Warriors, Witches, Women by Kate Hodges

Author:Kate Hodges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2019-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

The insatiable monsters also played a role in the tale of Jason and the Argonauts. During their quest, the fleece chasers washed up on a remote island where they found blind King Phineas. He had been given the gift of fortune-telling, but had angered Zeus by having visions that revealed the gods’ secret schemes. To punish the king, Zeus took away his sight and banished him to the island, but his final torture was worthy of a Bond villain. Every day, Zeus laid on a lavish buffet and, as starving Phineas went to help himself, a gang of harpies would descend, stealing the food, before gleefully defecating on the table.

An appalled Jason pledged to help poor, hungry Phineas, and he enlisted the brute strength of the Boreads, the sons of the Boreas, the god of north wind. Together, the wind brothers drove away the harpies, chasing them ceaselessly across the world, until their sister, the goddess Iris intervened and the half-women, half-birds escaped to a cave on Crete. A grateful Phineus told Jason how to navigate the tricky Symplegades rocks, which crashed together each time a vessel passed through.

Human disappearances were also blamed on these super-swift monsters – even noble women were vulnerable, the bounty-hunting harpies flying off with the daughters of King Pandareos, stealing them from their foster mother Aphrodite and taking them to act as servants for the goddesses of vengeance, the Furies (see here). The harpies could also go rogue, stealing meals, destroying houses and crops and whipping up storms, seemingly on a whim. The ancient Greeks blamed them when food or valuable items went missing or for sudden disasters.

The shrieking, hungry beasts are part of the pantheon of beings worldwide whose task it is to bear away the souls of the dead, like Morrígan (shown here) and the Valkyries (shown here). It’s a strong archetype and, through literature and art, these vividly portrayed creatures live on. Their distinctive shape appears on temple carvings and vases, while Roman and Byzantine writers kept their name alive. In the Middle Ages, they pop up in the seventh ring of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, infesting a haunted wood where the bodies of those who had committed suicide were absorbed into the trees. This scene was immortalised by William Blake in his 1824–27 painting The Wood of the Self-Murderers.

Thanks to their eye-catching role in the Golden Fleece saga, the harpies also make cameo appearances in adaptations of the story, including, memorably, in Ray Harryhausen’s 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts – their screeching, whirlwind appearance sending generations of TV-watching kids scuttling behind their sofas.

However, these monstrous entities’ name has also been appropriated for something perhaps more terrifying than their original incarnation. Benedick, in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, says of forthright Beatrice that he would rather do hard labour than ‘hold three words conference with this harpy!’ The term ‘harpy’ has crystallised into an intensely gendered byword for any woman too demanding, too loud, taking up too much room or audio space.

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