June 27, 2017
Mythical Horses
They say that in fiction, we don’t really create anything new, we draw on our memory of things we have seen to create something new: Like the Sevokloi in Web of Deception – they are like squids with reptile bodies (leather) adapted for a desert terrain and having two steadying legs like an overgrown insect. I love creating creatures that don’t really exist. I also like to pretend (in my stories) that other mythical creatures are real: like unicorns and pegasi. (The people of my world call them “skyhorses”.)
In our house, each of us have different theories on how the stories of mythical creatures like flying horses (pegasi) and horned horses (unicorns) came about.
My personal theory is that someone in ancient times came across a skeleton of a horse with a bone spear stuck through its skull. Since it was bone, they thought it was part of the skeleton (maybe they’d never seen a horse!) and voila, stories spread of a horned horse!
For pegasi, maybe there were some pre-Ionian shepherds out when Elijah rose up to heaven (it says “there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire… and Elijah went up by whirlwind to heaven”) and those shepherds said “Look Joe! Flying horses of fire driving a chariot of fire!” (tada, pegasi!) Then Joe says “maybe that’s how the sun goes across the sky.” Boom! Now there’s the Greek story of Helios driving flying horses in his flaming chariot.
Rebeccah thinks that flying horses and horned horses were mutants of the horse kind. An isolated, now extinct, species of horse in ancient times used an overgrown tooth to dig the ground like cracker cows and wild hogs looking for food. These were unicorns. A few, eohippus sized members of the horse kind, flew-hopped about like archaeopteryx with tiny wings. These ended up being called pegasi!
However you explain the origin of mythical creatures in fantasy stories, they do make the stories far more interesting. (They also let us know that the story world we are entering is not real – so we can expect many strange things.)
I love mythical creatures. I like pretending to create something new. And it’s fun to theorize about how people created them.
Thanks for reading!
Type at you later…
~Nancy Tart