As dumb as it sounds, one of the things I love about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the heraldry. Specifically, the house sigils, as they are more commonly known, are some of the most iconic things about the show. Of course Martin based this on medieval heraldry practices that, at least technically, still exist to this day. Plenty of families have coats of arms, as do cities, towns, universities and colleges, etc. And the central part of any coat of arms is usually a shield of some sort. In the world of ASOIAF these tend to be fairly simple (the direwolf of House Stark, both the HBO version and book-ish version) although a few do get more complex (like House Tarth, HBO version and book-ish version). And GRRM goes to a lot of trouble to describe the sigils of a great many houses in ASOIAF. To give you an idea of the sheer amount of creative calories burned, check out the Heraldry page at the Citadel website and this awesome Westeros map some uber-geeks put together. I totally geeked out about both of those.
Well, Kelly and I decided a while back to make our own sigil (in true geek fashion) and now I will share it with the world via the Intertubes. A lot of people did something similar with the “Join the Realm” promo web page done by HBO for Game of Thrones. But I wanted to do our own, with symbols that meant something to both Kelly and me.
Continue reading “Heraldry, history and ASOIAF/GoT”
