Friday, January 29th
10:00 - 11:00 AM
NEWT Roster

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Rain was winning today. Rain and snow had been warring all month, battering the windows and casting the room in a gray, dreary light. It happened to be the perfect light for what they would be doing this morning, but Aileen was not grateful. She eyed the weather outside, her thoughts shifting to the forest and the small hut right on its edge. As students filed in, her gaze settled on the faces before her, and she managed a smile.

“Good morning,” she greeted them. "Today's lecture won't last long. If you were planning on hunkering down in your seats and snoring behind your collars, you'll have to wait till next time."

Her smile turned characteristically wry. With a wave of her wand, the ancient slide projector in the back row sputtered to life, illuminating the white canvas hanging in the front of the room. Another flick of her wand, and an image of a tapestry appeared on the canvas.

"Since the beginning of the new year, you've been learning about the more unique examples of written and visual magic throughout history. Tapestries certainly fit into that category. Their large size, and the ease with which they could be transported, gave some witches and wizards advantages during the medieval era."

She moved to stand next to the image.

"The production of tapestries spans many cultures and time periods, but the French medieval weavers brought them into the limelight, so to speak. Tapestries were used in churches to illustrate biblical passages, and eventually they became status symbols for aristocrats. It was in homes and castles that they illustrated not only religious subject matter, but myths and allegories, battles and hunting scenes."

As she spoke, she showed examples.

“Take a close look at this one," Aileen paused on the last slide.

"I haven't told you its title, where it's from, or how magic could be involved yet. But what do you think it's trying to say? How is it communicating a theme or idea to you?"[1]

1.	No need to get too detailed! She's looking for basic impressions, not specialized knowledge. Here's the source in case you're curious.

The slide projector always made Figaro groan.  The way it rattled and the smell off it just reminded him of the long, grisly slide shows in Professor Storm's class, or the hilariously dull and out-dated muggle studies films.  It had also never boded well in Runes either.   He sank back in his seat, despite a promise from Professor Reid that this would be short.

But it wasn't a wall of text, long rune indexes, or horribly disfigured limbs that appeared in flickering colors on the screen - it was a unicorn.  A tapestry.  Figaro leaned forward in his seat near the back to get a better look.  As the slides flashed by one by one, he found himself actually feeling interested. 

Then came a scene filled with people. Everyone was jammed in together, every inch of the tapestry was filled.  The only colors seemed to be reds, yellowing whites, and blues.  It was a mess to Figaro's eye.

"Are those wands?" he thought out loud, squinting at the image.  Wait no - swords.

"Looks like a Where's Wanda? Oh, hell!  There's a severed hand at the bottom!"  He laughed and pointed to the middle of the image, right at the bottom.  He also saw a dog, castles, horses and knights in armor.  He didn't see what this had to do with Runes, though, other than a bit of indescribable writing near the lower edge.

Avalon really enjoyed this class, it reminded him of home. The ancient tapestries and old runes were a staple to this Oldworld Wales, and his mother's obsession with fairy folklore. She hung prints of many of these slides like plaques on the wall, able to recount each tale and ballad associated with the paintings as if she wrote them herself, and her silent son could never protest the retelling of Troy despite how badly he wished to.

His paintings were nothing like this, the woven world of another telling stories with each and every little figure. It was like watching a movie, though the entire thing all at once, but Avalon wasn't about to and explain it that way. Instead, he wrote on his little pad of paper and explained,


"I feel that it's some sort of festival maybe. Though the men in arms make it seem like it's some sort of battle though their expressions are not really drawn for that." Expressions were key, especially in his silent world, "They all seem rather bored and listless. Not very moving for a fight."

With that he handed his note to Professor Reid only to smile at what Figaro said, it did look like a 'Where's Wanda'.

Where the whir of the projector made Fig groan, it typically made Sasha straighten and shift forward in his seat, as if decreasing the distance between himself and the projected image by a few inches would enhance his comprehension of the material.  His quill stood at the ready in his hand as he peered up at the busy, jumbled reds and blues and creams in the images. 

Several of the examples that flashed into view were familiar, especially those illustrating biblical scripture.  The rotating images finally settled on a long image and Sasha fell quiet for several moments as he studied the images. 

"It's not biblical," Sasha offered as Figaro grew quiet and Avalon handed Professor Reid his note.  "At least, not that I can see.  It looks earlier." 

The Ravenclaw shifted a little further forward, squinting his eyes in hopes of seeing the lettering along the bottom better.  It was Latin, obviously.  Who would have thought his added "cover" Latin lessons with Mr. Morgan would have come to some use in class? 

