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Sigils, Heraldry Discussion


norwaywolf123

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http://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/genealogy/family-crests.htm

http://www.familytreesandcrests.com/heraldry-symbols.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraldry

1. Is there a hidden meaning behind the house sigils of westeros?

 

2. What are your favorite house sigils? And least favorite sigils?

-My favorites are (1. Lannister), (2. Toyne), (3. Mallister), (4. Bolton), (5. Tully), (6. Bar Emmon), (7. Tarth)

-My least favorite are (1. Dayne), (2. Darry) ,(3. Karstark),

3. Are there any rules for making new sigils?

 

 

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1) No idea. Myths about the house for some, based on location for others maybe?

2) My favourites- Blackwood, Umber, Dondarion, Harlaw, Stark

    Least favourite- Tyrell, Spicer, Blackmont

3) I don't think so. I'm pretty sure anyone; including hedge knights; can have their own sigil. I guess the only rule is don't use someone else's.

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1) I don't know about hidden meaning, they all seem to have a fairly obvious superficial meaning in regards to history, specialties, regions, and such.

2) Velaryon is my favorite sigil. Manderly, Estermont, Hightower, Tyrell. House Magnar's has stuck in my head, even though I don't think it's ever actually been mentioned.

The Massey sigil is boring, I don't like the Karstark one either. It always struck me as strange that they never used a variation of the direwolf. The Sun and Spear is my least favorite of the great houses. I'm terrified of bears, so House Mormont does nothing fore me.

3) There's plenty of characters with personal sigils, and we see Petyr create his sigil for House Baelish of Harrenhal, Janos Slynt creating a family crest, and Bronn making up a sigil when he's knighted. Plus, the green apple Fossoways have their green apple, and I'm sure the red apple ones would send out a cease and desist on the apple if they had any right to petition one.

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1) to some extent, like Starks being able to bond with direwolves and Targs with dragons, oh and dont forget Blackwoods. Others just simbolize their way of life: Lannisters with gold and pride, Tullys wih fish because of Riverrun, Freys with their towers, Darry with fertile lands?,  Greyjoys with invisible danger from sea,...

2) Lannister, Greyjoy, Bolton, Arryn, Velaryon, Royce , Harlaw and Umber are favourites

PrePetyr Baelish and house Baratheon of Kings Landing are least favourites

3) I think not.

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1. I think some do but not all. Off the top of my head, great houses that have gold as a color are taking a ton of casualties (Baratheon, Lannister, Greyjoy). And of course the Starks and their Direwolves.  I'm sure there are dozens of topics about the meaning of the heraldry.

2.

- Favs -> Vance (Atranta), Blackwood, Manderly, Baratheon, Connington, Greyjoy. 

- Least -> Flaming Heart Baratheon, Bolton

3. No. Baelish and Janos Slynt have made their own. There's so much variety too, quartered, halved, all different colors and designs and styles. 

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There isn't a hidden meaning in general, but the heraldry is what makes the storytelling have a bit of depth (not a LOT of depth, just more than this sort of thing usually has). It lets Martin make alusions to houses and characters using symbols. So he can be talking about wolves and Starks at the same time. It also provides the color coding, which is integral to the appeal of the books. It also allows him to make his characters either seem like they have more depth by each house having a visual ideal, or to associate them with ideas (in case of the Greyjoys with both Lovecraft and viciously and mindlessly attacking ships at the same time, which is petty brilliant).

The whole thing would fall apart if it wasn't for the heraldry. The reason it would be hard to write a fantasy series to rival ASOIAF has more to do with this than any other element (most other elemenst are 110% unoriginal anyway). If you wrote something with more "realistic" heraldry, it wouldn't work, because ASOIAF heraldry is un-realistic on purpose. If you wrote somethig with simple-but-flashy logo's like game of thrones - it would just look like you're ripping off Martin. But if you tried to use heraldry the way Martin does (and it's arguably the only thing he does really well, although it's a VERY dodgy practice - it's lazy writing, it's way more graphic design than literature, and it only creates an illusion od deph rather than actual depth. But it does work.), anyway, if you tried to use it like Martin does you'd have a hard time becaus he already cherry picked the animal motiffs you would llikely be looking to use anyway.

And then there's a problem that most readers will only be willing to learn one set of symbols per lifetime, so writing another sucesful series like ASOIAF might be impossible for a while, even if you knew exactly what makes it work.

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The rule tends to be that the major houses get the simple/strong/obvious animals (lion, dragon, direwolf, stag)* the next rung of importance gets sigils that are plausible but more of a stretch (rose, kraken, sun+spear, falcon) while the minor houses get BS that would never be used as a sigil IRL (apples, bats, lemons, seashells, etc...)

Of course there are exceptions (Tully trout is absolute BS) but it seems evident that George wrote the sigils in order from most important Houses to least, and ran out of good ideas somewhere along the line.

 

 

*Interestingly enough, if you replace direwolf with eagle, these 4 make up the vast majority of European sigils.

