Picture in your mind’s eye, if you will, a griffin. In what context(s) do you visualize this mythological hybrid beast? As depicted in a medieval bestiary? Ornamenting an item of clothing? As part of heraldic iconography? As the mascot of a sports team? Incorporated into the name of a pub or bar? Perhaps in relation to Harry Potter’s wizarding house in Hogwarts? Taken further, what meaning(s) do you ascribe to this creature? Avarice, vengeance, drunkenness, predatory fierceness, protection, martial and/or divine power, loyalty, connotations of royalty, or perhaps a sense of quaint and cozy fantasy?
Whatever your response(s), you are correct. As A.L. McClanan argues in her thoughtful examination, the visual image of the griffin has been employed by a plethora of cultures for at least the past 5,000 years in a long and circuitous series of appropriations, ultimately making it a blank cipher upon which endless meanings can be imposed. The image and meaning of a griffin are thus never merely that of a griffin, nor has the beast ever been easy to pin down with final meanings. Each iteration is saddled with its own imposed truth, with this meaning existing simultaneously amid other truths imposed on yet other cultural applications of the beast. Replete with 109 images, the vast majority in color, McClanan’s text focuses predominantly on visual depictions of griffins from an art historical perspective. This emphasis on studying images of griffins as opposed to focusing on examples of the beast in print-texts is due, according to the author, to a distinct “primacy” of “visual works in constructing the concept of the griffin” (35). A prolific image employed by many cultures, the griffin’s very ubiquity and easy facility of use has made it into a kind of ready-made symbol, although what this symbology might mean is largely in the hands of the artist. The result is that the meaning of the griffin as a cultural symbol has become a kind of moving target. As McClanan notes, Aelian “opines [in his third-century text On the Characteristics of Animals] that to see a griffin is to know one, affirming that the griffin looks ‘just as artists portray it in pictures and sculpture’” (35). Rather than a symbol whose meaning has simply evolved over time and place, the griffin is an image which has been wrested from one context to the next by an endless series of artists, with the meaning of each accruing by association with other cultural symbols within its newly acquired cultural backdrop. The griffin’s symbolic fluidity aptly exemplifies Lewis Carroll’s flippantly authoritative explanation that “‘If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture’” (172). In this manner, if the image of the griffin is itself a motif, it is perhaps a motif of a motif, as no base symbol exists across time and culture aside from its inherent malleability of meaning. As McClanan observes, “The griffin motif was and is, above all else, highly adaptable and highly transportable, readily slipping into the visual culture of many societies, its meanings ever open to renegotiation." “Given this multiplicity, one wonders if their [the griffins’] role at times can be as a kind of exclamation mark, an amplifying frame for whatever the griffin is represented alongside” (174; 9). In other words, with no intrinsic meaning of its own, an image of a griffin is never JUST a griffin.
McClanan, professor of Art History at Oregon’s Portland State University, notes that “No art-historical monograph has looked at griffin imagery beyond the confines of a specific period” (6), a scholarly void which the text handily fills. McClanan’s tapestrial overview demonstrates the many ways that images of “griffins [have been] prominently included in ancient art extending back to the fourth millennium BCE” (24), with “examples encircl[ing] much of the global north, encompassing Europe, Asia and North America” (171). As its title connotes, Griffinology: The Griffin’s Place in Myth, History and Art is as much a study of how the griffin has been employed in art and culture throughout history as it is a discussion of how this iconography has been presented, studied, and interpreted. Chapters 1-14 trace the circuitous routes that the image of the griffin has traversed over time, space, cultures, and meanings, with chapter 3 alone “ranging from Minoan Akrotiri to Iron Age Denmark to post-Mauryan India” (44). However, McClanan’s goal is not to be encyclopedic, but rather to address the question that naturally arises: “Their presence over vast periods of time and in such varied places makes us wonder: how and why did the griffin become so popular across different cultures and forms of media?” (6).
