The antelope, both fierce and fell

Very early this morning, fellow night owl WanderingGondola left this comment on "I am that Enkidudal boy":

Taking a break to play Wuthering Waves for a little while yesterday, I looked at my quest log and decided to complete something that'd been sitting there for months. The one I chose involved a character called Lingyang, whom has animal ears and a tail and is a member of a lion-dance troupe. I'd completely forgotten the quest's setup so was initially confused about a repeatedly-discussed wild beast, but it soon became clear the beast and Lingyang were the same being. At the quest's conclusion he called the beast a Suan'ni, implying he might be the last one alive and had chosen to become like a man. Suan'ni looks to be a transliteration of 狻猊, and Wiktionary says both Chinese meanings involve lions.

wutheringwaves.fandom.com/wiki/Suan%27ni

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8B%BB%E7%8C%8A

Suanni (no apostrophe in standard transliteration, as the doubled consonant makes the syllable boundaries clear) is pretty obscure Chinese (I'd never heard of it), but lingyang (羚羊) is a common Chinese word referring to an antelope or gazelle.

As soon as I saw the word Lingyang, a somewhat complex idea popped into my head fully formed, with no sense of its being the product of a train of thought. I imagined a medieval grammarian learnedly explaining that the etymological meaning of antelope is "forerunner" (from the prefix ante- and the English verb lope) and that the animal is so called because it "runs before," and is run after by, the lion. Furthermore, this makes the antelope a symbol of sexual purity, because it is "chased" (chaste). Since WG's comment was on a post that discussed lion symbolism in connection with the Lust card of Crowley's Tarot. The idea of a "chaste" antelope running from a lion makes a certain symbolic sense.

Of course this is neither the true etymology of antelope nor a plausible medieval pseudo-etymology. As I know from my childhood fascination with heraldry, antelope in medieval times meant not a timid runner-away but a fierce predator with the head of a tiger (or of what Europeans fancifully imagined a tiger to be) which could cut down trees with its horns. (Horns on a nominally feline head are a link to Cary Yale, which Bill saw as a symbol of Joseph. Running away to preserve one's chastity is also part of the biblical story of Joseph.)

From A Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, a book which was almost always in my home when I was a child, though I occasionally let the library borrow it back

As recently as Spenser, the antelope was included alongside the tiger and the wolf in a list of beasts "both fierce and fell." This ties in nicely with WG's video game, where the character named Antelope is later identified as a suanni -- either a lion or a mythical beast that eats lions.