[ANSTHRLD] Ermined Or and Argent - is this still 'legal'

Tim McDaniel tmcd at panix.com
Tue Oct 17 09:38:48 PDT 2006


On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Luciana Caterina di Borgese <dolce.luce at gmail.com> wrote:
> Specifically the blazon reads:
> "Per pale azure ermined Or and argent, a bend counterchanged"

Yet another example of "when asking a general question, provide the
example that provoked it".

You've misparsed the blazon.  Adding parentheses for grouping,
it means
     Per pale (azure ermined Or) and (argent), et cetera.

That is, "per pale" takes two tincture specifications following, as in
"Per pale gules and vair".  In "Per pale X and Y", X is the tincture
of the dexter half and Y is the tincture of the sinister half.
"ermined" takes only one tincture specification following, to describe
the tincture of the ermine spots.

So, as someone has already noted, the dexter half is "azure ermined
Or" and the sinister half is "argent".

A proposed parsing of
     Per pale (azure ermined (Or and argent)), et cetera.
would be invalid.  "Per pale" has to have two tincture specifications,
one for each half of the field, but that would have only one; also,
that would give two tincture specifications for the ermine spots,
which (as I mentioned in another note) is itself not valid.

Parsing
     Per pale (azure) (ermined Or and argent), et cetera.
as putting argent ermine spots on Or is not a valid parsing.  A
background tincture has to go before the word "ermined", not after.
Also, per pale is correctly blazoned as "Per pale X and Y", and the
"and" is mandatory, but in this misparsing it would be omitted.

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com



More information about the Heralds mailing list