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Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
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.