March 2017 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Arms and Badge for Lady Sofya Gianetta di Trieste

Or, a Florentine fleur-de-lys and on chief gules two mullets of eight points Or.

Lady Sofya came up with an initial design for her armory last year, but the submission paperwork was never finalized and she wanted to make a few tweaks.

Her persona resides in northern Italy and she’d previously selected the Florentine fleur-de-lys as her primary charge, as well as choosing red and gold as her personal colors. In the course of the design process she identified the eight-pointed star as a recurring theme in Italian heraldry and included that as well.

Arms for Lady Magdelena Caminante

Per bend sinister purpure and vert, a bend sinister argent, overall an inverted triangle Or.

Lady Magdelena’s armory registration was returned for a redraw as the submitting herald had made the triangular charge “barely overall.” She liked the design, so we adjusted the proportions to address the issue by ensuring that all three corners of the triangle lie on the field rather than on the bend, and it is now being resubmitted.

My Name and Device

My SCA persona is of mixed post-Viking Irish and post-Roman Welsh descent, living in northern Wales one thousand years ago, so I tried to select a name and armory that felt appropriate for that context.

Per fess argent and vert, a bear passant gules.

The Irish and Welsh of 1017 did not have a concept of personal armorial designs, which arrived in the British Isles with the Normans fifty years later, but heraldry is such a pervasive element in the SCA that I was willing to be anachronistic about it.

However, I still wanted to use a very simple design that was reminiscent of the earliest period of heraldry — per-fess fields with a single central charge are found by the twelfth century.

Heraldic Search Shortcuts

I’ve put together an integrated search page that allows you to easily run search queries against a number of different websites that contain useful heraldry information.

It was inspired by similar collections of search shortcuts posted by Morsulus Herald and Sofya la Rus, but I’ve added a bit of JavaScript to make the interface less repetitive. I’ve extended the list of search targets with some other useful sites including OSCAR, some of the onomastic reference books posted by Wenyeva atte grene, and some old armory books I have been using as sources for images for the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art.

I hope it may prove useful to others — if there are websites that seem of general interest that I have omitted please feel free to point them out and I’ll see if I can add them as well.

Heraldic Registrations of the Canton of Northpass

In the spirit of the recent writeup of Whyt Whey’s registrations, here is the registration of Northpass. My thanks again to the office of the Laurel Archivist for sharing these files.

Canton of Northpass

The canton’s name was submitted in January 1985, and registered without comment in May.

A Badge for the Outer Burroughs of Østgarðr?

At a recent provincial commons meeting, some people were joking about a proposed badge for the three “outer boroughs” of New York City which are part of Østgarðr but not within the boundaries of any canton: the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island.

I don’t think there’s any actual intent to register this, but I figured I’d draw it up for amusement value. I’m not sure if folks have thought through the tinctures they might use, so I just guessed at what seemed natural.

Argent, a pall azure between three otters in annulo proper.

The three otters and the segments they inhabit represent the three “outer” boroughs, while the blue represents the “rivers” (actually tidal estuaries) that divide them.

Unsurprisingly, this design is unregistrable due to conflict, and I don’t have the time to search for clear variants — perhaps a pall wavy? — so this will have to do for now.

A Map of Østgarðr

I have no particular cartographic skills, but have been meaning to try my hand at a map of the Crown Province and its cantons.

Attached is a halting first step in that direction — not totally wretched, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps some day I’ll set aside the time to come back to this and try to further beautify it.

(Updated following discussion on Facebook. Thanks to Jeff Morton to pointing out that I had left out the newly-formed Shire of Midland Vale — an omission which has now been corrected. And thanks to the numerous people who hashed out the status of the Bronx, which isn’t formally part of Northpass as had been indicated in the first version of this map. The new version also has “swamp” markings in Settmour, which I think turned out nicely, but I’m not as happy with the modern “forest” indications in Northpass and Midland Vale — maybe someday I’ll get a chance to replace those with little tree markers like the ones from John Speed’s map of 1605.)

Heraldic Registrations of the Canton of Whyt Whey

The canton’s registration of a new device and populace badge have been forwarded by Blue Tyger Herald from the East Kingdom to the Society’s College of Heralds, and I thought this would be a good moment to look back at the branch’s previous heraldic registrations.

(My thanks to Baroness Shauna of Carrick Point, Laurel Archivist, for retrieving these records from the depths of the Society’s storehouse.)

Canton of Whyt Whey

The canton took shape in the heart of the Crown Province of Østgarðr in the mid-to-late 1980s. (See the writeup on Cunan by Alexandre Lerot d’Avigné for a brief history.)

Riffing on the mis-reading of Østgarðr as “cheese farm” and the century-old nickname for the brightly-lit midtown portion of Broadway, the initial proposal was to name the canton “Grate Whyt Whey”, but the first word was dropped during the registration process as being too ahistorical.

More (and Less!) Traceable Art

There have been a bunch of incremental improvements to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art in the last few weeks:

I’ve continued to add images to the collection, so it’s now over 700 pages of traceable illustrations.
I’ve been sourcing more charges from historical rolls of arms, like this key from the Derring roll (c. 1270) and the Schnecke from Siebmacher’s Wappenbuch (1605).
There’s a new abridged version available for download that leaves out some of the mirror-image alternatives and artistic variations, producing a PDF with 10% fewer pages for folks who want to have less to haul to events in the field.
New “see also” links on some pages lead you to the matching entries in the PicDic and Pennsic Traceable Art libraries, so you can review alternative design options.
For the nerdiest folks who might be interested in how the site is built, there’s a new Build Scripts page which explains how a 2,000-line Perl program converts the book’s PDF files into a series of web pages.

I’m still working on a process to streamline artists’ contributions of images, but if you’re interested please feel free to reach out and introduce yourself and we’ll get the ball rolling.