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Rainbow Dash: She's half eagle, half lion.
Gilda: And AAAAAALL awesome!
Our Monsters Are Different, dealing with bird/mammal hybrids.
While not as popular as dragons or unicorns, gryphons, also known as griffins or griffons, are still prominent beasts in modern fantasy.
The oldest gryphon myths come from Egyptian Mythology and Mesopotamian Mythology. Later, they were picked up by Classical Mythology, and afterward used in Heraldry. They became a symbol of Christianity thanks to being a mixture of two majestic creatures that Christians back then saw as the "kings" of animals, thus making them rulers of both the earth and the heavens. After that, they went into literature, but their popularity would be low until the 1990s.
In modern media, gryphons are often wild, powerful predators but are also found as guardians, mostly of treasures, or as winged steeds. When not simple beasts, they're usually noble beings; they sometimes retain their medieval connection with explicitly divine forces, but this isn't very common. They're usually animal-level beings, but a few portrayals depict them as intelligent and capable of speech. If you are really prone to do some research you can see that their love for gold, their negative attitude towards horses (sometimes expanded to other real and fantastic equine beings), and their old conflict with vaguely cyclopean races are in fact drawn from myth, but don't expect them to be very prominent.
All in all, gryphons tend to have four main body plans:
- The Classical Gryphon, or Griffin, which is portrayed as a Mix-and-Match Critter with the body, back limbs and tail of a lion (modern depictions may add a feather fan at the tip), the wings, head, and front legs from a bird of prey. Some portrayals give them ears that may be either flesh-and-blood feline ears or based on the "ears" of eagle owls.
- The Opinicus, a slight variation with has the front legs of a lion, rendering only the wings and head (and sometimes they even don't have the wings) as being bird like; don't expect ears to show up. The tail is usually leonine, but may sometimes be reptilian or a full snake, chimera-like.
- The Wingless Gryphon, also called the Minoan Gryphon, Alces, Keythong and Demigryph, depicted as either a regular gryphon without wings or an eagle-headed lion. The exact name used tends to depend on context and the precise anatomy of the creature. "Minoan gryphon" tends to be restricted to gryphons in the artwork of the Minoan civilization of Crete. The alces and keythong originate in medieval heraldry, with the keythong being distinguished by spikes or thorns replacing the wings (in the original heraldry, those "spikes" are in fact sun rays). "Demigryph" is a more recent term and tends to be applied in fantasy fiction to all wingless gryphons, although those depicted with spikes or sun rays sprouting from their shoulders are still typically called keythongs.
- The Hippogriff, which resembles a gryphon with the body and back limbs of a horsenote instead of a lion. It gained a lot of newfound popularity and attention after one was prominently featured in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but was otherwise already well established in Renaissance lore due to its use in Ludovico Ariosto's epic Orlando Furiosonote . It is the most likely variant of gryphon to appear as a flying steed. It seems to have originally been an extravagant Cue the Flying Pigs-style joke: "breeding gryphons with horses" was a metaphor used by Virgil for an impossible task, since gryphons ate horses (compare "dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria"). Other ungulates might be used instead of horses.
Historically, gryphon iconography first formed in the Middle East during the Bronze Age, and spread out from there; gryphon-like creatures are evident in art and statues as early as the Babylonian period. At this time, chimeric mixtures of eagles, lions, humans, and sometimes bulls were very common and very diverse, producing swarms of lions and bulls with human or eagle heads, winged or bipedal variants of the same, winged humans with bird heads and talons, long-necked eagle-lions, and the like, out of which several more consistent artistic motifs emerged — sphinxes likely share the same origin, and Abrahamic depictions of angels may also have drawn on the more humanoid variants. Griffins became a very popular artistic motif in the Neo-Hittite and later Persian empires, and spread to Greece from there; specific legends featuring the beasts appear a little later.
In addition to these, variety is sometimes introduced to griffons by means of varying what creatures their designs combine: while the traditional griffons are part eagle and part lion (or part horse, in the hippogriffs' case), fiction sometimes varies this by using different cats and birds of prey, resulting in griffons that are part hawk, part owl, part vulture, part tiger, part leopard and so on. This may be either a purely aesthetic distinction or may impact the griffons' habitat and abilities (such as a peregrine falcon-and-cheetah griffon being very fast, a vulture-hyena griffon being a scavenger, or a snowy owl-and-snow leopard griffon living in cold climates). Raptorial birds are the most common kinds used, but almost all sorts of bird, such as ravens or parrots, are used on occasion. It's very rare for the mammalian parts to be anything other than a feline or an equine, however.
May overlap with Giant Flyer should the gryphon have wings. The wingless kind never flies, being seemingly not as magical as eastern dragons.
Not to be confused with Call a Pegasus a "Hippogriff", where one type of mythical creature is given the name of another mythical creature, and Hold Your Hippogriffs, where commonplace sayings are modified to include references to fantastic fiction worlds.
See also Our Sphinxes Are Different and Our Manticores Are Spinier for more sometimes-winged leonine creatures with non-leonine heads from Mediterranean mythology. See also Our Perytons Are Different, for another bird/mammal hybrid, though its mythical pedigree is a bit less genuine.
Examples
- Aquarion Logos: Aquarion Gai is a robotical, blue-and-white griffon with two horse legs, two lion legs, and the head and wings of a falcon.
- Digimon:
- Gryphonmon is a Mega-level Phantom Beast Digimon with tiger stripes, batlike wings and a face covered by a metallic helmet, who has appeared briefly in Digimon Tamers and Digimon Frontier. He was also a Monster of the Week in Digimon Adventure: (2020). He's the version that has a snake for its tail.
- Hippogriffomon is a hippogryph Digimon, with large claws over its hind hooves. All There in the Manual says he's Gryphomon's previous form, but in the Frontier movie, he was a disguise for a bad guy.
- Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan have Nobita creating mythological critters by mixing various strands of animal DNA, one of them being a purple-furred Gryphon named Gri.
- Fate/Apocrypha: Rider of Black can summon a hippogriff that he rides on. He is after all, Astolfo from Orlando Furioso. Because it is a Phantasmal Beast, it can briefly transfer itself and its riders to the Reverse Side of the World to avoid attacks, but using this too long or consecutively will rapidly drain Rider's mana.
- To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts: The Griffin is one of the Incarnates, super-soldiers who were given the power to transform into mythological monsters through arcane science. His monster form is a very unusual take on the griffin. It has the hindquarters of a lion and an overall leonine body structure, but instead of having both front legs and a pair of wings, it just has a pair of flexible wings which can double as legs while it's on the ground. Additionally, its bird half is not an eagle: it has enormous eyes and a short, wide beak which make it look more like a potoo than anything else.
- Tweeny Witches: Gryphon fairies look like owls and their feathers are used by the witches to fly on brooms.
- Artist Mel Tillery
has designed eight species of "trash gryphons
", including magpie/skunk, pigeon/rat, and ibis/possum.note
- Magic: The Gathering has griffins as a creature type. They're usually flying creatures associated with White, the color of order, civilization, and law, stronger than pegasi and some spirits but weaker than angels.
- Scars of Mirrodin has Razor Hippogriff
, currently the only true hippogriff in The Multiverse. Hippogriffs also appear in Innistrad, usually as allies to the Church of Avacyn, but they're typed and referred to as griffins alongside the regular kind. In sets set on Innistrad, the hippogriff creature type is instead used for gryffs, which are like hippogriffs, but with four horse legs and the tail, wings and head of a heron.
- Griffins are also common in the plane of Theros, based off of Greek mythology, where they were originally created by the gods to catch falling stars. Athreos, the ferryman who brings the dead to the underworld, uses skeletal griffins
to fetch the souls who try to avoid the crossing.
- Thunder Junction, a plane based on the Wild West, has griffins that resemble bald eagles
.
- While most griffins use the traditional eagle and lion anatomy, exceptions include Teremko Griffin
, which has the hindquarters of a leopard; Spotted Griffin
, which is part cheetah and part kestrel; Peregrine Griffin
, with the forequarters of a peregrine falcon; and Resplendent Griffin
, from the Mayincatec plane of Ixalan, with the forequarters of a brightly colored parrot.
- While Majestic Myriarch
, from Hour of Devastation, is technically typed as a chimera rather than a griffin, its appearance — a lion with the head of a raptorial bird and a pair of translucent energy wings — still gives across the impression of a griffon. With a cobra for a tail.
- Scars of Mirrodin has Razor Hippogriff
- Unstable Unicorns: The Unicorn Phoenix looks like an orange hippogriff with a horn.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- While not actually a gryphon, the Winged Dragon of Ra looks more like a griffin with teeth than a typical dragon. He's also light themed.
- One of the cards that was printed is Hieracosphinx albeit this one has wings.
- Asterix: Asterix and the Griffin centers around a Roman expedition into Sarmatia to find a griffin for Caesar's menagerie, stymied by the cold wilderness of the eastern frontiers and by the Sarmatians themselves, who worship the creature and hide its location. It turns out that the "griffin" is Styracosaurus frozen inside an icy lake, in a nod to the theory that griffin myths were inspired by the fossils of early ceratopsian dinosaurs.
- Star Wars Adventures: The Argora resembles a bright blue griffin with four eyes, and with four leonine legs instead of two being mammalian and two avian.
