"This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive." · 10:45am Sep 23rd, 2024
Let’s say it’s six hundred-ish years ago, and you’re the King of Scots.
Sure, you’re living the fifteenth-century high life, and your Stewart dynasty’s doing pretty well for itself, but you’ve also got all the attendant worries. Fractious nobles and magnates, the savage family drama of the gently-bred, clans across the highlands and the islands defying your attempts to drag them into compliance, Cumbrian border reivers, your border reivers, there’s been yet another damned Black Death outbreak, and oh god, what fresh hell’s England concocting now.
You need a symbol of royal authority. Some great standard to brandish that might make some of the problems stop and think again, to communicate your own strength and authority in your own neck of the woods. And it’s the fashion in this time to pick an animal of sorts.
(ENGLAND: “Wales, for heaven’s sake, you can’t just pick a dragon as your animal. You … you don’t have dragons!”
WALES: “Oh, don’t I? Fascinating. Hey, apropos of nothing, I saw you’ve gone for lions. Did I blink and miss all the lion packs marauding across the English savannah?”
ENGLAND: “Tha—that’s entirely different, that’s — look, at least my thing exists. See, even France is picking something real! You’re letting France be more sensible than you! France, you deplorable specimen, what eminently sensible animal have you picked?”
FRANCE: “Voilà, the porcupine!”)
There’s options aplenty, but only one creature fit for your purposes and stature. One thing that’ll impress your allies and subdue your would-be enemies.
The unicorn.
For, as anyone and everyone knows, even all the way back in the days of the Roman Empire and forgotten antiquity, the unicorn is the most terrible and dangerous of animals, a legend on the frontiers of the known world. Possessed of such magic that its ground-up horn, the alicorn, can cure any disease, thwart any poison; sufficiently close to the divine that artists use it as a symbol of Christ Himself, tameable only by the innocent and pure.
But maybe you don’t need to be a virgin, beloved of God, to control a unicorn. Maybe divine right could pull off the same sort of trick.
And the sort of king who’d go for that as his standard, to not only represent himself with the unicorn but to depict it in chains, subjugated to his will … well. Maybe that’s the sort of king who could hold his neck of the woods and throttle it into submission.
(Pictured: The most terrible and dangerous of animals.)
Perth Museum opened earlier this year, and it’s got several things going for it. It’s new and shiny and possessed of excellent lightning and technical wizardry that shows off its exhibits to best effect. It holds the Stone of Destiny, the stone on which Scottish monarchs would perch themselves for their coronation and which still sees use today. And till recently, it hosted an exhibition all about unicorns.
Let’s see what it had to say about the brutes.
The Scottish royal court embraced them, under James I, and couldn’t get enough of them (and quite right, readers of this might remark). Look to any royal standard from this time, from heraldry to coins to wood panels to carvings, and you’ll find a gratuitous unicorn or ten.
It may bear mentioning that success via unicorn iconography, as described above, did not actually manifest.
Take James I, the king who actually adopted the unicorn emblem. Assassinated by his own uncle. James II, blown up by his own backfiring cannon; James III, killed in battle with his own son; James IV, aforementioned son, killed in battle with England; you get the picture.
The Stewart kings factored the benefits of association with unicorns into their odds of success; they were not good at maths.
Once we’d embraced them, we couldn’t get enough of them. Throughout the country, you’ll find venerable mercat crosses, stone crosses raised up high to denote where markets could be held. We say ‘crosses’, but as often as not, people would just do without the cross and carve some other symbol of royal authority. Like a unicorn, for instance.
Happy market day! Keep your commerce law-abiding and honest, now. The unicorn is watching. Always watching.
Of course, they weren’t just symbols. We made good, practical use out of them, as did any enlightened soul in Europe with the means to get hold of a unicorn horn.
Conceive of the unicorn attached to this. Either it’s debilitatingly top-heavy, or it’s evenly-proportioned and terrifying.
Blame the Vikings, or at least their descendants. From the 11th century onwards, Norse ships would increasingly trade in long and fabulous horns, the tusks of narwhals which the Norse marketing department advised would be best be branded as Authentic Unicorn Product™.
Rare, certainly. Costly, definitely. But worth every penny to those with the means to buy one. Because what the unicorn horn — the alicorn — does is this: it protects you from poison, cures all disease, and purifies all that it touches.
Theriac! For when you’re not sure what’s wrong with you but just need curing, generally. Contains trace amounts of unicorn.
Drink from a goblet carved from alicorn, as Elizabeth I of England did, and no poison will ever pass your lips. If you fear being poisoned in captivity, as Mary Queen of Scots did, then write to your friends begging for a care package of powdered alicorn. And it needn’t just be the alicorn. Most parts of a unicorn could be pressed into medicinal service.
Hildegard of Bingen, cursed with visions of grimdark horsewords to come.