Evelyn Grimlish may have been a Ravenclaw, but she was not fond of school. As a result, she tended to resent having to attend even the classes she enjoyed. Hogwarts seemed to function under more structure than sense sometimes, but she felt it might be better to bide her time than to openly rebel against a thousand year old institution. With that said, however, Evie was fairly fond of Runes as a subject, even on days when she was angry at the system. She sat quietly in her seat, trying not to draw any attention to herself – beyond the attention that the collection of live fairies perched on the crown of her head drew to her, anyway. The Grimlish girl wasn't well known for her class participation – in fact, she was known, perhaps above all else, for her failure to participate in any endeavor that didn't meet her persnickety moral standards. She didn't tend to have a problem with Ancient Runes class, though. Even so, as she crossed her legs delicately at the ankle, she resigned herself to the idea that she'd most likely be sitting silently for the better part of the next hour.

She took interest in the tapestries being projected onto the screen, even if the rather stoic look on her face betrayed her fascination. Evie was overcome by how elaborate the images she was looking at seemed to be. How long it must have taken to weave something so full and bright! Magic may have made it easier, but she had to imagine that the labor it took to complete something like that was tremendously taxing, and she found herself respecting the pieces that were being projected in front of her, even in their flickering, low quality format.

 She was a little bit overwhelmed, in fact, her mind swarming with thoughts regarding the process, even though Professor Reid was asking about the subject matter. The tapestry they were being asked to respond to was incredibly busy, and it took her breath away in that regard, but she also sensed a violent theme, which made it hard to appreciate if she were to look at the scene itself and not the craft. Silently, she considered what her classmates had to say about it, though she was hungry for more facts and fewer speculations. She may not have been participating, but she was definitely engaged. 

Avalon looked at Sasha with bewilderment in his eyes. What did he mean it wasn't biblical? Of course it was! The battle may not have been or even the scene, but in every way the men looked English 'white washed' as they called it. All of the men, especially the ones in higher ranks and seated on horses looked like the very picture of Christ.

Maker, he'd never get that wrote down fast enough, but tried anyway handing Sasha the note.

Aliya had been unusually quiet in most of her classes at Hogwart's, not because she was unfamiliar or shy with the subjects, but because she liked to sit back at first to take in the comments of the other students first before she offered anything. And where possible, she liked to build off what others said in her own comments.

She found today's topic to be interesting from the very start. When Professor Reid mentioned that tapestries became status symbols for aristocrats, she felt a little sheepish. She was certain that all of the homes among her family members had tapestries of some sort hanging (or laying) around. She had never really considered them in an academic context before.

Her dark eyes drank in the scenes of the tapestries shown, and when the last one came up, Aliya carefully cast her gaze over the figures as the other students spoke about them.

The one Hogwart's boy made comments that caused a few students around her to snicker and laugh. But another student spoke seriously about the images and Aliya found herself listening intently and nodding. And then another student was chiming in about whether the artwork was biblical or not.

She finally felt like she had soaked it in enough to comment herself. Clearing her throat, she quietly began, "I'm not particularly interested in whether it is biblical or not. But I am interested in how it can be used as a window through which we can see the nuances of a culture or society of the time." She pointed to one area. "Yes, there are battle scenes with warriors." Then she shifted to point to the other side. "But you also have the lives of kings and queens depicted, with all of their glory."

One corner of Aileen's mouth twitched up as Mr. Sellaphix jumped in, and in this case, she appreciated his liveliness.

She took Mr. Roth's slip of parchment with an approving nod, reading aloud his observations. Mr. Schlagenweit and Miss Grumman also had insight to add.

"Good! We do have a very cluttered composition. Several of you mentioned signs of battle: the severed hand, the armor, the banners, a military tent,” she pointed with her wand. “The scene does not appear to contain biblical themes, but it does have several important figures."

Lacing her hands loosely in front of her, she shifted her attention back to her class. "The tapestry is actually part of a series - the ninth out of eleven tapestries depicting the Trojan war. You may have heard of it from The Iliad. The French weavers took this popular tale and modernized it to fit a medieval setting, and yes, their culture and values,” she nodded at Miss Grumman.

She spread out her hands, “This tapestry was not created with magic, and has no magic in it. No Wanda, either,” she smiled slightly at Mr. Sellaphix. “Yet you were able to glean some understanding of the tapestry without knowing all the details. Back then, when literacy was still a luxury, people relied on a language of symbols. Though we might find the lack of emotion in these figures strange, we can speculate that they were intended to do something else. To impress us. To communicate ideals. Not necessarily to move us.

"So what happens when magic is involved?" Aileen paused, more to gather her thoughts than to cause a panic among the Ravenclaws.

She waved her wand, and the next tapestry filled the canvas. "This is a later example, showing a family's coat-of-arms in the center and various animals around it. It was made to impress, it was made to flaunt wealth, but it also had another, more important purpose."

