Wyvern
A winged dragon with only two legs, a creature of heraldry: in English arms the two-legged wyvern and the four-legged dragon are different beasts.
Meaning
The wyvern (WY-vern, as Dictionary.com respells it) is the two-legged dragon of heraldry. A. C. Fox-Davies, in A Complete Guide to Heraldry (1909), puts the difference plainly: a wyvern’s head is the same as a dragon’s, but “The wyvern has only two legs, the body curling away into the tail”, while the English dragon has four. He adds that other countries mostly call this two-legged form a dragon, so the distinction is an English one. The name comes through Middle English wyver from the Old French guivre and the Latin for viper, according to Dictionary.com. Our drawing follows the heraldic wyvern, wings raised behind (endorsed) and tail barbed.
Origin and history
John Vinycomb describes the wyvern as a flying serpent with two legs like an eagle’s and a barbed serpent’s tail, and finds one on a standard in the Bayeux Tapestry. Old heralds, he writes, called these monsters emblems of pestilence, viciousness and envy, and used them in arms for the overthrow of tyranny or of a vicious enemy. A wyvern without wings is a lindworm.
In Milan the serpent, or guivre, in the arms of the Visconti was said to commemorate a lord of the family who killed a fiery dragon living in a cave under the church of St Denis.
Wyvern or dragon?
In English heraldry the count of legs decides it: two for the wyvern, four for the dragon. Fox-Davies notes that “the wyvern appears to be the form more frequently met with under the name of a dragon in other countries”. The cockatrice is the same beast with a cock’s head.
Wyverns in English arms
Two wyverns support the arms of the Duke of Marlborough, usually sitting erect on their tails and holding the shield with both claws, Fox-Davies writes, and Vinycomb gives the crest of the town of Leicester as a wyvern without legs.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeSelkieIn the folklore of Orkney, Shetland and the Scottish islands, a seal that can take off its skin and live on land as a man or woman, and must return to the sea if it finds the skin again.
- The same shape in Hindu deities and their symbolsMuruganMurugan, also called Kartikeya, Skanda and Subrahmanya, is the son of Shiva and Parvati, worshipped above all by Tamil Hindus. He holds the vel, a leaf-bladed spear, rides a peacock and has the rooster as his emblem.
See also
Basilisk and cockatrice, Red dragon of Wales, Minotaur, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra.
Sources
- A Complete Guide to Heraldry (A. C. Fox-Davies, 1909), Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1909), Project Gutenberg, chapter XIV, The Wyvern, pp. 226–227
- Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art (John Vinycomb, 1906), John Vinycomb, Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art, with Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), Project Gutenberg, The Wyvern, pp. 98–101
- Wyvern (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Wyvern” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry, pronunciation and origin
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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