Everything about Unicorns totally explained
A
unicorn (from
Latin unus 'one' and
cornu 'horn') is a
mythological creature often used in fantasy stories, picture book, and novels.Though the modern popular image of the unicorn is sometimes that of a
horse differing only in the
horn on its forehead, the traditional unicorn has a
billy-goat beard, a
lion's tail, and
cloven hooves - these distinguish it from a horse. Marianna Mayer has observed (
The Unicorn and the Lake), "The unicorn is the only fabulous beast that doesn't seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he's fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. He could be captured only by unfair means, and his single horn was said to neutralize poison."
Medieval unicorns
Medieval knowledge of the fabulous beast stemmed from biblical and ancient sources, and the creature was variously represented as a kind of wild ass, goat, or horse.
The predecessor of the medieval
bestiary, compiled in
Late Antiquity and known as
Physiologus, popularized an elaborate
allegory in which a unicorn, trapped by a maiden (representing the
Virgin Mary), stood for the
Incarnation. As soon as the unicorn sees her, it lays its head on her lap and falls asleep. This became a basic emblematic tag that underlies medieval notions of the unicorn, justifying its appearance in every form of
religious art. The two major interpretations of the unicorn symbol hinge on
pagan and
Catholic symbolism. The pagan interpretation focuses on the medieval lore of beguiled lovers, whereas some Catholic writings interpret the unicorn and its death as the
Passion of Christ. The unicorn has long been identified as a symbol of
Christ by Catholic writers, allowing the traditionally pagan symbolism of the unicorn to become acceptable within religious
doctrine. The original myths refer to a beast with one horn that can only be tamed by a
virgin maiden; subsequently, some Catholic scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary.
The unicorn also figured in
courtly terms: for some 13th century
French authors such as
Thibaut of Champagne and
Richard de Fournival, the lover is attracted to his lady as the unicorn is to the virgin. With the rise of
humanism, the unicorn also acquired more orthodox secular meanings, emblematic of chaste love and faithful marriage. It plays this role in
Petrarch's
Triumph of Chastity.
The royal throne of
Denmark was made of "unicorn horns". The same material was used for ceremonial cups because the unicorn's horn continued to be believed to neutralize poison, following classical authors.
The unicorn, tamable only by a virgin woman, was well established in medieval lore by the time
Marco Polo described them as:
» scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant's. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead... They have a head like a wild boar's… They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.
It is clear that Marco Polo was describing a rhinoceros. In
German, since the 16th century,
Einhorn ("one-horn") has become a descriptor of the various species of rhinoceros.
The ancient
Norwegians were said to believe the
narwhal to have affirmed the existence of the unicorn. The unicorn horn was believed to stem from the narwhal tooth, which grows outward and projects from its upper jaw.
In popular belief, examined wittily and at length in the seventeenth century by Sir
Thomas Browne in his
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, unicorn horns could neutralize poisons. Therefore, people who feared poisoning sometimes drank from goblets made of "unicorn horn". Alleged
aphrodisiac qualities and other purported medicinal virtues also drove up the cost of "unicorn" products such as
milk,
hide, and
offal. Unicorns were also said to be able to determine whether or not a woman was a virgin; in some tales, they could only be mounted by virgins.
The hunt of the unicorn
One traditional method of hunting unicorns involved entrapment by a virgin.
In one of his notebooks
Leonardo da Vinci wrote:
» "The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it'll go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it."
The famous late
Gothic series of seven
tapestry hangings,
The Hunt of the Unicorn are a high point in
European tapestry manufacture, combining both secular and religious themes. The tapestries now hang in
the Cloisters division of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York City. In the series, richly dressed
noblemen, accompanied by huntsmen and hounds, pursue a unicorn against
mille-fleur backgrounds or settings of buildings and gardens. They bring the animal to bay with the help of a maiden who traps it with her charms, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, "The Unicorn in Captivity," the unicorn is shown alive again and happy, chained to a
pomegranate tree surrounded by a fence, in a field of flowers. Scholars conjecture that the red stains on its flanks are not blood but rather the juice from pomegranates, which were a symbol of fertility. However, the true meaning of the mysterious resurrected Unicorn in the last panel is unclear. The series was woven about 1500 in the
Low Countries, probably
Brussels or
Liège, for an unknown patron. A set of six
engravings on the same theme, treated rather differently, were engraved by the French artist
Jean Duvet in the 1540s.
Another famous set of six tapestries of
Dame à la licorne ("Lady with the unicorn") in the
Musée de Cluny,
Paris, were also woven in the
Southern Netherlands before 1500, and show the five senses (the gateways to temptation) and finally Love ("A mon seul desir" the legend reads), with unicorns featured in each piece.
Facsimiles of the unicorn tapestries are currently being woven for permanent display in
Stirling Castle,
Scotland, to take the place of a set recorded in the castle in the 16th century.
Heraldry
In
heraldry, a unicorn is depicted as a horse with a goat's cloven hooves and beard, a lion's tail, and a slender, spiral horn on its forehead.
Whether because it was an emblem of the Incarnation or of the fearsome animal passions of raw nature, the unicorn wasn't widely used in early heraldry, but became popular from the 15th century.
