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.
Nina Shen Rastogi California native, theater and comics fan, Slate "Green Lantern" columnist
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Comments
So is it fair to say that the
By: Usama3 | Sat, 11/21/2009 - 08:07
So is it fair to say that the adolescent female's fascination with the unicorn common in modern American pop culture is her subliminal, or subconscious means to fantasizing and virtually experiencing sexuality, in particular heterosexuality, given that the unicorn- muscular limbs, carefree vibrant spirit, prominent pointing phallic- represents the idyllic virile male?
Thanks ...
By: Nina Rastogi | Fri, 11/20/2009 - 14:06
... for catching the "Ctesias" error, Niceros! And I'm looking forward to adding "The Unicorn Chronicles" and the creepy-sounding "Not Wanted on the Voyage" to my reading list ... keep the recs coming!
The Unicorn Chronicles
By: iheartapocalypse | Fri, 11/20/2009 - 08:44
OMG I had no idea the author had finally gotten around to finishing writing the rest of the Unicorn Chronicles. I read the first in 1994 and always wondered why it was called "Volume 1" but I could never find any sequels. Thanks to Wikipedia I now know its because the rest of books were released many years later.
Just wanted to say I enjoyed
By: wami | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 23:49
Just wanted to say I enjoyed this piece. As a bookish, dreamy type in the 1980s, I can credit my love of unicorns to my first Trapper Keeper and "The Last Unicorn." It was fun to believe in something magical and good as a little girl. It's kind of fun as an adult woman, too.
grammar patrol part 3
By: billerina | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 16:32
Sorry! Didn't realize I was dealing with Shakespeare!
Ctesias, not "Cteais," is the Greek writer about unicorns
By: Niceros | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 12:42
The unicorn-writer's correct name is CTESIAS of Cnidus, not "Cteais."
See the Wikipedia entry for Ctesias of Cnidus.
Slate.com should proofread its Greek and Latin citations.
Just trying to be of help.:)
Grammar Patrol Part 2
By: Trudy Kockenlocker | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 11:20
Grammar is wonderful but you must keep usage and precedent in mind when correcting others. Inflexibility defies the way that language evolves.
Usage note:
Although sometimes criticized as redundant on the grounds that “from” is implied by the word whence, the idiom from whence is old in the language, well established, and standard. Among its users are the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Dickens. From thence, a parallel construction, occurs infrequently.
grammar patrol
By: billerina | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 09:20
GRRRR. Sorry but "whence" means "from where" so the usage of "from whence" is redundant. Reaching for a $5 word like whence only works if you can use it correctly.
This is very useful indeed.
By: alexandrabucuresti | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 09:12
This is very useful indeed. The alternative would be to use sprees.. either method is really compulsory I think..The perversion of typical unicorn purity and innocence here is unnerving to the point of being almost nauseating.
Forum rent a car Bucharest
female unicorns in literature..
By: CVixen | Thu, 11/19/2009 - 03:22
There's a series, I'm not sure if it's finished yet or not, where the Unicorns there are a matriarchal society. The oldest (and wisest) is a female.. It's called 'The Unicorn Chronicles' by Bruce Coville. I've only ever found the first 2 - 'Into the Land of the Unicorns' and 'The Song of the Wanderer'. They're tween-ish reading level, but still fun.
Just my two cents..
Of course, I missed that you were talking pre-20th century.. *headdesk*