- Superman: The Krypton Chronicles features Kryptonian hippogriffs called Tanthuo Flez or "the Winged Ones", being winged mammals with four horse legs and the head of a raptor.
- The Twilight Empire: Robinson's War: Maximillianus is a talking griffin, which is noted to be unusual for his species. Griffins are known to eat horses, although Max prefers mutton. Hippogriffs are also mentioned offhand but not seen.
Maximillian: I thought you'd never come get me! The food was terrible, and the smell of horses!
Robin: I thought that griffons ate horses.
Maximillian: Only griffons with no taste.
- Ice and Fire (Minecraft): Hippogriffs can be found in the mountainous versions of multiple environments and have a different coat and feather pattern for each biome, such as bald eagles in taigas, golden eagles in temperate mountains, kestrels in savannahs, and snowy owls in icy peaks. They are neutral and can be tamed to serve as flying steeds that can be commanded to attack enemies. They love eating rabbits, and can be tamed by feeding them rabbit feet and bred by feeding them rabbit stew; instead of producing a young immediately, they lay an egg that hatches after a while. Their talons can be used to craft powerful swords.
- Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail: One of Lexi's favorite mythological creatures is the gryphon and he is capable of changing and folding his papers to have the appearance of one. He turns into one at the end of Chapter 6 for Chloe and Atticus to ride on.
- My Inner Life: Griffins are a noble but reclusive race who live in the Black Mountains, across the desert from Hyrule. They are intelligent and can speak and even brew beer, and live in a town laid out very much like a human settlement.
- As they were one of the earliest intelligent species besides ponies to be introduced in the show, griffons tend to feature quite often in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction.
- Equestria Divided: House Stormwing uses both regular gryphons and keythongs, horned and wingless griffons with shoulders and upper backs bristling with long spikes and with a taste for pony meat, as mercenary soldiers.
- Equestria at War: Griffins make up the bulk of the population of the continent of Griffonia, of which many countries are expies of European powers. Its largest polity, the Griffonian Empire, is on the brink of Civil War due to its current emperor, Grover V, being sickly and inevitably dying before his son Grover VI becomes of age. In general, tensions between Ponies and Griffins are also frequent on the continent.
- Heart of Gold, Feathers of Steel: The griffons are a Dying Race whose glory days are long behind them; they're well aware of both their glorious past and dismal future, and it shows. Culturally speaking, they're patterned after the Germanic tribes. They're traditionally a warrior people and on poor terms with ponies; Gilda believes that their insistence on holding onto their old traditions is a large part of why they're declining now.
- The Palaververse:
- The griffons live in a large number of proudly independent tribes and clans scattered in the Greycairns and the Hyperborean Mountains throughout most of the Ungulan continent, with many living in Equestria. Historically they have never answered to any single ruler, although in the past a chieftain named Grover managed to unite many tribes around his home in Griffonstone and make himself king, giving the griffons unity until Griffonstone fell into ruin. In the modern day, another chieftain named Gellert has managed to unite the majority of the griffon tribes, becoming their de facto ruler.
- There are also the axex, a subspecies of sorts, who are part of the federation of Gazellen in the local equivalent of Africa.
- The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: Wind Breaker is a classic griffon with the front of a bird of prey (although he's colored more like a falcon than an eagle) and the back of a lion. Griffons are also described as having two different subspecies, mountain griffons and the smaller valley griffons, Wind Breaker being the latter type.
- Ponyfinder, a fanmade adaptation of Pathfinder based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, includes griffons and hippogriffs as playable races:
- Griffons are divided between several aspects, which affect their avian traits, feline traits, or both. These are the Predator aspect (basic griffons), Cheetah aspect (more ground focused, faster running speed), Cursed aspect (crystaline growths across the body that cause great pain and weakness, but enhance endurance and psionic ability), Prey aspect (less adept in melee, but better spellcasters and more charismatic), Pride aspect (lion feline traits, more socially focused and diplomatic), Scavenger aspect (vulture and raven avian halves, more focused on cunning), Sea aspect (otter back half, sea eagle front half, adept in water as well as land and air) and Snow aspect (usually resembling snow owls and snow leopards, adapted for cold environments).
- Hippogriffs are the hybrid children of griffons and ponies. They can belong to any of the griffon aspects and have the associated avian traits, and can have the hindquarters and nature of any kind of pony (regular pony, zebra, crystal pony, etcetera).
- The Steep Path Ahead: Considered Brimir's sacred animal, Saito claims that they look like wolves with wings, and both their feathers and feces are valuable reagents. They don't primarily attack humans unless provoked, but they can easily clear out a countryside.
- All Creatures Big and Small: The two recurring antagonists are called 'Griffins', but closely resemble giant bats the size of big cats. They walk bipedally, have heart-shaped noses, and very tiny wings proportionate to the rest of their arms.
- DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp: At the end of the movie, the villain Merlock transforms into a gryphon as part of his One-Winged Angel act.
- Fantasia 2000: A gryphon can be seen among the various mythical creatures (the others being a dragon and a unicorn) that were mocking the animals as they were boarding Noah's Ark, and presumably drowned in the flood.
- Onward has a bizarre example, as griffins are apparently the Fantastic Fauna Counterpart to chickens, with Corey the Manticore's tavern even serving "griffin nuggets".
- Quest for Camelot has a particularly weird gryphon. While following the classical griffin design, the black-feathered bird forequarters are proportionally much larger than the lion hindquarters, while the head is not particularly eagle-like — the beak, especially, resembles that of a vulture. He's also very much a Butt-Monkey, being continually beaten by a falcon ten times smaller than him and by his boss, to whom he is loyal though sadly very incompetent at doing his job. He's eventually burned, presumably to death, by the two-headed dragon, and on top of that he is considered The Scrappy by the fans.
- The Chronicles of Narnia: The movies features classical gryphons with feline ears, which aren't present in the original books, as part of the heroes' army in the first movie.
- Godzilla (1998): An early draft features a rival monster called the Gryphon; however, it's described as an amalgam of mountain lion and bat rather than the traditional lion and eagle.
- The Golden Voyage of Sinbad: An opinicus, representing good, fights a centaur cyclops (representing evil). In the ensuing fight it becomes clear the griffin is gaining the upper hand until Prince Koura slashes the griffin's hind leg, weakening it and allowing the cyclopean centaur to throttle it.
- Rebel Moon: The film's black gryphon-like creature straddles the lines between the classic depiction of the gryphon and opinicus with the body, limbs and tail of a lion and the wings and head of a bird of prey.
- Revenge of the Sith: The planet Utapau has creatures called dactillions that basically resemble the gryphon version of a pteranodon. They appear in the prominently in the background of several scenes set on the planet, as the inhabitants use them as aerial mounts.
- The Spiderwick Chronicles: Like the book series, the compressed adaptation included a griffin but only halfway through the movie; its only purpose is to fly the heroes to the Secret Glade.
- Alice in Wonderland has a classical gryphon, which is about as much of a help as the mock turtle. He only appears rarely in the movie versions, being no help to Alice opposite Cary Grant in 1933. In the 2010 movie it's implied he once fought against the Jabberwock, as a picture of him fighting the monster appears in a mural.
◊
- Barlowes Guide To Fantasy, by Wayne Barlowe: Griffins are fancifully portrayed as a species of real, albeit extinct, creatures native to Central Asia, which endured until at least the first century AD before dying out for unknown causes. In a nod to (fanciful) speculation that the griffon myth arose from early discovery of Protoceratops fossils, they are portrayed as literally being descended from a mutant strain of the actual dinosaurs, and consequently depicted as Protoceratops with avian wings and long, feather-tipped tails in the illustration
◊. Female griffins excavated extensive tunnel systems in which to brood their eggs, often bringing gold to the surface as they did, but only a very brave or very foolish person would have risked delving into a griffin's nest to get it.
- Book of Imaginary Beings:
- Sir John Mandeville, in his fantastic accounts of his supposed travels, reported that griffons were large enough to carry off two oxen together, while medieval texts and artwork typically used griffons as symbols of Christ.
- Hippogriffs are inherently paradoxical things, as griffons' hatred of horses was so well-known that "to breed horses with griffons" was a saying referring to an impossible task. Ludovico Ariosto was inspired by this saying to create a hippogriff for the Orlando Furioso, which is used as a steed by Astolpho until he sets it free late in the poem.
- Dark Lord of Derkholm and its sequel, Year of the Griffin, feature a mixed human and griffin family, the result of a wizard who created intelligent griffins by mixing lion and eagle (and, later, cat) germ plasm with his own and his wife's and raising the hybrid kids alongside his more traditionally-conceived (human) children. There are also naturally occurring griffins in the world, which gave the wizard the idea in the first place.
- "Darkness Box", by Ursula K. Le Guin, features gryphons used as war animals, which are apparently immortal (or near to it) and which bond closely to their owners.
- David and the Phoenix, by Edward Ormondroyd, features three different species, each with a slightly different spelling. The reader encounters the lazy, thick-headed griffens and vicious, territorial griffons; the amiable, red-feathered griffins remain off-screen.
- The Divide Trilogy: Brazzles are what griffons are known as in the magical world, but have a number of unusual properties: their claws turn red when dipped in poison, their feathers have mystical properties related to the treatment of heart conditions, and they have a culture where male brazzles typically become mathematicians while females are generally historians.
