Creature of the Week: Rukh

Name: Rukh, Roc, Somehow a griffin according to Marco Polo.

You may know it from: One Piece, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, My Little Pony, Dungeons and Dragons, Final Fantasy, God of War

Dear Reader,

While I would typically begin with an explanation of the creature's appearance, the popular myths in which this creature features don’t begin with description, so neither will I. In One Thousand and One Nights  the Rukh is depicted by Sinbad and Shahrazad alike as a massive white hill towering towards the heavens and Marco Polo introduced it with a single feather, 90 times longer than his waist (although he called it a griffin). Across these disparate stories from disparate cultures, one thing should be obvious: the bird is really, really big. The Rukh is a massive white bird, capable of carrying three elephants on its back and consuming large snakes capable of downing elephants themselves. The creature is resemblant of another massive bird, the Simurgh (another bird for another day, as the kids say), although it is much more animalistic. Its name probably comes from the Farsi word for cheek or face, “rokh,” which is a surprisingly human name for such an intimidating creature. 

Rukhs act the most like humans when it comes to their young: if anyone attacks their children by cracking open their eggs, they will retaliate by dropping large boulders on the attacker, which happens multiple times within One Thousand and One Nights. In the first instance, after King Abd al-Rahman hurts the Rukh’s child, he is pursued by the Rukh and is barely able to escape. The second time, Sinbad and his crew were in the same situation and weren’t so lucky. Sinbad had several other encounters with the Rukh in One Thousand and One Nights. In the first encounter, he was lulled to sleep by the comforting call of birds.  He stumbled upon a white hill—which was actually a Rukh egg—when what was presumably its mother descended, eclipsing the sun. Like with Sinbad, sleep took hold of the bird. While it was in reach, Sinbad hatched a plan: he tied himself to the Rukh with a turban. His reasoning was: “This bird may carry me to a land of cities and inhabitants, and that will be better than abiding in this desert island” (I am using Richard Burton’s translation because it is the only one I have access to. Unfortunately he was an Orientalist). His plan succeeded, but instead of a city, it took him to a desert with nothing to eat, but plenty to eat him. 

One escape and three voyages later, Sinbad had another encounter with a Rukh. His crew first witnessed the egg and cracked it open without his permission in order to eat the Rukh fetus, which they believed would let them gain eternal youth. When he learned of the incident, Sinbad commanded the crew to stop, but they refused. Then, a much larger shadow eclipsed the sun and two Rukhs descended from the heavens. They got on the ship to escape but they did not get far: one of the boulders destroyed the boat and only Sinbad survived. 

Douglas J. McMillan, English professor emeritus at East Carolina University, described the Rukh as a symbolic representation of “[t]he desire to escape the here and now.” Like change, the Rukh is something that cannot be fully described, it must be experienced and seen for oneself. This interpretation is also supported by Sinbad’s encounters. In his first encounter, Sinbad’s desire to escape the comparative comfort of the so-called desert island led him to suffer in the desert. In the second story, the greed of the sailors to gain eternal youth leads instead to their deaths. In both encounters the punishments are ironic. The stories communicate the theme that escapism can overshadow the value of one’s present existence by glorifying a light at the end of the tunnel that may not exist. A monster like the Rukh that dwarfs any human in scale is well-suited to communicate the common theme of human hubris.