0 Responses to “June has arrived . . . .”

  1. tltrent

    Awesome. 🙂

  2. sapphohestia

    Woot!

  3. kendokamel

    Woohoo!

  4. sartorias

    Oh, that is awesome!

    • Marie Brennan

      Glad you like it. It’s as realistic as I could make it, down to borrowing specific spellings from things Elizabeth wrote.

      • sartorias

        I thought I was getting that frisson of memory!

        • Marie Brennan

          I love knowing geeks. <g>

          • sartorias

            My study of the Court Hand is not the least bit academically rigorous, but I swear I stood there a solid hour when I was 20 and I first saw the holograph of Elizabeth’s letter to Mary, in the British Museum. I not only had that thing memorized, but I can still see the shape of the letters, the upward slant that indicated Elizabeth was writing under extreme stress.

          • Marie Brennan

            I haven’t seen the letter itself, but there was an image of it in one of the books I consulted while working on this. Being able to see her handwriting, and things like those upward-slanting lines, the slashes she put through the remaining space so no one could add a passage to her letter — it turns her from an Important Historical Figure to a frightened young woman trying to survive.

          • sartorias

            YES! It was that letter more than anything that turned my lifelong interest in history into a fascination.

          • kitsunealyc

            Wow. Now, *that* is an interesting observation about the benefits of studying original documents (or copies of them) rather than just the text. That’s cool.

            Love the letter, love the website. The intro is particularly cool.

          • Marie Brennan

            Elizabeth’s words to her sister communicate certain things; the shape of those words communicates another. I’m not exaggerating when I say you can see her fear in them. She was trying to avoid being thrown in the Tower, but all she bought was a delay of one day, because writing the letter took long enough that the tide was against them when she was done.

  5. sora_blue

    YAY! I’m going to start spelling Kinge with that Elizabethan ‘e’ on the end.

  6. diatryma

    Now that is a thing. I love how their two signatures complement each other.

  7. gollumgollum

    What does the word “sayd/layd/fayd” mean? I see later where it’s “said/laid/faid” and i get where it says “laide” (by which i assume it means “lady”) but i’m a bit confused by that one.

    It’s very very cool, though. Makes my head hurt a bit, but that makes it feel more real, rather than Fauxlizabethan.

    • Marie Brennan

      I suspect you’re just running afoul of the old alternate s. If the letter you’re looking at looks like an f, but doesn’t have a cross-bar, it’s just an s, and therefore “sayd” is just another wacky spelling for “said.”

      Not only did they spell things differently, they felt no compulsion to be consistent within a single document.

  8. mirrorred_star

    Much awesome. Though it took me a paragraph or so before I could figure out what nearly every word was. Consistent spelling may be less fun, but it is a bit more practical 🙂

    • mirrorred_star

      As in, I kinda prefer the system we have now. Not as in ‘But you’re spelling it all funny *whine* ‘

      • Marie Brennan

        Oh, absolutely. No argument here. But my publicist let me slip my leash on this one and go as hard-core Elizabethan as I was capable of, so, y’know . . . hell, at one point they were talking about seeing if they could cobble together a font out of Elizabeth’s actual handwriting.

  9. akashiver

    Oooh! It gave me chills.

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