Arthurian Alphabooks: K is for Klinschor

Here's a version of Klinschor, yet another character from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival:
 
His name appears as Clinschor in the manuscripts, but it's commonly spelled with a K in modern German, so that's my excuse for drawing him this week. Fair warning: this will not be the last time I use spelling variations to fudge my way through the Arthurian alphabet! (And incidentally, on the subject of names: Richard Wagner further changed Klinschor's character, his role, and his name in creating the part of Klingsor for his opera Parsifal; a final change for the wizardly knight came with his transformation into Corporal Klinger in M*A*S*H*. Ha, I kid! Moving on...)

Klinschor was a knight and Count of the Terra di Lavoro in Italy, but he had the misfortune to be castrated by his lover's husband. (Nevertheless, the part of Klingsor in Parsifal is sung by a bass.) Thereafter Klinschor turned to the arts of magic and created threatening traps for other knights in his Castle of Wonders (Schastel marveile), until the spells therein were defeated—or at least survived—by Gawan (Wolfram's version of Sir Gawain / Gauvain).

The technique this week is a bit of an experiment. I did a very quick pencil sketch from life, as a guide to the shadows, principally; then I put down the vellum and attempted to ink the image with a minimum of outlines, hoping to build up the shapes out of hatching (not unlike the way John Totleben might ink, though very unlike his way in the care taken and the effects achieved):
 
That turned out okay, but it lost a lot of the shadowy contrast I'd been hoping for. So I tried again by inking the pencils directly with a bias toward direct black and white opposition instead of gradations of shade (though not exclusively, as you can see below):
 
I liked that one better, overall, but just for fun I decided to lay the vellum over the original inks and see how that composite would look when scanned. And lo, that's how I got the version I submitted to Alphabooks and that appears at the top of this post. Not exactly the best of both versions, but I think the overlaid image is more interesting than either of its layers alone. And to spare you any scrolling up for a recap, here it is again just before the post ends:


Next week: a foregone conclusion for the letter L...

Arthurian Alphabooks: J is for Jeschute

Sorry I'm late. In this week's Arthurian alphabet image, J is for Jeschute:

Jeschute is the name Wolfram von Eschenbach uses in his Parzival to designate a character who goes nameless in his source, Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, or The Story of the Grail. In both texts, the character is a woman who is twice victimized: first by the titular hero, whose abusive behavior can in part be explained (though not excused) by his vast ignorance of society and courtesy; then she is tormented over a longer period by her own husband, Orilus, the Proud Knight of the Plain.

Soon after Parzival has left his home in the Waste Forest to find Arthur (in hopes of being made a knight), he encounters the beautiful Jeschute lounging in her pavilion. Misunderstanding his mother's  instructions about how to treat women, Parzival grossly mistreats Jeschute, forcing his kisses on her, stealing a ring from her finger, and eating her food before riding off, completely oblivious to his violations of courtesy and insensitive to Jeschute's tearful protests. (The first time I taught this text, several of my students described him bluntly as "a jerk.") When Orilus returns to see the disorder in his tent and the distress of his wife, he assumes that Jeschute has betrayed him with another man and strips her of her finery, cruelly taunting her and refusing to believe her protestations of innocence.

As (badly) depicted above, Jeschute next appears in the text some time later. The main descriptive detail provided by both Chrétien and Wolfram is that her clothes are in tatters, little more than the collar of her shift and a few rags that reveal more than they conceal. I assumed her hair would also be in some disarray and that she would look rather pained.

I would have liked to have made her look a bit more aggrieved, rather than just wounded, and I would have liked to have made her more beautiful (at least by my lights), but I had a really hard time making a satisfactory drawing this time around. I made various attempts at inking a pencil sketch, on vellum tracing paper and then directly on paper, before I gave up and tried to get a decent freehand image. The first few passes at a freehand drawing were also pretty lousy, but the one above I can live with. I do wish it looked more obviously medieval, however; the hairstyle's disarray masks my original design, which had a more ancient appearance, and the tatters of her shift look dismayingly like a worn T-shirt. Oh, well.

Incidentally, an affecting (and effectively disturbing) cinematic treatment of Jeschute's character—or, more accurately, that of her nameless Old French forebear—may be seen in Eric Rohmer's film Perceval le Gallois (1978). It hews fairly closely to Chrétien's text, apart from its ending (in that Rohmer attempts to supply a conclusion to Chrétien's unfinished narrative, which abruptly breaks off in the middle of an episode with Gauvain/Gawain).

Alphabooksbeasts: J is for Jeremy Fisher (and Jack Sharp)

As I said in my "Alphadonjon" post, I'm traveling this week, so this post is actually being composed at 3:30 AM on Thursday night, for scheduling, instead of Sunday night. Maybe I'll be able to keep it brief.

Okay, J is for Jeremy Fisher. You know his story, right?

Maybe you'll even remember (I hadn't) that the stickleback he catches is named Jack Sharp.
 

I'm not wild about the way this drawing turned out. I wanted to emphasize the smallness of the characters (I mean, he's just frog-sized), but apparently I couldn't be bothered to draw a setting for him to be small in. (I drew this several weeks ago, knowing that I'd need to be away.)

This was one of those drawings that, like my Gurgi and my Pushmi-Pullyu, went through a lot of problems, even up to a completely inked version of the drawing that I decided to scrap. This time, though, it wasn't a problem of character design.

