Arts

Why Do Girls Love Unicorns?

It’s more than just the horn.

Girls love horses. Ponies? Even better. But there’s one member of the equine family that holds a special place in our collective, red-blooded female heart. Three hints: It’s white, it shoots sparkles out of every orifice, and it has a single, swirly horn.

What is it about girls and unicorns? From whence did this rainbow-flecked love affair spring? After all, there’s nothing inherently cute, sweet, or fluffy about a horse with a dangerous, spearlike appendage.

Women have been linked to unicorns since at least the Middle Ages, but in the early days, our horny friends were decidedly uncuddly, and they weren’t even particularly sparkly. Spend a few weeks poking around in the history books, and you begin to see how unicorns have suffered a centuries-long Cullenization: a slow transformation from a creature both dangerous and seductive to something mincing and insipid, best suited to serve as a decorative motif in little girls’ bedrooms or the apartments of slightly cracked adults.

The earliest mention of a four-footed, one-horned animal in Western literature comes courtesy of Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician who plied his trade for the king of Persia. In his fourth-century B.C. work Indica, Ctesias describes an Indian wild ass that had a crimson, black, and white horn some foot and a half in length. This creature is “exceedingly swift and powerful,” he writes, and tears into its enemies with “horn, teeth, and heels”; it “cannot be caught alive,” and if it’s approached in combat, it will “kill many horses and men.” (Ctesias did note that the ass had “the most beautiful ankle-bone” he had ever seen.)

Since the days of Ctesias, one strand of stories and artworks has focused on this notion of the unicorn as a fierce, powerful beast. A Scottish unicorn has been snarling at an English lion on the United Kingdom’s coat of arms for the past 400 years. (Hence the showdown in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 Through the Looking Glass.) In the King James Bible, which first appeared in 1611, God is described as having “the strength of the unicorn.” More recently, there was Jewel, the “lordly beast” from the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, who impales swarthy, garlic-smelling Calormenes and “tosses them like hay.” Even in the soft-focus 1985 film Legend—starring Tom Cruise as a Mowgli-like boy charged with overseeing a magical forest’s magical creatures—unicorns retain a certain majestic, stallionlike aura.

Tags: lisa frank, tapestries, through the looking glass, unicorns

Nina Shen Rastogi Slate "Brow Beat" blogger and DoubleX editor.

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