page_title: Roc (mythology)
section_title: Western expansion
hierarchical_section_title: Roc (mythology) / Western expansion
caption_attribution_description: Jorden efter syndefaldet. 1690. Oil on canvas. 64,5x82,5 cm. Modtaget 1905, juli. Inventarnr.: KMS1899 National Gallery of Denmark The white dodos pictured have not been previously mentioned in the literature, but the image was figured in the following catalogue, after I (the uploader here) notified researcher J. P. Hume about it in 2011:[1]
context_page_description: The Roc is an enormous legendary bird of prey in the popular mythology of the Middle East.
  The Roc appears in Arabic geographies and natural history, popularized in Arabian fairy tales and sailors' folklore. Ibn Battuta tells of a mountain hovering in the air over the China Seas, which was the Roc. The story collection One Thousand and One Nights includes tales of Abd al-Rahman and Sinbad the Sailor, both of which include the Roc.
context_section_description: Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela reported a story reminiscent of the roc in which shipwrecked sailors escaped from a desert island by wrapping themselves in ox-hides and letting griffins carry them off as if they were cattle. 
  
  In the 13th century, Marco Polo (as quoted in Attenborough (1961: 32)) stated 
  It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird swoops down on him and eats him at leisure.
  Polo claimed that the roc flew to Madagascar "from the southern regions", and that the Great Khan sent messengers to the island who returned with a feather (likely a Raphia frond). He explicitly distinguishes the bird from a griffin.
  In The Arabian Nights the roc appears on a tropical island during Sinbad's second voyage. Because of Polo's account, others identified the island as Madagascar, which became the location for stories about other giant birds. Doubtless, it was Polo's description that inspired Antonio Pigafetta, one of Ferdinand Magellan's companions, who wrote or had ghost-written an embroidered account of the circumglobal voyage: in Pigafetta's account the home grounds of the roc were the seas of China. Such descriptions captured the imaginations of later illustrators, such as Stradanus ca 1590 or Theodor de Bry in 1594 who showed an elephant being carried off in the roc's talons, or showed the roc destroying entire ships in revenge for destruction of its giant egg, as recounted in the fifth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor. Ulisse Aldrovandi's Ornithologia (1599) included a woodcut of a roc with a somewhat pig-like elephant in its talons, but in the rational world of the 17th century, the roc was regarded more critically.
caption: 1690 painting by Franz Rösel von Rosenhof showing two roc-like birds carrying a deer and an elephant; a third grasps a lion.
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