Hippogriff

Also Known As: also Hippogryph; Italian ippogrifo; from Greek hippos, horse, and Italian grifo, griffin
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Italian Mythology, Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It flies faster and further than any horse can run, crossing seas, deserts and mountain ranges without tiring, and it is flesh and blood rather than enchantment.
Role in Mythos: It is the flying steed of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, ridden in turn by the wizard Atlante, the knight Ruggiero and the English duke Astolfo.
Relation to Humans: Only three men ever ride it, and each of them has to be taught how, because the animal answers to a bridle and to nothing else. It carries riders willingly enough once it is bitted, but an unbitted hippogriff goes where it pleases and takes its passenger with it.

Atlante kept it in a stable in the Pyrenees, and the knights who saw it lift off the crag assumed they were watching another of the wizard’s illusions, because everything else about that man was. They were wrong, and Ariosto says so with unusual flatness. The horse was no figment. It was real, it had a real mother, and its mother was a mare.

Its father was a griffin, and there is the whole joke and the whole engine of the animal. Fifteen hundred years before Ariosto, in the eighth of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd named Damon watches the woman he loves marry a man he despises and spits out a curse against a world that has stopped making sense. Now griffins will be mated with mares, he says, and in the age to come timid deer will drink alongside the hounds. He means it as a definition of the impossible. Horses and griffins were held to be natural enemies, and the pairing of the two was the ancient world’s shorthand for a thing that would never, under any arrangement of the heavens, occur. Ariosto read the line, took the impossibility, and put a saddle on it.

The result is a chimerical animal split cleanly down the middle. From the shoulders forward it is its father: hooked beak, feathered crest, broad barred wings, forelegs ending in a raptor’s talons. From the shoulders back it is its mother, all horse, with a horse’s barrel and rump and hind legs and a horse’s tail. Feathers give way to hide somewhere around the withers. It is roughly the size of a warhorse and it can carry one in armour. Ariosto does place its breeding ground, and the location tells you what he thought of its likelihood: the Riphaean hills, a mountain range of classical geography that nobody has ever securely located, somewhere out beyond the frozen sea. Rare, he says. He does not say how rare.

Atlante drew a foal from that distant lair by enchantment and set about breaking it, and the schooling took him a month. Saddle first, then bit, then the gallop to the mark; then the whole formal vocabulary of the riding school, the turns and the caracoles and the collected paces, performed on the ground and then performed again in the air. At the end of the month the wizard had the only real thing in a castle otherwise built entirely out of lies.

Ruggiero takes it from him, more or less by accident, and immediately discovers the flaw in the arrangement. A hippogriff without a proper bridle is not a vehicle. It is an animal with opinions. It carries him east over Spain, over the Strait, over the Atlas, over the whole width of the known world and out past it, and sets him down on an island belonging to the enchantress Alcina, from whose bed he then has to be rescued. Only when he reaches the realm of Alcina’s virtuous sister Logistilla is he given a bit and rein that the creature will actually answer, and taught how to use them. Nobody in the poem ever asks the hippogriff where it would like to go.

Properly bitted, it becomes the most useful object in the epic. Ruggiero, flying home, passes over the island of Ebuda and looks down on a naked woman chained to a rock in a cold sea with the tide working at her ankles. The orc that comes for her is a mass of blind bulk and grinding jaws, and there is no way to fight such a thing from the ground. He fights it from above instead, stooping and climbing and stooping again while the monster snaps at the shadow on the water rather than the rider casting it, and he gets Angelica off the rock. The whole rescue is possible only because the animal under him can hover, bank and climb.

After that it passes to Bradamante, and from her to Astolfo, who needs to reach Ethiopia and then the edge of the world on an errand to recover Orlando’s lost wits. It carries him. It carries him across the sand from Biserta, and later, with the war over and the Nubian army sent home, it carries him from Africa to Sardinia in a single flight, on to Corsica, and then out over the open sea to the salt marshes of Provence.

There Astolfo takes off the saddle and the bit and lets it go. He had been told to. Saint John himself had given the instruction at the world’s end: bring the beast this far and no further, gall it no more with harness, and let it return to its own lair. The horn that had terrified armies fell silent in the same place and at the same hour, its voice taken away with everything else that had been lent to him. The hippogriff goes back, presumably, to whatever cold country it came from. Ariosto never mentions it again.

Its powers are simple and entirely physical: speed no horse can match, an endurance that eats continents, the ability to fly with an armoured man on its back, and the plain fact of being alive, which is why it can be trained at all when nothing else in Atlante’s castle can be trusted. Its limits are equally plain. It obeys the rein and only the rein, so whoever holds the bridle holds the animal, and whoever does not hold it is merely cargo. It cannot be bred to order, being the offspring of two species that loathe each other. And it can be dismissed, which in the end is what happens. The most miraculous creature in the poem is unsaddled on a French beach by a man following instructions, and walks away.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hippogriff?

A hippogriff is a flying creature with the head, beak, crest, wings and taloned forelegs of a griffin and the hindquarters, hind legs and tail of a horse. It was invented by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto for his epic Orlando Furioso, first published in 1516, where it serves as a flying steed. Ariosto is careful to state that it is a natural animal and not a magical illusion.

Who invented the hippogriff, and is it an ancient myth?

Ludovico Ariosto invented it, and it is not ancient. He built the creature out of a line in Virgil’s eighth Eclogue, where a jilted shepherd says that griffins will now be mated with mares, using the pairing of two natural enemies as an image of the impossible. Ariosto took the impossibility literally and gave the offspring a name, a pedigree and a saddle.

Who rides the hippogriff in Orlando Furioso?

Three characters ride it. The wizard Atlante captures and trains it first, the knight Ruggiero takes it from him and uses it to rescue Angelica from a sea monster at Ebuda, and the English duke Astolfo later borrows it from Bradamante for his journey to Ethiopia and the world’s end.

How is the hippogriff controlled?

Only by a bridle. Ruggiero’s first flight is a disaster because he has no bit the animal will answer to, and the hippogriff carries him wherever it wants, depositing him on the enchantress Alcina’s island. The sorceress Logistilla later gives him a bridle the creature obeys and teaches him to steer with it.

What happens to the hippogriff at the end of the poem?

Astolfo releases it. Acting on an instruction given to him by Saint John, he flies it as far as the marshes of Provence, strips off the saddle and bit, and lets it go free to return to its own lair. Ariosto does not mention it again.