Explore "The Hippogriff" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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, 18):