The Wyvern is the two-legged winged dragon of European heraldry and legend: a dragon-like creature with a pair of eagle’s legs, two great bat-wings, a serpentine body, and a barbed, often venomous tail — distinguished from the four-legged [european-dragon] by its two legs — a fierce and martial beast of war, pestilence, and valour, especially beloved in British heraldry. It is the two-legged dragon, the winged serpent of the coat of arms.
The Two-Legged Dragon
The Wyvern (from Old French wivre, “viper,” from Latin vipera) is a kind of dragon distinguished above all by its anatomy: where the classic heraldic dragon has four legs and two wings, the wyvern has only two legs — the clawed legs of an eagle or a bird of prey — together with its two wings, and a long, coiling, serpentine body ending in a barbed or arrow-pointed tail, which is often venomous (echoing its “viper” name). It is generally smaller and more serpentine than the great four-footed dragon, swift and vicious.
The Beast of War and Pestilence
In the medieval imagination the wyvern was a creature of war, envy, pestilence, and aggression — a fierce and dangerous monster, associated with the spreading of disease and with martial ferocity. Tales of wyverns ravaging the countryside, poisoning wells and air with their venomous breath, and being slain by heroes are found across Europe; like the dragon, the wyvern was a monster to be overcome. Its venomous, stinging tail was its most characteristic weapon, and its association with the viper marked it as a poisonous and deadly foe.
The Heraldic Beast
The wyvern’s greatest fame is in heraldry, where it is one of the most important and frequently used of all dragon-forms — especially in British and Welsh heraldry, where the heraldic “dragon” is very often technically a wyvern (two-legged). It signified strength, valour, protection, and overthrow of the enemy, and it appears on the arms and badges of many families, cities, and military units, and famously in the dragon-standards and devices of England and Wessex. (The modern distinction between the four-legged “dragon” and the two-legged “wyvern” was largely fixed by later heraldic and fantasy convention.) In the Wyvern, the European imagination gave form to the two-legged dragon — the winged, serpent-tailed, venomous beast of war and pestilence, fierce monster and proud heraldic emblem, the winged serpent of the coat of arms.