- The Divine Comedy: A gold-and-white griffin appears at the top of Purgatory as an allegory for Christ, who is both God and man like the griffin is both eagle and lion. In order to make this work with the doctrine that Christ is 100% divine and 100% human with no compromise, Dante perceives the griffin as both a complete eagle and a complete lion simultaneously, creating a very bizarre image that he struggles to convey.
- Dracopedia: Griffins and hippogriffs are described in Dracopedia: The Bestiary.
- Griffins are pretty much what you'd expect. They're large predators that dwell in the mountains of Europe hunting fish and game, but went extinct in the Renaissance for unknown reasons. There is also speculation of the existence of an American species due to the prominence of eagle-like deities in American mythologies.
- Hippogriffs are described as herbivorous cousins of the griffin, with their equine body being more like a wild mustang in contrast to the more elegant purebred form of the pegasus.
- Dragon Rider (1997): In the second book, The Griffin's Feather, griffins have the traditional love of gold and hatred of horses — but, less traditionally, they have a poisonous snake for a tail. Surprisingly, they give live birth while pegasi in this universe lay eggs. The majority of griffins, as they come from the Babylonian desert, have tawny plumage and fur, but one younger griffin who had been born in the Indonesian jungle has bright green feathers, a blue-green snake-tail, and the fur of a marbled cat. Some speculate that he is the son of a "Pelangi bird".
- The Dragon Wars Saga: Like all Speakers, gryphons come in various types depending on affinity. Kimi has an ice affinity and is half arctic eagle, half snow leopard.
- A hippogriff features in the titular novella of The Dream Eaters and Other Stories by Louise Searl. In this case, hippogriffs are the hybrid offspring of a horse and a griffin, not an actual species.
- Fancy Apartments has its own resident gryphon, Gordie; who was raised, more or less, by the building's manager.
- A Fantasy Attraction includes Bob and Sally, two recently married griffins, as well as a murderous hippogriff.
- The Firebringer Trilogy has gryphons that prey on unicorn colts, probably a reference to the mythical horse-eating gryphons.
- Great Ship: Griffons are used as artificial soldiers by the Gaian entity in the short story Aeon's Child. They have claws adapted to be compatible with high-powered laser rifles, and have beaks made of a nearly indestructible compound known as hyperfiber. They are connected through a sapient Hive Mind.
- "The Griffin": Hans is ordered to fetch a feather from a griffin, who is willing to eat people. The griffin also has a wife and knows answers to any question.
- "The Griffin And The Minor Canon", by Frank Stockton, has a Griffin that is, from its description, quite obviously meant to be a dragon. While the front half matches the usual type, the wings have spikes on their joints and it has no hindquarters, having a snakelike tail that ends in a barbed tip that glows red hot when it's angry. It eats only at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and feeds only on the brave and the good.
- Griffin Mage Trilogy features griffins who are magical and fully intelligent — even if they mix with humans only very problematically. They are also strongly associated with fire, and live in deserts.
- Harry Potter: Hippogryphs are a dangerous but tamable type of magical creature, and can be ridden as flying steeds by wizards who earn their respect — which can be a bit difficult, as they're very proud and intelligent creatures and prone to viciously lashing out when treated badly. More "traditional" griffins also exist in the setting, but are only part of the background lore.
- Hell's Gate: Griffins are barely controllable killing machines created by magical genetic engineering.
- Heralds of Valdemar: Gryphons are highly intelligent beings who were created by a powerful mage thousands of years before the main timeline; their origins are explored in the Mage Wars prequel trilogy. They are generally noble and brave and very beautiful, but many of the males tend toward the vain and hedonistic, and they depend on having human "assistants" to help with daily tasks such as grooming. Gryphons can't speak a clear human language and don't habitually resort to Telepathy; instead, they can speak aloud but are prone to Sssssnaketalk and Trrrilling Rrrs. They are not capable of carrying a rider, but magic-using gryphons (of which there are a few) can enchant a basket to be weightless, and then carry a person (or the equivalent weight of cargo) in it.
- Urtho's enemy Ma'ar created a counterpart species, the makaar, who are like Bizarro versions of gryphons: even bigger than gryphons and a bit stronger and faster, but ugly as sin and distinctly less intelligent. One on one in a direct clash a single makaar is more than a match for most gryphons and makaar are too cunning to dismiss as mindless brutes, but gryphons can often outthink or outmaneuver them. Makaar only breed at the command of their masters, so it's thought that they died out after the Mage Wars.
- During the Mage Wars, Urtho experimented with a variant gryphon he called a "gryfalcon". The prototype gryfalcon had shorter talons than an average gryphon, but she was also more agile on the ground and in the air, and her short claws and slim digits made her forelimbs more like stubby hands.
- Imagine Someday: Griffins are Proud Warrior Race Guys but have no magic powers to speak of.
- Impossible Creatures: Griffins have the classic half-lion, half-eagle design and are considered some of the most magical creatures. They can't speak, but they're highly intelligent and can quickly learn to understand human languages. They also radiate heat.
- InCryptid has many species of Lesser Griffins
, which have the front half and wings of some sort of bird, the hindquarters of some kind of feline, and feline ears on their bird head. Alex Price has a pet church griffin (crow and large cat) named Crow. Australia has the convergently evolved Garrinna
, which has the front half of a galah and the back half of a thylacine. Shelby has one as a pet.
- John the Valiant: After surviving his ship being tragically wrecked, John finds dry land and a griffin feeding her young in their nest. He captures her and rides on her back to travel back to his home land.
- The Lotus War gryphons are known as Thunder Tigers and are half-tiger rather than half-lion. They are descended from the thunder god Raiden and have lightning powers as a result. Certain individuals with supernatural bloodlines known as Stormdancers can bond telepathically with them.
- Mira’s Griffin has four-limbed griffins (the wings fold to become forearms). They are sentient but cannot communicate with humans. Though bigger than humans, they are not large enough to carry one in flight.
- Mistress Of Mistresses features hippogriffs as part of an Impossible Task. The author illustrated the book himself, and gave the hippogriffs horse heads, raptor wings and front legs, and lion rear halves. Not quite your classical hippogriff!
- The Night Circus: Celia uses them as figures on the carousel. Once Widget and Poppet both wanted to ride one, and Celia had to tell of the Kitsune to get Poppet to ride the nine-tailed fox instead.
- Ology Series: Monsterology, a companion book for the Dragonology series, includes griffins and hippogriffs in its chapter about flying creatures. The former are carnivores with a taste for horses, and are especially fond of winged ones. The latter are grain-eaters instead. People seeking to hatch griffins or hippogriffs should keep both horsemeat and grain handy, as their eggs are largely indistinguishable, but keep them out of sight until the chick hatches, as a hippogriff chick will find the sight of horse flesh distressing.
- The Orphan's Tales: Griffins are he size of elephants, often vivid in coloration — picture cobalt blue and marbled white. Their preferred diet is horses, their preferred material for their nests is gold, and their enemies are the Arimaspians — gigantic cyclopses.
- The Pinkish, Purplish, Bluish Egg: Zeke the griffin has the coloration of a bald eagle, but other than that, he's based on the classical griffin. Griffins also apparently have problems learning to fly, as their lion half lacks flying instincts.
- Protector of the Small: Keladry raises a baby Opinicus-type griffin until his parents are found, getting savaged often in a subversion of Pet Baby Wild Animal. Griffins there are intelligent, if hard to communicate with and not quite on the level of humans and some other immortals. They're also Living Lie Detectors — it's physically impossible to lie when they are near — whose feathers have related properties such as seeing through illusions and making arrows fly truer. Griffins can sense if someone has handled their young, and will kill whoever that is unless, as with Kel, there's a translator there to explain. And there are also hurroks (horse-hawks), which like griffins are magical immortals, but decidedly nastier and more animal.
- The Ship Errant: There's an alien species called the Thelerie which a human First Contact Team immediately compares to bat-winged gryphons with pointed flat faces, noting that they're quite feline from the shoulders back. Thelerie are flighted Heavyworlders that can use fingers on their wings and forepaws to manipulate objects, so they construct furniture that allows them to lounge and use four "hands" at once. Due to their mythology about benevolent wingless people bringing them to a new golden age, the Space Pirates who made real First Contact with the Thelerie were able to take on a God Guise that had the friendly griffinlike aliens happily supporting them in exchange for technology, and teaching their children to speak human languages.
- "The Singing, Springing Lark": The protagonist instructed that he can escape with her husband on a griffin after breaking the husband and a princess' curse. But after being saved, the princess kidnaps both the husband and the griffin, leaving the protagonist behind. When the protagonist saves the husband from the princess, they are able to escape on the griffin again, then they leave it to rest on a giant tree.
- The Spiderwick Chronicles: There is a gryphon called Byron, whom the children find rescue from a goblin camp and secretly nurse back to health in their barn; he afterwards comes to serve as a flying mount for them. While following the eared variant of the classical griffin design, he's more slender than most depictions and his beak has teeth/tooth-like serrations. Griffins are also quite large — Byron is around the size of a bus — and mortal enemies of horses; because of this, the rare hybrid hippogriffs are considered to be a symbol of undying love.
- Star Trek Novel 'Verse: The Kinshaya race are essentially griffins, being mammals with four legs and a pair of wings sprouting from their back. They are too heavy to fly, though — in modern Kinshaya, the wings are used for display purposes instead.
