Reply #24: Exactly ...

[Lisa]

Good point. As in a lot of other areas, there are things which just haven't made it into books yet. I think the central collection downtown subscribes to "Heraldry in Canada" (the Royal Heraldry Society of Canada's journal), and that should give recent updates.

But still -- aside from Slater, there is a big gap with hardly anything between Fox-Davies, and the special Canadian heraldic primer issued by the society, which covers events since 1988. (Looking at their website, I notice it was written by one of the people I used to do work for. I guess he finally managed to find more time for this -- I heard he'd retired from his ordinary job a while back.) It would be nice to fill in that gap a bit, with some good stuff.

I hadn't seen the BCIT coat of arms yet -- someone must have had some fun designing that one! I'm glad the "computer chip" is on the abstract side, though (I think Fox-Davies pointed out that technological items proposed as charges during the Victorian era look strange, are hard to draw, and quickly become outdated because nobody knows what they are). So there is something to be said, for not going for photorealism.

http://www.bcit.ca/files/pdf/styleguide/bcitstyleguide.pdf


It's not just the aboriginal imagery which is gaining wider acceptance in Canadian heraldry -- we've had Governors-General for the past couple of decades who are from a range of cultural backgrounds, so it's been cool to see the range of symbols used for each new coat of arms -- Ukrainian, Danish, Chinese, and now Haitian.

http://www.gg.ca/heraldry/emb/03/index_e.asp


I loved the Canadian Heraldic Authority's supporters -- I was hoping they would make up an exotic name for them (nanuravens?) but I see the blazon just called them "raven-bears". (For Jara sang, if you're still hanging in there reading through all this ... the "blazon" is the official description in specialized heraldic terminology. In theory anyone trained in heraldry should be able to re-create what the coat of arms looks like, without having to refer to a drawing. It's like learning a new language ... that's what I was struggling with when I was trying to teach myself how to write and decode blazons. The Royal Heraldry Society of Canada has a training programme now -- when I was learning, things were rather rudimentary -- for one thing, they weren't online.)



http://www.gg.ca/heraldry/cha/02/cha-arm_e.asp