Status Update: Sorting 3D Models

Just a quick update today to let you know what's going on. I've decided at this point to create as much of the art as I can for each scene as I write it, thereby allowing each to more accurately reflect the other. I feel it will be far more efficient to describe a scene that I can actually visualize than try to recreate what's been written or have to rewrite to match the art I come up with.

However, one of the things I need to do before I start creating the characters and sets to populate each scene is to finish building my archive of 3D models. Over the past year I've been accumulating these are I find ones I can use, and as I have the funds to acquire them. At this point I have literally thousands of them, from swords and shields to trees and rocks and clothes and furniture, not to mention humans and animals and other creatures, as well as sets of lights, cameras, special effects, poses, expressions and textures. My folder of hair props alone has several hundred models to choose from: a virtual beauty salon of coiffures to select. And I could fill a Dillards with the digital clothes I have archived.

But all of these have to be installed before I can use them, as they function much like any digital program, with a file structure containing geometries, textures and interactive icons, all of which have to be organized in such a way that I can find them when I need them, and see what I've got to work with at a glance. With that in mind, I've put together a pretty good system as I've gone along. But now I have to load it all and make it work. And installing them will take some time. I've already installed quite a few, but I've got a lot more yet that I plan to use.

I figure I can do this in about a week of eight hour days - really tedious, boring long work days that I'd rather spend doing something more creative. But it's something that must be done, and I'd hate to finish a scene only to find out later I had a better prop or costume I could have used, but didn't know I had (yes, I have that many models). I figure I've spent about four thousand dollars buying 3D models over the past year, so I suppose I can afford to invest a week sorting and installing them. I have 2619 to sort through. Today's goal: 158 items beginning with "A". So bear with me, I'll be right back...

Outline Completed

After many long months of effort, working virtually every day without a break, I've finally completed all the primary research necessary to begin the writing process for Book I of the Ring Saga. In addition, this week I put together a detailed outline of all four books, based primarily on Wagner's operas, but with several changes and a significant amount of additional material brought in from the Old Norse sources, primarily to develop more of the mythological aspects of the story.

For example, among the elements I'll be developing or bringing in are the story of Loki's punishment and imprisonment in Hel, giving him a greater arc from scheming trickster to evil instigator of Ragnarok; Odin's quest for wisdom as he tries to find a way to avert the final doom that has been prophesied for the gods; much more of Alberich's efforts to regain the ring and get revenge upon his enemies; and several scenes in which we see more of the cursed Rhinegold's effects upon the Aesir and the giants, including Fafnir's transformation into a treasure-hoarding dragon. And that's just in book one!

Today I threw together this little title page vignette, which I've had in the back of my mind for awhile. My idea for the Rhinegold Ring was to have it crafted in the likeness of a serpent swallowing its tail, symbolizing its inherent self-destructive power. For the 3D ring, I used the Dinokonda EP Plus model by Garee, available at DAZ, which I posed into as perfect a circle as I could manage. I then textured it using several variations of ParrotDolphin's Metals Poser Materials, available at Renderosity (Scaled Gold 2 for the body and Beat Gold 1 for the horns and teeth, which incidentally is the texture I used for the Rhinegold globe itself). I made about twenty versions in different shades and styles of gold before I came up with the one above, which best matched the lettering I wanted to use.

The titles themselves I made in Photoshop with gold styles from Ron's Flourishes set, matching colors with the vignette as closely a possible, and tossing on some drop shadows to give it depth. Then I just dropped in my little 3D Fantasy Castle Books logo to complete the layout and composited it all atop a nice art paper background, and voila! the title page for Book I is mocked up. This will likely undergo further tweaks and changes before publication, but it will do the trick for now.

As always, you can click on the image to see a larger version, or visit the art pages at Fantasy Castle Books to view a high-resolution image with more detail.

The Ring of the Nibelung: Das Rheingold

Richard Wagner's musical drama Der Ring Des Nibelungen is a tour de force on many levels. Running sixteen hours over the course of four days, this operatic story-cycle retells the Nordic saga of Sigurd the dragon-slayer (here in his Germanic guise as Siegfried) using densely worded alliterative verse and thematic musical motifs to express on both emotional and intellectual levels the universal mythological significance inherent in this story of human spiritual evolution, as revealed through the psycho-theological archetypes of primeval gods and demigods. In other words, a story of everyman.