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7 hours ago, Victarion Chainbreaker said:

The rule tends to be that the major houses get the simple/strong/obvious animals (lion, dragon, direwolf, stag)* the next rung of importance gets sigils that are plausible but more of a stretch (rose, kraken, sun+spear, falcon) while the minor houses get BS that would never be used as a sigil IRL (apples, bats, lemons, seashells, etc...)

Of course there are exceptions (Tully trout is absolute BS) but it seems evident that George wrote the sigils in order from most important Houses to least, and ran out of good ideas somewhere along the line.

 

 

*Interestingly enough, if you replace direwolf with eagle, these 4 make up the vast majority of European sigils.

Why wouldn't those symbols be used IRL? The bat was part of the heraldry of the kingdom of Aragon and is still used for example in the crest of Valencia.

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Looking at real world heraldry reveals two things off the top my head

1 )  Some of it is insanely complicated. Have you ever seen the coat of arms of the Early of Warwick (the 'kingmaker' of the Wars of the Roses)???? Ridiculous! Whereas in a book you can say 'the silver eagle of Mallister', 'the sunburst of Karstark' or whatever... A lot of real world heraldry cannot be neatly summarised in a sentence!!!

2 )  Though animals like lions, dragons, griffins etc were popular, more 'mundane' animals and surprising things are used too. So I have no problem with trouts, bats, entwined snakes, etc....

I am actually working on a Westeros tabletop wargaming project, set in the Riverlands, and am making loads of flags for the houses I am using. A lot of them look awesome - Mallister, Vance, Piper, Mooton, Blackwood..... Though a few I am really wishing GRRM had thought through a bit better! The biggest culprit is Darry. I really want to paint up some Darry troops, but I haven't worked out how to make their flags look good yet. A black ploughman on a brown field????? I'm open to ideas.

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3 hours ago, Lemonking said:

Why wouldn't those symbols be used IRL? The bat was part of the heraldry of the kingdom of Aragon and is still used for example in the crest of Valencia.


There's a ton of weird things used IRL, and it also depends a lot on whether lords got to choose their coat of arms or if it was assigned to them (and needed to indicate something specific - what meant what changed). Take the Croatian flag (modern) the stuff on top of the chequy are coats of arms for the 5 provinces, and one includes a marten and one consists of nothing but a goat. One has 3 Leopards (which everyone thinks are lions, although there never were any Lions or Leopards in the country).  

What's really weird is that Martin doesn't have any houses with just a sword arm. A sword arm (often with a scimitar) was very common.

2 hours ago, Ser Something said:

Looking at real world heraldry reveals

That any situation where 95% of the houses don't have lions on them is highly unrealistic. Ok, SOME (huge) number of houses have lions on them, but all the other houses which don't don't because all the possible poses you could draw lions in were allready taken.

Many of the more complicated sigils included figuring out creative ways to get your sigil to have lions on, too, like dividing lions in halves and painting halves wildly different colors, etc. 

Eagles were huge, too.

The other thing is that most other places had a pattern or an abstract symbol, not something you could use for characterisation or storytelling. Which is the entire purpose of heraldry in the books. Try imagining the riveting atmosphere and strong contrasts and sense of individuality among characters if 5 out of eight houses had lions, and the other 3 completely abstract patterns, and all used some combination of about 4 different colors. Yay!

Martin uses it to make writing fantasy similar to writing cheezy SF where every group of people are of a different race and live on a different planet. So you get this illusion that you're reading more "realistic" fantasy because everyone's human, but you're not, really, because a lot of caracterisation (when there is any) is space-opera alien characterisation. He even jokes about it and points it out in a conversation  between Illyrio and Tyrion, where it's said that "Westerosi are stupid because they sew an animal to their clothes and instantly believe they're that animal".

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1) No i don't think so.

2) Favorites: Greyjoy, Tully, Velaryon, Dayne, Targaryen, Martell, mormont.

   Least Favorite: Glover, Tyrell, Flaming heart Baratheon, Bolton, Karstark.

3) No not really, i mean everyone can have a sigil for example it was a Bravos sellsword who was the founder of House Baelish and he made the sigil, so i think everyone can make their own sigil without any rules. 

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On 2016-06-30 at 0:19 AM, norwaywolf123 said:

http://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/genealogy/family-crests.htm

http://www.familytreesandcrests.com/heraldry-symbols.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraldry

1. Is there a hidden meaning behind the house sigils of westeros?

 

2. What are your favorite house sigils? And least favorite sigils?

-My favorites are (1. Lannister), (2. Toyne), (3. Mallister), (4. Bolton), (5. Tully), (6. Bar Emmon), (7. Tarth)

-My least favorite are (1. Dayne), (2. Darry) ,(3. Karstark),

3. Are there any rules for making new sigils?

 

 

1. Yes, I think that there are plenty of hidden messages in names, coats of arms etc. but we are unlikely to see it before it becomes relevant. For example Lord Bolton sides with the Lannisters, his coat of arms has a red man, just like the field color of the Lannister coat is red, and his name is Roose, similar to the fact that the Tyrells who also join with the Lannisters have a rose on their coat of arms. I am utterly convinced that names, arms and so on are a kind of foreshadowing for the altert but also that it will be next to impossible to decipher this before the "thing" happens.