An awkward sod might at this point ask awkward-sod questions like, “But hang on, it’s essentially just a pointy horse. Why’s it being touted as an infallible means of physical salvation? And also why do those narwhals over there have tusks suspiciously similar to that alicorn I bought the other day? And also why’s nobody brought one back alive and tamed despite there being a well-attested means of doing exactly that? And also —”
Well, to touch on the infallible physical salvation query and discreetly detour around the others, we’re going to have to get kind-of-sort-of-somewhat Biblical.
Christian imagery and text, which were the main sort of imagery and texts going in medieval/early modern Europe, were abundant with unicorns. You’ll find illuminated Bibles wherein unicorns are pictured with their horns pointed at the Virgin Mary’s womb, affirming her chastity. You’ll find many tapestries specifically depicting a unicorn in a meadow or a walled garden, a metaphor for Mary’s womb and Jesus therein.
A nice, roomy unicorn paddock, as unicorn paddocks go.
“But hang on,” says the (well-informed) awkward sod, “the Hebrew Bible doesn’t even mention unicorns.”
Indeed it doesn’t. (And what follows is a radically summarised fragment of Biblical translation history, a field of which I’m blithely ignorant and derived the grand sum of my knowledge thereof from a glance at a museum sign, to which I assign all blame if it’s wrong).
What it does mention is some manner of creature called a Re’em, and when scholars in Alexandria sat down to translate the Old Testament into Greek, the Re’em gave them pause. At which point, one imagines the following exchange:
SCHOLAR 1: “Balls, how do we translate this? It’s referring to some sort of big horned thing.”
SCHOLAR 2: “Antelope? Wild ox? Unicorn?”
SCHOLAR 1: “Hmm.”
SCHOLAR 2: “...Tell you what, we’ll roll this die to decide.”
I don’t think the je ne sais quoi of this picture would necessarily be lost if that was an ox instead of a unicorn, but it would certainly be a different flavour of it.
These scholars matched Re’em to unicorns because there was a pre-existing unicorn legend to work with in the first place, going all the way back to at least the early Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder, the famed author and natural philosopher who took one for the cause of science by going out to observe Vesuvius as it erupted and perished to its fumes, compiled the Naturalis Historia, an encyclopaedia of the natural world as known to Rome — and though that knowledge did get a bit fuzzy the further out you went, the vast trade networks that ran through the Mediterranean and Africa and Asia meant it was quite extensive.
Over in India, so he tells us, you get this sort of creature:
“A second-hand account of a rhino, perhaps?” you might speculate. Not so. Pliny discusses rhinos separately in Naturalis Historia, and it and the monoceros are distinct entities. Besides, though the unicorn remained a mystery, the Roman Empire knew all about rhinos. Flash bastards who wanted to fund a spectacular day at the Colosseum imported them to fight and die there. On at least one occasion, they matched one against an elephant to see who’d win.
The Romans are not recorded as ever having sent a unicorn into the arena, but they would have if they could. Goodness knows what they’d have made it fight.
So, a legend since time immemorial, handed down from the encyclopaedias of antiquity to medieval Christendom to early modern Scottish kings looking for a good brand. If medical science hadn’t progressed, we’d probably still be knocking back alicorn concoctions to this day.
What are we doing with them nowadays, anyway? Where do the unicorns now roam?
Well, as luck would have it, the museum dedicated another floor to this topic.
Sunny, I see you there, I saw the film, this is grotesque infiltration, we both know you’re not a unicorn. Sunny, you’re why Maretime Bay’s police horses drink.
You’ve seen where the unicorns roam in part, assuming you passed by Fimfiction’s front page on your way here (and I don’t dare ask exactly what they were engaged in there). Presumably you’ve also glimpsed them immortalised in plastic with brushable manes, on clothes, adorning toys, stampeding across screens of all sorts, and generally jabbing their horns into most places.
Here’s another great thing about unicorns, they were invented prior to modern copyright law. Some might be sufficiently audacious and sacrilegious to trademark specific unicorns — I don’t know what happens to you if you try and use Rarity’s likeness for unauthorised commercial purposes, but I imagine Hasbro eventually adds your kneecaps to their ever-growing collection — but the creatures as a collective romp around unbounded. No enclosed gardens for the modern breed.
They retain some of their old connotations, but some are more stressed than others, and that informs the fields you’ll be most likely to find them galloping on. Purity, grace, and maidenhood lend themselves to traditional conceptions of youthful femininity, and so media aimed at young girls finds itself culturally primed to take on board a unicorn or ten. Indeed, gendered marketing being what it is, you won’t often find products with conventional unicorns being aimed at young boys.
Not technically part of the exhibit, but my god, this was a pretty good playroom they set up next to it. Park a child here and I’m not sure you could extract them with anything short of a crowbar.
