Tempus Peregrinator's Little Heraldry Book

[jducoeur]

So I was just Googling around, looking for the answer to "what does this heraldic charge look like?", and stumbled across The Little Heraldry Book. It's a delight, and well worth a bookmark. It has various articles on heraldry, but most usefully it has a *zillion* pictures of various heraldic charges, colors, field divisions, etc. I particularly note the page on crosses, which shows a wide variety of them and helps show what all those different names refer to.

Recommended to anyone who needs to ask, "What does this heraldese actually *mean*?". Probably especially useful for scribes and illuminators as a quick reference...

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Man, there's a lot of interesting stuff there. Most tantalizing, though, are several pages, e.g. the field divisions, that clearly have a big pile of funky rare types that he hasn't gotten to writing up yet. What is that division-by-swirl? Or the lightning-like ordinaries...?

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

I haven't examined the whole thing, of course, but first impressions are that it's very ambitious and pretty good. A lot of broken links, though, and some...funky...interpretations and a little inadvertent misdirection. For example, his discussion of coronets is heraldic depictions of real-world headgear, not a discussion of what SCA royal peers actuall wear. Yet he mentions the proper term of address for a marquess as though there were SCA marquesses. Strange, and confusing.

The division by swirl is "gyronny arrondi", a/k/a "schneckenweise" (German for "snailwise"). The Germans have some pretty cool divisions, my favorite being schwalbenschwanzegegenzittenschnittende %^), which is interlocking swallow-tails. The (modern) Finns have gone totally off the hook with that stuff: they do some very M.C. Escher-esque stuff with field divisions. And the Canadians have started as well: they do "erable", which is interlocking maple leaves.