An island full of fantasy vikings
An island full of fantasy vikings
Here I answer questions about the Bjartey project.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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: …
I am an atheist and therefore writing religious people isn’t something that interests me deeply. Religion makes for boring fantasy characters most of the time. Besides, most religious people go on about their religion in a quiet way, and so do most of my fantasy characters, if they have some sort of belief. Like so …
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? …