Mathghamhain – Page 25 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

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.

Now updated following discussion on Facebook.

Thanks to Bróccín MacIvyr for 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 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.

More Traceable Art

I’ve made a number of changes to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art recently:

I’ve finished incorporating the last of the 74 images I received from the Pennsic Bored-Artist Collection.
I’ve added a couple dozen more images from historical sources, including Bossewell’s book of 1572 and Guillim’s from 1611.
Many more of the items have downloadable PNG and SVG clip art files.
The online index does a better job of cross-referencing items under multiple terms; for example “Stalk of Wheat” is indexed under both “Stalk” and “Wheat.”

Two Articles by Lothar von Katzenellenbogen

I am reposting two armory articles by Lothar von Katzenellenbogen (mka Thomas Barnes) which I think are interesting and useful: Authentic Heraldry Made Simple and A Critique and Ranking of Charges Found in the “Pictorial Dictionary of Heraldry As Used in SCA”.

They were written in the 1990s and archived at the Academy of Saint Gabriel, but were only available in a plain-text format that wasn’t very readable — the versions I’ve posted have had modern web styling applied to them and will hopefully be easier to scan.

These are over two decades old, and somewhat out of date, and they’re very opinionated, but they also contain some useful information, and I feel there’s value in them if they’re considered in context rather than taken as an authoritative reference.

Traceable Art Update

As I mentioned recently an effort is underway, led by Lady Þórý Veðardóttir, to update and expand upon the Pennsic Traceable Art collection in order to facilitate emblazoning of armory submissions at Pennsic and other SCA events.

I’ve been working on a draft document that combines field divisions and ordinaries were from a collection of heraldic elements I had been assembling, along with a number of charges picked up from other sources, including the original Pennsic Traceable Art book, illustrations by the volunteers of the Pennsic Heralds’ Point Art Tent, and several publicly-available sources, including the Viking Answer Lady‘s collection of SVG elements.