Tag: symbol

A Flag of the English – The White Dragon Flag

I have always been tremendously jealous of the Welsh flag. It’s got a dragon on it – it looks fantastic.

The English flag, by comparison, is rather plain – a red cross on white. Plainness is generally quite a good thing in flag design – it means the flag is easily recognisable and easily reproducible. But still – who doesn’t want a dragon? Dragon flags look fantastic. The flag of Bhutan has a dragon on it, and it looks amazing. The flag of the Qing dynasty also had a dragon on it, and that looks even better – a truly outstanding flag design – much better than the current Chinese flag – they should consider going back to it.

Why can’t we have a dragon on our flag? Well the thing is … we could. The symbolism of the red dragon on the Welsh flag goes back to Arthurian legend. A red dragon and a white dragon are locked in combat, with the red dragon representing the native Britons (the Celts) – now the Welsh – and the white dragon representing the Anglo-Saxons – now the English. So a white dragon is a symbol of the English.

This is fairly well known – lots of people already know this, and lots of people have already had the idea of making a white dragon flag to represent the English. (I mean, you could argue the idea never went away from Anglo-Saxon times – the Kingdom of Wessex used a golden dragon as its symbol (still on the flag of Wessex today, though as a wyvern (the distinction being somewhat unimportant here)), and the flag of Somerset also features a dragon.) But the idea has not spread very far – partly I think just because of a lack of awareness of the symbol, but also because of a lack of good designs. A good design propagates on its own.

So for a while now I’ve thought it would be good to make some designs for an English White Dragon flag – an unofficial flag as an alternative to the St. George’s Cross.

The simplest thing to do is just to change the colours on the Welsh flag, as shown below. (I am most certainly not the first person to do this – you can see that others have already done it just with a quick internet search.)

This is the exact same design as the Welsh flag – it just uses the red of the dragon from the Welsh flag as the background, and then the dragon itself is pure white. The design is incredibly striking – I think actually even more so than the Welsh flag.

This design also looks fantastic with a black background.

As with my design for a flag of Wiltshire (featuring a white horse), I find myself torn between different styles of illustration. The dragon on the Welsh flag is obviously very stylised – it’s not just a dragon, it’s a heraldic dragon. I particularly like heraldry and I quite like the heraldic style of illustration, but I do think there are some things that are a bit odd about the design here.

I have never liked what I call the ‘demon’s tail’ style of tail that the design above has. Almost every cartoon drawing of a demon has a tail like that. Personally I think it would look better if it were more naturalistic. That goes for the dragon’s tongue too.

I have also never liked the ‘nose horn’ of the dragon. This seems like a rather odd place to have a horn (that is, a forward-pointing one). In more naturalistic depictions of dragons – which are rather common nowadays thanks to CGI – you never see this. (It’s a remarkable thing that, with decades of stories and movies about dragons, we now have a very strong collective understanding of what a dragon is supposed to look like.)

So I set about modifying the above design. The result is below.

As with my design for a white horse flag for Wiltshire, I found that there were so many things to agonise over while making this design.

I wanted to make some improvements to the design, but I also wanted to retain much of the style – the heraldic style – of the original design. Of course, here we’re not dealing with a purely mathematical design – we’re dealing with freeform paths that can be given any shape. Should this control point go here? Should I move it slightly? Is that a better curve? That looks good, but does it deviate from the style too much? I agonised for hours and hours over it. I am not really certain about most of it, but at some point you just have to decide that it’s done.

I have removed the ‘demon’s tail’. I have also changed the tongue. Now, I’ve given it a forked tongue – that’s sort of a bit of a problem because of course a forked tongue typically carries the symbolism of the snake and of deception. That’s not the intended meaning here, of course – the aim is just to be naturalistic.

I have removed the nose horn, and elongated the dragon’s face. I think this is a tremendous improvement – again, more naturalistic – but of course it does lose some of that heraldic style. I have changed the eye quite substantially – making it a bit meaner. The eye on the original design makes the dragon look a bit dopey. I have also adjusted its spines – and I think this is the only change that I’m completely sure of.

There are so many other things I could have changed (adding more spines along the tail, changing the wings to be a bit more anatomical, changing the ears to look a bit more reptilian, and so on), but of course that risks losing some of the style. As with my white horse flag for Wiltshire, I consider this to just be Version 1 – I may make other versions in future with more modifications. I would also like to make some versions that don’t use the heraldic design at all – and which use something a bit more ‘modern’, for lack of a better word.

So we English can have a dragon on our flag, and it looks rather good. As ever, I don’t suggest making this the official flag – it’s just nice to have as an unofficial one. I’ll be getting some of these made for myself.

Valknut Flags

A few months ago I discovered the Valknut symbol. It’s a very angular trefoil knot – essentially a very sharp version of the Celtic Triquetra. (Or alternatively, it’s three linked triangles.)

It’s a very aesthetically pleasing symbol – combining the Power of Three with the mesmerising effect of an unending loop and un-untiable knot. It has rotational symmetry and is chiral.

And it’s an Anglo-Saxon and Germanic symbol (and it certainly does look very Anglo-Saxon). It’s part of English heritage. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that we don’t really see the symbol in modern life. (It’s part of a broader problem of our disconnect from the Anglo-Saxons. I’ve mentioned before that next to nothing – and sometimes literally nothing – about the Anglo-Saxons is mentioned in British schools. Most English people, I think, are completely unaware of Old English as a language – which is absurd as it’s a very nice language. Given all of this, it’s not surprising that this symbol has been forgotten about in modern life.)

