds and planted them in the pachysandra.

A while back, I noticed we had some new plant growing in the front side yard, between the mulberry and the cherry. It was pretty and green, and other than a vague idea that I needed to figure out what it was, I didn’t think much of it at the time. Then I got that debilitating crick in my neck I mentioned and wasn’t doing much of anything, particularly gardening, so the pretty green plant grew and spread, looking quite lovely in the shade and filling in a bare patch in the ground cover that needed something anyway.

Then my neck got better and I went out to take a closer look. Leaves of three. Oh, crap. The leaves weren’t shiny, like I remember from summers in Kansas, but I knew.  I came in and fired up the laptop just to check.

We’ve got poison ivy, a patch about 10′ x 15′ that bleeds into the pachysandra and the lilies of the valley (also poisonous, btw, but not in quite the same way). I scooted off to buy Tecnu and Marie’s Poison Oak Soap, and then hubby and I geared up for the attack. But the woody root is well buried in the pachysandra and intertwined with those of the mulberry, and it quickly became obvious we were never going to succeed that way. So hubby headed off to the armory (garden store) while I scrubbed the tools with Technu. (Here’s a great site with info on poison ivy, how to recognize it, and what to do about it.)

Thank goodness Steinarr and Marian (IMMORTAL OUTLAW) didn’t have to worry about poison ivy (imagine that scene under the tree at the collier’s camp if they discovered they’d been sitting in the wrong plant!), It’s not native to England,  but unfortunately, modern English practitioners of love al fresco have to look before they lie. The plant is so beautiful in the autumn that some fool brought some in to enhance his garden. Somebody, presumably, immune (about 1 in 4 is, although that can change with continued exposure).

The bird that made us a gift of the seeds was likely a downy woodpecker, who loves the creamy white berries. I’ve seen way more woodpeckers in the neighborhood than usual this year, including one I think was a downy. But it could have been anything, because the only beasts NOT immune to poison ivy are primates — like us. So there you go.

Anyway, chemical warfare has been launched. Leaves are beginning to wilt (not to include the mulberry or cherry, we hope). We’ll still have to grub up the roots this fall while wearing exposure suits, but at least we’ll know they’re dead when we do. And then we’ll have to replant. Something pretty and green…and non-toxic.

We’ve avoided rashes so far, but I bet some of you haven’t.  Care to share your itchy story? Got pix?

Okay, maybe not.  But here’s someone who did, and it’s fun to see how he did it. Since there’s a scene in IMMORTAL WARRIOR in which the the serfs at Alnwick spend a rainy day in the hall making spoons, I was interested to see this authentic recreation of the process, and I hope you are, too.

When I was a kid, I was so jealous of my older male cousins and their pocket knives that I nagged my Grammie into giving me one.  I immediately started “whittling” — not well, but enthusiastically, and there’s still a part of me that wants to carve something wonderful from wood.  (Note to self: Add to Life List)

How about you?  Did you ever carve/whittle?  What did you want to do as a kid that you haven’t done yet?  Have you put it on your Life List?

(via Boing-Boing)

PS:  Okay, I’m going to come clean.  I originally went to Boing-Boing’s post because the title that came up on my RSS feed was “howto-make-a-viking.” Now there’s a worthwhile project…

Apparently so.  Today is my regular monthly blog slot at Rose City Romance Writers.  The topic of the month is research, which could be boring, but has turned out not to be at all.  What’s most interesting to me is how differently each person approaches both the topic and the research itself. Pop on over and check it out. I promise we won’t bite.