The name “Marshall Burns” is great for business, but I often wished I had a fun nickname too. It seems that the rule is that you get your nickname from your friends. Well, sometime into my 40s, I got tired of waiting. At first, “Roc” was just a handle that I used on an online bulletin board that I visited sometimes. Eventually, I decided that I liked the name and started asking some friends and basketball buddies to use it. Now there are a lot of people who know me only as Roc and don’t even know my other name. I like “Roc” because it’s short and fun and I like its strong, masculine connotation. It would have been “Rock,” but that handle was already taken on the bulletin board.

Figure 1. The roc was an enormous and powerful bird in ancient mythology that was said to be the master of the genie. [From Monstrous.com]

     After I’d been using this nickname for a while, I started hearing people ask me if it had something to do with the mythological bird. I didn’t know what they were talking about. After hearing that a couple of times, I decided to check into it. What I found was very interesting. Not only was the roc an enormous and powerful bird in ancient mythology, but it also was said to be the master of the genie. This was an incredible coincidence, since I had spent the 1990s trying to bring a machine to market under the trade name, “Genie!”

     This page reviews some of what I found about the mythological bird known as the roc. I am happy to adopt this history as the meaning of my nickname, as accidental as it might have been.

From Mythological Birds by Michael Shapiro:

“A mythological bird that might have been based on a real bird is the Roc (pronounced like “rock”). It is mentioned in the Arabian collection of folktales called One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The stories of Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor both appear in the Arabian Nights, and both mention the Roc. The Roc is a huge eagle-like bird that is said to be able to carry off and eat elephants. In Aladdin, the Roc is supposedly the genie’s master. In one of the stories of Sinbad, the Roc attacks his ship. The Roc may have come from a real bird called an Elephant Bird that lived in Madagascar until about 500 years ago. This was about 10 feet tall and weighed at least 1000 pounds. A recently found fossilized Elephant Bird egg was about 3 feet around. The Elephant Bird, however, was related to Emus and was flightless.”

In Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, the genie refers to a roc’s egg as his master:

“[The princess told Aladdin that] her pleasure in the [palace built by the genie] was spoiled for the want of a roc’s egg hanging from the dome. ‘If that is all,’ replied Aladdin, ‘you shall soon be happy.’ He left her and rubbed the lamp, and when the genie appeared commanded him to bring a roc’s egg. The genie gave such a loud and terrible shriek that the hall shook. ‘Wretch!’ he cried, ‘is it not enough that I have done everything for you, but you must command me to bring my master and hang him up in the midst of this dome? You and your wife and your palace deserve to be burnt to ashes ...’”

Figure 2. Sinbad hitching a ride on a roc. [From Monstrous.com]

In The Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, Sinbad uses a roc to escape a desert island, and later describes a roc carrying off both a rhinoceros and an elephant:

“I had before me one of the legs of the bird, which was as big as the trunk of a tree. I tied myself strongly to it with the cloth that went round my turban, in hopes that when the roc flew away next morning she would carry me with her out of this desert island.”

“The rhinoceros fights with the elephant, runs his horn into him, and carries him off upon his head; but the blood of the elephant running into his eyes and making him blind, he falls to the ground, and then, strange to relate, the roc comes and carries them both away in her claws to be food for her young ones.”

In The Fifth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, a roc couple avenge the death of their child by destroying Sinbad’s ship:

“... we found an egg of a roc ... The merchants whom I had taken on board my ship ... broke the egg with hatchets, and ... pulled out the young roc piece by piece, and roasted it. ... Scarcely had they made an end of their feast, when there appeared in the air, at a considerable distance from us, two great clouds. ... it was the cock and hen roc that belonged to the young one ... [They] approached with a frightful noise, ... [and] carried between their talons stones, or rather rocks, of a monstrous size. When they came directly over my ship, they hovered, and one of them let fall a stone ... so exactly upon the middle of the ship that it split into a thousand pieces.”

Relation of the roc to the constellation Cygnus, by Masm:

“The origin of the representation as bird of these stars is Greek. It is thought that the original figure of the mesopotámica tradition had taken the name of Urakhga, prototype of the Rukh Arab, more known in the West like the great “Roc”, a fiction personage inspired by the merchants of Bagdad, the story of Simbad the Sailor, content in Thousands and the One Nights.”

More background information on the roc is at Monstrous.com.