Das Rheingold begins the story as a prelude, telling of the theft and cursing of the Rhinegold by the dwarf Alberich from the three Rhine Maidens, and of Odin's attempts to wrest it from him as payment to two giants who are holding the goddess Freya hostage for wages earned in building the golden hall of Valhalla for the gods of Asgard. As an introductory drama, this sets up a conflict between the forces of love and power which will play out among both gods and men in the subsequent trilogy.

Wagner, over the course of 28 years, created this mammoth work by drawing out the psychological and spiritual essence of the Old Norse story, deftly crafting it into a work more relevant and poignant to his modern audience, and one which has since become one of the benchmark epics of the operatic stage, and rightly so. Sadly, however, since few these days attend - or even listen to - opera, Wagner's brilliant work is in danger of once again disappearing into the haze of obscurity. It is for this reason that I've chosen to update the story in a newer medium more acceptable to us here in the 21st century.

In preparing to write and illustrate a prose novelization of this 19th century opera cycle, I've spent well over a year doing research, on top of the many years of study already undertaken in this area. As those of you who follow this blog will know, one of the tools I like to use when studying works in translation is the my "Comparative Study Guide" format, in which I line up various editions side by side to get a better look at what I've got. It helps me get a handle on the text by breaking it down and looking at it closely, line by line and word by word if necessary - and it often is: sometimes a single word can greatly alter the underlying meaning of a passage.

For Das Rheingold, I've employed three translations into English (from Wagner's original German), two of which are in the public domain, and so made it into my Study Guide. These are the 1877 Alfred Forman translation, which was not only the first translation into English, but the first translation of Wagner's Ring cycle into any language. The other is that done by Frederick Jameson and published in 1900. Forman's is the more literal, but less poetic of the two, so I find they complement each other nicely. The other translation I have is that of Stewart Robb, copyright 1960, and which I did something of a "book review" on back in March.

For the Das Rheingold - Comparative Study Guide I have utilized a three-column format with the line-by-line English translations in the first two, along with running commentaries drawn from six sources in the third, these being:

• George Dippold, Richard Wagner's Poem...Explained (1888)
• Gustav Kobbé, How to Understand Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung (1895)
• Jessie L. Weston, The Legends of the Wagner Drama (1896)
• William C. Ward, A Study of the Inner Significance of Richard Wagner's Music-Drama (1889)
• Richard Aldrich, A Guide to The Ring of the Nibelung (1905)
• Gertrude Hall, The Wagnerian Romances (1907)

In this way you can not only study the primary texts quite closely, but also refer to the contemporary academic scholarship of the day as you go along, more effectively drawing out the deeper meaning and hidden subtext of complex passages. This is of particular use for those not well-versed in musical theory or the classical motifs of Wagnerian opera, which is a study all in itself. Two among the commentators describe for the reader the relevant musical phrases used to represent each character and action, so that the Comparative Guide may be used to study Wagner's music as well as the Siegfried story.

For my purposes, of course, it is the story I am focused on. And so begins my next phase of work. There are still several reference works I wish to read, but I will continue to do this as I go along. It is now time to start putting together my own detailed outline and begin the writing process. But because this will be a highly illustrated work, I am not as yet entirely sure how to proceed. My guess is that once I have a solid outline and synopsis sketched out I'll begin by drafting each scene in text and then creating the characters and sets with 3D models necessary to bring that scene to life. Whether I will finalize each scene before proceeding or only rough them in is yet to be seen, but if I follow my standard course I will likely get them fairly close to finished before moving on. Then I will only have to tweak each scene as work progresses and not redo the whole thing over fifteen times before it's done.

Visit Fantasy Castle Books or click the title to access and download the Das Rheingold Comparative Study Guide. There is a chance I may publish this, since it took me a lot of work to put together, so download it now while it's still free! And, of course, there are three more volumes yet to come....

The Nibelungenlied

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Volsung saga is the rare and unique glimpse we get into its development through time. No other early epic work of literature has such a diverse and well-documented evolution, save perhaps the legendary tales of King Arthur.