2. Best favorites: Lannister, Arryn (I think they have much better words than Lannister) and Marbrand

Least favorites are Darry for being so "muddy" with black on brown, and Dayne for what seems to be a bit crowded. I kind of dislike Dunk's coat of arms as well due to the similar reason

3. In real life there are plenty of rules, like the rule of tincture etc. but in Westeros there don't seem to be any rules like that.

 

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11 hours ago, Lemonking said:

Why wouldn't those symbols be used IRL? The bat was part of the heraldry of the kingdom of Aragon and is still used for example in the crest of Valencia.

"Of course there are exceptions" absolves me of any errors.:D

The abundance of eagles and lions in the Holy Roman Empire had political significance. The eagles symbolized the centralized power of the Empire (primarily the Habsburg emperors/archdukes) while the lions symbolized the localized power of all the different princes/counts/margraves/dukes etc...

http://www.historytoday.com/sites/default/files/hre_eagle.jpg

 

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8 hours ago, Victarion Chainbreaker said:

The abundance of eagles and lions in the Holy Roman Empire had political significance. The eagles symbolized the centralized power of the Empire (primarily the Habsburg emperors/archdukes) while the lions symbolized the localized power of all the different princes/counts/margraves/dukes etc...

Plus lions and eagles are cool

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If you look at the Wars of the Roses, significant lords' heraldry became superseded by personal sigils. This is because, in part, because the rules of heraldry became so complex, with so many divisions, that it would take a reference book and a team of experts to work out who was who in battle. They all started using personal emblems, their favorite animal or something that was special to them. 

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53 minutes ago, Shouldve Taken The Black said:

Plus lions and eagles are cool

This was the main reason, really. Everbody just HAD to be a lion, as the lion was presented in various christian "guides" as "the king of the animals" or otherwise the animal with the coolest symbolism behind it. Plus, the really rich and powerful lords could afford to keep "menageries" where they'd keep an imported lion or two and show them off whenever they had a chance. This added an additional air of prestige. Naturally this lead to you having to have a lion on your shield if at all possible.

Actually that's the second biggest unrealistic thing about heraldry in the series - there's very little putting down on account of lame house sigils. In real life it was very likely quite merciless and the competition for the prestigeous or fashionable ones seemed to have been cutthroat.

The other thing is

Spoiler

that there's simply no way a wolf would be sigil to a great house. It was a rather controversial symbol. It was used, sure, comparatively often in some countries, but the symbolism of wolves has always been that of carnivorous vermin or livestock predator, even in regions which have Wolf as a name (such as in the Balkans where it was a fairly common name, but it was given to children in danger of dying due to being sickly, as it was a "terrifying name given to scare off evil spirits"). The whole wolf-as-cool-or-noble from ASOIAF is more of a late 80-ties early  1990-ties (enduring) teen fad than anything. The whole wolf thing always stuck me like something your pubilsher would make you put in a book if they thought your manuscript didn't have enough mass market appeal (same as dragons and white hair protagonists with exotic eyes - when it came out the GoT book looked like it was devised by a corporate publishing board rather than an actual person due to all the really cheezy pandering of that sort).

In places where the general populace has wolves around, they would most certainly not have them as the symbol of top house. Even today wolves are a huge nuisance in rural areas because they're under goverment protection and folks can't defend their flocks from them as they're not allowed to kill them. It's a big point of contention between country folks and urban folks, as the country folks believe that the whole "preservation" thing is an insane regulation enforced by city hipsters who don't know anything about wolves and just think wolves are  somehow cute. The werewolf myth also comes from these places and there was nothing at all romantic about it originally, it just meant that a person has turned into a carnivorous menace. Vampires, revenants (esentially zombies) and werewolfs originally all had the same folk name in the Balkans where they originated, too, "wolfskin", since wolves were hugely reviled.

Which, in part, is why the lion was so popular. It wasn't around to kill your livestock and children, and was regarded to be about as mythical as a gryphon or a dragon, except really rich guys could acquire them from the comparatively nearby Africa. The original most fearsome "king of the forest" animal was the bear, but folks just had too much interaction with them (and the church really campaigned to phase them out because it was part of pagan imagery while lions you could only find out about from christian sources). This would really make House Mormont a more realistic ruler of the North, with Starks just being "lord 90-ties teen urban hipster dollar baiting".

So, um, there IS a deeper meaning to the Stark sigil :D It sells really well. I've personally known plenty of young female ASOIAF fans who were into the series pretty much only on account of the wolves. What's funny is that the original white haired strange eyed fantasy character was nickname "The White Wolf" because he was terrible at being a hero and was meant to be a dangerous, unlikable idiot. Then it turned into the biggest cliche ever, and now the most famous fantasy protagonists have the Wolf as their house logo. Woot!

   

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