Talos by Jorge Luis Borges — Read

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 Arabian Nights, ‘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 traveling 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.