/etymology of Ludovic / Fleur de Lys

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Geoff wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/31742>:

<< Ludwig is quite a noted name. Ludwig van Beethoven comes to mind as
did Ludwig who built Oberschwanstein castle in Bavaria. >>

I believe Hogwarts Castle looks much like Oberschwanstein castle,
except being built on top of a cliff, it has more levels tunnelled
inside the cliff, so it can have underground rooms with windows (in
the cliff face).

<< I've always assumed that JKR's abbreviation of Ludovic to Ludo
was one of her famous(?) plays on words with the Latin because of
his obsession with games. >>

I agree, and conveniently, the "vic" element even sounds like
"victory", as in  your example below. 

<< In public schools, the overall winner of a championship used to
be declared "Victor Ludorum" (= Champion of the Games). Its
etymology is not from "ludo" , the verb, but "ludus" (=game), the noun. >>

Magister Ludi?

The names Ludwig and Louis both come from Chlodovach, the name
modernized as Clovis the Frank. IIRC Frankish is a Germanic language
but France is named after the Franks.

I know of two stories attributing the fleur de lys (its name and its
use as a French royal symbol) to Clovis. In my favorite, he and his
army were on one side of a river and the enemy army was on the other
side. Irises were growing in the river, which Clovis recognized to
mean that the river was shallow, so he ordered his army to ford the
river and attack the enemy (by surprise), so they won the battle and
the war. So Clovis adopted the iris as Fleur de Clovis, later slurred
to Fleur de Lis.

The other story is that Clovis converted himself (and all his subjects
who didn't want to be executed) to Christianity because the Virgin
Mary appeared and handed him a lily, which could go with the name
Fleur de Clovis or the name Fleur de Lily. (A quick peek at Wikipedia
indicates that his wife Clothida orchestrated this.)

IIRC, some years ago I looked this up in an old edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, and it said that Fleur de Lys started as
Fleur de Loys, which was the then spelling of the name of Louis the
somethingth who ordered that all the regalia of his son and heir
Philip Augustus be decorated with that motif. At the time, I was
playing in an frpg campaign in which Philip Augustus was the villain,
so it was a memorable coincidence for him to turn up in an
encyclopedia article that started with motifs in Egyptian tomb
paintings and the frescoes at Knossos.