Aethelflaed’s Horse

Progress on the Opus Anglicanum panel of Aethelflaed. Some of the darkest details of her horse are now in place, in dark blue.

Now the thing about Opus Anglicanum is that it’s lots of very small stitches, so you maybe don’t see so much of Aethelflaed, but apart from occasional periods of Life getting in the way, she is making progress.

I’ve started on her horse. It’s going to be a grey – what you see of it, what with her riding dress and all! – so with a wave of my artistic licence, shadows and details are going blue.

Starting to put the mid and light blues on Aethelflaed's horse.

I have time to wonder what she’d call her horse – all the names I can come up with tend towards the Norman French (Blanchemain, Blanchefleur), and that’s a good couple of centuries too early. So I’m looking for something Brythonnic, or Welsh (although the Mercians weren’t on reliably good terms with the Welsh, so maybe not..). Welsh would suggest something with “gwyn” in (for “white). Moving to Old English, “hwita” is “white”, but “aedre” is “stream”, and then suddenly you have a name starting with the same syllable as the rider’s. And that is the sort of thing you find in retellings of myths as a way to bring the two close together in the mind.

Thoughts, anyone?

1 Comment

  1. Sue Jones says:

    The “Aeth” part of her name means Noble, the whole thing being Noble Strength, which sounds a good horse name, too! (Wikipedia tells me this.) Apparently the name Audrey is derived from her name. But I suppose they can’t both be Audrey. Aedre sounds good. (The spell-checker just tried to ‘correct’ that to Audrey, so it must be on the right track.) Have fun choosing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.