Wyvern

The wyvern is a category of heraldry rather than a creature with a mythology of its own. English and continental armory came to distinguish a dragon, which in strict blazon has four legs, from a wyvern, which has two legs, a pair of wings and a knotted, barbed tail, a distinction developed by heralds from the later Middle Ages, not a difference recognised in older dragon-lore, where the two were not separated.

The word derives, through Old French wivre, from Latin vipera, "viper," pointing to its serpentine root. As a charge the wyvern signifies strength and endurance and, sometimes, war or pestilence, and it appears in the arms of English and Welsh families and towns; the red dragon of Wales (Y Ddraig Goch) is technically a wyvern in form. Because it is defined by blazon, the wyvern has no birth-story, no habitat and no legend attached to it as such, it is a way of drawing a two-legged winged dragon, given a name and a set of rules, and its recent prominence in fantasy gaming has treated that heraldic distinction as though it were a species.

The wyvern is not a folk creature that heralds happened to draw. It is a term in a technical vocabulary. Blazon, the language in which coats of arms are described, has to be exact enough that two artists working from the same words produce the same shield, so it distinguishes creatures by countable features. A dragon has four legs. A wyvern has two, with wings, and a barbed tail. That is the whole of the difference and it is a difference of description rather than of nature.

English practice hardened the distinction more than Continental practice did. In much European heraldry the two-legged form is simply what a dragon looks like, and the separate word is unnecessary. This is why medieval texts that mention dragons cannot be sorted into wyverns and dragons: the category did not exist when they were written and was applied afterwards.

The device has had a long civic life. A winged two-legged beast appears as a standard associated with Wessex and is used to this day by regiments, councils and clubs across the English west and midlands, and it is on the arms of several cities. Its modern visibility in games and fantasy fiction, where it is usually a smaller and less intelligent dragon, is drawn from heraldic illustration rather than from any narrative tradition, because there is no narrative tradition to draw from.