Unicorns

Medieval themed fantasy often involves unicorns.  I hate to be the one to break it to you.  Unicorns aren't real.

This doesn't keep them from being beloved.  Many a little girl has a unicorn toy.  They sometimes get crossed with Pegasus and have both horns and wings.  Although rainbows may make an appearance, unicorns are almost almost white, graceful, beautiful, and friendly.

(Let's avert our eyes and keep moving.)

People in the Middle Ages, like today's little girls (why not little boys?), liked unicorns.  But theirs weren't friendly beasts.  Medieval unicorns were savage and dangerous.  They also were not simply horses with a horn sticking out of their forehead.  They had cloven hooves, more like a cow than a horse, and a tail described variously as that of a lion or a wild boar.

That's actually an early modern unicorn in the picture, but it's pretty much as medieval people pictured them; you will note the cloven hooves.

Belief in unicorns went back a long way.  The ancient Greeks talked about them as living in India or Persia or somewhere far away.  The Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder described unicorns, and they went into medieval bestiaries along with other fabulous beasts.  Many believe the idea of a unicorn started with a misunderstood description of a rhinoceros.  Narwhal horns, which were traded to Europe by the Norse, were believed to be from unicorns. 

But there was more to medieval belief in unicorns than misunderstood creatures from Africa and the North Atlantic.  Unicorn horn was considered to be medicinal, both curing disease and making polluted water drinkable.  (Similar beliefs flourish in parts of the world even today, which is why rhinoceroses have been pushed close to extinction.)

The horn was also phallic.  (Big surprise.)  To catch a unicorn, it was believed, one needed a virgin girl, who would lure the unicorn into laying its head in her lap.  (In case you missed the "subtle" phallic image....)  Then the hunters could kill it.  The image below is one of the late medieval tapestries depicting the hunt for a unicorn, which has been successfully captured.  I must say, I'd worry about being that girl, supposed to lure a savage and dangerous beast, who had a sharp implement, to get up close and personal with my lap.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For so much more on medieval beliefs, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.