Draken Store — the dragon in European heraldry | draken-store.com
Heraldry tells its dragons apart by anatomy: the number of legs, the presence of wings and the shape of the tail.
Ask a herald how many dragons exist and the answer is a number, not a shrug. Classical armory recognises a small set of canonical forms, and each has a fixed name in blazon: the dragon proper, the wyvern and the lindworm, with the cockatrice, amphisbaena and sea-dragon standing nearby as distinct charges.
The dragon proper is the full form. It stands on four legs, carries a pair of wings — usually drawn with bat-like membranes — and ends its tail in a barbed point or a deliberate knot. Tongue and claws are often blazoned in a contrasting tincture, langued and armed, so that the small parts read against the body.
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The wyvern keeps the wings and loses two legs. It stands on a single pair of eagle-like limbs, and its long serpentine tail, typically ending in a barb, does much of the visual work: curled, knotted or struck out behind. In British armory the wyvern is the commonest of all dragon-forms, frequent as a crest and as a supporter.
The lindworm removes the wings as well. What remains is the old Germanic serpent-dragon: two legs, a supple body, a tail that ties itself into knots on Scandinavian picture stones and in German civic arms. Strict blazon keeps the lindworm wingless; where folk art adds small wings, armory declines to follow.
The lesser relatives complete the plate. The cockatrice is a wyvern with a rooster's head, heir to the tale of the egg hatched by a serpent; the amphisbaena carries a head at each end; the sea-dragon trades its hindquarters for a fish's tail and belongs to marine bearings. Each name in a blazon picks out exactly one of these anatomies.
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