So I think we should bring it back. It is a very nice symbol of the English and of Englishness, and it forms a very nice counterpart to the Celtic Triquetra (which is very well known about), given that they are just curved and angular versions of each other. (The Valknut probably needs a more English name – ‘Valknut’ is rather obviously Norse. I mean, really, it could just be called an ‘English Triquetra’, as ‘triquetra’ means ‘three corners’ – it being curved is not specified in the name. (Perhaps it could even be called a ‘Sexaquetra’ – ‘six corners’ – depending on how you want to count them – but that name doesn’t have as good of a ring to it.))

There are different ways of designing the Valknut – differences in line width and line spacing, and so on. And of course the distinction between the trefoil knot and the three linked triangles. In this post I present some designs, but I have not been exhaustive in these designs – yet – I might add more later. The style that I find to be most aesthetically pleasing is what I call the ‘close trefoil knot’ style, where the turns of the knot appear to leave almost no gaps – you’ll see what I mean if you look at some other designs. I’ve made these in a 5:3 ratio – which is a standard flag ratio – but that doesn’t really matter as they’re all just geometric shapes in the middle of a rectangle.

A blue on black design looks very nice – as does blue on dark grey, shown below. The blue I’ve used here is the same blue as from the Union Jack.

A blue on dark grey version – the blue is the same blue as from the Union Jack.

Blue on white also looks very good – quite minimalist, but pleasingly so.

A blue on white version – again, the blue is the same blue as from the Union Jack.

Red on black looks a little harsh, and red on dark grey is nothing special, but red on white is very pleasing.

A red on white version – this is the same red as from the Flag of England – the St. George’s Cross.

This uses the same red as from the English flag, so it makes a nice companion to it.

As I say, it would be nice to see this symbol used more widely. I think it would look very nice on British bank notes and coins. Similarly it would look great on rings and pendants. Symbolically it ties together so many things – the Anglo-Saxons and their Germanic origins, the Celtic Triquetra and Celtic knotwork, even things like the Triskelion (with Greek and Roman significance) and the Flag of the Isle of Man – it even has a passing resemblance to the symbol for the Deathly Hallows from Harry Potter. It links together many different things from thousands of years of English and British history. It could even be said to represent the three nations of Great Britain – the English, the Welsh, and the Scottish – should we so choose.

So I will try to use it more. Even just as a stamp or a sticker it’s very nice – or a background pattern. As a symbol it is simple enough, meaningful enough, and pleasant enough to be used excessively and not become tired or cliché.

Symbolomania – The obsession with symbolism over reality

By all means, accuse me of inventing too many words with the suffix ‘-mania’, but I do find it to be infinitely useful.

The year is 2019. The month is May. Fans of fantasy all around the world gather to watch the final episode of Game of Thrones.

Daenerys Targaryen has, inexplicably, gone mad. Jon Snow decides to kill her. Drogon, her dragon, after seeing this, decides to attack … the Iron Throne.

It makes no sense. Dragons in this world, while unable to speak or communicate telepathically as they can in some other fantasy worlds, are supposedly ferociously intelligent. There is no way that Drogon doesn’t know that it was Jon Snow who killed Daenerys. Dragons are also vicious, and rather indifferent to humans other than the ones they are bound to in some way. Drogon would kill Jon Snow. That would make sense.

But instead the dragon attacks … the chair. Why? It’s a chair. What does it mean to a dragon? Unless of course, Drogon somehow knows what the chair symbolises – the desire for power, and all the infighting it causes. Drogon, in this moment, gains a meta-level understanding of the world he’s in. He momentarily becomes the audience, and that’s why he attacks the symbol and impetus of the show.

For a show that is supposed to be realist, this is ridiculous. It only happens because the writers think it’s profound, and that profundity takes precedence over physical and logical realism. It is one of the many reasons why the show is considered a car crash, and why people hardly ever talk about it now, despite it being one of the most popular shows in the world for about a decade.

In the subsequent years, I have seen this obsession with symbols many other times. I have seen people be obsessed with the symbolism of something – what they think it means – regardless of the actual logical, physical, or logistical consequences of something, regardless of reality.

I won’t enumerate all of the examples, as that would make this post unbearably long, but I will focus on one: royalty.

I am a royalist. It’s actually one of the few ‘-ist’ words I will actually apply to myself. I’ll save a full explanation of why I’m a royalist for another post, but it’s worth saying that being a royalist does not mean that you support or are in favour of every single thing every single member of the royal family does all the time. It means you are in favour of the concept of royalty.

In any discussion on royalty, one of the arguments against it you’ll hear quite often and quite early on is ‘I don’t think anyone should be considered “better” than anyone else.’ – in other words, they see the meaning of ‘royalty’ as being that some people in society should be higher up, higher in status, more important, intrinsically more moral people – better.

It’s a weird argument, because I don’t think anyone who is a royalist today actually believes that members of the royal family are better, more worthy, than the rest of us. I think royalists just see the royal family as inheritors of an ancient tradition who have a life-long duty to preserve a substantial proportion of our cultural heritage. That does not make them better, or more worthy. They are not necessarily more moral people, nor should they escape justice when justice is needed. Now sure, we should expect higher standards of them than we do of most people, since they are the inheritors of this legacy, and the performers of its rituals, but this does not mean they are necessarily better.

I think the people who see royalty as some kind of status of intrinsic superiority are obsessed with what they believe the symbolism of royalty is rather than the practical, real effects that we see in society as a result of them (or even, indeed, a truer, actual symbolism, rather than a false interpretation). In that sense they are the same as the writers of Game of Thrones (and the very small number of people who actually liked that final episode).

So I find I need a word to describe this phenomenon. I choose symbolomania – the obsession with symbols or symbolism – usually a perceived symbolism – over reality or over a more logical understanding of something.