- The Summer King Chronicles is a Xenofiction High Fantasy series about "gryfons". Physically, they range from wolf-sized to lion-sized and give birth to a single "kit" at a time. Most live in "prides" ruled by kings. Males fight while females hunt. There are two races of gryfon: the Aesir and the Vanir. Aesir are larger, powerful, predisposed to battle, eat red meat, and are often impossibly brightly colored. This turns out to only apply to the population who conquered the Silver Isles, due to a dragon curse. When Shard travels to the Aesir homeland, the gryfons there are much more naturalistically colored. Vanir are smaller, more agile, eat fish, and have more subdued coloring. Both are sapient and can interbreed.
- Thursday Next: The griffin from ''Alice in Wonderland' appears on a number of occasions.
- The Traitor Son Cycle: Griffons grow rapidly and not only generate love, but feed off it. They will bond with the first person to demonstrate immense love in front of them and can talk with their bondsmate telepathically, though their intelligence is rather childlike. Appearance-wise, they're your traditional Mix-and-Match Critters, to the point where Gabriel wonders if they weren't artificially created.
- The Unicorn Chronicles: Medafil, introduced in book 2, is pretty much a classic gryphon; he even hoards treasure. He's also the most intelligent of his kind, the rest being little more than beasts and barely able to say more than "Gaaah", which is part of why he left their territory and lives on his own.
- Xanadu (Storyverse): The first sighting of a winged horse that Hannah and Beth investigate when searching for Wynd turns out to be a hippogriff, which as they point out to the soldier accompanying them is distinguished from a pegasus by its eagle head and predatory habits, which are soon after demonstrated when it dives on and decapitates a cow.
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Wizard: Kamen Rider Beast has a Griffin familiar that seems to be the Classical style.
- Kamen Rider Zi-O: The title character's potential future self Ohma Zi-O wears black-and-gold armour with both lion and eagle motifsnote , representing his nature as an absolute, invincible Evil Overlord.
- Merlin (1998): Merlin and Arthur are attacked by creatures that Merlin calls "griffins". They look a little like monkeys with the patagia of a flying squirrel and the heads of hawks, and they act an awful, awful lot like the "raptors" in Jurassic Park.
- Merlin (2008): One episode has an opinicus, which acts pretty much as a one-time terror, eventually meeting its demise.
- Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Goldar is something of an odd example, as his leonine features include a muzzle. This, along with his fur colour and the shape of his forward fangs have lead some to assume he's a gorilla or wolf-man, but he is in fact an anthropomorphic griffin. This is backed up by his Zyuranger self being named Grifforzer. In season two, the Yellow Ranger had a Griffin Zord (as a Western version of its Dairanger counterpart, a Kirin).
- The historian Adrienne Mayor theorizes that the legend of griffons was based on a misinterpretation of Protoceratops fossils (four legged animal, birdlike beak, crest on its head that could be interpreted as a set of wings if broken off at the base, etc.). However, there are arguments against this theory, as articulated here
and here
by paleontologist Mark Witton — broadly speaking, the theory ignores that Protoceratops fossils are rare and found very far away from gold deposits while Greek scholars broadly associated gold-hoarding with exotic monsters in general, griffin iconography is well-established as having emerged in Mesopotamia thousands of years before any contact with eastern Asia and not having followed the strictly east-to-west route of spread that Mayor's theory requires, griffon myths show consistent traits such as feathers and additional limbs that the fossil origin struggles to explain, and Mayor's assumption that early griffin art looks "prehistoric" relies on a very modern idea of what extinct life looked like that wouldn't have existed in antiquity.
- Lions with bird heads, wings, or both appear as early as Sumerian and Akkadian artwork, alongside other hybrids, and continued to appear during the Bronze Age; things already fairly similar to what we'd call griffins became prominent in Assyrian art, such this famous frieze
◊ depicting a battle between a god and a monster, although some very humanoid entities
◊ also appeared alongside them. The essentially modern form later became very popular among the Hittites and Persians during the Iron Age; bipedal griffins were also still present in Hittite art. Similar creatures appear in Bronze Age Greek art, but the primary influence of griffin art was likely contact with the Hittites and later Persia in early Iron Age, around the 8th to 7th centuries BCE; actual stories with griffins in them turn up a couple centuries later as the Greek world expanded, which is also when griffin art and artifacts shaped like the beasts start turning up in Etruria. Gryphons also appear in Scythian gold artworks starting in the 6th to 4th centuries, usually as guardians or as eating other animals, and likely also spread there from Persia.
- It has been suggested that the myths of the gryphons are connected to the sphinx and the Mesopotamian shedu and lammassu, other lion-bodied creatures generally depicted with wings, which likely formed out of the same loose collection of chimeric lion-human-bull-and-eagle chimeras of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian artwork. Some scholars have also drawn links between this tradition and Biblical angels and artistic motifs such as the tetramorph
.
- Egyptian Mythology: The akhekh fits the general bill of being part quadrupedal mammal and winged. As Egyptian artwork involving this creature tended to be rather stylized, different archaeologists have interpreted it as a winged lion and as an oryx with bird wings and head and a serpent tail.
- According to the Greek historian Herodotus, there were griffins living among the Riphean Mountains (generally thought to mean the Urals or Carpathians) in Hyperborea (meaning "beyond the North Wind", a general term used by the Greeks to refer to the wild north beyond Thrace/modern Bulgaria and Romania). There, they were supposed to jealously hoard gold, something that brought them in constant conflict with the Arimaspi, a race of one-eyed barbarians who lived in the same area. Later Classical and Medieval accounts tended to follow Herodotus in placing griffins (and later hippogriffs) in northerly locals, such as the Ripheans and Hyperborea.
- Celtic Mythology:
- The Gundestrup Cauldron, which shows various scenes from Celtic Mythology, has griffins running about within the images. Since the ancient Celts had contact with the Scythians, it's of little surprise that griffins would pop up in Celtic myth too, even if any oral traditions about them no longer survive. Griffins also appear on the shields of two De Danann brothers that aid Fionn Mac Cumhaill on a quest, implying that some may exist in Tir Na Nog.
- Caoilte, an Irish warrior with Super-Speed is tasked by the High King with capturing a series of animals in order to free his captain Fionn Mac Cumhaill from captivity. While most of the beasts are of the normal variety, the king also throws in a request to capture a wild man and a griffin as well.
- In the Middle Ages, griffins became a popular symbol of Christ — by being unions of the king of beasts and the king of birds, they represent Christ as the King of Kings and, being both beast and bird, they represented Christ's dual divine and human nature. Dante used a griffin to represent Jesus in the Purgatorio, for instance, and statues of griffins and of eagle-headed lions were often placed at the doors and on the walls of medieval churches.
- Historically, the gryphon has been a common and important heraldic animal in Europe, and is especially common in this role in English and German heraldry.
- British heraldry recognizes male griffons as distinct from the neutral kind, and depicts them without wings and with a short horn on their foreheads.
- The keythong is a wingless griffin with large spines on its body that is occasionally depicted as having horns on its head.
- The sea-griffin, also termed the gryphon-marine, is a heraldic variant of the griffin with the head and legs of the basic variant and the hindquarters of a fish or a mermaid.
- Some legends about Charlemagne claim that he and his knights rode on hippogriffs.
- Magic Girl has a brown-furred gryphon with taloned hands perched in the upper-right corner of the playfield.
- Paragon (1979) prominently features a lion/eagle/lizard hybrid griffon on both its backglass and playfield.
- Cool Kids Table: In the Harry Potter-themed game Hogwarts: The New Class, Jake gets a pygmy gryphon (whom he names Jomps), which has the body of a house cat and the head and wings of a red-tailed falcon.
- The Dark Eye:
- Griffons are holy creatures, servants on the god Praios and stalwart defenders of truth, justice and order. They are intelligent creatures and can speak multiple languages, and never lie. They exist to serve their god and his cause, and can be found all over the world in crusades against demons and dark magic.
- Irrhalks are griffon-like demons with horns, black feathers, and a fiery glow in their chests, serving the demon lord Blakharaz, and are very intelligent and evil. They are either fallen griffins or demons made in mockery of the real thing, it's not entirely clear.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The game has long included the griffon and the hippogriff among its monsters. Generally, griffons are intelligent creatures capable of either speaking human languages or at least understanding them, while hippogriffs are animals. Both are used as mounts, although obviously riders have very different relationships with a sapient griffon steed than with a hippogriff mount. Griffons prey on horses, which often results in enmity between them and intelligent horselike beings such as pegasi and asperi, and in some settings this includes a sense of animosity towards hippogriffs as well. As a result, although pegasi normally reserve their enmity for evil beings, they bear a particularly deep-seated hatred of griffins and hippogriffs. Some further variants exist, such as Rimefire griffins with elemental affinity for both ice and fire.
- The Hieracosphinx, mentioned in the page image, has been a semi-regular monster which is here depicted as an Always Chaotic Evil variant of the sphinx that can be mistaken for a griffon quite easily, due to having an eagle's head and wings on a lion's body. It's an Always Male race that reproduces by raping the Always Female gynosphinxes.
- The Opinicus also appears by that name in older editions, but instead it is a Chaotic Good creature resembling a winged camel with a lion's tail and mane, a monkey's head and hands, and a love for jokes and playing pranks.
- While they've never been linked to griffons, owlbears fit the mould pretty well as hybrid beasts with the bodies of large mammalian predators and the heads of birds of prey. And while owlbears can't fly, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to compare them to some of the wingless griffon variants.
