there is a Tree of Life and a Pool of Life, in whose waters the dead can be revived. A Scandinavian romance has the hero go through the mouth of a dragon to reach the Otherworld. Griffin Sir Eglamour's baby son is carried away from Christabel by a griffin. A griffin is a mythical creature with the body and feet of a lion and the head and the wings of an eagle. Its earliest depiction can be seen in the throne room of the Palace of Knossos on the Mediterranean island of Crete, in Greece, in a Minoan fresco that dates to the mid-2nd century BC. Sir Eglamour's young son is not the only baby to be carried off by this mythical bird in medieval romance. The baby son of the Roman Emperor Octavian is seized, first of all by a lioness and then by a griffin, in the medieval romance Octavian. Lioness and baby are both carried to a distant isle by this flying creature, where the lioness is safely deposited, kills and eats the griffin and suckles the young boy as though he were her cub. Lioness and baby are accidentally found by the boy's mother, who travels on with them both into exile in the Middle East. Her other son, who was seized by an ape at the same time that his brother was seized by the lioness and then the griffin, journeys to a new life as Florent, the son of a Paris merchant. As in the tale Sir Eglamour of Artois, mother and son in Octavian are finally reunited after many years apart, and a giant is defeated during the unfolding of the tale. Big bird Icelandic saga When the Scandinavian hero Arrow-Odd, in a 13th-century Icelandic tale, finds his path blocked by a deep gorge, he is lifted into the air by an eagle and carried to the eagle's nest high up on a sea cliff. Soon, a giant appears in a stone boat and rows up to the nest. Arrow-Odd is taken by this giant to Giantland where he spends some time, before continuing an extraordinary life that is destined to last for three hundred years. Chaucer's House of Fame The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a work sometime around 1380 in which the poet himself is carried by an eagle up into the sky, near to the stars, to a place called