Update: Due to illness my holiday is prolonged. Please stay tuned. During the past six months I have published two characters and two related non-fictional articles each month. While this has proven to be a doable amount of work, now I’m heading for a six-week break from my fantasy viking characters and their island! News …
Frequently Asked Questions
The following questions will be answered in this article, and below them you will find more topics I have written separate articles on. What is Bjartey? What do you mean by “fictional vikings”? What do you mean by “vikings”? What are these characters based on? So, are there dragons? What about orcs, hobbits and fairies? …
Are these characters made using AI?
Yes, the portraits are. The characters themselves are not, and to the best of my knowledge they can’t be done well using today’s AI tools. I have experimented a little with text-based AI, and while the first character reads astonishingly well, the moment you read the third or fourth character you realize it’s all just …
Indexing Landnámabók
As I have written on several occasions, I spend some of my free time reading and indexing Landnámabók (the Book of Settlement). It’s a fascinating read, at least for people who have a compulsion towards collecting names and/or indulging themselves in anecdotes of the Viking Age — so, me, in essence. My names index is …
Funky Hats
Artbreeder has a tendency to go overboard when I try to make people wear hats. Sometimes they get horns. When I succeeded in removing his horns, he lost his cool beard, too. Sigh. Still a good expression though. Some hats look like something from the catwalks of Paris or Copenhagen. (And he wasn’t even supposed …
How to name your Old Norse character
Take into account the period your character lives in Naming practices have changed over the ages. For example, most Scandinavian countries have introduced surnames at some point, but Viking Age people only used what they called “kenningarnafn”, which is a patronym, matronym, sometimes a byname, and/or, very rarely, a place name to denominate one specific …
How to come up with ideas for characters
Here are a few tips that proved useful for me when creating my characters. Make the picture first and get inspired by it. I often want to picture something else than what I get. (See some examples.) Of course you could think that’s mildly annoying, but most of the time it’s just plain useful. When …
What are these characters for?
First and foremost, they are my art and literature project. They are my way of telling a very, very short story in non-fiction style (the style I’m most comfortable with) aided by a strong visual cue (which I use as a writing prompt). I’m having fun coming up with the biographies of fantasy inhabitants of …
Look Ma, no hands
Making a teenage boy who reluctantly helps with haymaking — that was the plan. First off, the Artbreeder AI doesn’t have a clue about tools. Tools are just some sticks floating around each other and sticking out at weird angles. Once you add the keyword “hay”, the sticks get beards and start looking like brooms …
On making diverse Old Norse characters
When I had made my first batch of 25 Fantasy Old Norse/Viking NPCs (non-player characters), I was terribly proud and excitedly showed them to my role playing and gamer friends. I got generally positive feedback, but two important points of criticism: There are too few Christian characters The characters aren’t ethnically diverse I thought about …
What does NW, NE, SW and SE mean?
I use NW, NE, SW and SE in the tags to denote where a character lives or can be found. N stands for north, S for south, W for west and E for east. The four quadrants NW, NE, SW and SE aren’t parts of Bjartey, but of the whole continent and even further away: …