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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesBorn of a griffin and a mare, Ariosto’s hippogriff carries knights above mountains and seas, sometimes far from where they mean to go.
Also recorded as Hippogryph, Ippogrifo
Bradamante has broken the enchanted prison and found the man she loves. Then Ruggiero climbs onto the waiting hippogriff. A few running strides become a flight, and she can only watch as the rider she has just freed disappears into the sky. [3]
Read the manuscriptLudovico Ariosto’s ippogrifo, called a hippogriff or hippogryph in English, belongs to Orlando Furioso, a poem in which knights travel between war, love and enchantment. Its griffin father and mare mother give it a recognizable body with an unfamiliar possibility: a horseman can leave the road and continue through the air. William Stewart Rose’s English translation calls its principal rider Rogero; the Italian name, used here, is Ruggiero. [3]
The poem gives the animal a distant home in the Riphaean mountains, beyond the frozen ocean. Atlante, the enchanter who raised Ruggiero, brings the young creature from its lair by magic and spends a month training it. It learns to bear saddle and bit and perform a horse’s manoeuvres on the ground and in the air. Amid the deceptive apparitions Atlante produces, the narrator insists that this animal is real: the mount has a body, a birthplace and an education within the romance. [3]
The first sight of the hippogriff stops a household in its tracks. People crowd to door and window as if a comet or eclipse were overhead. Broad wings of several colours carry an armoured rider westwards, until horse and man disappear among the mountains. Later, Ariosto gives the close view: a beak, crest, wings and griffin forefeet attached to the remaining body of a mare. The distant marvel becomes an animal a knight can saddle. [3]
Bradamante comes to Atlante’s stronghold with a ring that defeats enchantment. When he bares his shield, she closes her eyes and falls as though its light has overcome her. He brings the hippogriff down, hangs the covered shield at the saddle and approaches with a chain. She springs up, throws him down and binds him. Her captive is an old man whose strength is no match for hers. She spares him and demands to know why he has imprisoned so many people. [3]
Atlante says he foresees Ruggiero’s death through treachery after becoming a Christian. To protect the young man, he has shut him away with knights and ladies, abundant food, fine clothes, games and music. He offers Bradamante the shield, the mount and all the other prisoners if she will leave Ruggiero behind. She refuses. At the castle threshold Atlante overturns a marked stone and breaks the vessels of fire beneath it. Walls and towers vanish, and the captives find themselves on bare rock. Some regret the comfortable lives they have lost. [3]
Ruggiero greets Bradamante joyfully, but their reunion lasts only until the company descends to the hippogriff. As she reaches for its rein, it flies a little way off. The knights scatter to catch it; finally it settles near Ruggiero. He abandons his ordinary horse, Frontino, mounts the winged one and uses his spurs. The short gallop turns into an ascent he cannot stop. Bradamante watches until he vanishes, then takes charge of Frontino. Atlante has arranged the departure: the fallen prison has been replaced by a journey out of Europe. [3]
In Canto VI the weary hippogriff circles down towards an island of meadows, flowers and clear streams. Ruggiero jumps off when they are near the ground, holds the rein against another ascent and ties the animal to a myrtle. He removes his helmet and gauntlets and cools himself by a spring. Something frightens the mount. It pulls against its tether so violently that leaves fall, and a voice begins to complain from the tree. Ruggiero hurries to untie the animal and apologizes. [3]
Atlante carries two instruments whose powers are separate from his mount. His book creates the appearance of blows he has not struck; his shield, normally covered in crimson silk, overwhelms those who see its light. The hippogriff supplies movement. Keeping those powers distinct is crucial to the rescues: a rider can inherit the enchanter’s equipment without inheriting either his purpose or his skill at directing the animal. [3]
The island’s beauty makes its inhabitants difficult to recognize. Ruggiero can see grass, flowers and a convenient tree without seeing a person in distress. The hippogriff’s startled movement interrupts that mistake: a place chosen for rest begins to speak. Astolfo’s account makes the surrounding pleasures newly troubling. A landscape can be lovely to someone arriving from the air and still be a prison to those who cannot leave it. [3]
A griffin is part of the hippogriff’s parentage, while Pegasus offers a comparison with a winged horse from Greek tradition. The difference is visible in the forefeet and beak as well as in the stories. Ariosto’s creature brings the griffin into a new family, giving the romance both an airborne mount and a body that recalls its other parent. [3][5]
Control passes unevenly between the people in these adventures. Atlante confines Ruggiero out of love, Bradamante insists on releasing him, and Logistilla teaches him to direct his own course. Yet command of the hippogriff does not teach him to respect Angelica’s choice. He treats her departure as an injury to himself. The ring that first protected her eyes also allows her to leave his sight, carrying the rescue beyond the ending he would have chosen. [3]
Orlando Furioso first appeared in 1516 and reached its final, expanded form in 1532. Rose’s nineteenth-century English translation follows the forty-six-canto poem. Readers moving between it and Italian names will also find Bradamante called Bradamant and Atlante called Atlantes. The translation’s spellings belong to the same characters, not to additional knights or rival versions of the enchanter. [3][1][2]
