Record #79
Hippogriff
A winged horse-griffon hybrid embodying impossible wonder and freedom.
Original Text
To signify impossibility or incongruence, Virgil spoke of breeding horses with griffons. Four centuries later, his commentator Servius explained that the griffon is an animal which in the top half of its body is an eagle and in the bottom half a lion. To strengthen his text he added that they detest horses. In time, the expression Jungentur jam grypes equis (‘To cross griffons with horses’) came to be proverbial; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto, remembering it, invented the Hippogriff. Eagle and lion are united in the griffon of the ancients; horse and griffon in Ariosto’s Hippogriff, which makes it a second generation monster or invention. Pietro Micheli notes that it is more harmonious than the winged horse Pegasus.
A detailed description of the Hippogriff, written as for a handbook of fantastic zoology, is given in Orlando Furioso (IV, I8):
The steed is not imagined but real, for it was sired by a Griffon out of a mare: like its father’s were its feathers and wings, its forelegs, head, and beak; in all its other parts it resembled its mother and was called Hippogriff; they come, though rarely, from the Rhiphaean Mountains, far beyond the icebound seas.
The first mention of the strange beast is deceptively casual (II, 37):
And by the Rhone I came upon a man in arms, reining in a great winged horse.
Other stanzas give us the wonder of this creature that flies. The following (IV, 4) is well known:
E vedel’oste e tutta la famiglia,
E chi a finestre e chi fuor ne la via,
Tener levati al ciel gliocchi e le ciglia, Come l’Ecclisse o la Cometa sia.
Vede la Donna un’altamaraviglia,
Che di leggier creduta non saria:
Vede passar un gran destrieroalato,
Che porta in aria un cavalliero armato.
[And she saw the landlord and all his house, and some at the windows and some in the street, their eyes and brows lifted to the sky as though it were an Eclipse or Comet. The Lady saw a wonder on high not easily to be believed: she saw pass over a great winged steed, bearing through the air a knight in arms.]
Astolpho, in one of the last cantos, unsaddles and unbridles the Hippogriff and sets it free.
A detailed description of the Hippogriff, written as for a handbook of fantastic zoology, is given in Orlando Furioso (IV, I8):
The steed is not imagined but real, for it was sired by a Griffon out of a mare: like its father’s were its feathers and wings, its forelegs, head, and beak; in all its other parts it resembled its mother and was called Hippogriff; they come, though rarely, from the Rhiphaean Mountains, far beyond the icebound seas.
The first mention of the strange beast is deceptively casual (II, 37):
And by the Rhone I came upon a man in arms, reining in a great winged horse.
Other stanzas give us the wonder of this creature that flies. The following (IV, 4) is well known:
E vedel’oste e tutta la famiglia,
E chi a finestre e chi fuor ne la via,
Tener levati al ciel gliocchi e le ciglia, Come l’Ecclisse o la Cometa sia.
Vede la Donna un’altamaraviglia,
Che di leggier creduta non saria:
Vede passar un gran destrieroalato,
Che porta in aria un cavalliero armato.
[And she saw the landlord and all his house, and some at the windows and some in the street, their eyes and brows lifted to the sky as though it were an Eclipse or Comet. The Lady saw a wonder on high not easily to be believed: she saw pass over a great winged steed, bearing through the air a knight in arms.]
Astolpho, in one of the last cantos, unsaddles and unbridles the Hippogriff and sets it free.