- Eberron: The griffon is House Jorasco's heraldic magical beast.
- Exalted:
- Gryphons are Wyld creatures that originated as chance fusions of hawk and lion, but have since stablized into their own species. They're frequently used as steeds by the Fair Folk.
- Flame gryphons are a variant found in the Southern Wyld, and possess golden claws and wings made out of flame. They can live fine in creation, but can only reproduce in the Wyld. They're fiercely independent, to the point of tearing themselves apart rather than submit to magical compulsion. They also possess a deep and innate hatred of horses and horse-like creatures, which they kill whenever possible.
- Gods of the Fall: Griffons are wild predators with the head, wings, forelimbs and talons of an eagle, and the torso, hind legs (but not feet) and tail of a lion. They are wild animals, but those found as chicks can be trained as mounts.
- GURPS Fantasy Bestiary includes gryphons and hippogriffs, both of which fly through the use of Mana stored in their feathers.
- Gryphons are fierce predators, and fond of horse meat. They can be tamed if captured young, but will only obey the commands of their original trainer.
- Hippogriffs have the hindquarters of horses and the forequarters of gryphons — essentially, a hippogriff has the legs, rump and tail of a horse, the head, talons and wings of an eagle, and the chest of a lion. They're easier to tame than gryphons are, which is thought to be due to their partly equine nature, and their horse legs make them faster runners on the ground.
- Palladium Fantasy: Griffons fit the standard fantasy mold in terms of physical appearance, live in high mountains in northern climes and will generally leave humans alone unless threatened or hungry.
- Pathfinder includes the griffon, hippogriff (speculated in-universe to have come about as a wizard's weird joke on the griffons' taste for horse meat) and hieracospinx, ultimately based on their D&D incarnations.
- Griffons were originally created by Curchanus, a god of beasts and the wilderness, to act as guardians to his faithful. When Curchanus was slain by the demon lord Lamashtu, the formerly intelligent and organized griffons descended into their current bestial state.
- While eagle-and-lion griffons are the most common kind, certain environments are home to specific variants: desert-dwelling griffons typically have the heads and wings of hawks and the hindquarters of mountain lions, while jungle-dwellers may blend the bodies of panthers with those of colorful parrots or black-feathered eagles and arctic griffons may resemble lynxes and snowy owls. Griffons whose bird and feline parts are of different kinds from those common in their region (such as a tiger-striped griffon born among lion-based ones) are shunned by their parents and forced to live on their own.
- Alces are a rare variant of swift-running griffon born without wings. In 1st Edition they're hatched from eggs brooded by their father, rather than their mother, while in 2nd Edition they're the result of a rare mutation and often treated as the runts of their litters.
- Pathfinder's hippogriffs have the added peculiarity of having birdlike talons at the end of all four limbs, and do not coexist very well with true griffons — griffons are sapient, hippogriffs aren't, and the former have a habit of hunting and eating the latter. However, while the two are normally separate species, it's possible for a mythic griffon to produce hippogriffs or mythic hippogriffs by mating with awakened horses, Unicorns, or mythic horses or unicorns.
- Griffons were originally created by Curchanus, a god of beasts and the wilderness, to act as guardians to his faithful. When Curchanus was slain by the demon lord Lamashtu, the formerly intelligent and organized griffons descended into their current bestial state.
- RuneQuest: Griffins and hippogriffs, like most avians and in particular birds of prey, are solar creatures aligned with the gods of fire and the sky, and are often characterized as noble and intelligent beasts.
- Griffins have the heads, wings and forelegs of eagles, and the bodies and hind legs of lions, and hoard gold and treasure in their lairs. They are an ancient and powerful race, know basic magic, and sometimes join their equivalent of Fire/Sky Rune cults. They rarely mix in the affairs of men, and leave others alone unless they try to take the griffin's hoard of gold.
- Modern hippogriffs are the descendants of the goddess Hippogriff from before the Great Darkness, who was a favored child of King Griffin but whose beak, claws, and wings were torn off or broken in battles with enemy gods, and who was eventually tamed and renamed Hippoi by the demigod Hyalor Horsebreaker. The majority of her progeny are modern horsekind, who inherited their mother's mutilations as part of their basic nature; a few true hippogriffs also endure, but are rare. The sample adventure "The Pegasus Plateau" focuses on climbing a mountain where a convocation of hippogriffs has gathered to breed in order to impress a few adolescents enough to gain them as mounts, a process that involves convincing the bird-horse to partner with you based on respect and shared values and runic affiliations.
- Shadowrun: Classic griffins, resembling the usual mix of lion and eagle with feathered ears, exist as Awakened animals of unclear origin, although they're tentatively classified as birds. They're solitary mountain-dwellers and prey chiefly on large hoofed mammals. A few additional variants are known to exist, generally created by additional magical mutation of the main griffin species.
- An Asian species exists that is distinguished by a scaly head and neck and a spiny fin running down its neck and back.
- False griffins are largely identical to the normal kind, but lack wings and external ears.
- The hieracosphinx resembles a griffin with a falcon-like head and vestigial wings, while the criosphinx resembles a hieracosphinx with lion ears and ram horns. They live only in the Serdarbulak Plateau in the Middle East and are believed to have diverged from regular griffins in the surge of magical transformations that came with the passing of Halley's Comet.
- Heliodromus are mutant griffins with fully feline bodies and the wings and heads of vultures. They're opportunistic scavengers, waiting near freeways to glean roadkill, raiding graveyards, lurking around battlefields and sometimes picking through garbage dumps. They are also known to try to scare other creatures into dangerous situations by using their ability to induce supernatural fear, and will attack targets directly if they're especially hungry.
- The Strange: Griffons are predators found in some magical recursions, usually on mountains or the canopies of very large trees. They hate horses and attack them on sight.
- Warhammer: Griffons are highly sought-after steeds among the nobles and generals of the Empire and the High Elves due to their ferocity in battle, their ability to fly and the prestige of having one as a mount. Hippogryphs play a similar role for Bretonnia. Such steeds are very rare, as neither griffons nor hippogryphs will breed in captivity — all tame ones have to be taken as eggs or very young chicks from the high mountains where they nest, something rather complicated by their highly protective parents, and nobles will pay exorbitant prices for an egg or chick of their own. Griffons in Warhammer are also fairly varied in appearance — they've been portrayed with markings like leopards and tigers as well as lions, others have hawk- and falcon-like forequarters, and some have two heads.
- Karl Franz, the current Emperor of the Empire, can ride one of the Empire's fiercest gryphons into battle (or a regular horse, or a dragon, depending on what you're willing to put together) that he himself raised from an egg. King Luen Leoncoeur of Bretonnia rides a hippogryph named Beaquis, and in the End Times the imperial wizard Gregor Martak rode a two-headed griffon named Twinshriek.
- One Imperial hero, Theodore Bruckner, rides to battle on a wingless breed called a demigryph. Demigryph-riding knights are an Imperial unit choice as well. All four of a demigryph's legs are feline, making them resemble giant tigers with eagle heads.
- Hippogryphs and griffons are extremely hostile to each other, usually fighting to the death when they meet in the wild, and have claimed distinct mountain ranges as their territories — griffons chiefly live in the World's Edge Mountains and hippogryphs in the Grey. This has led to their association with the nations neighboring this mountain ranges. Griffons in particular are considered sacred animals in the Empire, and the leader of Sigmar's church wears a jade emblem carved to resemble a griffon.
- In early editions of the game, griffons and hippogriffs were instead creatures of Chaos and part of the Chaos army lists. This largely fell by the wayside as the game evolved, but there is still some in-universe speculation that griffins and hippogryphs were originally Chaos mutants created in a similar vein to manticores or chimeras, due to their chimeric body plans. The theory goes that, despite their origins, they have been separated from their unnatural genesis for long enough to stabilize and "go native", and now live and breed like any other animal. Due to the symbolic importance they carry for most major human nations, however, this theory is a very unpopular one.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar brings back griffons and demigryphs as creatures associated with the forces of Order, and particularly with the Free Cities and the Stormcast Eternals. Griffons and demigryphs are native to Azyr, the Realm of Heavens, which is generally associated with birds and aerial creatures. A distinct breed of two-headed griffons, originating as an offshoot of the main Azyrite kind, exists in Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, and is known for greater strength and fiercer temper. These are usually ridden by wizards of the Lore of Beasts. In addition, two additional breeds of wingless gryphs are introduced:
- Gryph-hounds are essentially demigryphs the size of a large dog and have very keen senses; they're typically used as attack animals, watchdogs and companions.
- Gryph-chargers resemble wingless hippogriffs with lion tails, as they have horselike hind legs and avian forelegs instead of a demigryph's four feline legs; some also have two tails.
- The World of Darkness:
- Bygone Bestiary:
- Griffins are the lion-eagles of classical myth, noble and proud. They nest in high, inaccessible mountains, where they raise their chicks and store great troves of gold and gems amassed over their centuries of life. They are keenly intelligent and noble beings, are deeply faithful to their mates and friends, and enjoy engaging other beings in discussions about philosophy and morality. They are also, however, extremely greedy, proud, and territorial, and hound thieves with a terrible vengeance. They are predators and often hunt humans, because they have learned that human civilization looks for missing vagrants and travelers with much less zeal than when it investigates theft of livestock.