Baron Georges Cuvier maintained that as the unicorn was cloven-hoofed it must therefore have a cloven skull (making impossible the growth of a single horn); to disprove this, Dr.
W. Franklin Dove, a
University of Maine professor, artificially fused the horn buds of a
calf together, creating a one-horned bull.
P. T. Barnum once exhibited a unicorn skeleton, which was exposed as a
hoax.
Since the
rhinoceros is the only known extant land animal to possess a single horn, it has often been supposed that the unicorn legend originated from encounters between Europeans and rhinoceroses. The
Woolly Rhinoceros would have been quite familiar to
ice age people, or the legend may have been based on the rhinoceroses of
Africa. Europeans and
West Asians have visited
Sub-Saharan Africa for as long as we've records.
Elasmotherium or rhinoceros
One suggestion is that the unicorn is based on the extinct animal
Elasmotherium, a huge
Eurasian rhinoceros native to the
steppes, south of the range of the woolly rhinoceros of Ice Age Europe.
Elasmotherium looked little like a horse, but it had a large single horn in its forehead. It became extinct about the same time as the rest of the glacial age
megafauna.
However, according to the
Nordisk familjebok (the Nordisk Familybook) and science writer
Willy Ley the animal may have survived long enough to be remembered in the legends of the
Evenk people of
Russia as a huge black bull with a single horn in the forehead.
In support of this claim, it has been noted that the 13th century traveller Marco Polo claimed to have seen a unicorn in
Java, but his description makes it clear to the modern reader that he actually saw a
Javan Rhinoceros. Perhaps additional supporting evidence can be found in the fact that a rhinoceros' horn reacts with alkaloids by turning a different color. A majority of the medieval poisons were made from
alkaloids, which coincides with the myth that unicorn horns change color when a poison in placed within them.
A single-horned goat
The connection that's sometimes made with a single-horned goat derives from the vision of Daniel:
» And as I was considering, behold, a he-goat came from the west over the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes.
In the domestic goat, a rare deformity of the generative tissues can cause the horns to be joined together; such an animal could be another possible inspiration for the legend. Antiquities researcher
Timothy Zell also produced artificial unicorns dubbed "the Living Unicorn", remodelling the "horn buds" of goat kids in such a way that their horns grew together into a single one. Zell theorized that this process might have been used in the past to create court curiosities and natural herd leaders, because the goat was able to use this long straight horn effectively as a weapon and a tool.
Medieval art often depicts unicorns as small, with cloven hooves and beards, sometimes resembling goats more than horses with horns. This process is possible only with animals that naturally have horns. For a time, a few of these unicorns travelled with the
Ringling Brothers Circus.
The kirin
The Japanese
kirin is depicted as a bearded one-antlered deer.
The narwhal
The unicorn horns often found in
cabinets of curiosities and other contexts in Medieval and
Renaissance Europe were very often examples of the distinctive straight spiral single tusk of the
narwhal (
Monodon monoceros), an
Arctic cetacean, as
Danish zoologist
Ole Worm established in 1638. They were brought south as a very valuable trade, passing the various tests intended to spot fake unicorn horns. The usual depiction of the unicorn horn in art derives from these.
Elizabeth I of England kept a "unicorn horn" in her cabinet of curiosities, brought back by
Arctic explorer
Martin Frobisher on his return from
Labrador in 1577.
Furthermore in the 1500's people believed that all land animals had a counterpart in the sea. The discovery of narwhals "proved" that unicorns really existed.
The oryx
The
oryx is an
antelope with two long, thin horns projecting from its forehead. Some have suggested that seen from the side and from a distance, the oryx looks something like a horse with a single horn (although the 'horn' projects backward, not forward as in the classic unicorn). Conceivably, travellers in
Arabia could have derived the tale of the unicorn from these animals. However, classical authors seem to distinguish clearly between oryxes and unicorns. The
Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, published in 1486, was the first printed illustrated travel-book, describing a
pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, and thence to
Egypt by way of
Mount Sinai. It featured many large
woodcuts by
Erhard Reuwich, who went on the trip, mostly detailed and accurate views of cities. The book also contained pictures of animals seen on the journey, including a
crocodile,
camel, and unicorn - presumably an oryx, which they could easily have seen on their route.
The eland
In
Southern Africa the
eland has somewhat mystical or spiritual connotations, perhaps at least partly because this very large antelope will defend itself against lions, and is able to kill these fearsome predators. Eland are very frequently depicted in the
rock art of the region, which implies that they were viewed as having a strong connection to the other world, and in several languages the word for eland and for dance is the same; significant because shamans used dance as their means of drawing power from the other world. Eland fat was used when mixing the pigments for these pictographs, and in the preparation of many medicines.
This special regard for the eland may well have been picked up by early travellers. In the area of
Cape Town one horned eland are known to occur naturally, perhaps as the result of a recessive gene, and were noted in the diary of an early governor of the Cape. There is also a purported unicorn horn in the castle of the chief of the
Clan MacLeod in Scotland, which has been identified as that of an eland.
Further Information
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