Dear reader who found my blog whilst googling, “knit-harpy,”
My lordy, thank you. Because of this odd request I had to go back to the Google God and see what the living hell this could possibly refer to in the interwebs. And lo, the findings were good.
Really good.
Unlike the magazine title, “Real Simple,” because blech. It’s either REALLY simple or it’s simply real, but it’s never real simple. They don’t call the Grammar Queen of All Things Grammatical and Holy for nothin’ (note: this blog is not necessarily a standard by which you should ever measure my grammatical prowess).
Where were we? Ah yes, googling the knit-harpy.
I do not knit. I would like to knit, but alas, I haven’t tried it since I was six. I should maybe think of doing that someday. I would knit you all a permanent version of the tiny cakes. You could maybe put it in your bathroom. Like a tiny cake tissue cozy. Maybe you wouldn’t try to eat it, but if I scented it lightly with white chocolate, you might.
In rushing off to do my own bowing to the Google God with the ammunition of “knit-harpy,” I found this: YARN HARPY. Yarn Harpy is a fellow mythical lady creature but she knitblogs. Yes, knitblogging. Awesome (note: I must learn to knit so I can participate in this knitblogging and make you a tiny cake tissue cozy).
This is the knit-harpy I assume you are looking for in your google search.
But. ha.
I also found this: the Limited Edition Spyderco Harpy Knife. Harpy knife? Wowza. Seriously, go look at that thing, it’s a bit scary. You buy it at Bad Dawg Sports (buwahahahahahahahahaha!). It’s all big and meaty and manly. Which, why call it a harpy knife? Harpy? Knife?
Is for harpy wielding? I don’t think so.
Tighten up the reigns, I feel another etymology session coming on.
The term, “harpy,” is thought to come from the Greek “Harpyia,” meaning “snatcher,” and probably related to the word, “harpazein” meaning “to snatch.” I’ve also seen the word translate to “robbers” or “the swift robbers.” In Greek, the word is á¼Ïπυιαι or `Arpuia and I’ve seen that translated as “the snatchers, a personification of whirlwinds or hurricanes.”
Exciting. There’s more. Harpies started their mythological life as beautiful and powerful winged maidens and ended up being shrew, hateful women. The story seems so unique in the history of powerful women, I hardly know where to start. *snort*
Early myths define harpies as those who were the goddesses of the sweeping storm, symbolic of the disappearance of humankind. As such, they were sometimes deemed as the entities that escorted a soul to Hades. This is not an unkind thing to be, having an escort in the afterlife is better than having none and there does not seem to be an attachment of malice in the harpies’ doings. In the ancient Aegean, death appeared to people as seabirds and the people left offerings of food to the seabirds, the harpies.
In Homer (9th-8th BCE), we get Harpies. Capitalized. The Harpies are the personification of a stormwind and one of them, Podarge (fleet foot), is married to Zephyr, the West Wind. Podarge rides in the shape of a swift mare and with Zephyr, she births the horses of Achilles, Xanthus and Balius.
“Xanthos and Balios, who tore with the winds’ speed, horses stormy Podarge once conceived of Zephyros and bore, as she grazed in the meadow beside the swirl of Okeanos.” – Homer, Iliad 16.148
Hesiod (8th-7th BCE) brought Harpies as winged goddesses with beautiful fair hair, pretty faces, and a load of power. According to Hesiod, they are the daughters of Thaumas, the Sea God of Wonder, and Electra, and Oceanid and Cloud Nymph, not this one. The daughters of Electra, the harpies, being the daughters of the West Wind and a Cloud Nymph, are written to have flown faster than birds and winds alike. Some names of the harpies are Aello (storm swift), Okypete (swift wing), Aellopus (storm swift), Okythoe (swift runner), Nikothoe (running victory), and Celaeno (storm darkness). All the names refer to the winds and storms (and perhaps an homage to their parentage) and the speed with which they can fly. In Hesiod’s later works, harpies begin turning into creature that are half-bird, half-women.
“Now Thaumas married a daughter of deep-running Okeanos, Elektra, and she bore him swift-footed Iris, the rainbow, and the Harpyiai of the lovely hair, Okypete and Aello, and these two in the speed of their wings keep pace with the blowing winds, or birds in flight, as they soar and swoop, high aloft.” – Hesiod, Theogony 265
Delving a tad deeper into the life of harpies, we get the root ar, or ar-n, and perhaps “bhur”, all allied with the Latin “nostrum” meaning “ours.”
