Helloooooooooo beefriends, I'm back with more faerie accoutrements that I've been making over the past few days. :)
First I made them a couple of spears, and I had a lot of fun whittling wood with my camping knife. 😊
Then I started work on the Gae Bulga. Now, the Gae Bulga is a specific spear that gets mentioned in history as being one of the treasures of the Tuatha De Dannan, the faeries. It's Lugh's spear, but it also shows up again in the Ulster cycle, where CuChulainn (who is Lugh's son) receives it and keeps it for a good chunk of his life until ultimately he bends it inward upon itself so that it cannot pierce anyone again and he throws it into the sea (the reason why is tragic, I won't spoiler it for you, but it's in my novel). The Gae Bulga will only work for CuChulainn and Lugh as it's an enchanted spear; if anyone else tries to throw it, it will fly off in wild directions and definitely miss your target (and possibly hit someone you didn't want to). But if Lugh or CuChulainn uses it, it will always hit its target; even if they threw it at someone and that person ran around a corner to hide, it would turn the corner and get them anyway - it's magick! - and then pull itself out of their body and return to the thrower. It has three tines, and though usually artists depict it looking like Poseidon's trident, I think it would have been a twist shape, because it is said that when it pulled out of the person it hit, it would pull out their entrails as well, and that just sounds like it went in on a twist and grabbed their guts, doesn't it? I even saw a modern knife advertised before that is specifically a twist to do the most damage. So I made the Gae Bulga a twist with its three tines:
The middle point is actually the yarn threader that broke before, and I just cut it to shape with a pair of kitchen scissors. The two outside tines I whittled first, then I soaked them a little to make them easier to bend. I glued them and tied them down with old friendship bracelets.
I also made them a long-handled knife, using a piece of a blender blade that broke for the blade, and a grooming tool that I have never known what it was for as the handle (I inherited a grooming set - nail clippers, scissors, and the like - from my grandfather years ago, and this part I never knew what it was for). So I just used super glue to attach the blender blade piece to the handle. Yes, my blender really threw one of the blade arms off as I was blending one day. 😂
And finally, I made Nuada's crown! He is the Holly King (and Lugh is the Oak King), so I took this little grapevine wreath and cut and sewed on green fabric holly leaves and red beads for berries.
The fae were kind enough to model my handiwork:
I feel like Morrigan is yelling something like, "Come at me, bro!" and Maggie in her photo on the laptop in the background is yelling, "Yeah! Get 'em, Morrigan!"
Nuada looking very kingly
Laeg with the lighter spear
Lugh with the Gae Bulga
So now my faerie friends have plenty of weapons for battle. :) And a chariot. And a team of horses. If you know the stories, you might know what I am building up to eventually telling in a story one day. 😄
I hope everyone has a great day! Thanks for reading! :)
