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Post by The Creature Codex on Jul 9, 2018 17:37:43 GMT
Does the ipotane really exist? For those unfamiliar with it, it's a name given to a human with horse legs. But the Wikipedia page has exactly 0 sources, and the only other pages that mention it are stolen straight from Wikipedia. My current hypothesis is that it's a back-creation of modern teratologists intent on splitting the original Greek satyr, which sometimes had horse-like legs, from the faun-influenced version that everybody thinks of when they think "satyr". Are there legitimate sources for the ipotane that I'm missing?
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Post by WannabeDemonLord on Jul 10, 2018 23:31:34 GMT
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Post by QuirkyBestiary on Jul 11, 2018 14:54:28 GMT
Cool. Should this be in the fakelore section? That section could perhaps function as a group of casefiles, like creatures and sources that are yet to be tracked down/confirmed to be legitimate. I would also like to put the Wilddeoren of 'Merlin' fame in that group as well, because it appears to be referenced in a book of Arthurian monsters as well as just in Merlin, but I'm not sure were the book got them from.
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Post by The Creature Codex on Jul 12, 2018 4:17:07 GMT
Good find! I've heard of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, but have not yet read it. I did find that Project Gutenberg has a version of it here, and here's the relevant passage: "In that country be many hippotaynes that dwell some-time in the water and sometime on the land. And they be half man and half horse, as I have said before. And they eat men when they may take them." Pliny refers to "hippopodes", so we seem to have a pretty clear linguistic drift here, from hippopodes to hippotaynes to ipotanes.
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Post by QuirkyBestiary on Jul 12, 2018 11:04:33 GMT
It also says that they live partially in water, as you demonstrated in the quote that you just provided - so that's an interesting twist. Also, from that same quote they seem to have been vicious and felonious, which is something that I didn't know about the Ipotanes before.
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