This award, our Baronial service Order, was given to Lady Cellach ingen Chernaig who has deserved it for a very long time. This was the first Salamander made after the accession to the Baronial coronets of Lorcan and Scheherazade at Pennsic XXXII; Scheherazade wanted it to be Celtic (which I assumed, knowing Cellach) and her only other request was that I include a ferret in the design. "OK," I thought, "I think I can manage that.. even though I have never done a Celtic scroll before and need to find pictures of ferrets to refresh my memory.."
I couldn't fit the scroll text that Scheherazade had given me onto the scroll in proper insular format, which requires that the lines of text be well-spaced, so I decided to do the main text in an Insular Majuscule hand in a way that would make sense when read as a whole, and then inserted the rest of the text (which is also sensical when taken on its own) in an Anglo-Saxon miniscule hand — when English monks in the 10th and 11th centuries would get books from Ireland, they would often translate the Latin into Old English by writing the Anglo-Saxon gloss just like this, above the Latin. This was done in the Lindesfarne Gospels, for example – the work I used as a basis for this scroll.
The illumination is based on the Lindesfarne Gospels and the extended "n" in "Salamander" comes from the Book of Kells.
