Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Spinningspark (talk | contribs) at 20:48, 24 September 2021 (→Description: Something for Liddell and Scott to cite after all). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The topic of this article may not meet Misplaced Pages's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Ipotane" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Ipotanes are mythical creatures; a race of half-horse, half-humans. They are the dual of centaurs having their upper bodies horselike and their lower bodies humanlike whereas the centaurs are the other way round. The ipotanes are supposedly from Greek mythology but likely originated at a much later date. They appear in many modern works of fiction of the fantasy genre.

John de Mandeville

In 1356, John Mandeville published The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville reports the existence of a violent race of ipotanes in Bacharie (Bactria).

...ben many Ipotanes that dwellen sometime in the water and sometime on the land; and thei ben half men and half hors and thei eten men when thei may take him

— Wyken and Worde, 1499

More modern editions of Mandeville's work have variant spellings; hippotaynes (Macmillan, 1900), hippopotami (Penguin, 1983).

Description

The typical ipotane looked overall human, but had the legs, hindquarters, tail, and ears of a horse. However, some had human-like rather than horse-like legs (compare with early satyrs, whose front legs were often human-like). The Greek suggested by "ipotane" is ιππότης (hippotes). It means knight, which is reasonable since knights are typically thought of as being on horseback. It is also used as an adjective as in ιππότης λεώς (hippotes leos) – horse knights that rode people. The definition given above would fit ιππότης λεώς – "horse-people".

See also

• Glaistig - Scottish
• Hippopodes - Greek myth

References

1. • For example
   • Nancy A. Collins, Right Hand Magic: A Novel of Golgotham, Penguin, 2010 ISBN 1101445777
   • Amanda Bouchet, A Promise of Fire, Hachette UK, 2016 ISBN 0349412537.
2. Charles Knight, Charles Knight's Popular History of England, vol. 2, p. 13, London: Bradbury, Evans, & Company, 1862–67 OCLC 942643783.
3. John Vinycomb, Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art, p. 144, Gale Research Company, 1906 ISBN 0810331470.
4. Sir John Mandeville, A.W. Pollard (ed), The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, p. 177, London: Macmillan & Co., 1900 OCLC 1268064505
5. Sir John Mandeville, C.W.R.D. Pollard (trans), The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, p. 167, Penguin, 1983 OCLC 1261243004.
6. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, p. 708, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890 OCLC 493157397.

• Centaurs