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Kevin Pacey wrote on Wed, Sep 7, 2016 10:12 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

Hi Fergus

Nice pictures of the lovely plastic fairy chess pieces!

Regarding the mysterious representations of the Spider & Dragon pieces, I came up with possible explanations, which are a bit of a stretch of the imagination, though.

The Spider piece could be meant as an abstract representation of a spider's body, minus all 8 of its legs (perhaps for practical reasons); it looks like there may be 4 little stubs near the top of the piece, possibly representing the beginnings of a spider's front 4 legs.

The Dragon piece does look like it has an armoured face mask to me, too. I found a wikipedia illustration of the type of face mask (actually, helmet) that it might represent:

Helmet_(heraldry)

Since this (barred) type of helmet is reserved for nobility, that led me to heraldry, to verify that dragon symbols were ever used for that. ;) Sure enough, yes; see part way down from the start of this link:

Origins_of_modern_heralry

P.S.: A dragon can sometimes mean a soldier who is a musketeer (dragoon is common spelling); muskets have been around a long time, so it's possible a (nobleman) musketeer could have worn such a helmet too, I suppose.


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