I just couldn't seem to get the character or the pose to look good. Here's the scrapped ink version, very much like the final version in some ways, but missing even the tiny bit of energy I was able to get into the finished one.

I leave it to you, in the comments section, to diagnose what has gone wrong here.

Next week: a koffeeklatch of ko-konspirators. Wish me luck.

Alphadonjon: J is for John-John

My concession to the fact that I am traveling this week is that for this installment of Alphabooks I've only drawn one character from Donjon. Sort of.

You see, J is for John-John.

You can see John-John in the background of lots of the Zenith and Parade books, but it's only in the first volume of Monstres that you'll discover why he looks that way.

Do you remember when I told you that the Sword of Destiny can cut without wounding? Well, before he met Delacourt, John-John was a big four-legged potato of a guy. Then there was an altercation, from which followed an alteration.

John-John is a sweet guy, though, and although he's technically one of the monsters in the Dungeon, my impression is that he's a lot less dangerous than Grogro.

Some doodles:

Next week: the very model of a peristeronic dungeon administrator.

Arthurian Alphabooks: I is for Sir Ironside

Here's another knight from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur—the Red Knight of the Red Lands, whose given name is Ironside:

As usual, physical descriptive details are few in Malory, but we are told that Ironside is attractive, at least. He's also proud, and a wily fighter. Indeed, when he's in combat with Sir Gareth, his foe in the first part of The Tale of Sir Gareth, his cunning style of fighting serves to educate his young opponent, who up till then has prevailed against his enemies through straightforward strength and skill.

He's also a pretty vengeful heartless fiend—at least at first. When Gareth embarks on his inaugural quest, he does so to answer an appeal to save a beleaguered woman from Ironside's unwanted attentions. In the meantime, Ironside has cultivated a creepy habit of hanging the bodies of the woman's would-be deliverers, assembling the corpses of his knightly victims in a large group that dangles from a tree. When Gareth sees this, he's not sure what to think, but he's certain that it's not chivalric behavior.

It's something of a surprise, then, that Ironside gets recuperated: his life spared by the victorious Gareth, Ironside renounces his hateful ways, explains that it was all 'cause he loved a lady, and ends up welcome at the court of King Arthur. Go figure!

But all that redemptive stuff comes after the drawing above, which is meant to show Ironside in his pitiless days. He could maybe do with still more of a sneer, but I hope it's at least marginally credible that the face above is that of a man who is pridefully ready to hang a bunch of his fellow knights just because his would-be squeeze won't give him the time of day.

Alphabooksbeasts: I is for IT

For my non-Donjon Alphabooks entry, I have chosen a disembodied brain that I hope will be familiar to all of you.

Yes, I is for IT.

IT's name is not an acronym. IT's just capitalized because you're supposed to speak ITs name with fear and respect. IT dominates the minds of an entire world. IT is what Big Brother wishes he could be.

IT poses some compositional puzzles, if you're just working from the description in Wrinkle in Time.

For starters, IT is on a dais inside ITs dark dome-shaped building, but L'Engle doesn't say whether the disembodied brain is floating in a sort of receptacle, or in a terrarium, or just sort of flopped onto the dais in a pile. I opted for the fishtank approach.

Second, IT is supposed to be larger than a human brain. I exaggerated this a bit, but if you're just drawing a brain in a tank, how is anyone to get a sense of scale? I had to put Meg and Charles Wallace into the picture as points of reference.

I had a lot of time to think about this drawing before I had a chance to put it on paper, so I guess it's no surprise that my first doodle is pretty close (in terms of composition) to the final version.

Next week: a stickleback and the fisherman who catches him.

Alphadonjon: I is for Isis and Isidore the Scribe

Okay, this is another week in which I'm composing my Alphabooks posts at about 4:00 AM on Sunday/Monday, and I don't need to make an even later night of this. Let's be brief.

I is for Isis, the Kochak Princess, and for Isidore the Scribe, bearer of the Sword of Destiny.

In Dungeon, one woman turns out to be the love interest of both Hyacinthe (as the Keeper) and Herbert, two of the main characters in the series. If I understand Terra Amata genetics correctly, she even seems to have had children with both of them. And that's Isis, the Kochak Princess.

Isis is supposed to be sexy, but not in a cheesecake sort of way. Rather, her sexiness comes from confidence, competence, and self-determination, as well as a mysterious or at least checkered past. It's that last factor that's symbolized by her hip tattoo: she's been a member of a thieves' guild. (If you can't see the tattoo, maybe you can click to enlarge.)

So: there's your sexy cat-woman, as promised last week.

As for the sorrowful scribe: meet Isidore. He appears in the book occasionally when someone tries to steal the Sword of Destiny, as he is one of the Sword's former wearers. He wore it, however, for only twelve seconds before someone killed him and claimed the sword. (I haven't read the volume in which this story is told, because it's one of Dungeon's French-only publications. Maybe one day.) Anyway, that's why I didn't put the Sword around his waist: I figured by the time I could explain it, you'd be more than twelve seconds into this post.

Not much to tell beyond that. I include a couple of doodles so we can carry on the conversation about energy in the sketch versus the finished product. I know I like the facial expressions on Isis better in these sketches. Alas.

Was that my idea of a brief post?

Next week: I'll be traveling, but I'm hoping to schedule a post with a creature (or is he two creatures?) before I leave.