Thomas Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne, published in 1863, retells the castle rescue and Angelica’s flight in prose. The change in Brittany is substantial. Bulfinch says Ruggiero lands to let Angelica rest; he omits the explicit sexual pursuit in Ariosto. Her disappearance remains, as do his accusations and the missing mount, but the danger that explains her urgency has gone. Bulfinch even calls her cruel. A reader who knows only this adaptation is given a different reason to judge the same escape. [4][3]
Antoine-Louis Barye compressed the airborne rescue into a bronze, Roger and Angelica Mounted on a Hippogriff. The Metropolitan Museum dates the model to about 1840 and its cast to about 1845–1850. Barye’s catalogues offered small bronzes to collectors, turning an adventure spread across cantos into an object for a room. The mounted passengers above the sea monster hold the rescue at its triumphant moment, before the uneasy landing. [6][3]
In a 2016 British Academy essay, Italian literature scholar Stefano Jossa follows the hippogriff into later fantasy, including the Harry Potter books. He argues that readers can recognize connections between works even when direct borrowing is uncertain. His discussion treats Bulfinch as a possible intermediary, rather than demonstrating a documented reading history. The familiar creature can lead a reader backwards into a considerably less reassuring romance. [5]
Astolfo eventually becomes another of the hippogriff’s riders, but one famous destination belongs to a different vehicle. In Canto XXXIV, Saint John takes him towards the Moon to recover Orlando’s lost reason. They travel in the chariot once used by Elijah, drawn by four horses redder than flame. The hippogriff belongs to Astolfo’s larger journey; it does not make this ascent. [3]
Its own ending comes in Canto XLIV. Astolfo flies from Africa to Sardinia, then Corsica, and finally Provence. There he follows Saint John’s instruction: the animal is to be freed from saddle and bit and allowed to return to its lair. After so many journeys shaped by human wishes, the mount receives a destination of its own. The last act of care is to stop riding it. [3]
Rose’s Orlando Furioso supplies the encounters and final release. Bulfinch’s “Bradamante and Rogero” and “The Orc” offer the prose comparison. The British Library dates the poem’s publication stages; the Met identifies Barye’s bronze. Jossa discusses later literary connections. Canto XXXIV.68–70 identifies the Moon-bound chariot. [3][4][1][2][6][5]
The British Library · Google Arts & Culture / The British Library
Complete institutional description; shelfmark C.7.d.7, Venice edition 1772
Checked 2026-10-11
The British Library · The British Library Archives and Manuscripts
Contents: French verse translation of first five books; final Italian form published in 1532
Checked 2026-10-11
Ludovico Ariosto · Project Gutenberg · English translation, 1823–1831; final forty-six-canto poem · Translated by William Stewart Rose
IV.4–50; VI.17–56; X.64–74 and 90–115; XI.1–15; XXXIV.59–70; XLIV.23–25
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑The myrtle is Astolfo, a knight whom the enchantress Alcina loved and then transformed when she tired of him. He explains that her discarded lovers inhabit the landscape as plants, animals and streams. Ruggiero cannot undo the transformation, but he asks how to reach her virtuous sister Logistilla. His first landing has brought him to another world of captivity. Later, at Logistilla’s court, he finds Astolfo restored to human shape. Logistilla prepares a suitable bit and teaches Ruggiero how to guide the hippogriff upwards, downwards, in circles and into a hovering pause. Now he can choose a route. [3]
A later flight takes him over Angelica, chained naked to a rock as food for a sea monster. He strikes the creature with his lance, but its body resists like stone. The monster follows the shadow of the hippogriff’s wings over the water, abandoning the woman while Ruggiero attacks again. Its tail lashes up so much spray that he fears the soaked wings will no longer support them. Bradamante’s ring has since reached him through the enchantress Melissa. He turns to the shield, first putting the protective ring on Angelica’s finger so its glare cannot harm her. [3]
The uncovered light overturns the monster. Ruggiero keeps striking, still unable to wound it, until Angelica begs him to release her before it recovers. He leaves the attack, unbinds her and lifts her behind him. The hippogriff carries them to Brittany, where they land in a meadow by a fountain. Here Ruggiero’s desire becomes a new danger. As he struggles to remove his armour, Angelica recognizes the ring on her finger, stolen from her long before. She slips it into her mouth and disappears. [3]
Ruggiero searches and reaches into empty air, accusing her of ingratitude. Angelica is already on her way to a herdsman’s shelter, where she can find food, clothing and rest. In the evening she takes a mare and sets out again, intending to regain her eastern kingdom. Ruggiero eventually turns back to his mount. The hippogriff has slipped its bit and flown away. He gathers his equipment and continues on foot; the rescuer has lost both the woman he meant to possess and the creature that made the rescue possible. [3]
Thomas Bulfinch · Project Gutenberg · 1863
“Bradamante and Rogero”; beginning of “Astolpho and the Enchantress”; complete “The Orc” hippogriff/Angelica episode
Checked 2026-10-11
Stefano Jossa · The British Academy · 2016-03-23
Complete essay body; intertextual reuse argument
Jossa’s proposed routes of influence are literary interpretations; the encounters here follow Ariosto’s poem.
Checked 2026-10-11
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts · The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Object 10.133.1; complete curatorial text and primary object photograph
Checked 2026-10-11