The Griffin, Guardian of Gold

The story

Lion below the shoulders, eagle above, the griffin combines the two most feared creatures of land and sky into one: strong enough, medieval writers held, to carry off a fully grown horse and its rider in its talons. This border miniature catches the confrontation head-on — a mounted knight, sword raised overhead, closing on a griffin that has already turned to meet him, wings still spread from flight. Bestiaries placed the griffin among the beasts of the far north, guarding rich veins of gold in the mountains from any human who came near, which made it, for medieval readers, both a genuine zoological curiosity and a byword for jealously hoarded treasure. Unlike most of the Aberdeen Bestiary's animals, no griffin folio survives in that manuscript at all — the leaf was lost centuries ago — so this piece is drawn instead from the Rochester Bestiary, its gold-ground cousin.