Hircocervus
The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag or horse-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag. In his work De Interpretatione, Aristoteles utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is knowable even though it does not really exist.[1]
The word hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398 (now at the Bodleian Library).[1]
A hircocervus is depicted in a wall-painting called The Trusty Servant, painted by John Hoskins in 1579. dating from the 1580s.[2] It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England.[1] The author Arthur Cleveland Coxe described the painting as such: "I must not omit to mention the time-honoured Hircocervus, or picture of the 'trusty servant,' which hangs near the kitchen, and which emblematically sets forth those virtues in domestics, of which we Americans know nothing. It is a figure, part man, part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth, and various other symbols in his hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable character."[1]
The painting had a didactic function: it is accompanied by allegorical verses that associate the hircocervus servant's various animal parts with distinctive virtues that the college's students were meant to follow.[3]
The Latin verses have been translated into English as:
A trusty servant's picture would you see,
This figure well survey, who'ever you be.
The porker's snout not nice in diet shows;
The padlock shut, no secret he'll disclose;
Patient, to angry lords the ass gives ear;
Swiftness on errand, the stag's feet declare;
Laden his left hand, apt to labour saith;
The coat his neatness; the open hand his faith;
Girt with his sword, his shield upon his arm,
Himself and master he'll protect from harm.[4]
Umberto Eco refers to a hircocervus in his novel The Island of the Day Before.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e Quinion, Michael (2009). "Hircocervus". World Wide Words. http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hir1.htm. Retrieved February 8, 2009.
- ^ Pattern Histories: The Trusty Servant accessed 29 May 2007
- ^ Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing "monsters" in Shakespearean drama and early modern culture (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 139.
- ^ Quoted in Howard Staunton, The Great Schools of England (Strahan. 1869), 61n.
