ANSTHRLD - Forcene?

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

Kathri at aol.com wrote:
> Is there a precedent against using forcene?  Or did we just forsake
> reality?  Horses really do this

There's lots of things that animals do that aren't in heraldry.  You
won't see period arms, or SCA-registered arms either, with
"cats lickant de butts".

If you open the Pict Dict to "Horse", you will find

    The horse is sometimes blazoned "forceny", literally, "enraged":
    the term denotes a posture halfway between rampant and salient.
    Since the posture is too easily confused with rampant *and*
    salient, and since the term seems to have been first used in the
    18th Century, "forceny" currently is not used in SCA blazons.
    (Some early SCA blazons use the term.)

We have a general policy of not giving a CD for hybrid things that
blur the distinction between two things that have a CD.  "Forceny" is
such an example.

> and equine-like monsters such as unicorns

Unicorns are not really "equine-like monsters".  In SCA heraldry, and
In My Insufficiently Humble Opinion in the better sort of real-world
art, they are rather goat-like monsters; according to the Pict Dict,
"it is generally described as having a bearded chin, a horse's body,
tufted cloven hooves, and the tail of a lion" (and those tufts look
goat-like to me).

He writes, further, "Modern fantasy art often depicts the unicorn as a
horned horse, with long sweeping mane and tail; this is not the
medieval concept of the unicorn", though I'd a period depictions of
that exists *somewhere*.

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel is tmcd at jump.net; if that fail,
    tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work account.
"To join the Clueless Club, send a followup to this message quoting everything
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