A flick of her wand animated the canvas. Gilded thread from the borders of the image began to travel around the tapestry, circling around the quail and the hawk, creating a strange shape around the left fountain, and then coming to rest on the word 'loyal'. It repeated the process as Aileen spoke.

"I won't ask you to try to interpret what this means, because it would be too difficult without any context. Which is the point. In a time when there was no distinct separation between the magical and muggle worlds, when competition was fierce within wizarding circles, some magical families began to hide messages in plain sight."

She allowed them a moment to take notes.

"I will explain how we think they accomplished this, but for now, consider the amount of work it must have taken to use tapestries as a secret form of communication. Creating the tapestry itself was a very time-intensive and costly project.  Weaving messages around a static set of symbols, like the animals and the fountain, also took time.  It wasn't like attaching a message to an owl. It wasn't instantaneous, like floo powder."

"Consider who would have received the message," she went on. "The animated thread was not visible to muggles. Random witches and wizards wouldn't have necessarily been able to make sense out of it even if they realized it was more than decoration."

"And remember that tapestries were sometimes given as gifts. They were hung in homes and castles. They could be rolled up and transported fairly easily from place to place."

Aileen waved her wand at the canvas, stopping the animation.

"With that in mind, I'll open the floor to you. Imagine if you were a wealthy medieval witch or wizard living in those times. When would you have used a magical tapestry like this?" she gestured at the canvas. "What would you have said? Who would you have said it to?"[1]

Glancing around the room, her gaze settled a little longer on the ever-silent Miss Grimlish, curious about her thoughts.

1.	There are many answers that could be considered correct. I have ideas in mind, but any new interpretations are welcome!

"I'm not particularly interested in whether it is biblical or not. But I am interested in how it can be used as a window through which we can see the nuances of a culture or society of the time."

This caused Avalon to perk up and slide his ocean colored eyes over to the Durmstrang student with a peeked curiosity. Had he not said some of the exact same things? He wished he could answer her, but Professor Reid returned her voice to the lesson and moved them on. With a little sigh he returned his attention to the head of the class, and put his chin on his hand to engage the Professor as she spoke.

Professor Reid was one of his favorite, and no matter how her classes reminded him of his mother's madness he still signed up as many times as he could. Runes often became a great room of debate, and though he couldn't offer heated words or passionate exchanges Avalon enjoyed feeling engaged in the conversation.

In a time when there was no distinct separation between the magical and muggle worlds, when competition was fierce within wizarding circles, some magical families began to hide messages in plain sight.

Like paintings he would have replied, and being an artist of his own he knew the power behind hidden meanings. He understood what it meant to try and appease a larger audience, by way of keeping his art as little about his personal life as possible. Yet, without thinking Avalon turned to one of the two students who seemed to be the subject of his expression the most and wondered if she would speak up at all.

Evelyn Grimlish was in fact as close to a cat as a human could get without shifting. She didn't do anything she didn't want to do, and was only interested in a subject if it looked like she wasn't. Her silence and attention meant more than any reply she could come up with (or so he thought). However, it appeared Reid didn't know that as he picked up on her stare.

This was actually proving to be a very interesting class, and Avalon was looking forward to seeing what his fellow classmates came up with. Selfishly he thought about how it turned the tables on his world, and now they would have to express themselves in silly little pictures to get a point across.

Avalon lost himself to his own thoughts as he pondered through exactly what he would say, and started to doodle little drawings on the blank page. He didn't want to seem selfish, but he would totally put himself in the middle of a tapestry. With all the world coming at him at once, it's what it felt like sometimes, especially in the dining hall. But that wasn't deep enough, and he figured she wouldn't ask if she wasn't looking for some sort of serious answer.

Figaro had to bite his tongue to stop his first impulse, which was always to fling back some kind of glib joke answer.  In these elective NEWT level classes, he was finding that most of his classmates were serious and studious and no good audience for his wit anyway.  Plus, he was finally pulling his marks up to acceptable. 

The question was pretty complex and Fig found himself zoning out.  He just wasn't really following.  He absently began scribbling a doodle on the corner of his notebook cover, a geometric pattern that kind of looked like a maze.  He couldn't land on an intelligent-sounding answer.  How was he supposed to know what went through the minds of old rich wizards?

When the professor turned to stare at her, Evie just stared right back, the rather blank look on her face unshifting. She wasn't sure what she'd done to attract the teacher's attention besides sit there attentively. She gave her crossed legs a little kick so that they swung back and forth between her chair legs while she waited for the professor to look somewhere else. It was hard to think properly when you had the presumably judgmental eyes of a professor trained on you – and she wanted to think about this. Who didn't want to spend time ruminating on real, live secret codes crafted during medieval times and hidden in the homes of the rich and powerful magicians whose unrestricted magic was still keeping their world afloat? 

