Heraldry of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick

"The Duchy of Grand Fenwick?" I hear you ask.

Well, yes, but ...

The fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick was stated to be the smallest independent country in Europe, in the novel The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberly.

In 1959, the novel was made into a movie of the same name, starring Peter Sellers (in three different roles), Jean Seberg, William Hartnell, and David Kossoff.

The plot of both the book and the movie is: An impoverished very small nation declares a war on the United States of America hoping to lose and then get financial support, but things don't go according to plan.

In the book, the arms of the Duchy are said to be a red double-headed eagle displayed, with two small scrolls held one in each beak, one with the word Aye (or here in the movie, Yea) and the other with the word Nay.

Unwilling, apparently, to leave it at something so relatively simple, the movie includes a much grander, far more complicated, coat of arms, complete with quartered arms on the breast of the eagle, complete with inescutcheon, along with other shields placed on the eagle's wings, as well as three crowns à la Russia. All, I have to assume, on the theory that a duchy with "grand" in its name should have an equally "grand" coat of arms.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the arms of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, as appeared in various scenes in the 1959 movie, The Mouse That Roared:

There was also another coat of arms that appeared in the movie on the side of a building in the Grand Duchy. It was very crudely painted, and, frankly, looks a little too much like something from a bucket shop to be real arms.

Nonetheless, there it was, and so I include it here for your perusal:

It is a quartered coat. I cannot make out what the charge in the first quarter is supposed to be. It looks vaguely like a seated human figure facing dexter, but that is only a guess. The second and third quarters appear to be Argent a lion passant gules, and the fourth quarter is an argent bend on a field of indeterminate color.

The shield is surmounted by a gentleman's helm which is so drawn as to be impossible for anyone to have actually worn (i.e., no one could get their head through that neck!), flanked by what looks like palm branches trying to be mantling. Above the helm is something golden, but impossible to make out what it is supposed to be.

Be that as it may, this is what the 1956 filmmakers used for heraldry in the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick.