Character · Berserk
Griffith
He wanted a kingdom of his own, said so out loud as a teenager, and never once treated it as a figure of speech.
In Otakana the clue reads: White-haired leader of the Band of the Hawk
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Berserk
- Letters
- 8 · Easy
Griffith raised the Band of the Hawk out of nothing and turned a company of mercenaries into something the kingdom of Midland could not do without. He is white-haired, beautiful, and better with a sword than men twice his size. What makes him frightening is the arithmetic. He tells Guts early on that a friend is someone with a dream of his own, which sounds generous until you notice what it excludes.
Everything he does is measured against the kingdom. He charms nobles, he sells what he has to sell, he spends lives, and he keeps a ledger nobody else can see. When Guts leaves the Hawks to find his own reason for swinging a sword, the ledger stops balancing, and Griffith's answer to that is where a war story turns into a horror story.
Kentaro Miura began Berserk in 1989 and spent the Golden Age arc making the reader like this man on purpose. The Eclipse at the end of it is the most infamous sequence in manga, and the argument about whether Griffith was always heading there has been running for more than thirty years. Miura died in 2021 with the story unfinished.
Spelling GRIFFITH
GRIFFITH is eight letters and the doubled F does the damage. Japanese renders it グリフィス, gurifisu, with no TH sound at all and no hint of a second F, so anyone typing from the anime audio comes up short. Two F's, then I, then TH. It ends the way the Welsh surname Griffith ends, because that is what it is.