Griffin

Origins

Long before anyone wrote its name, artists were carving the griffin. A beaked, four-legged hybrid appears on Egypt's Two Dog Palette from Hierakonpolis, around 3300–3100 BCE, and griffin-like beasts turn up on Mesopotamian cylinder seals of the same age. By the Bronze Age they guarded the Minoan palace at Knossos, where crested griffins flank the throne room, and Greek workshops of the 7th century BCE fixed bronze griffin heads, beaks open as if screaming, around the rims of great cauldrons.

The literary griffin comes from Central Asia. Aristeas of Proconnesus, a Greek who traveled toward the Altai in the 7th century BCE, wrote a poem, now lost, about the gold-guarding griffins of the far north and the one-eyed Arimaspians who raided their hoards on horseback. Aeschylus and Herodotus preserved the story in the 5th century BCE. Scythian gold ornaments show griffins tearing at horses and stags, and the Roman writers added the rest: Pliny the Elder gave them wings and long ears, Aelian gave them black backs and red breasts, and Isidore of Seville declared them the horse's great enemy. Medieval Christians read the union of eagle and lion as a symbol of Christ's two natures, and Dante has a griffin draw the chariot of the Church in the Purgatorio.

From there the griffin flew into heraldry, where it became a sign of strength and courage on the arms of Genoa and Pomerania, and into literature. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516) made the hippogriff, the offspring of a griffin and a mare, a knight's winged mount. Lewis Carroll's Gryphon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a lazy, Cockney-voiced guide who takes Alice to hear the Mock Turtle's story.

Into the dungeon

Griffons (D&D uses the French spelling) and hippogriffs were both in the first monster list of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The game kept Isidore's detail that griffons love horseflesh, which makes them dangerous neighbors for mounted adventurers, and Ariosto's idea that such beasts could be ridden: later rulebooks let a griffon captured young be trained as a flying steed. That turned a gold-guardian into a prize, and the flying mount became a standard reward in tabletop campaigns.

Video games took the steed idea furthest. Blizzard's Warcraft II (1995) gave the Alliance gryphon riders from the Wildhammer dwarves, and World of Warcraft (2004) made the gryphon master a fixture of every Alliance town, carrying players along fixed flight paths across Azeroth while Horde players rode wyverns. Heroes of Might and Magic and its sequels fielded griffins as recruitable troops, and they appear as mounts, foes or summons throughout fantasy games.

Variations

The hippogriff is the most successful offshoot: J. K. Rowling's proud Buckbeak in Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) made the creature beloved to a generation, and her Harry Potter books also name a whole school house for the griffin. Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean series gives griffins to the fliers of Poromiel as a rival to the dragons of Navarre. Heraldry supplies stranger kin: the sea-griffin with a fish's tail, the opinicus with a camel's tail, and the wingless "male griffin" or keythong of British arms.

The griffin sits beside the Phoenix and the Unicorn as one of the classical composites that fantasy never stopped using. Where the Dragon became the ultimate enemy, the griffin became, more often than not, the ally you ride.