Record #135
Talos
A gigantic bronze guardian patrolling Crete with destructive force.
Original Text
Living beings made of metal or stone make up some of fantastic zoology’s most alarming species. Let us recall the angry bulls with brass feet and horns that breathed flames and that Jason, helped by the magic arts of Medea, yoked to the plough; Condillac’s psychological statue of sensitive marble; the boatman in the ArabianNights, ‘a man of brass with a tablet of lead on his breast inscribed with talismans and characts’, who rescued the third Kalandar from the Magnet Mountain; the ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’, which a goddess in William Blake’s mythology caught in silken nets for the delight of her lover; and the metal birds who nursed Ares.
To this list we may also add a draft animal, the swift wild boar Gullinbursti, whose name means ‘golden-bristled’ . The mythologist Paul Herrmann writes: This living piece of metalwork came from the forge of skilful dwarfs; they threw a pigskin into the fire and drew out a golden boar with the power of travelling on land, sea, and air. However dark the night, there is always light enough in the boar’s path.’ Gullinbursti pulled the chariot of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, marriage, and fertility.
And then there is Talos, the warden of the island of Crete. Some consider this giant the work of Vulcan or of Daedalus; Apollonius of Rhodes tells us about him in his Argonautica (IV, I638-48):
And Talos, the man of bronze, as he broke off the rocks from the hard cliff, stayed them from fastening hawsers to the shore, when they came to the roadstead of Dicte’s haven. He was of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung from ash-trees, the last left among the sons of the gods; and the son of Cronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze. Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein; and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin.
It was through this vulnerable heel, of course, that Talos met his end. Medea bewitched him with a hostile glance, and when the giant again began heaving boulders from his cliff, ‘he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the ichor gushed forth like melted lead; and not long thereafter did he stand towering on the jutting cliff’ .
In another version of the myth, Talos, burning red-hot,
would put his arms around a man and kill him. The bronze giant this time met death at the hands of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri,who were led on by the sorceress Medea.
To this list we may also add a draft animal, the swift wild boar Gullinbursti, whose name means ‘golden-bristled’ . The mythologist Paul Herrmann writes: This living piece of metalwork came from the forge of skilful dwarfs; they threw a pigskin into the fire and drew out a golden boar with the power of travelling on land, sea, and air. However dark the night, there is always light enough in the boar’s path.’ Gullinbursti pulled the chariot of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, marriage, and fertility.
And then there is Talos, the warden of the island of Crete. Some consider this giant the work of Vulcan or of Daedalus; Apollonius of Rhodes tells us about him in his Argonautica (IV, I638-48):
And Talos, the man of bronze, as he broke off the rocks from the hard cliff, stayed them from fastening hawsers to the shore, when they came to the roadstead of Dicte’s haven. He was of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung from ash-trees, the last left among the sons of the gods; and the son of Cronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze. Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein; and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin.
It was through this vulnerable heel, of course, that Talos met his end. Medea bewitched him with a hostile glance, and when the giant again began heaving boulders from his cliff, ‘he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the ichor gushed forth like melted lead; and not long thereafter did he stand towering on the jutting cliff’ .
In another version of the myth, Talos, burning red-hot,
would put his arms around a man and kill him. The bronze giant this time met death at the hands of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri,who were led on by the sorceress Medea.