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A single
word can be a world and every letter a land
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While there are numerous books
on the market about Faeries, no books to date present the reader with
practical history, philosophy and tools for entering Faerie by using art
and story as touchstones to the imagination. Through story and image,
The Runes of Elfland allows us to discover the Gateways to the Faery realm
and reconnect to the powers of place abounding in our natural environments.
Readers will return repeatedly to this book because its stories are the
beginnings of their own stories; its art illuminates the path to their
own creative expressions of place and their experiences with the wondrous.
The Runes of Elfland enables
us to experience both tradition and place, helping us to hear the song
of the soil, to observe carefully and closely the living world around
us, to remember those that have gone before, and to travel with intention
out upon the storied lands, leaving our own marks, our stories, for those
who will follow.
Froud’s paintings are
powerful icons. Each inspired by a specific rune, they are richly symbolic
and open to infinite interpretations. The runes are letters as well as
sounds and signs, simultaneously representing a host of metaphors: spells,
places, conditions, feelings, artifacts. Inspired by the lore of individual
runes, traditional knowledge, as well as his personal travels, Berk’s
poetry and stories encourages the reader's imaginative engagements with
the images, laying the groundwork for storytelling of their own.
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"Brian
and I, as artists and each in our own time, stood before the runes and both
asked the same thing: 'What are you hiding, then?' We wanted to know what
stories stood behind the ancient letters. We wanted to see where those stories
might take us. We wanted to find the hidden lands within the lore. Brian
painted. I wrote. This book is our answer to that question, our record of
what we found within the runes." ~ Ari Berk
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All the pieces of the
natural world are a kind of living alphabet, each with a tale to
tell, and if you look at the land in the right manner, there are
stories to be read in the way leaves fall upon the ground, in the
patterns of bird flight, in cloud shadow moving across the moor.
This, then, is a living
book.
You may read the Rune for Beginnings today, but what will that rune
mean to you twenty years from now?
After you plant a birch tree?
After you learn that crowns of birch were worn ceremonially by ancient
people to signify the end of one life and the beginning on another?
After you walk to the birch wood?
After you turn the page?
The right rune drawn
upon the ground can have curious consequences, might invite adventure,
may open ancient doors. Here are the Runes of Elfland. Here are
songs of the shining lands. Here are signs of crossing and threshold.
Here are stories of fate and illumination. Here are images and tales
of the guardians of mirth and magic, of laughter and language. Chant
the charm, tell the tale, and step across… Even as children
we know that letters are magic — the entrances to new stories,
and new ways of experiencing the world. When we make our first tentative
marks upon a page, we begin to understand the creative power inherent
in letters and images.
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©Brian Froud |
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©Brian Froud |
Runes helps us to rediscover
that magic, to journey into stories whose roots are found in and inspired
by the ancient and enduring landscapes of legend, myth, and lore.
Runes represent lore — the preservation in symbol and memory
of all that that is wondrous, powerful, inspiring and wise. As both
alphabets and icons runes reflect the many ages and peoples that have
used them while also existing here and now, in the very moment of
our recognition of the mark. We must listen to the land. Look for
signs. Watch the shapes of nature, the branches, the stones, their
shadows. Here are shards of tales waiting to be told. Because they
are so deeply associated with peoples and legends (some hardly remembered
in these times), if we truly wish to understand the transformational
power of the runes, we must travel the paths of tradition into Elfland,
the stronghold of myth, magic, and imagination. The key to that land
resides — as it always has — in the act of storytelling.The
sacredness of letters is largely forgotten in these times because
our contemporary alphabets have become abstract. The letters "A,
B, C" are no longer, for the most part, directly connected to
symbolic meanings or the forms of the land. But with runes, we may
again experience the power and poetry of a magical alphabet. Each
letter has a sound, but also a story, a connection to a living, mythic
world. These living letters and images are still full of portent and
possibility: verdant lullabies, maps of the secret goblin provinces
sprawling invisibly below the ground, solsticial sonnets, berry song,
root wisdom, elvish prayers and puns, charms, alphabets, or the secret
names that fade from our memories as we enter this world. Each rune
provides a door into the Otherworld, into the time of trees, the distant
age of stone, and the cave of knowledge where the answers to life’s
mysteries may be sought and won. |
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Each rune is both an
emblem of a unique living world and the key to that world, filled
with wonder and wisdom, with vision and poetry. Each of these runic
tales and its faery guardian has something to tell us, some perspective
to impart, some new landscape to open to our senses.Even now, among
clever folk, faery stories are still vital and necessary, important
aspects of living traditions, because they do far more than merely
entertain. They delineate boundaries between this world and the
Other, they express rules of conduct, they identify safe pathways
through the tangled forests of our lives. They keep us well warned
and out of trouble. They are vessels of human wisdom, recorded,
treasured, and handed down from times past.Imagine speaking the
charm and reading these stories out on the land: Your words go out
into the world. The old places are awakened. Now rising about you
are the ghosts of ancient trees, twisted low, worn by the weight
of time. Here are standing stones, a broken wall. Their quiet gives
the place a sense of breadth and every sound, from footfall to the
distant bird call, sinks deep into the mossy ground and is held
within. From the edge-wood, the Faery Guardian emerges to join you
for the telling of its tale.
As your voice rises and
falls like the land, you will come to stand between the worlds,
between the present and the past in the living moment of the tale's
telling. Through storytelling, we ask the mythic world to stir and
acknowledge us. Beyond the sound of our own voices, we may hear
the horns of Elfland and in that way know the gates of Faery are
close at hand.
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©Brian Froud
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©Brian Froud |
How to begin?
Not hard
to answer.
Choose a rune,
chant the charm,
tell the tale,
and step across.
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The Runes of Elfland Trailer!
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