Source Materials: Heraldry in Fantasyland (Part 1)

It's inevitable: Take an interest in Disneyland trivia, and sooner or later (probably sooner), you're bound to come across this little tidbit:

Walt Disney's family crest is on the front of Sleeping Beauty Castle.

This factoid is impressive for its sheer density of misinformation—no fewer than three errors or partial errors in only twelve words! The falsehoods are corrected as follows:

1. The design in question is not a crest (though it includes one).

2. Designs of this type do not represent families per se, at least traditionally.
3. This particular design is probably not directly associated with Walt Disney's specific family at all.

Thus we enter the often murky but always fascinating world of European heraldry!

Heraldry, the “noble science,” is a really big subject. I would need at least a few blog posts in order to properly explain just the bare basics, and I'm afraid you would wander off before we got to the juicy Disneyland-related stuff. So for now, let me further elucidate the three above points:

1. It's actually what's known as an achievement of arms.

Long story short, heraldry was devised in the Middle Ages as a means of identifying knights when their armor included a face-concealing helmet. Positive ID was achieved by means of a unique colored design which the knight displayed on his shield, as well as on the cloth surcoat he wore over his armor for protection from the sun—hence “coat of arms.” The colors and images used had their own symbolism, of course, indicating which virtues or qualities the knight prized or claimed—red for courage, white for purity, a cross for piety, a bull for strength, etc. Over time, the shield shape, or escutcheon, became the standard format for depicting coats of arms in record books and so forth.

An achievement of arms, then, is a coat of arms with all the bells and whistles. The shield with its design is sufficient to establish identity, but the full achievement allows for bragging rights and artistic flair. The addition of a helmet sitting atop the shield helps to humanize the image a little, and the position and coloring of the helmet conveys rank. A crest, displayed atop the helmet, serves as an additional emblem of the knight. Ornate mantling, thought to have originated as a depiction of the surcoat cloth itself, but typically so stylized as to resemble foliage, dresses up the design a little.

All of these elements are evident in the achievement of arms displayed on the front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, as shown below. So technically there is a “crest” there...but it's only a small part of the design people are referring to, hence a misuse of the term.

2. Coats/achievements of arms properly represent individuals, not families.

Well...sort of. Like the titles of rank that they go with, achievements of arms are usually hereditary. But just because your mom plans to leave you her house in her will doesn't mean you can unilaterally use the deed as collateral for bank loans while she's still alive. Traditionally, only the head of a family was entitled to use the “family” coat of arms as a personal symbol, with other family members perhaps represented by variations on the design—depending on their country of origin, as different nations developed different rules. In the case of Walt Disney, it's all rather academic, since the United States has no codified heraldic tradition of its own, but the most we could say for sure is that some traceable ancestor of his was entitled to display the achievement of arms that graces the Castle.

But we probably can't even say that.

3. More recent and better research suggests that the achievement of arms associated with Walt's specific lineage is this one:

Let's not be too hard on whoever it was who made the decision to put a shield with three lions on the Castle. It seems to have been added in 1965, probably as part of the “Tencennial” celebration. They didn't have the Internet back then, and the aforementioned lack of any American heraldic tradition meant that the best way to figure out what arms your ancestors might have borne was to phone up the right government office in the Old Country and hope for the best. It's quite likely that the three lions are associated with a Disney family, but not the one that produced our beloved founder. The above photo was taken in the Castle Heraldry Shoppe, and within the borders of Disneyland there can be no higher authority.

One thing worth noting is that both achievements of arms have identical crests: a red lion in a walking pose, head turned to face the viewer. (A quick Google Image search confirms the correct coloring of the design on the Castle.) There has been at least one period of time where the crest eclipsed the coat of arms itself as the preferred emblem of identity, so what possibly happened here is that the Disney lineage split during one of those periods, with both branches retaining the same crest but adopting different arms.*

So there you have it—Sleeping Beauty Castle's second most famous “fun fact” (after the golden dot under the archway showing where the original center of the park was, but before the ungilded spire symbolizing that Disneyland will never be complete) turns out to be a big fat lie.** But that's okay, because in the process of learning the truth, you got to learn a little something about heraldry! And with this knowledge under your belt, you can move on, through the Castle archway and into Fantasyland, and come to realize...there's actually a hell of a lot of heraldry in here! Some of it is way off base vis-a-vis genuine heraldic design and usage, but much of it is actually accurate...or at least interestingly inaccurate! So let's explore!

First, turn around and look at the back of the Castle.

Oh...right. There are Diamond Anniversary banners all over it. Go back in time a couple of years and look again:

There we go! Three more coats of arms, and these ones are in full color! Can we get a closer look?

Excellent! The colors are a little washed-out in the closeup view, but we can cross-reference them with the other one to confirm that the arms are as follows, from left to right: 1) Three gold fleurs-de-lis on a blue field; 2) Three black birds (possibly intended to be ravens, or maybe hawks, it's hard to tell) on a white field, with a black chevron (inverted V-shaped band) studded with three crosses running between them; 3) a gold wolf beneath three gold stars on a black field.

(Incidentally, I'm not going to go into blazonry, the jargonistic language of heraldry, at this point, Might be a bit much.)

