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Post Archive

Identifying Charge Groups Revisited

Four years ago I posted an adaptation of Yehuda ben Moshe’s “Charge Group Theory” flowchart, intended to guide people in classifying the elements in an armorial design.

The chart I posted was slightly simplified, but I worried that it still might be daunting for beginners, and the recent occasion of teaching a class on charge-group analysis provided a good excuse to revisit it.

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Ordinaries, Divisions, and Arrangements Revisited

Six years ago I posted a fun little chart that highlights the relationship between the terms we use for ordinaries and the related divisions, arrangements, and orientations.

Recently I made a few minor updates to the chart, the most notable of which was to add a column for the corresponding multiple divisions, such as barry and bendy.

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O&A Search for Unregistered OSCAR Submissions

Here’s a nifty trick for the folks who might be running their own O&A server — which is admittedly a very, very small audience.

The OSCAR software can generate a supplementary data file in the same format as oanda.db which contains the names and armory currently in-process on LoIs which have not yet made it to an LoAR.

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A Concordance of Heraldic Terminology

TL;DR: The International Heraldry Phrasebook provides translations of 500 blazon terms between six different languages.

When reviewing documents about medieval and early-modern European armory, it’s quite common to encounter blazons in languages other than English. In some cases, automated translation tools such as Google’s will suffice, but the degree of specialized heraldic jargon sometimes exceeds their grasp, or yields a confusing jumble that doesn’t resemble a workable blazon.

In the middle of the last century, the short book Vocabulaire-Atlas Heraldic, by Gaston Ferdinand Laurent Stalins, attempted to address a similar need by providing a concordance of over 500 terms, showing their equivalents in each of English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch, along with corresponding illustrations.

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An Ancient Branch Name

When the Canton of Whyt Whey resolved to change its name to Appleholm last year, it simultaneously submitted a household name similar to its original name in order to memorialize this bit of its history. We went down this road because there was no option to preserve the old name as our “ancient name” the way we already had with “ancient arms.”

So I was surprised to hear this summer that our name change was pended to consider establishing support for ancient branch names. The change provoked a fair amount of discussion but in the end we decided to take the opportunity to preserve the old name.

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Third Quarter Update

It’s been six months since my last roundup of changes to the Traceable Heraldic Art collection, during which time more than a hundred and eighty new illustrations have been added, bringing the total to well over six thousand.

As always, I am indebted to the generous contributors who choose to share their illustrations with the community through this collection. My thanks in particular to first-time contributors Gwenyvere Rose Foxe, Wylet Fraser, and Rhian Preston.

My appreciation also goes out to returning artists Malyss Makneile, Vémundr Syvursson, Volusia Zoe, Nest verch Gwilim, Iago ab Adam, Aurora Faw, and Ragna stórráða Úlfsdóttir — and to Joakim Spuller, from whose WappenWiki collection I pulled more than three dozen images in this round.

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Branch Arms on the East Kingdom Pennsic Sheetwalls

The sheetwalls surrounding the East Kingdom royal encampment at Pennsic are donated by local branches, and decorated with their arms.

This lovely display of the provincial arms is reported to have been created by Lord Renier VerPlanck (sometimes written Reijnier Verplanck), and is likely about fifteen years old.

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Team Blue Square

The Blue Tyger has served as a mascot for the East Kingdom for about fifty years, since it was selected to combat the red dragon of the Middle, and it is displayed widely as a populace badge as well as being integrated into other badges and displays.

This has led to a bit of good-natured grumbling from scribes and others who have been repeatedly asked to paint this image in a wide variety of sizes and media: “oh no, another tyger, with all of those fiddly little tufts of hair — why didn’t we choose something simpler?” Nobody was seriously suggesting replacing the tyger, but a joke developed within the scribal and heraldic communities that things would be easier if our populace badge was a simple blue square.

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