When I told my wife about this, she at first thought that lift was accomplished by tying two whales together, and spinning them. When I pointed out that this was a silly idea — I mean, really, the whales would just start vomiting — she looked at me. And then she helplessly started to laugh.
Ceteacopters
History does not record the name of the medieval mage who first looked at a whale, and then at a double samara (otherwise known as a ‘helicopter seed’), and decided that the two should be combined, somehow. Possibly because History was laughing too hard: first at the concept, and then the exceedingly comic attempts to execute it. For some reason, Northern European mages and monarchs were obsessed at the idea of making a whale take off, hover in the air, and then touch down in a specific and precise location.