More on Unicorns

 Season 2, Episode 1: The Wooded Island

Unicorn stories are all over the place.  Unicorns have appeared in stories and on artifacts for millennia.  There are unicorn-like animals in the folklore of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.  With a history this long and stretched over such a large area, it's not surprising that there's no one common story of what a unicorn is or what it does.  The episode "The Wooded Island" focuses on more European interpretations of this creature, so I'll mostly be talking about that in this post.  However, I hope someday to write about the kirin or the shadhavar or the okapi. (One of these things is not like the others.)

For the most part, unicorns are horse-like (although some look like goats) with a long, spiraling horn coming out of their foreheads.  The horn has all sorts of magical properties like being able to cure illnesses and clean tainted water.  In Europe, shady merchants used to sell narwhal horns, saying they were unicorn horns, thus convincing people unicorns existed in the wild. 

The Throne Chair of Denmark is said to be made out of unicorn horns

This emphasis on purification ties in with the only way to catch a unicorn: for a virgin to lure it up close so the unicorn will lay its head in her lap, at which point knights would rush out of their hiding places in the woods and kill it.

But towards non-virgins, unicorns were wild and vicious.  They'd use their deadly, powerful horns to impale people.  Not only that, but they refused to be captured to the point where if capture were imminent, they would throw themselves off a cliff and land so that they impaled themselves on their horn.  Since they'd rather die than be captured, they became an important symbol in Scottish heraldry.  

Both the emphasis on purity and the gruesome horn stabbings have taken a back seat in contemporary American folklore about the unicorn, which now focuses more on the unicorn's cuteness and ability to fart rainbows. 

Visiting my dad over Christmas, he'd bought a unicorn coloring book to keep my three-year-old son occupied.  My favorite page was of a donkey with braces and a unicorn horn.  My second favorite page was an iced doughnut with sprinkles and a unicorn horn.  I think I might prefer this Lisa Frank-esque version to the version that's a terrifying stab monsters who slut-shames.

My favorite unicorn story of all time is a chapter in the Once and Future King (Book 2, Chapter 7) where Queen Morgause arranges a unicorn hunt for the visiting King Pellinore, who is feeling down.  Morgause announces that she's going to be the virginal bait, despite the fact that the chapter follows the adventures of her four sons.  Pellinore knows better than to point out any flaws in this plan.  The boys, suspicious of the visitors, decide they're going to catch their own unicorn.

Also of note is the Shel Silverstein poem/song "The Unicorn," which explains how there are no unicorns today because they didn't show up to board Noah's arc.