- Hippogriffs are extremely rare beings born from the rare unions of griffins and mare, or potentially from the breeding of their own kind. They are innately matricidal, slashing their way out of their mother's womb and being forced to survive on their own from birth. They possess no magical powers, but are fierce, wild, intelligent beasts, and while often sought as steeds they are dangerous and difficult to tame. They are said to be innate enemies of both of their parent species.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Griffin spirit is the tribal totem of the Red Talons, and is an embodiment of wild, predatory savagery.
- Bygone Bestiary:
- Transformers:
- Transformers: Generation 1: Sky Lynx's combined beast mode has the head and wings of a bird (a prehistoric bird of indeterminate species instead of an eagle) and the lower body of a big cat (a lynx instead of a lion), making him resemble an Opinicus-type gryphon. He still differs a little from that body-plan due to his tail coming from his bird mode.
- There has been some speculation surrounding the Beast Machines toy of Silverbolt
◊, which ostensibly turns into a condor... a condor with plainly visible, not-hidden-in-the-least legs in front of its wings. The toy can be reconfigured into a griffin mode by turning these legs downward, and for all world, this makes it actually look like something. However, beyond the fact that this configuration looks a hundred times better than its "condor" mode, and that it's also something of a callback to Silverbolt's original form (a wolf-eagle hybrid), there is nothing official to suggest that this was the original intent of the designers, and the character appears as a condor in the animated series as well — although the cartoon was notorious for often disregarding what the toys looked like, so perhaps releasing the toy as a condor was a (failed) attempt to make it resemble its on-show counterpart.
- 2013 brought Grimwing, a Predacon in the Transformers: Prime toyline, who is an ursagryph
, which is basically a classical gyphon with the lion swapped out for a bear. He never appeared on the show, but a Palette Swap named Darksteel was in the Predacons Rising finale movie (with his own limited toy release), and Budora is their counterpart in Transformers: Go!.
- AereA requires you to fight a Gryphon boss called the Harp Gryphon. Like all the monster-themed bosses in the game, it's half an animal merged with a giant, sentient musical instrument.
- American McGee's Alice has the Gryphon, who is initially held captive by the Mad Hatter. Alice frees him, and he helps lead her force against the Red Queen's army. He is killed in an aerial duel with the Jabberwock, and his corpse is pretty much one of the only things that Alice can take cover behind in the ensuing boss fight.
- ARK: Survival Evolved: Griffins are added from the Ragnarok Update onwards, which is a fantasy-themed update. They are difficult to tame and they attack by slashing their claws or dropping from a tall height.
- Battle for Wesnoth has gryphons that mostly look like giant birds, except they use four feet like a mammal and have mammal-like tails. Lore-wise, they are used by the dwarves as mounts, and they are sentient, although they have difficulty speaking due to physiological constraints.
- Brigandine has griffins as a base monster with the holy attribute. If you upgrade it, then it becomes a holy griffin and can shoot its feathers at enemies.
- Castlevania:
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has a Hippogriff as the boss of the Royal Chapel, with the body of a horse and the front claws, head and wings of an eagle. Later, in the Inverted Castle, more Hippogriffs appear as a Degraded Boss.
- Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: Hippogriffs return, although only as a regular enemy, again with the hindquarters of a horse and the claws, wings and head of an eagle.
- Darksiders: The Angels ride angelic creatures called Ortho that look like white, armored griffins.
- Dragon Age: In the lore, the Grey Wardens of old rode on Griffins. They all eventually died out by the present, though. Warden armor still carries a griffin crest in their honor. Due to the events of Last Flight, griffons are revealed to just barely avoided extinction, with about thirteen griffon eggs recovered from a magical stasis spell. One of said griffon eggs hatches into Assan, who serves as a companion for Grey Warden Davrin in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In this game, griffons have a recognizable design, with the difference of sporting visible ears.
- Dragon's Dogma: The griffons are of a rather classical design, except for having the coloration of bald eagles and for generating electricity while flying.
- Dwarf Fortress: Griffons are one of a small number of creatures that exist as in-game myths: they have a bare minimum of game data and show up in engravings, but they do not exist as actual creatures you can encounter. Despite this, dwarves can still express a liking for their strength.
- The Elder Scrolls Online has gryphons
as wild animals, which follow a somewhat more avian version of the classical appearance: they do have cat-like ears, but their bodies are completely feathered and their hindlegs are bird-like claws as well. There are a rare few trained ones, namely by the Welkynar Knights of Cloudrest (which are featured in the Cloudrest 12-player trial). There is also a wingless variety called the quasigriff
, which were selectively bred to be used as mounts, and which do have feline hindlegs.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening: The Griffin Rider, a Jack of All Stats armed with an axe, is an alternate branch class of the Wyvern Rider sub-group.
- Gigantic: Leiran, one of the Guardians, is a five-story tall gryphon that can shoot lasers from its eyes.
- God of War II: There's a sequence where you fight people riding griffins. This being God of War, you hop on the griffin's back, cut off its wings, and let it plummet to its death while you hop back on Pegasus. Closer inspection of artwork and scenes suggests the creatures have a hooked blade at the end of their tail similar to a manticore. There are also the dark griffin riders, who ride black griffins wearing bronze masks.
- Heroes of Might and Magic: In the first three games, the griffins stand on their hind legs, while in IV and V, they go on all fours. At least in the old setting (I-IV, and all the Might and Magic RPGs except for X), while the recruitable creature is consistently called griffin across the games, variant spellings do appear when it comes to people actually in the setting referring to them — mainly gryphon (the Gryphonheart family was named that because they got to power by managing to tame Erathia's native griffins). They are usually associated with a given game's "holy" faction, such as the Castle in 'III, the Haven in V and VI. In IV, they're instead part of the nature-themed Preserve faction alongside various other monsters and elementals. They can usually be upgraded into an armored form known as a Royal, Imperial, or Battle Griffin.
- Krut: The Mythic Wings have a gigantic rainbow-feathered Gryphon Mini-Boss in the Garuda palace. Who flies all over the place during the boss fight, and can fire gusts of wind from it's wings as a ranged attack.
- The Last Guardian: Tricos are often called griffins by the English-language fanbase, being mix-and-match critters with an emphasis on feline and avian traits. However, the proportions of cat to bird are different from classical gryphons, other animals such as hyena facial features and ratlike (albeit furred) tails are in the mix, and the species sports blue horns, lightning powers, and a reputation for eating people.
- Miitopia: Griffins are modeled after the Opinicus but have ears like the Classical Gryphon. They also have multiple Mii eyes on their wings.
- Monster Sanctuary has the Gryphonix. Like the traditional European griffon, it's half-eagle, half-lion, and is said to guard gold, rulers, and tombs, but it's ON FIRE!
- Octopath Traveler: The Ogre Eagle has the hindquarters of a lion and the wings, forelegs head of a colorful eagle. Despite this, its English name references the "Tengu" portion of its Japanese name with the term "Ogre", and emphasizes its avian traits by referring to it as an eagle rather than a griffon.
- Palworld: Shadowbeak is a Bioweapon Beast Pal styled much like a classical griffon but with all four of its legs being avian in appearance and long tail feathers instead of a leonine tail. It also has a distinctive feather crest as well as a spiked metal ring around its midsection.
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous: "The Last Sarkorians" DLC introduces a new companion Ulbrig. Ulbrig has the new Shifter class (also bundled in the DLC) with a unique subtype that lets Ulbrig turn into a Griffon. This is the result of him performing a Fusion Dance with a dying Griffon deity. While Ulbrig can normally only stay in Griffon form for a minute in real-time, if he gains the Mythic Ability "Master Shapeshifter" he can stay in Griffon form permanently.
- Phantasy Star Online has the Gal Gryphon, a hippogriff-styled gryphon with hooved feet, a bulky body reminiscent of a bull, and two large tusks protruding from the sides of its head that it uses to fire lightning beams.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon: Type: Null and Silvally are essentially cyborg Pokemon made out of parts of other Pokemon, but their basic shape (talons on their front feet, paws on their hind feet, and a beaked head) resembles a Keythong or Minoan Gryphon.
- Pokémon Uranium, a Pokémon fan game, has Gargryph, a griffin made of rock and based on gargoyles.
- Prince of Persia: Warrior Within features an enormous griffin
, as a boss. Interestingly, it serves as a protector of the castle.
- Riviera: The Promised Land: Griffons appear as demons, and in Yggdra Union and Blaze Union as mounts alongside horses and dragons. The latter two games have griffon-riding units as female-only, seeing as all the characters riding anything else happen to be male. In Yggdra Unison, the superior mobility of griffon riders during the daytime makes the only two of them in the game, Kylier and Emilia, Lightning Bruiser-style Game Breakers for as long as the sun is up and Mighty Glaciers at night; the other two Ancardia games give the class the Weaksauce Weakness of lacking terrain bonuses, making them far easier to pummel.
- Shovel Knight has two fire-breathing and armored gryphons as minibosses in King Knight's stage. Talking to the castle's previous owner in the village after finishing the stage reveals that they were the king's pets. Good thing they respawn. Palette swapped versions also appear in the final stages.
- Skylanders: One of the Skylanders is Sonic Boom, a mother Opinicus.
