Kirsti (Christine de Byzance)Kirsti used to be a servant (which at this time automatically means a slave) at the exceptionally wealthy and well-known merchant house of Mistress Tófa Jóhannsdóttir in late Viking-age Finland. Some might have noted Kirsti's uncanny resemblance to a certain performing dancer who wandered into Aarnimetsä many years ago and then disappeared. In a baronial court recently, it was discovered that she actually was this Occitan-born performer, called Christine de Byzance because her mother insisted on following her crusading husband in the wake of Eleanor d'Aquitane's women's crusade and gave birth in Byzantium. As her mother died in childbirth and her father took her back to Provence but remarried, she had no place in the house and became a dancer in a minstrel troupe. Here in Aarnimetsä, all was well for a while, but then she had a long run of bad luck which ended in her being abducted by a group of rowdy merchants on the road and sold to slavery in Carelia. Later, having become used to her fate and the Finnish form of her name, she was sold back to Mistress Tófa's house, where she actually had an easy time, what with there being so many servants, the mistress of the house being exceptionally kind and the merchants free with their gifts at the swish of a braid or glimpse of an ankle. The royal letters recognising her noble status and her service for the arts had been waiting for her for all of ten years while she was lost and then working, so she is finding it a little hard to adjust to such good luck, after all this time... Some of the actual activities that Kirsti gets herself into are sewing (Italian Renaissance, the bliaut style and Viking Finn), dancing (though it's been on the back burner for a while), poetry elocution, and trying to revive the interest in acting and other performing arts. She's a beginning court herald (though the armorial stuff gives her headaches) and is getting into helping to run the canton of Hucca while hoping to find the time to learn some illumination and fencing. She runs errands for Baroness Moira on occasion. (A footnote: for a short time in between she was sold to a German lady who did not approve of the name Kirsti but did not bother to ask her the original either, and called her Theodora. So some circles know her by that name.) |
You can still contact me at svaha at iki dot fi |