The Original Zelda MS Revealed! (Mmm… Marginalia #57)

Here’s a little something I worked up tonight:


VoilĂ : the opening crawl of the NES classic The Legend of Zelda mocked up as a gothic manuscript page of the sort I’m always going on about in my Mmm… Marginalia posts. It demonstrates a few things about the way professional manuscript houses in England and France serving the nobility in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries put a page together. Chiefly…

  • The space a text fills is as important as the text itself. It should be as close to a solid wall of letters as possible.
  • Words can be compressed or split up in order to make the text fit the space.
  • They can also be abbreviated, as I have done with ‘before’, ‘darkness’, and ‘into’ above.’
  • Medievals used Roman numerals and their own capricious system of punctuation.
  • In general, the decorative border should be vegetative, and it should usually not cover all four sides around the text.
  • Nearly everything on the page should be connected to everything else.
  • The page should be drawn as though gravity pulls everything from the top of the page into the lower margin. Nothing can be unsupported.
  • Though gravity is active, weights can be inconsistent.*
  • Almost always, it’s only the main illumination on a page that concerns the subject of the text directly.
  • The marginalia can be anything else your heart desires.
  • I just now realized I left out the fancy “S” I’d planned for “SHE”, even though I left a little space for it. Believe it or not, you see planned but omitted decorations all the time in medieval manuscripts. So let’s just forget I ever admitted it was a mistake… Fixed it!

I make learning fun!

By the by, here are the two reference images I used in making this:

And yeah, I used a reference that violates half my little rules, but it’s a much smaller book from a different region than the deluxe ones I’m talking about, and I needed something with a simpler layout to copy.

P.S. Image now available in magnet form, for a limited time.

*Large initials like the ‘G’ can be held up by Guile’s hair just fine, thank you very much.

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