So here we get that a root for harpy is ours. Harpy so far is a personification of the winds, then she is a beaufitul winged maiden who can fly faster than the winds, she is an escort to those who have died, and she is ours. She sounds so evil, already, no?
Except that isn’t where it all ends, hence my reclaiming of the word in this blog title.
Harpies along the line become not just swift wind runners but also a bit mischevious. Even in Hesiod the harpies have a mischevious bent, but this is far different than what is to come. In the Greek story of Jason and the Argonauts, the harpies turn into the workmaidens of Zeus…and worse.*
By the time of Aeschylus’ writings (Eumenides, 6th-5th BCE), harpies are turning into monsters, not goddesses or even the swift, mischevious offspring of the wind and clouds.
Apollonius Rhodius (3rd BCE) writes The Argonautica and tells the story Jason and the Argonauts, including the story of the Thracian King Phineus. Phineus had the gift of prophecy but manages to piss of Zeus by telling too many plans of the Gods. So, Zeus places Phineus before a lovely buffet and sends down the Harpies to snatch any food away from Phineus before he can eat.
“For he showed no reverence even for Zeus, whose sacred purposes he did not scruple to disclose in full to all. Zeus punished him for this by giving him a lingering old age, without the boon of sight. He even robbed him of such pleasure as he might have got from the many dainties which neighbours kept bringing to his house when they came there to consult the oracle. On every occasion the Harpyiai swooped down through the clouds and snatched the food from his mouth and hands with their beaks, sometimes leaving him not a morsel, sometimes a few scraps, so that he might live and be tormented. They gave a loathsome stench to everything. What bits were left emitted such a smell that no one could have borne to put them in his mouth or even to come near …” – Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2.179-434
Why does the leftover food have that “loathsome stench”? Because the Harpies are defecating on the leftovers. By now they have become birds with razor-sharp claws and beaks with the heads of women and a foul stench (always with the stench). The Harpies are set to the task, by Zeus, to punish Phineus. Each time food is magically laid out for him, the flock of Harpies swoop in, snatch some of it, scatter some other bits of food, and then shit on the rest, leaving Phineus hungry and growing thinner.
“The Harpyiae ever watch my food; never, alas! can I elude them; straightway they all swoop down like the black cloud of a whirling hurricane, already by the sound of her wings I know Celaeno from afar; they ravage and sweep away my banquet, and befoul and upset the cups, there is a violent stench and a sorry battle arises, for the monsters are as famished as I. What all have scorned or polluted with their touch, or what has fallen from their filthy claws, causes me to linger thus among the living. Nor may I break fate’s bond by death: by nourishment is my cruel need prolonged.” – Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4.425
Okay, bring that story to today’s version of the word harpy. Dictionary.com, my lover whom I delight in naughty threeways with WordReference.com, says this for the word “harpy.”
1. Greek Mythology. One of several loathsome, voracious monsters with the head and trunk of a woman and the tail, wings, and talons of a bird.
2. harpy A predatory person.
3. harpy A shrewish woman.
Dude.
The ever-fabulous Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. nicely sums up what’s going on in her book about women archetypes, Women Who Run with the Wolves. She explains this literal fouling of Phineus’ food can be seen as a temblón, a shiver story, since we have all experienced a figurative fouling at some time.
She explains the Harpy Syndrome. The Harpy Syndrome “destroys via denigration of one’s talents and efforts” and comes from others or with our own “disparaging internal dialogue.” She goes on, “A woman brings up an idea and the Harpy shits upon it.” Her raison d’être is to shit on everyone else’s ideas and thoughts.
In more recent literature, I have read the harpy as a woman who has died by the hand of a man, rendering her full of hatred and bitterness – with a keen sense of violent revenge – in the afterlife for all men. This is possibly related to her role as a death escort and the Phineus tale of fouling his dinner and taking delight in it.
The harpy moved from a wind to a beautiful winged maiden to our own mischevious minor deity to a bird-woman to a monster who shits on Phineus’ dinner.
I reclaim the Harpy as a swift, figuratively winged woman with a flair for the mischevious and as one who does not shit on everyone’s parade, but rather calls ‘em likes I see ‘em and thus violently shits on an asshat’s dinner when it’s necessary to avenge what has been done to women’s history and what is being done to the contemporary woman.
Sincerely,
Melissa
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*Seriously, this is fabulous: Jason