So what's the deal with these? Why are they here? Strictly speaking...probably just for decoration, to add a bit more medieval “flavor” to the courtyard. Within the fiction of Fantasyland, however, you might suppose that these coats of arms represent vassals of the king who owns the Castle and whose own achievement—carved in stone and gilded, as opposed to merely painted—naturally adorns its front.

Of course, anyone versed in heraldry knows that the achievement of arms over the Castle archway is not that of a king. A king would have the helmet facing the viewer, rather than turned to one side, and wearing a royal crown besides...to say nothing of all the other goodies he'd be entitled to display by virtue of being the head honcho of this feudal state. So scratch that interpretation.

Ultimately, I don't think enough care was put into their presentation to support any self-consistent story that also lines up with authentic heraldic practice. But that doesn't mean they're not interesting—far from it! For example, the arms on the leftmost shield—three gold fleurs-de-lis on a blue field—are the traditional Royal Arms of France. A possible nod to the French origins of the Sleeping Beauty story? A variation on the middle one that omits the crosses has shown up a few times in my searches, usually in association with Wales, but the significance to Disneyland, if any, is anyone's guess.
The rightmost one, though...we'll get back to that one next week, when we track down its match elsewhere in the park!

The next big display of heraldry in Fantasyland is the Castle Heraldry Shoppe itself. I won't attempt to analyze everything, since there's simply too much on view there, but I'll highlight some of the more interesting pieces.

First, there's this shield in the window display:

What's interesting about this coat of arms is that it breaks one of the cardinal rules of heraldry by putting a black lion on a blue field. Crash course in terminology here—traditional hues used in heraldry are called tinctures and are classified as either metals (gold/yellow and silver/white) or colours (red, blue, black, green, and purple). (A third category, the stains, was standardized during the Renaissance.) You're not supposed to pair metal with metal or colour with colour, simply because the values of the tinctures need to be different enough to make the images distinct at a distance or under less-than-ideal conditions of visibility. It's the same principle as the design of road signs. Two things might mitigate the problem with these particular arms.

First, that's a fairly light shade of blue. It may be intended not as the standard royal blue referred to in heraldic language as azure, but instead as bleu celeste—literally “sky blue,” which is sometimes treated as a metal due to its paleness. Secondly, the lion is outlined entirely in gold. You can get away with putting colour on colour or metal on metal if the charge (image) in question is outlined with a tincture from the correct group, providing the necessary contrast.

The Heraldry Shoppe window display also has this shield:

I include this one primarily because it is an example of marshalling, or combining two or more coats of arms in one. A secondary coat of arms appears on the small shield, called an inescutcheon, in the center of the main design. In British heraldry, this usually signifies a marriage between an armigerous man and an heraldic heiress. The wife's ancestral arms appear on the inescutcheon, and thus both coats of arms are preserved for future generations of the blended family. On the European continent, this would be the coat of arms of a sitting monarch or noble, with their personal ancestral arms on the inescutcheon and the arms of their realm(s) on the larger shield.

Ducking inside for a moment, we see this shield prominently displayed inside the glass case with the weapons:

This is almost a dead ringer for the Royal Coat of Arms of Scotland; the only difference is that the lion is black instead of red. (Even the blue coloring of the tongue and claws is the same.) What does that one difference signify? My research hasn't turned up any definite answers...although I did discover a reference to a Clan Buchanan in whose arms both the lion and that complicated border around the shield are black.

Proceeding north through the Fantasyland courtyard, we encounter quite a large and appropriate display of heraldry indeed at the King Arthur Carrousel. Eleven shields hang around the canopy, with matching banners on poles above. What's really exciting about these arms is that they actually belonged to some of King Arthur's knights!

I'll wait...

You don't see the problem?

Here it is: King Arthur and his knights may never have actually existed, and even if they did, it was centuries before the codification of heraldry as we know it. These shields and banners are examples of attributed arms—arms retroactively assigned to ancient personages and figures of myth and legend.*** An impressive roll of arms has been devised for the characters in the Arthurian mythos, and thoughtful designers decided to adorn the Carrousel canopy with a handful of them, bolstering the theme suggested by the name. Unfortunately (and somewhat inexplicably), the rich array of colors we would expect has been flattened into a palette of only three—orange, apparently standing in for red; silver, standing in for both metals; and a rather anemic shade of purple, standing in for purple, blue, black, and perhaps even green, depending upon which coats of arms were intended. Nonetheless, the shields of some of the more prominent knights, such as Lancelot, Gawain, and Kaye, are easily recognizable:

Sir Lancelot (slightly blurry)

Sir Kaye the Seneschal

Sir Gawain

And on that note, I'll wrap up for the week. Join me next week for Part 2 of Heraldry in Fantasyland!

* The word “arms” by itself refers to the basic design, independent of the surface used for display. In a coat of arms that surface is a shield or shield shape, but a person's arms can also be used on, say, a banner.

** Although...come to think of it...the other two aren't true either. That golden dot was never the geographic center of the park; just a survey marker for defining the center of Main Street. And the ungilded spire didn't symbolize anything in particular. (And anyway, it's been gilded for ten years now.)

*** Sort of like how some people try to play Sorting Hat to every fictional character they take even a remote interest in. Only taken way more seriously.