Fictive Calligraphy

In Vibramundi, in addition to the drawings, I also describe the world, its foreign cultures with their peculiarities, their music, in a world of magic. But wouldn’t it be nicer if the languages and the typeface also came from the foreign world?

Which … Vibramundi?

Oh, I forgot to mention that I changed the name of my project Instruments of Tamriel to Vibramundi. The reason for this is that the old title sounded too much like fan art to me and of course included the name of the world, which is possibly protected as intellectual property. But I want to appeal to a broader audience anyway, for whom the name and lore of the world may not be so relevant, but rather what my pictures convey.

The first chapter will deal with the so-called Summer Isles. In the Elder Scrolls series, these islands are called Summerset, which is presumably a reference to the actual Somerset (a region in the south of England). I might also change the names of the other provinces, races and cultures, but maybe that won’t be necessary.

The other world speaks German?

Have you ever heard of the Voynich Manuscript? It fascinated me that someone would go to the trouble of writing a book by hand that nobody could read. Actually, all abstract art is to a certain extent a kind of wildly coded message from the artist to the recipient. But in the Volnych manuscript, the author really does seem to have subjected himself to the rules of his own language.

I have now recently decided to write the book not in German or English, but in the fantasy languages and scripts of the world from which the book is supposed to come. It allows me to create the unity of the drawings, the calligraphy and the pages (margins, etc.) as a whole. Just like the scribes before the invention of printing.

As you can see in the photos, I am currently developing a language (using an LLM) and a script (using my hand and a quill). The language is based on names and loose terms from the Elder Scrolls fandom. Based on that, I asked the LLM to generate some additional words for me in a mixture of Sanskrit, Gaelic, and Tolkiens Quenya and Sindarin, and used that to create a vocabulary list. Some of the results were not worth the time because I ended up making up most of the words myself. But now I can have LLM translate smaller text fragments with the vocabulary list, and these are quite usable. Today I started to develop an Altmerian alphabet with the translated fragments.

But then there won’t be a story to read? Well, yes and no. I will offer the translations into the readers’ languages (German, English, etc.) in an accompanying booklet. This will make it less easy to consume, but I’m not hurting over that, because it has the huge benefit of making it much more immersive.

In any case, I am convinced that this is the right way forward for this project. Because all art is an art of abduction: there I lead my readers into a foreign world, and here I keep the process entirely to myself and the artworks: Win-win!