While Griffinology focuses primarily on the image of the griffin, brief forays into historical instances of griffins in print-text support McClanan’s overall argument. McClanan points readers to the description of griffins in Aeschylus’s fifth-century BCE tragedy Prometheus Bound: “‘Beware of the sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus that do not bark, the gryphons, and the one-eyed Arimaspian folk, mounted on horses, who dwell about the flood of Pluto’s stream that flows with gold. Do not approach them’” (30). This colorful warning is taken up by Herodotus, whose Histories include “five mentions of griffins,” with three of these “doubl[ing] down on the Prometheus Bound characterization of gold-guarding, Arimaspi-fighting, foreign-dwelling beings” (30). Rightly describing this cultural narrative as a “pretty threadbare story,” McClanan observes that “The equivalent in our time might be a TikTok rolling through its endless loop every few seconds, compared to a feature-length movie.” She posits that “Perhaps [… the] very simplicity” of this repeated narrative, “– griffins guard gold from Arimaspi – contributed to its adaptability and ongoing usage for centuries to follow” (31).
McClanan deepens this argument, observing that “Such fluid transmissions from past to present make clear the tenacity of griffins as a visual motif, and the way in which the insistence on foregrounding the textual tradition—most often in the work of Herodotus and a small cluster of classical authors—has obscured and flattened [the] meanings” of the griffin (77), thus helping to account for the griffin’s facile transmission across cultures. As McClanan concludes, “The breadth of the griffin motif’s cultural dispersal and the way in which one composite can be so readily reworked is ultimately the most important story that emerges from gathering these far-flung examples. I would say that this ambiguity is not a problem; rather, it’s the whole point” (174).
Greatly enhanced by a thoughtful introduction and epilogue in which the primary theoretical arguments about the image of the griffin as a symbolically blank cipher are laid out in clear jargon-free prose, the text also contributes to other scholarly conversations. For example, McClanan weighs in on what she describes as the misconception that the classical Greeks invented the conception of griffins from fossils, as put forth in historian and classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Showing that “the griffin motif first appeared in art of the Bronze Age among the first groups of people to live together in the earliest cities” as well as “the astonishing richness of composite animal imagery already in the late fourth millennium, featuring many leonine-avian hybrids” (12), McClanan demonstrates evidence of griffin imagery having been “part of the menagerie commonly depicted in Bronze and Iron Age eastern Mediterranean visual culture” (34), arguing that the proliferation of these earlier griffin images needs to be taken into account as a pervasive influence upon the origins of classical Greek griffins. McClanan’s text reminds us of the potential dangers of what she asserts as “folklore’s orientation towards the verbal over the visual” (34), with an underlying theme of Griffinology being an acknowledgment of the benefits of combining the visual with verbal and print records of a subject in order to attain a greater totality in the tapestry of evidence.
McClanan also takes to task a potential short sightedness in her own discipline, noting that the “vast array of images [of griffins], whether on wine vessels, belt buckles, tattoos or weaponry, often falls beneath the attention of art history. Because of a scholarly habit of privileging texts over images, even within art history, important aspects of how and why griffins appear in art and particular routes of transmission across cultures have before been neglected” (9). Once again, McClanan’s primary emphasis in analyzing the visual record enhances the depth of her argument. Further, folklorists will recognize her willingness to study griffin imagery within the quotidian geographies of craft, such as those on “wine vessels, belt buckles, tattoos or weaponry” as a strength. Folklore’s longstanding valorization of the vernacular can run counter to “art history’s long tradition of undervaluing anonymous works and those tainted with the label of ‘decoration’ or ‘craft’” (174). While McClanan acknowledges that this prejudice in art history “has in recent decades been reassessed,” her text is part of the ongoing corrective toward that “shift” away from disciplinary myopia (174).
Griffinology is impressively researched with over twenty pages of reference notes. Given the subject’s inclusion in several mythologies, the text’s bibliography features many sources on topics relating to folklore, but few written by folklorists per se. Nevertheless, I found it refreshing to be immersed in a discussion of a mythological creature and cultural motif from a perspective outside of my scholarly discipline. The text could be suitably assigned to courses related to material culture, myth, monster studies, and art history. I can also imagine the text being profitably assigned to a graduate student embarking on a thesis or dissertation, with McClanan’s book an example of a text that deftly employs a plethora of cultural examples to make a complex and convincing theoretical argument.
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[Review length: 1610 words * Review posted on April 20, 2026]