[ANSTHRLD] FW: Real world Heraldic Emergency

[Tim McDaniel]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Tomas Niallagain <siortomas at gmail.com> wrote:
>  My curiosity is how in the world the EU political body got
> jurisdiction over heraldic law for any group of people.

The original article, <http://www.thelocal.se/9398/>, didn't actually
say that there was a "political body" or that there was jurisdiction:
it said that the army changed the design after a complaint was filed
with the European Court of Justice.  Organizations have sometimes made
changes based on complaints regardless of the legal status of the
complaints.

> I also wonder if the person sited as "ticked off" that he wasn't
> consulted was the Swedish king of Arms.

The current statsheraldiker is Henrik Klackenberg.  The designer was
Vladimir Sagerlund.

The only existing kings of arms eo nomine I know about are in England,
Scotland, and Spain (memory refreshed from
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Arms>; a cursory Google doesn't
show evidence that the Portuguese KOA still exists).  Only a few more
countries have official general-public heraldic authorities: Canada,
Ireland, South Africa.

However, <http://www.lyon-court.com/lordlyon/495.html> says that Lord
Lyon was gave a dinner party for

     ... The State Herald of Sweden, the State Archivist of Denmark,
     ... the Head of the State Heraldic Service for the Russian
     Federation, the Chief State Councillor for Heraldry of the Slovak
     Republic, the Norwegian Heraldic Adviser and ...

My suspicion is that those are officers intended to help the
governments themselves with their own official heraldry, like the US
Army's office heraldic office.
<http://hem.passagen.se/jonar242/vapnet.htm> confirms that for Sweden:

     No official registration is kept for commoners' Coats of
     Arms. .... The State Herald only deals with state, provincial,
     municipal and other public Coats of Arms, but predecessors in the
     older form of National Herald saw the approbation of a few
     commoners arms in the 1930'ies.

<http://www.heraldik.se/english_3.html> is an English-language potted
history of heraldry in Sweden.
<http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statsheraldiker> and
<http://www.statensarkiv.se/default.aspx?id=1207&cid=46&type=U> are
probably more informative to anyone who knows Swedish.

Dankyn de Lincoln
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com