- Total War:
- Total War: Warhammer:
- As in the parent tabletop game, Emperor Karl Franz can ride an enormous griffon named Deathclaw that he raised from an egg. Imperial Griffons are also a high-level steed for Imperial generals, and Imperial Amber Wizards, who specialize in the Lore of Beasts, can ride green-feathered jade griffons. Griffons can have the back half of multiple kinds of large cat; while generic griffon mounts have traditional lion bodies, Deathclaw has tiger-striped hindquarters and jade griffons have those of clouded leopards.
- A couple or regular Imperial units ride demigryphs, essentially wingless griffons with catlike front limbs. Like the regular kind, they have to be individually tamed by prospective riders, but the reward is the Undying Loyalty of one of the fiercest creatures in the Empire. The main version has white heads and tiger-striped bodies, but their unique Regiment of Renown, the Royal Altdorf Gryphites, ride demigryphs with blue-gray feathers and snow leopard bodies.
- The Warden and the Paunch introduces griffins to the High Elf army, including Eltharion's mount Stormwing, who has leopard-spotted hindquarters and an osprey's front; generic griffon mounts for generals with bald eagles heads; and the Knights of Tor Gaval, a unique regiment of three elven knights riding jade griffons.
- Hippogriffs appear in the Bretonnian army roster both as mounts for lords, a single hero and a unit of elite air cavalry, the Hippogriff Knights. Unlike the tabletop version, they have lion tails.
- A Total War Saga: TROY: Griffins are creatures present in the Mythical mode, where they can be recruited if the Griffin Patriarch is brought over to the player's side. They all have the bodies and ears of lions and heads and wings of vultures, with feathers as strong as bronze; the Patriarch resembles a griffon vulture, while his lesser progeny have the features of lammergeiers. They're also quite big — lesser griffins are the size of elephants, and the Patriarch is around twice their size. They jealously hoard gold and live in a complex, conflict-filled balance with the one-eyed Arimaspoi that share their lands, with whom they constantly compete for treasure. As such, partnering with the Patriarch also allows the recruitment of Arimaspoi units. In battle, griffins serve as extremely fast and mobile flyers capable of dealing devastating damage to most common units.
- Total War: Warhammer:
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Griffons are among the many creatures Geralt can hunt. Unlike most examples, it seems more like a rough cross between a vulture, a lion, and a bat. It has only four limbs as well, and uses its wings as forelimbs while it's on the ground.
- World of Warcraft has both classic style gryphons and hippogriffs, the latter with antlers due to being raven/stag hybrids. The former are associated with dwarves, in particular the Wildhammer Clan, while the latter are associated with night elves (whether these are meant as a reference to perytons or just a function of the Rule of Cool is unknown). "Standard" (dwarven) gryphons function as the default flying mount for the Alliance.
- The Cyantian Chronicles: Cyantia's wildlife includes various species of gryphon, some of which have been domesticated by the immigrant Cyantians as mounts including the owl-like "Guardians." As seen in "Shivae" some of the wild gryphons are actually sapient.
- El Goonish Shive: A griffin appears for a one-panel gag
, which becomes far more serious when another shows up
, looking for the first. Tara the gryphon is a Magic Knight from an Alternate Dimension, and she and her wife were investigating the unusual magic situation when her wife disappeared, apparently Trapped in Another World (ours). (Although it turned out Andrea just got a bit lost and couldn't find the spot where she could return from). Griffins in that dimension have more variety than eagle + lion: Andrea is the classic version, Tara's pantherine-half is a tiger, Liam Tyrant-Slayer
has an owl head with a lion's mane, and Dwight
is all white with a cockatoo head.
- Erfworld has Gwiffons and the larger Megalogwiffs, which are giant marshmallow peeps that fulfill the role of griffons as mounts for the good-aligned forces.
- Their resemblance to a certain type of candy is important early on. Stanley requests that the perfect warlord be summoned "who eats Marbits and Gwiffons for breakfast". Cue Parson, who literally eats Peeps and Marshmallow Bits for breakfast.
- They're also apparently actually quite fearsome, which is understandable when you realize that their entire front opens into a gigantic gummy maw. They eat horn, hooves, and marrow, and get soggy in the rain.
- Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: There are three types of gryphons
with varying degrees of anthropomorphization. Type "A" gryphons are as anthropomorphic as beings, while type "B" are quadrupedal but still sapient, and type "C" are Kaiju-sized.
- Housepets!: Pete, a Celestial all-powerful being, takes on the form of a Gryphon who can switch between bipedal and quadrupedal as he desires.
- Skin Deep: Both classical griffons and opinici are present as named characters, in addition to some weirder species in the bonus content. As with most of the mythical creatures with multiple subspecies, it's not uncommon for a single family to have multiple variants among its members. They're also known to be among the creatures native to Wonderland.
- Classical gryphons are the most common variety, and have tufts of feathers resembling pointed ears that grow in when they hit adulthood.
- Some gryphons resemble cats and raptors other than the standard lions and eagles, but they're not common. As an example, Leah Tanno is part red-tailed hawk and part bobcat, and as a result is much smaller than other gryphons.
- Opinici, or maned gryphons as they're usually known, have lion forepaws, lion ears and — in the case of males — leonine manes; they are also the only type of griffon to give live birth instead of laying eggs. Most of the central gryphon characters in the comic are opinci.
- In contrast to the lion-heavy opinci, feathered gryphons favor their avian side and largely resemble four-legged eagles. The Jubjub Birds of Wonderland are also thought to descend from Wonderlander feathered gryphons, and themselves resemble all-bird griffons with checkered wings and black-and-white banded antennae-like structures on their heads.
- Alce, or keythongs, resemble classical gryphons in most respects but do not have any wings; instead, they have pointed horns sprouting from their heads and shoulders.
- Inverted gryphons, as their name suggests, have their bird and lion bits in the inverse of the usual order, with leonine heads and forepaws and avian wings, hind legs and tails.
- "Pigmy" gryphons are any extremely rare variant that may combine any type of bird and mammal. At least some, such as the diminutive hummingbird-and-mouse gryphons, aren't sapient and are effectively just animals.
- Hieracosphinxes — wingless, hawk-headed lions — are considered by other sphinxes to be just a gryphon variant with pretensions.
- Transcendent, being a Lighter and Softer take on the fantasy genre, has griffins as housecats mixed with songbirds. The cast meets an older woman who keeps a flock of them in her house, and lets the main character Olive take one home with her.
- Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: When Arnora attempts to summon a gryphon Familiar, the result... isn't quite what she expected
. She's the size of a housecat and has a parakeet front half, to begin with.
- Beast Fables: Griffons
are a form of chimera that emerges among birds of prey that incorporates traits of large mammals, chiefly but not exclusively felines; like all chimeras, they spend most of their time in their natural form, but can take on their larger, hybrid form at will, and mostly use it for hunting and fighting. In hybrid form, they are the size of a large cat and are quadrupeds, with modified, taloned wings acting as forelegs, with their mammalian traits manifesting chiefly in the anatomy of their torsos, their size, and leonine tails.
- Griffons arise from different avian groups at different rates. Eagles are the most likely group to become griffons — almost all eagle chimeras are griffons — and tend to be sturdy and powerful in hybrid form. Hawks and ospreys come next, and primarily tend towards leaner, swifter builds. Owls and then vultures come next, and finally falcons.
- There are two rarer forms with the broader griffon type, the bugbear and the hippogriff. Bugbears incorporate ursine traits instead of feline ones, and tend to be very heavily built and strong. Most bugbears are owl chimeras, who use this form to outmuscle competing predators. Hippogriffs are partly equine instead, and are usually found in vultures who decide they want live prey or to bully away other scavengers.
- Codex Inversus: In the World Before, griffins were noble creatures that soared through the skies of Heaven. When the Collapse forced all planes of existence into a single world, they found themselves having to compete for food and space in the mundane food chain and lost much of their heavenly status. Their modern descendants are for the most part just predatory animals.
- Birch griffins, part tiger and part snow owl, are among the creatures that inhabit the Infinite Forest, a dimension-warping landscape formed from a shard of a heavenly wilderness.
- Psittagryphs are macaw-like gryphons that live in areas where the natural jungles of Uxali border the mechanical jungles created by the Matras. They hunt the living constructs found there, cracking open their artificial casings to drink their animating fluids.
- Wolfyrs lost their wings entirely, and have lupine traits instead of feline ones. They live throughout the Angelic Unison as vicious and intelligent pack predators with a taste for horse meat, especially that of magical equines such as pegasi and unicorns. Some believe that the wolfyrs are driven by a hunger for the paradise that they've lost.
- Neopets:
- The Eyrie originally a dragon-like creature, became an opinicus sort of gryphon, albeit with ears.
- Add the rare Maraquan Paintbrush item, and you've got yourself a Marigryph.
- Windsonde
is a community-based role-playing game at DeviantArt, and nearly all of the player characters are gryphons. The rules for character design are pretty strict... except for Tookie Island, where any bird/mammal combination goes. There, the gryphons are
really
different
.
- According to DeviantArt any bird/terrestial mammal hybrid qualifies as a gryphon. Take a look at the tiny hummingbird-mouse
, secretary bird-maned wolf
, cockatiel-sugar glider
, hornbill-puma Cassidix
, bluejay-squirrels
, and vulture-hyena
. You can also have your pet house griffin
.
- UniCreatures' Khet, a gryphon on fire
◊.
- On this Tumblr post, a gryphon that's half hyena, half kookaburra, and twice the maniacal laughter.
