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Anonymous03/13/26, 11:30No.97701467Lesser known monsters and their folklore
A thread for sharing lesser known folklore of famous classical monsters or lesser known monsters so you can have fresh takes on old traditional monsters in your games/ worldbuilding that isn't just headcanon, but real historical 'fact' as it were
I went down a rabbit hole about the Arimaspians and learnt a bunch of stuff about Griffins.
>They are NOT ancient greek monsters
Now everyone thinks of them as part of the ancient greek pantheon but they're Scythian lore that the Greeks and Romans recorded, thinking they were real creatures in the far east. This is around the 7th century BC.
This is also why no greek heroes ever fight a Griffin or see one themselves, they're a foreign creature they believed to be real but not actually in Greece itself.
>Griffins are the original Dragons
In the sense that griffins are strongly associated with gold. The Arimaspians were a tribe of one eyes Scythian who would battle griffins to steal the gold, a behavior that would be utterly appropriated by the later western dragon myths and fairy tales. Older Griffin depictions also gives them a scaly reptilians neck, kinda like an early basilisk
>Griffins could not fly
Any art of griffins in the ancient world shows them as grounded, and their is no story of them using their wings. They were thought to be as large as wolves or lions and would hunt like mountain lions.
I thought all this was cool, I never knew all this lore about the Griffin monster and I didn't associate them with stuff like gold hoarding, so I'd thought I'd share.
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Anon03/13/26, 12:11No.97701532
so they can't fly... what's the purpose of their wings then? inb4 they're just glorified cocks (my hypothesis is they're indeed mythicised cocks and hens, a bird species originating from the South-East Asia and slowly introduced during Bronze/Iron Ages in Europe)I guess one could turn their wings into weapons (like throwing hardened feathers in a sort of machine gun way, or just entirely scaly and as sharp as swords), or have magical roles etc.
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Anon03/13/26, 12:12No.97701536
Monster discussion for world building and shit I dunno can we really not discuss monsters on /tg/ now?
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Anon03/13/26, 12:34No.97701592
>They are NOT ancient greek monsters
They are, though. We have bronze age depictions of them in Anatolia, Greece and Crete. But the earliest stories are Greek. In the Greek stories, they are placed outside Greece. But the stories themselves are Greek--not Scythian. They might have been Scythian as well, but we don't have any Scythian sources. The Scythians wrote (almost) nothing (there's like a couple inscriptions). We have depictions from all three areas, but the only sources we have where we can say for sure "these are called Griffins" are from the Greeks.
>Griffins are the original Dragons
We have Hittite and Babylonian stories from the bronze age of serpent-like monsters guarding treasure hoards that pre-date the Greek griffin stories by half a millenia.
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Anon03/13/26, 13:51No.97701831
>Any art of griffins in the ancient world shows them as grounded
there's Minoan and early Mycenean art showing wingless gryphons, but those are called kythons or alcas for differenciation. The oldest art pieces representing winged lions or lion-like creatures come from India, me thinks
>Griffins are the original Dragons
there are literal dragons in ancient Greek myth (hell the word "dragon" IS greek) that guarded treasures or holy places
as much as I like to geek about ancient mythology and world building I pronounce OP to be the same bot that keeps on spamming world building threads
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Anon03/14/26, 20:50No.97708343
Well, there’s Blemmyes, Monopods, and those dog-headed guys, what are some other potential races that have existed in folklore and legend for so long, but aren’t very well-known?
