Talk:Peryton

AfD discussion and comment

From VfD:

The article is poorly written & misrepresents. Content is very like the few other mentions found via Google. Lempriere's Dictionary has never heard of it, and neither has Bartleby.com, so I'm guessing that, if this is, indeed, a mythological creature, it's a) a very recent one b) not one that inspired any authors to write about it or allude to it. With the fake ancient history, the article is misinformation. Geogre 13:21, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• Comment. Judging from this link [1], this beast comes from "The book of imaginary beings" by Jorge Luis Borges. Not sure if that's encyclopedic, but at least it's not internet fanfic. Andris 14:17, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)
• Delete for Geogre's reasons above. — Trilobite (Talk)
• Keep & cleanup- it has legitimate literary background. I think it had sources before Borges, but can't document that right now; but Borges & the subsequent usage is sufficient to be worth an entry. The article needs a lot of workm though. -FZ 17:51, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Comment: It's possible to do that, yes, but is this really significant? There appears to be a town called Peryton, but the fictional beast is of recent vintage, and Borges's readership is pretty specialized. Geogre 19:30, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Delete. Google gives only 11 hits for Google Search: Peryton Borges. The article is just a non-literary spoiler summary of what Borges writes. If Peryton is hardly ever mentioned outside the tale itself then it's not suitable for an encyclopedic article as it is not something anyone would be likely to look up. Even if there were an article here on the "Book of Imaginary Beasts", one should not want to give away this information. A more minimal account would be better in such an article. Jallan 23:05, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings deserves an article, especially since it was a book Borges reworked several times (see Jorge Luis Borges bibliography for details). If he's the only source for it -- that is, if he wasn't actually working from earlier accounts -- that sounds interesting to me, because most of the beings in the book are legitimate legends. It would have been characteristic of him to make one up and sneak it in among the legends. Even if theis article as it is isn't worth keeping, I bet there's a topic here. So I guess Keep & cleanup. -- Jmabel 02:17, Aug 21, 2004 (UTC)
• Keep and cleanup. I'm not convinced the beast is original with Borges. His book includes well-established classical monsters (banshee, unicorn, etc.), as well as some expressly credited to other authors ("An Animal Imagined by C.S. Lewis"). One website says the peryton is "of Celtic mythology" but doesn't elaborate. Whether it's a Borges invention or not, I think it deserves an article. If we can't figure out the origin yet, it will have to be something like "a creature described by Jorge Luis Borges in The Book of Imaginary Beings" (ambiguous as to whether he was recounting old myths or adding a creation of his own). JamesMLane 06:31, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
• Keep and cleanup based on reasoning by Jmabel. Andris 07:10, Aug 21, 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. -Sean Curtin 02:46, Aug 22, 2004 (UTC)
• Delete The purpose of an encyclopedia is not to reprint imaginary creature ever invented, especially if it is well documented in a book. If The Peryton is such a notable aspect Borge's Book of Imaginary Beings then it should reside in an article about said book, assuming the book itself is notable. -TheFed 23:37, Aug 25, 2004 (UTC)

end moved discussion

Keep but definitely change - the peryton is original with Borges as far as anyone has ever been able to document. Borges claims the account is from the usual lost medieval manuscript, which certainly is possible but it's also the "dog ate my homework" of source attribution. However, it's one of those fictional things of recent vintage that has taken on a significant life of its own, so it merits documentation on that account. What the article should say but doesn't is that it originates with Borges and has wandered into the fantasy genre as a sort of faux-mythological monster via Dungeons and Dragons (the first edition Monster Manual). Tarchon 19:06, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Seeing as no one has produced evidence to the contrary, I am going to assume that the Peryton is an invention of Borges and edit accordingly. I would recommend against looking for the alleged manuscript source; I know the Book of Imaginary Beings pretty well, and it's an intentional mix of other people's legends and stuff he made up for the book. He likes playing with sourcing a lot; the vague reference is neither true nor a lie, but a literary effect. I'm gonna do a quick job; hope someone else will come by and either expand or delete. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.125.52.41 (talk) 15:30, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

I think it's an almost certainty that Borges based the Peryton on the illustration of the demon Furfur from Collin de Plancy's "Dictionnaire Infernal", first published in 1818. Perhaps he left out the source due to its perhaps controversial nature, being from a book on ostensibly black magic and not from a fairy tale. Borges reference to it being in a "medieval manuscript" would seem to back this up. You can simply look at the illustration of Furfur in de Plancy's book and immediately recognize it as the source of the Peryton. 207.153.46.3 (talk) 17:06, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