Beginning with the Old Norse Poetic Edda collection of the earliest known lays and ballads composed and transmitted orally from as early as 850 A.D. to the Middle High German Nibelungenlied penned sometime around 1230, the Volsung matter spans not only centuries, but regions as far removed and diverse as Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the British Isles and a broad swath of northern Europe. The divergence between the ancient Nordic warrior sagas and the later chivalric romance is vast and dramatic.

By the early 13th century France and Germany were well into the era of courtly chivalry, with a highly developed code of knightly conduct, in which wealth and social status are as prized as actual deeds. This is reflected in a form of poetry that by this time had reached a highly refined state, with a clearly ordered rhyme and metre penned almost exclusively by the very knights it praised, for only they were literate and educated and had time to spare for such endeavors. Its content, too, has little to do with common men, but is filled instead with lengthy descriptions of richly embroidered clothes and lavish palaces the likes of which only the wealthiest of kings might dream of.

The Nibelungenlied is, in fact, so far removed from the gritty Old Norse story of Sigurd the dragon slayer that it has all but forgotten the reason why the dragon is in the tale at all, and the central motivation has been reduced to little more than avenging the slights and insults of bickering women. Events have lost almost entirely any significance they once held, and are made instead to serve only as a means to describe another tournement or army a hundred thousand strong brought down by the might of a single man. The whole is so ridiculously blown out of proportion as to mean nothing at all. It is just this type of high-flown narrative that Cervantes was mocking in Don Quixote.

But still there is a certain charm and wit to be found in The Nibelungenlied, buried amidst its 9516 lines of verse (three times that of Beowulf!). And there are touching moments too. The vow of Kriemhild to never love for fear her bad dreams might come true might truly have been a forceful motivation, had the poet seen it through. Tellingly, although Wagner himself was a German writing opera for a German stage, he used the Old Norse version of the Volsung story rather than the one told in his own language.

This past week I slogged my way through a reading of four different translations of The Nibelungenlied, searching for material to use, and I have to say that it was grueling. There are about a thousand translations to be found out there (just do a search on Google Books), of which I have half a dozen or more. Of these I compared two translations in verse and two in prose, the first two being those of Horton (1898) and Needler (1904), while the prose renditions I employed were those of Armour (1897) and Shumway (1909). I had started piecing together one of my comparative documents for these, but only made it to around stanza 1000 before I gave that up as far too time-consuming: there were way too many errors in the text files to spend my time correcting them, and since Google Books has actual scans of them all, there was no point in wasting time with it.

The one thing of most interest that I found in doing this, however, is in discovering just how different Armour's prose rendition is from the actual verse. While the poetic translations vary only in specific wording of each line (and not at all in content), Armour has created a highly concise and compact version in which stanzas are reduced to single sentences, making it less exact, but far more pleasant (and speedy) to read. For though Shumway's prose follows the verse lines literally (and so, mechanically), Armour has captured more of the sense and spirit of it. Indeed, she has even added in some of her own bits here and there to flesh it out, a move which incensed the academics to no end, but made her book more popular than any other translation. It was, in fact, her text that Arthur Rackham illustrated.

So although I agree with Wagner in his choice of primary source material, there are some episodes and events in The Nibelungelied that I might yet use. For one, I like the idea of a warrior maiden who vows to marry only the man who can defeat her in athletic competition, and who beheads anyone who can't. And should I go so far as to bring in the Atli matter, in this version Kriemhild's vengeance on her brothers rather than her husband makes much more sense. But that has yet to be decided.

Maybe if I make a sequel.

The Volsunga Saga

The Völsunga Saga is a 13th century prose retelling of the heroic lays found in The Elder Edda. For the most part they follow closely the heroic poems, although there are a great many additional and/or alternate details given, including - most importantly - the matter contained in "The Great Lacuna" missing from the Edda, as well as an introductory sequence not found in the Eddas at all which concerns Volsung's descent from Odin. The only existing manuscript dates to circa 1400, and also contains Ragnar Lodbrok's Saga which follows after Völsunga Saga without a break (readers of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles series will know Ragnar's name quite well).

One of the best things about the Völsunga Saga, of course, is that it's in prose, which makes it far easier to read and understand, being more closely akin to the common speech of normal mortals (those of us not endowed with poetic tendencies or divine inspiration). That is not to say that it's written in modern English, nor is it easy to breeze through. But it is much more like reading narrative, poetic though it may still be.

