Awhile ago I finally submitted a device. I’ve never had one before, and for a while I couldn’t really settle on any one thing. At the time I started working on it, I was beginning to focus more on my German persona than my Viking which I’ve had forever. After some advice and help from my Laurel and friends we came up with the following:
Purpure, two stags combatant and on a chief argent three oak leaves gules
So a little background on how to I came to this final design. First I decided on two stags. In Norse mythology there are four stags (usually referred to as harts) that circle the base of Yggdrasil and eat the buds from the branches. Their names are Dvalinn, Duraþrór, Duneyrr, and Dáinn (some of the names may seem familiar, as Tolkien used much of Norse mythology in his own world building. Dvalinn and Dáinn are the names of some of the dwarves). At that point, I had not delved into Medieval German heraldry too much, but as I was going through some ideas with our shire herald (who has a fantastic early German Renaissance persona), he assured me that both the leaves and the stag were both found within German heraldry. I did, however, find a stag on a FANCY German hat (in red) so that gave me some confidence on the matter. Of course I had to put them on a purple field (this is me we’re talking about) and made the stags white.
Believed to be 16th C. German, still need a source to confirm.
Recently, someone shared a link to an SCA heraldry group I joined when I was seeking help for my new name, and was delighted to see so many different examples of German heraldry with a wide variety of elements. I did see a stag in different forms on multiple coat of arms, so that assured me I made the right choice. Here is the link to some of those examples:
http://www.wappenbuch.de/pages/wappen_156_Siebmacher.htm
For the next part, I tried to think of some elements to go along with the dual Norse/German theme, as well as something I didn’t see much of (which is another of my ‘things’). The next element I wanted to incorporate was leaves. I had considered ash leaves, since I had read somewhere that Yggdrasil was a giant ash tree in the eyes of the Norse (I’ll find that link to include here). I ended up on oak leaves, which was a nod to a quote from Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway (1046 to 1066) “The oak trees of insurrection grow from the acorns of treachery.” which I thought was a pretty cool quote. I made them red to contrast with the purple since green would have been too obvious and I was afraid my device would end up looking like Mardi Gras if I wasn’t careful. Red is also a color I wear often so I thought that was reason enough to incorporate it. Other than some minor adjusting on the sizing of the images I’m pretty happy to have my first official device passed. At some point I may consider adding to the overall design to up the complexity a bit and make it a bit more interesting, but I’ll wait until my German name passes (hopefully!) and go from there.