The term "Peryton", I can't trace past Borges. The visual of a winged stag, I did manage to trace in a now-since deleted addition to the article (which I would like to restore in some form):

Some historical versions of the heraldry of King Charles VI of France featured winged stags as heraldic supports, as did some versions of the late medieval battle standard of the Dukes of Bourbon<ref>Wise, Terence: Medieval European Armies, Oxford: Osprey Publishing 2004, colour plate H1 & p. 39 (= Men-at-Arms Series, vol. 50). Whedit (talk) 21:57, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Hippogriff

"Perytons are the primary inspiration for the Hippogriff creatures from the fantasy Warcraft universe."

Surely Hippogriffs are the primary inspiration for Hippogriff creatures. Is there something special or different about Warcraft Hippogriffs? P Ingerson (talk) 18:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree, and I'm removing the comment until someone can provide evidence that Warcraft hippogriffs are based on perytons, not mythological (or perhaps, D&D) hippogriffs. Applejuicefool 19:24, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that WoW doesn't get the idea of hippogriffs from the peryton, but if you look closely at the model they use for "hippogryphs," they aren't entirely hippogriffs. They're dark-bluish, feathered quadrupeds with beaked and antlered heads, which fits Borges' description in some ways. See http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Hippo.jpg and http://www.wowwiki.com/Hippogryph (contrary to wowwiki's claim, the back hooves are the uncloven perissodactyl hooves of a horse, not the cloven artiodactyl hooves of a deer). I think it's possible that the WoW hippogryph is intended amalgamate the peryton and the the classical hippogriff. I haven't paid much attention to the shadow, but I'll have to take a look now. :) Tarchon 06:06, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite?

From what I've seen of the current page, it's almost verbatim of this website, which seems to have invented its own mythology of the peryton independently of Borges. 67.162.118.167 (talk) 06:04, 5 March 2008 (UTC) Chris G.

W&W creatures

this is a monster of the mind in weird & wild creatures. 23:55, 18 February 2009 (UTC)68.3.191.130 (talk)

Not a legendary creature

Hello, I've completed the french article about peryton (sorry for my bad english), and it's not a legentary creature, Borge have "invented" it. See, in spanish, Rainer W. Klein, Monstruos Y Gigantes, Imaginador, 2004, 128 p. (ISBN 9789507684777), or in french : Michel Lafon, Borges, ou, La réécriture, Éditions du Seuil, coll. « Collection Poétique », 1990, 336 p. (ISBN 9782020123563). Borges loves the mirrors, labyrinths, and co. The medieval manuscript quoted in the book of imaginary beings don't exist ! Thx. --Tsaag Valren (talk) 08:39, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Perton is not a mythological or a legendary creature --Tsaag Valren (talk) 17:41, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Most certainly not a legendary creature; corrected as such. Sphenacodon (talk) 14:52, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Presence in "La-Mulana"

A peryton appears as an enemy Japanese freeware game La-Mulana, one of several creatures that appear in the Book of Imaginary Beings. Should a mention of this be made in the pop culture section? 71.213.195.146 (talk) 00:58, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dark Summoner

I'd been seeing a lot of peryton monsters in the Dark Summoner mobile game, and I was curious, so I searched and found this page. The reason is that I was editing a page on the YGO Wikia. Said page is about a card based off the peryton.

As I just joined, I'm not sure if either of the examples are notable enough, though I'm much more certain about the "Yu-Gi-Oh!" example than the "Dark Summoner" one. Can someone help with this? BeyonderHermes (talk) 21:24, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I've added the Yu-Gi-Oh! example; haven't looked into the Dark Summoner one yet... FallingGravity (talk) 06:09, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Let me help you with that. BeyonderHermes (talk) 16:26, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Radio Astronomy

Peryton seems to be a term used in radio-astronomy ( see for example http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.05245v2.pdf ) Could someone who knows about this include a few words of explanation? Redcliffe maven (talk) 15:23, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

I came here for that, too (from Fast radio burst) and I don't think they're the same thing at all. It needs to be a separate article with a disambiguation page. Wabbott9 Tell me about it.... 22:02, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm guessing that the radio-astronomy anomaly was named for the Borgesian creature. By the way, why are there two "citation needed" tags on a sentence that is in effect nothing more than a citation?