An old coat of arms redrawn

No.36. The other day I was approached by a gentleman, who wished to have his inherited coat of arms redrawn in gouache. The shield in red displays a silver hawk with lifted wings, followed by four golden St. George crosses, one in each corner. This lead me to the conclusion that the shield had to have a basicly rectangular form. The hawk is repeated in the crest. The result is as shown above.

No. 35 The Catalan musician Jordi Savall conducts these wonderful pieces of music from the time of chivalry, Cantigas de Santa Maria, songs for the St. Mary. The illustrations connected to this music, which is collected from you tube, display some lovely heraldry.   

No. 34. In a blue escutcheon, two crossed golden spears over a golden spray with leaves of laurel. This is the plain idea behind this coat of arms, which I developed for a learned gentleman and his wife-to-be on their wedding. The family crest has many references to the history of their families in rural Sweden.    

No. 33. Maybe there's too long a step from the art of heraldry to the art of music. But still, sometimes one simply cannot refuse to dare to take it! So here's a little piece of music I found on you tube, a fandango by Luigi Boccherini. The choreography is by Nina Corti, who performs the castanets, accompanied by a string quartet - The Carmina Quartet - and a guitar - Rolf Lislevand. The film was recorded in Lenzburg, Switzerland.

No. 32. This image of a coat of arms is placed in a classic antique environment. I developed it for a Swedish gentleman and his family, Dr Jonatan Forsberg-Gillving, now living in Denmark. On his blog one could read about how it was developed step by step, to me a very thrilling story.Some other versions of his family creast could be view on the website of Creative Heraldry.

A unicorn, drawn in only one line! How clever! But not so rare as one might think, as it was quite popular in olden times to draw images in this manner. This ink-drawing by an unknown artist is from the 17th century. It is kept in a collection of guest-books in the University library of Uppsala (UUB), Sweden. These guest-books were kept by students and many other people who traveled around in Europe on foot or by horse. The people they visited or stayed at were asked to make a note or a drawing in the guest-books, so these consist of many nice memories and interesting things from olden times, some of which are heraldic drawings and water colours. My source is UUB, stambok nr 16 by Johann Christoph Salbach (1637-1708).

In British heraldry there is a creature called a wyvern, which is a sort of snake with the wings of a dragon.  On the continent, it is said, there are two types of this animal, both without wings though, one good-natured, the other more of the evil sort. In southern Sweden, there was in the olden days a province called Wärend, where the more evil sort was said to be dwelling. It was called a lindorm. It was huge in size and extremely dangerous, as it could form itself into a wheel and hence quickly capture and kill almost any other animal or man that happened to cross its way in the deep forests. The only way to escape it was to flee or to kill it! Anyone who managed to kill it was regarded as a very brave man and hence he (and of course she) could proudly show the image of the frightening lindorm on his shield. As a proof of being able to resist evilness.