Over the weekend - between bouts of partying and dancing in bars with wild women (as if!) - I polished off a comparative re-reading of both R. G. Finch's 1965 edition, and that great staple translation done by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson in 1888. The latter was, in fact, the first English rendering of the Völsunga Saga, and has never been surpassed, at least for popularity. That might be due in part to the fact that all subsequent editions simply pale in terms of poetry: the breadth and beauty of William Morris's work has long been hailed by critics and casual readers alike, and his and Magnusson's obvious love of the material shines through on every page. Today the rendering leans toward the archaic and borders on hard to comprehend, but once the rhythm of the language is grasped it flows freely and with truly astonishing grace and power.

Texts of both of these translations can now be found on the Fantasy Castle Books website, along with a complete outline of the story and a thorough genealogy (as given in this version of the story). To the Morris-Magnusson edition I have appended, or rather incorporated, all of Finch's academic line notes, while from Finch's own edition I have deleted all of the facing Icelandic pages, as well as his entire introduction, which is poorly written and far less useful than his notes. As some of those notes were on the original Icelandic facing pages, you will have to refer to those notes in the Morris-Magnusson edition, or download the complete Finch pdf somewhere else (which is a monster at 55 megabytes, and the reason I deleted half the pages).

I highly recommend you make the effort to read the more poetic Morris-Magnusson translation, which presents more accurately the sense of the old Norse world. A single example will suffice to make my point: for the line given by Morris-Magnusson as "Now these things wear away with time," Finch has simply "Then it was over."

I rest my case.

Norse Mythology Source Texts: Elder Edda Conclusion

At last we come to the of our foray into that ancient northern epic known as The Elder Edda. Two more lays remain after the Atli-Gudrun sections end, and these bring in the tale of Jormunrek and Svanhild, an originally unrelated story connected later by making Svanhild a daughter of Gudrun and the historical Gothic king Jormunrek (Eormanrech). This gives our long-suffering arch-heroine yet further reason for lament, as nothing works out well for her. She is destined, it seems, to make bad decisions, the results of which hurt her as much as anyone.

Guðrúnarhvöt, or "Gudrún's Lament." Gudrún, now married to her third husband, suffers further tragedy and instigates another round of tragic vengeance, this time on Jormunrek for his killing of her daughter Svanhild. This is the true "Lament of Gudrún," of which all others are mere shadows and imitations. It doesn't get much sadder than this, as the poor Gudrún can't even succeed in committing suicide.

Hamðismál, or "The Ballad of Hamthir." In this "old" lay of Hamthir is told in greater detail the attempted revenge of Gudrún's sons on Jormunrek for the death of their half-sister Svanhild, taking up where the narrative of Gudrún's Lament leaves off, thus giving the reason for her latest grief. Here ends The Elder Edda, but not the story of the Volsungs, which will undergo futher mutation and accretion in the following centuries.

Having finished these off, I've now posted up two additional genealogies drawn from the Eddas, the first based on the Volsung lays and giving that bloodline, while the second details Gudrun's offspring from her three husbands as given in the Atli-Jormunrek sections. There are some inevitable divergences among them, as the lays are drawn from various traditions spanning thousands of miles and hundreds of years. I've done my best to make them clear and complete. They are intended for my own use in developing the characters and story of The Ring Saga, and consequently will be greatly amplified and altered as work progresses.

There is also a new outline containing a chronological sequence of events as they occur throughout the heroic sections of the Edda. Again, there is a great deal of discrepancy at certain points, and I've used colored fonts to indicate where conflicts occur, while still retaining as accurate a timeline as possible. References to the relevant lays are given for each event for ease of research, which is my purpose. Here again my reasoning behind this extended effort is to sort out all the variant strains and changes and try to make some sense of it, with the intent to forge it into as cohesive a plot as possible. Not that I intend to use it all, or in this form - for that I look to Wagner - but it is upon this foundation that the Volsung tale is built, and a good understanding of that base can only serve to aid in constructing an edifice upon it, however shaky it may be.

Click the image above to visit the Research pages at Fantasy Castle Books.