- These cat/bird
crosses, created by Iguana Mouth.
- Aladdin: The Series: A few episodes involve griffins. One episode has Aladdin and his friends try to return an egg stolen by Abis Mal to a rampaging mother griffin, another has the group encounter one of a bunch of mechanical monsters piloted by a grumpy insect, among them a mechanical griffin, and another has a clumsy thief transform himself into a griffin from the Stone of Transformation given to him by Mozenrath. This was an appalling move on his part, since the toenail of a griffin was needed to transform Jasmine's father back to normal after magic powder turned him into a golden statue, but somewhat mitigated by the fact that the transformed griffin had Projectile Spells.
- American Dragon: Jake Long: According to Fu-Dog, gryphons lay an egg only once every thousand years. Once the baby hatches, the mother actually swallows the baby, which lives in her digestive tract for a week or two before it's healthy enough for the mother to throw back up and live on its own. Of course, this all grosses out Jake.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender:
- In keeping with the plethora of Mix-and-Match Critters in the franchise, one episode briefly features a griffin (with what appears to be a griffon vulture's forequarters) that's used as one of the trained animals in a traveling circus.
- The Legend of Korra: The Lizard Crow
is a scavenger that can be seen scouring the city for scraps, especially around industrial and coastal areas. It has the head and wings of a crow on the body of a lizard, giving it a strong resemblance to a more reptilian take on the classic griffon.
- Disenchantment: A single griffon has been seen, nesting on a cliff at the edge of the world. In addition to being hybrid of lion and eagle, they're also part human — they have the hindquarters of lions, the chests, heads and arms of humans (they walk on their knuckles) and the wings of eagles, in addition to very beak-like noses. Further, griffons have no sexual dimorphism; even the females look and sound masculine, despite laying eggs.
- Family Guy has a gryphon randomly fly through a rehab center's cafeteria in "The Thin White Line" solely for the sake of ruining Peter Griffin's attempt at a Line-of-Sight Alias. (He already saw a pea and tears.)
- Garfield and Friends: One episode has Orson and his friends Separate Scene Storytelling themselves in their own version of Camelot called "Hamelot" where they must bypass a hungry talk show host griffin who's obviously a spoof on Merv Griffin.
- Gargoyles: Griff is a British gargoyle that looks a lot like a humanoid griffin, he has greenish brown skin, a hawk-like beak, feathered wings and a lion's tail, he does not have Griffin ears, he makes him look more like a humanoid hawk than a humanoid griffin and wears a punk style black leather vest and wears black underwear. He is very considerate, courageous and friendly. He's also adventuring with King Arthur himself.
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002): Beast Man's control over wild creatures allows him to use whale-sized, twin tailed gryphons as his mounts.
- Hercules: The Animated Series has two griffins. One is elderly and has the job of guarding the first diamond. The other is a talk show host and is voiced by... Merv Griffin.
- Monster High (2022): Ms. Ziz, the faculty advisor at Monster High, is a ziz, a gryphon-like creature that originates from Jewish mythology. Besides the usual physical features, she also has Aura Vision, which she uses to determine which student should lead the werebeasts in their group midterm project.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Griffons were one of the first non-pony species introduced; they come from another continent and consequently aren't all that common in Equestria itself. Biologically, they're Classical griffons without the "ears" and with more variety than the traditional half-eagle half-lion build, with some resembling tigers or owls instead, and while most stick to natural color schemes several instead have fur and feathers as brightly colored as the ponies'. All their names also start with "G".
- "Griffon the Brush-off" has Rainbow Dash's friend from flight school, Gilda the Griffon; she's the first griffon in the show, and has the white head of a bald eagle. It turns out she's a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who has an aversion to all of the ponies except Rainbow Dash for being "uncool". Remember what was said in the introduction, about how griffons were said to be hostile toward horses?
- "MMMystery on the Friendship Express" includes Gustave le Grand. He's a baker with a thick French accent who comes off initially as a jerk, but then again so do his baking contest opponents. Strangely, he has a mustache on his beak.
- Given how Equestria seems to be set up, the griffons appear to have a city state within Equestria's borders. The episodes "Rainbow Falls" and "Equestria Games" have griffon participants, the latter showing that the griffons are also prone to having a technicolor population — one of them is pink and maroon, another solid purple and third cyan with teal head and wing feathers.
- "The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone" exposits rather abundantly on griffons. Gilda hails from Griffonstone, a griffon kingdom located in a mountainous continent across the sea from Equestria. Said kingdom used to be proud and strong; however, when a one-eyed monster named Arimaspi stole a precious idol that they based their national pride around, the griffons' spirit broke. Griffonstone is little more than a decrepit slum nowadays, and almost all of its inhabitants are greedy, selfish jerks who won't do anything for free even if lives are at stake. Gilda actually turns out to be one of the nicest griffons by virtue of being willing to let her old friendship with Rainbow Dash motivate her into saving her life even while costing her the chance to recover the lost idol. The episode's portrayal of griffons is fairly faithful to mythology — the love of gold, less than friendly relations with horses, and rivalries with cyclopean beings are all shown to some extent in this episode.
- From Season 8 onwards, a male griffon, Gallus, appears as a supporting character, as he becomes one of five foreign students who study at Twilight Sparkle's School of Friendship.
- The movie introduces hippogriffs, which appear to be a totally separate species. They're referred to as half pony and half eagle and tend towards light body colors and crests of colorful feathers. Their nature as chimeric creatures is less visibly obvious than the griffons' is, as their bird and mammal parts are the same color and don't stand out much against each other; they also possess external ears, and their tails are made of feathers. They used to live on the island of Mt. Aris in the far south, but when the Storm King rose to power their queen used the power of an enchanted pearl to transform them into seaponies, so that they could hide under the sea where they would be safe. Hippogriffs make proper appearances in the TV series starting in Season 8, with the Pearl of Transformation having been divided up amongst them so they can change between hippogriff and seapony at will, and Queen Novo's niece Silverstream joins Gallus as a supporting character and student at Twilight's School of Friendship.
- Griffons were one of the first non-pony species introduced; they come from another continent and consequently aren't all that common in Equestria itself. Biologically, they're Classical griffons without the "ears" and with more variety than the traditional half-eagle half-lion build, with some resembling tigers or owls instead, and while most stick to natural color schemes several instead have fur and feathers as brightly colored as the ponies'. All their names also start with "G".
- Sofia the First: a family of gryphons formed by a couple and their cub are shown to be the sentries in the treasure chamber where the amulet of avalor was stored before being given to sofia, because they were attracted to shiny stuff.
- The Owl House:
- Griffins are referenced in a flashback of the main character's "weird" antics when she makes a taxidermy replica out of the upper body of a pigeon, the lower body of a squirrel, and "anatomically correct" spider-breath — something that gets her in trouble. Upon arriving in the Boiling Isles and escaping guards with Eda, they fly by a much larger, real griffin (with a leonine lower body) that spits up spiders, with Luz even gleefully shouting "I knew it!"
- "The First Day" includes a seemingly young (and rather adorable and affectionate) griffin named "Puddles", owned by the troublemaker Viney who also served as her medic assistant before she was put in the Detention Track. Puddles is used by Viney as her part of the defeating the Monster of the Week.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- The Daughter, the embodiment of the Light Side of the Force, can turn into a gryphon with white and golden feathers and a light green mane and tail tuft. This is in contrast to the Son, the embodiment of The Dark Side, who can turn into a monstrous creature resembling a mix between a bat and a particularly ugly dragon.
- Mastiff phalones
are quadrupedal predators native to the world of Maridun with muscular, feline bodies, vulture-like heads and feathered manes. They're pack hunters, and overall resemble typical griffins without wings.
- Winx Club: a family of space-ship sized gryphons tried to attack the ship were the winx were traveling in their way to find the mirror of truth.
- World of Quest: Graer is a brown-furred griffon, depicted as an intelligent if comical companion of Quest and Prince Nestor. However, his front-heavy build, lack of tail, and cartoony proportions (namely, his oversized beak, which is quite deep and broad for a griffon) can make this a bit less than obvious for first-time viewers. In the episode "War of the Griffins", we meet more of Graer's kind, depicted as having all kinds of beak shapes and coming in many colors, although they also share his burly body shape.
- The platypus is the closest modern-day thing in the real-world animal kingdom to one, having the face and limbs of a bird (in this case, a duck) and body and tail of a mammal (specifically, a beaver).
- The dinosaur Hagryphus
. The group that it belongs too, Oviraptorosauria, is in itself quite gryphon like, having bird of prey-like beaks and powerful claws on both front and hind-limbs, and have long tails.
- The logo for Sprecher Brewery of Wisconsin is a fairly standard gryphon, but the more cartoonish version
◊ (named Rooty) on their root beer has a huge beak and a vaguely monkey-like body.
- Merv Griffin is naturally a very different griffin, being a person with that family name. The emblem for his company, Merv Griffin Enterprises, was a stained glass window of an Opinicus griffin with lion ears (and strangely, a single horse hoof
◊). This emblem appeared after the closing credits for each Enterprises television show in the 1980s and 1990s, including Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!.
- The Swedish jetfighter SAAB 39 Gripen ("Gryphon"), designed to be able to carry out both interceptor, ground attack and reconnaissance duties.
- The source of the name for 1970s Progressive Rock band Gryphon.
