Re: Heraldic help

[Tanner Lovelace <lovelace@acm.org>]

Poster: Tanner Lovelace <lovelace@acm.org>

On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, Heather Swann wrote:

> >On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, Stephen Mumford wrote:
> >
> >> 2) The drawing is considerably more important that the blazon.  
> <snip>
> Why is this?  I'm just curious, because frankly the ability to write is
> more common in the SCA than the ability to draw.
> In a word, this seems, well, stupid.  

Actually, I believe this has its roots in period.  In period, wouldn't
someone who wanted arms be more worried about how they looked, and leave
the description of them to the heralds?  The idea that Laurel appears to
be trying to get across here is that different arms *must* look different.
If you can't look across a battlefield and tell one arms from another,
how are you going to be able to tell your archers who to shoot at?
(And don't say the ones with blue tape on their helms... :-)  If you
can't tell a difference between a cow and a goat, then you're in 
trouble and the device should be redrawn.  The blazon is not what's
important, the picture is.

In service,
Lord Kendrick Wayfarer
Sometime herald
---
             |                       lovelace@acm.org
             |\                       Arlington, VA
 8*<%%%%%%%%%|+>-===================================================-----
             |/      Per chevron argent and azure, a wolf passant 
             |     sable between three compass roses counterchanged.





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