Arendelle coat-of-arms
Thank you @tehgfhewe for your interesting question.
These are the coats of arms on the castle wall that you are referring to:
This question has been on the minds of Frozen fans for 12 years and has repeatedly prompted some fans to post further questions and speculations about it on Tumblr, Reddit and elsewhere. Here are two examples from this forum:
[[MORE]]- Why are there different shields on the front of Arendelle’s castle?
- Anyone ever take notice of the coats of arms on the castle walls in OFA?
In May 2020, I (@bigfrozenfan) took up the topic (first link above), researched it further and prepared it for publication on my Tumblr blog. This promptly sparked a wider discussion among many Frozen fans on Tumblr and led to further facts: LINK
As it turned out, many if not all of the 18 shields had counterparts among real-life coats of arms of Norwegian municipalities and were clearly inspired by Norwegian heraldic symbols:
👆Graphics created by @azaffranist
Note that there are (almost) no repetitions when it comes to what county (Norwegian: fylke) the municipalities are located in. All of Norway’s counties are equally represented (except for Oslo and Bergen).
To cut a long story short, it was actually just a simple question, but one that revealed the very complex nature of the possible answers and led to many new questions that (like with so many other Frozen-topics) will likely never be fully answered.
As you can see, your original question has been largely answered (these are indeed the coats of arms of the provinces of Arendelle), but we have of course continued our research and now also included Frozen II and currently available map-material on the Frozenverse from books and previous research by Arendelle Archives, in particular the maps collected by @virtual-winter (all of the posts are published here on our blog, in particular his 2021 project Frozen Geography as well as the 2025 and 2026 entries to the Frozen Map Bonanza.
Here’s an updated version of the castle wall view, taken from a Youtube-video featuring gameplay from the Disney mobile game Frozen Adventures from around 2021 (upscaled by @snowflaketale12):
In the Disney comic collection Storied Places from 2019, only 16 coats of arms are present on the castle walls and four of them are unique to this book and do not appear in the movies.
Why these four are different is unknown, but they also have close counterparts in Norway:
@virtual-winter did some additional research and identified seven additional matches among Norwegian municipalities’ coats of arms. So, here’s the updated final picture, together with @azaffranist’s original graphics:
As you all know, Disney did a lot of research in advance for the production of Frozen, especially in Norway. Unfortunately, we don’t know the full scope of their research or the full level of Norwegian culture, history and geography they had at hand when designing Arendelle. So far, the official map material provided (even in the more detailed books) has been missing out on a lot of details and there are still many unanswered questions about the kingdom of Arendelle (size, history, previous rulers, etc.).
To be honest, it is now questionable whether we will ever get answers to all the burning questions from Disney (I will spare you the extremely long list at this point). With the sequels Frozen III and IV coming out soon, some of us fans are willing to bet that this time, just like before, many questions will be raised but remain unanswered again.
This makes it all the more likely that we will continue to rely on our own research and conclusions, and the (ever-growing) Discord team at Arendelle Archives has dedicated itself to this task. Incidentally, we call ourselves ‘Royal Archivists’ for a reason, and they certainly don’t always have it easy. Sometimes, it turns into a full-time job for some of our projects and would be impossible to manage without the help of many people. Whenever a particularly important discussion is brought up, we might deploy either of these labels to show we mean business:
But we are die-hard Frozen fans and we won’t give up on finding out the facts about the Frozen films and sharing them with other Frozen fans.
We would also like to send a big thank you to all those who send us questions here on our Tumblr blog!
Some of them are so interesting that even we experienced archivists haven’t come across them yet and are really amazed that we haven’t thought of them ourselves.
But let’s stick with the coats of arms of Arendelle for now. I found what I was looking for on Reddit again and would like to add the following information and a few of my own speculations to my 2020 post.
There are currently over 500 coats of arms in Norway, and who knows how many of them have been added, changed or even completely disappeared since 1840, the time in which Frozen is set. Who knows whether Disney has researched this in documents that are not publicly or easily accessible.
Quote from the following website Heraldry-Wiki/Norway:
“Norway is divided into 19 administrative regions, known as counties (fylker, singular: fylke), and 429 municipalities. The capital, Oslo, is considered both a county and a municipality. All counties and municipalities use arms.”
So two things become apparent here:
- The complexity of the Kingdom of Arendelle cannot be denied, and
- azaffranist said at the end of the addition to my post: ‘Arendelle is much bigger than we all thought…’, but given the new information, Arendelle may not be as big as we thought, even though a family in OFA baked a cake in the shape of Norway, leading some of us to believe that Arendelle is a kingdom as big as the entire country.
But more likely is, quote by @virtual-winter: “Going by the dimensions on the Frozen II map, Arendelle is still a small kingdom, many times smaller than Norway. Around 10 000 sq km (3 800 sq mi), about the same size as Lebanon or Kosovo. Yet still much bigger than just the town + castle. My theory is that the coats of arms represent 18 provinces, possibly with the ‘capital’ being a 19th area represented by the crocus shield. 'Provinces’ are actually mentioned on a warning poster for the Duke of Weselton (found at EPCOT) as well as in the story Cold secrets deep down from the novel All is found and would be the equivalent of Norway’s fylken (counties), i.e. a higher administrative level than municipalities or cities.”
It can be assumed that just like Norway, all the settlements within the Kingdom of Arendelle have their own coat of arms, with Arendelle as the capital in the middle, and we only saw 18+1 coats of arms on the castle wall in the films. Only 19 of possibly hundreds outside the borders of this kingdom.
Disney itself always describes Arendelle as a “town” or “village”, but not as a “city” or even a “capital”, as befits a kingdom. Elsa is even sometimes referred to as “Queen of the village” in the Anna & Elsa chapter books. So how small did they really imagine Arendelle to be, or had they planned it to be?
And the next fact to illustrate the scale is the distance to the Northuldra territory. According to research by @virtual-winter, the monoliths near the dam are only about a day’s journey from Arendelle away (110 km, to be precise, as he found out) and can therefore also be reached on foot in a relatively short time (which is also consistent with what we see in Frozen II).
Why the former King Runeard had the dam built there — for whatever reason — also remains one of the many mysteries that intrigue Frozen fans, because the dam would be too far away to supply Arendelle with water (on the maps we have seen, there is no direct waterway from the dam to the agricultural areas around Arendelle), and electricity, or a reason to generate it, does not yet exist in the Frozenverse. See our own speculations on this question here: LINK. The Alta Dam in Troms og Finnmark county in northern Norway was certainly the model for the dam in Frozen II, and unlike the construction and subsequent effects in Frozen II, the generation of electricity was the main reason for building this dam. So is the reason solely Runeard’s expansion of power into the north? Who knows…
As a closing act, I wanted to see how close together the different counties were in real-life Norway:
I was curious to see how near to Arendelle the provinces are, aka their pendent in Norway, and made a little (2 hrs) map test where in Norway all the coat-of-arms are located. It seems most of them are concentrated in southern Norway, in the area of Oslo (Østfold, Aust-Agder, Vest-Agder and Telemark), a few are near of it (Hordaland, Buskerud, Rogaland and Sogn og Fjordane). I think some can be excluded because they are far to the north in Troms, Nordland and Nord- and Sør-Trøndelag and also 2 in Møre og Romsdal.
This map with roughly placed arms is the result:
/BigFrozenFan