She had lots of ideas, but they weren't quite coherent yet. 'If this were a book,' she thought to herself, 'what would make the most interesting plot?' Perhaps every one of the birds woven into the tapestry represented a person, or a group of people, or something else entirely? She counted no fewer than twenty little birds woven into the fabric, and the enchanted thread seemed to focus on two above the rest, which made her think they were important symbols. The fountains, too, must have represented something, and there were two of them – perhaps something binary? What really interested her, above all the other symbols, was the word 'Loyal' and its part in this. Did this tapestry tell a story of deceit? Better yet, was it some sort of warning? If tapestries were easily (and presumably frequently) gifted, then it wouldn't be unusual to transport them from one home to another without suspicion, whether a secret message about loyalties was hidden in the threads or not. Could the enchantment on the thread change to indicate different birds or fountains, or would a new message need to be woven? But if you were wealthy enough to live in a castle and hang tapestries, then surely you wouldn't have the time to...?

 That was where her train of thought became derailed. Her many thoughts didn't yet form one cohesive idea, but maybe she just needed more information. Tentatively, Evie raised a hand and waited to be called upon. She didn't have an answer, however – she had a question. Her thoughts didn't feel ready for sharing yet, and she wanted to try to refine them before she committed to her narrative, even in her own mind. “I wondered who it is doing the weaving,” she asked softly, “Surely not the nobility?”

Aileen heard the scritch-scratch of quills on parchment. Whether that meant the students were hard at work, or inventing new ways to hide, she couldn't be sure. She raised her eyebrows at Miss Grimlish's unnerving blank stare, then nodded, relieved at the question.

"Most of the nobility employed teams of weavers and would give them a design to copy. They'd also give them an enchanted thread to weave in the border, so that when the tapestry was finished, the nobility could animate it without the weavers ever knowing - supposedly - that they were involved in making something magical."

Aileen gestured at the canvas, "When they needed to, wizards could pick which symbols were animated and the order they appeared in. All they needed were the proper tools, and a rough image of the tapestry in their minds."

Oh. Well, that answer was somewhat disappointing, she had to admit, and the nearly blank expression in the girl's face seemed to grow even more dour, if that were even possible. She'd hoped that there was some small chance that the theory she was cooking up under the surface had merit. She'd thought, perhaps, that it was the artisans, the underlings, doing the communicating between castles, perhaps planning an uprising or something similarly fascinating. For a moment, she'd even entertained the idea that it may have been house elves doing the weaving and, thus, the communicating.

She released a faint sigh of disappointment through her nose. That's what she got for spending so much time with books – she came to expect so much more from reality. They said truth was stranger than fiction, but this young witch wasn't yet convinced. She stared ahead at the image of the frozen tapestry, having disengaged somewhat from her original musings, which forced her to return to square one. Evie hadn't exactly stretched her mind to its creative limits, but it was hard to do more than go through the motions while sitting in the dark. “Were they organizing something?” she offered, her voice soft as always, especially against the whirring of the slide projector. 

Aileen smiled slightly, barely able to hear Miss Grimlish's words over the projector. "You tell me."

Oh, the statement that every student hated.

"I want to hear your theories, right or wrong. I could give you all the information, but that would makes things far less interesting, and I did promise to keep this lecture short."

She couldn't help but glance at Mr. Sellaphix, aware that he was better suited to the hands-on activity she was hoping to implement later.

"So, what do you think?" Aileen addressed the room at large. "Were they organizing something or not?"

Runes. It wasn't a bad class, so far as school that doesn't just involve lectures yawn went. Even if it did now fall into that category of things she was now expected to get an O in because Tappy and badge. At least she was mostly past the stage of alternating between said badge is totally awesome and great Cthulhu what had she gotten herself into. Seemed like she was getting this Prefect thing down.

She'd even managed to bite her tongue before she pointed out the....umm...egotistical implications of the tapestries. Like medieval gearscore for wizards. Something which led to a series of thoughts that she promptly cut off before they ended in snickering. Class, respectable, trying not to ruin a certain dork's chances of getting laid.

It'd taken a little thought, but she'd dug up a reasonable question, and was about to ask when Professor Reid turned on Evelyn. Those Grimlishes. Evelyn had always struck Gigi as the sort who'd hang out in Silvermoon declaring herself the love child of Illidan and Kael'thas while emoting about her beautiful bat wings. Fun to watch, sometimes.

But questions. "Take a lot of time and money to muck about with sending a message like that. Lots of easier ways, if you want to organize something.  Guess it's more just hey, look how much money I can spend to mess with you." She shrugged. Wasn't what she'd do, with vast piles of cash. Might roll in them, though.