The children's section of the library had Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings on display, so I grabbed it for myself.
It's Borges's catalogue of mythical and fictional creatures. Each entry is firmly pressed with his take.
From it, I learned that Bahamut is actually a magic fish. AD&D used his name for the platinum dragon. (Metallic dragons are good in D&D.) He was the opposite number of Tiamat, a five-headed dragon, whose name was also nicked from mythology for an unrelated character, though less unrelated in that place.
The original Arabic Bahamut was one of those "hold up the world" types. In bottom-to-top order, it went:
- Darkness
- Water
- Bahamut the Fish
- A great bull
- A ruby mountain
- An angel
- Six infernos
- The earth