my eye on david jones' footsteps

[cimorene]

I've been thinking about the work of David Jones more and I started wondering about what medieval written Swedish looked like, because David Jones's painted inscriptions have a lot of Welsh and Latin in them, neither of which I understand, but Swedish has some Scandies whose forms have evolved over time (Å was originally aa, Ö was originally oe, and Ä was originally æ), plus old Norse obviously had ð and þ as well and I wasn't sure when those disappeared.

So today I started down the rabbit hole looking for these, first in medieval documents written in Swedish, and then because they were completely the wrong kinds of letter forms, in medieval Swedish gravestones. I should've looked there to begin with. I knew David Jones collected his own rubbings of medieval gravestones from around Wales. It took me some time to find search terms that would work, but eventually, with waxjism's help, I was able to find some (the keyword is "gravhäll", when today they're called "gravsten". Or at least I think they are, maybe they're just usually called that).

The result of this was me ecstatically tugging Wax's sleeve and practically shouting "I've just found my favorite early modern Swedish gravestone!" To be fair, the letterforms of DIG031896, chamber 1, from Alsike church in Uppland are absolutely the cutest I saw today out of a bunch of Swedish and Finnish gravestones, WITH several exotic bonuses:

• It contains multiple forms of E, that is, a straight-backed and a curve-backed uppercase E! A lot of the stones I saw have just straight back ones!


• The first X I've seen so far!


• A W, which isn't the first I've seen but is still quite rare!


• The cutest G.


• It contains a J. In this period a lot of stones just use I instead of J!

I can't read the top couple of lines at all, I mean, I can't even figure out what all the characters are. But the rest is in Latin, so I can't REALLY read it either anyway.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

so much fun!

[cimorene]

😄 IT REALLY IS 💚

[dorothean]

Eeee gravestones! I had not made a connection between awesome lettering on gravestones and calligraphy but of course.

I visit older cemeteries a lot (although not as old as that one you linked—exceptionally old stones around me are late 1700s and most are post—U.S. Civil War) not to be gothic but because I think they’re beautiful and fascinating. I keep finding Art Deco lettering and motifs on appropriately aged stones!

[cimorene]

Yeah, the Roman-style latin capitals found in early modern stonecarving (not just on gravestones, but fancier buildings and monuments tend to look more polished and professional and hence a bit less charming...) of lettering isn't exactly drawn in the traditional calligraphic way usually, although it can be, and I suppose David Jones painted his, since he called them 'painted inscriptions'.

Printed books and even mass-produced printed advertisements were so commonplace already in the 19th century - and fairly common in the 18th - and the standard European handwriting style had progressed well into the modern so-called 'roundhand' style that range of letterforms is almost the full modern range by then. (Art Deco, of course, is the outlier. It evolved in the early 1900s of course, but there were early 20th century and Art Nouveau letter styles that were quite popular which evolved into it. The midcentury sans-serif fonts like Helvetica have their roots in the Bauhaus-inspired fonts from the Art Deco era like Century Gothic.)

Stonecarving and quarrying had also allowed the widespread use of granite in the 1800s, which is a much harder stone than those that were previously used, and that had its effects as well! In short, the 17th century produced inscriptions like my favorite gravestone so far above, which is still rendered in a Roman Empire-inspired block of text, and the handwriting of the time was often still an italic hand evolved from the iconic Renaissance chancery corsiva, but by the 1800s handwriting was fully roundhand and most of the decorative fancy fonts have some relation to medieval blackletter as a result of the neogothic craze sparked by the publication of Ivanhoe. Sometimes one sees a more standard Times New Roman look, or some ornamentation reminiscent of roundhand cursive from then.