It’s certainly a situation that would take some explaining to the old Stewarts.
Here’s yet another great thing about unicorns, they don’t stand still. Take your eyes off them for a second, and they’ll accrue new meaning as society shifts around them, absorb more ideas, become a fresh symbol for a new group seeking to plant a banner.
For instance, the LGBTQ+ community.
Start with a horse’s head, and unicornify it into something new and fantastic.
Several queer artists were given a brief. Take a horse head model, and make a unicorn out of it. And in the process, the unicorn rose to the occasion to channel those qualities close to their heart, that merited communication via their art.
When the powerful and the elite and the forces of reaction sneer and threaten, they can’t strip away your freedom to satirise, and they’ve no power to flatten a spirit that declines to be flattened. Unicorns are proud creatures, after all, and notoriously tricky to tame.
When those same forces pontificate on the fixedness of identity, the immovability of sex and gender and proper orientation, here gallops the unicorn, as free a creature as was ever thought of, and as any inspection of the historical record and shifting symbology’ll tell you, astonishingly fluid.
And when those reactionary forces have really upped their ante, threatening healthcare and rights that had seemed a settled affair only a few years ago, then in such times, a community can lock ranks, take shelter, and guard their hearts and stories in their fortresses — like great Trojan Unicorns, like the one pictured — so as to endure, rally against, and eventually prevail over the storm.
(No picture of the underbelly, alas, because there was a glass panel that would have risked jumpscaring you with my reflection, but in the wooden cavity, there were messages, valued items and symbols, and recorded messages from a whole host of groups and communities in Perth and beyond.)
The Stewart kings got it wrong in one specific but vitally important aspect of their iconography. You’ve no chance of actually putting unicorns in chains.
Because, if nothing else, the sparkly pests keep changing on you.
To summarise, it was a good exhibition.
Imagining the unicorn implied by that narwhal tusk is terrifying indeed. The only way people could miss that one is if it sits still long enough and makes them think it's a small hill.
Don't worry, she's just the Ponyville chief of police.
This is how a unicorn sneaks? (Sneaks.)
Based on what happened to one fellow who leaked Magic: the Gathering cards ahead of time, the Pinkertons may get involved. Yes, the literal, union-busting Pinkertons.
And the medieval connotations of unicorns are still a useful storytelling tool, especially when one can use them to make fun of Rainbow Dash. Great overview of what looks like an outstanding exhibition. Thanks for sharing it.
shit, that's cool :O good blog!
Beautiful stuff!
I sometimes wish I could "like" blogs. This is one of those times.
Regarding the re'em, the general consensus now is that it refers to an aurochs, aka wild oxen, the precursor of modern domesticated cattle. Descriptions in various parts of scripture make that relatively clear, including the fact that the re'em had more than one horn. This makes considerable sense in the context of the time, when the aurochs was a very important and powerful symbol for many cultures throughout its range. We know that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans deified it; and the Israelis certainly absorbed much of their cultures, and likely had done so themselves prior to the advent of monotheism.
Regarding the unicorn, if you follow the origins of the myth, it becomes rather clear that the "monocerous" is indeed a rhinocerous. When reading Pliny the Elder, it's important to keep in mind that 1) he was not a first-hand observer, but was compiling reports from far older and often unreliable sources, including the mythologies of Herodotus which Pliny reported as sort-of fact (he did often note the unreliability or improbability of the literature he was pulling from); and 2) the accounts he compiled were clearly fanciful in mainy instances, including such beings as dragons, men with dog's heads (even the ancients were furries), and people riding to school on dolphins. Interestingly, he's also the source of our modern myth about elephants being scared of mice. So Pliny's writing cannot be used to discount the association of the "monocerous" with the "rhinocerous"; and most modern scholars consider them referring to the same animal.
hell yeah unicorns
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I didn't see any mention in the exhibition that mythical qualities attributed to the unicorn included 'Able to take on Godzilla toe-to-toe', but based on the size of that one's alicorn, it surely must have been among them.
Crivens, I remember that affair. I suspect their willingness to involve Pinkertons and collect kneecaps hasn't diminished since.
5805944
Thank you! Can confirm it was very cool.
5805951
More exhibitions should have such great taste in subject matter.
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Thank you! One day, with enough votive offerings and sacrifice, I'm sure knighty'll bless us with that feature and others.
5805958
Much obliged for sharing that about Re'em! I'd gleaned that it was potentially referring to a wild ox of sorts, but an aurochs in particular makes sense. One of the last remaining megafauna can't help make that sort of impression on myth. I did look them up for story purposes back in the day, and it was a surprise how recently extant they were, up till only a few hundred years ago. Back when the Stewarts were picking out their unicorn trademark, there were still aurochs in the world.
Much obliged for the input regarding the monocerous/rhinocerous puzzle also! It does seem plausible that rhinos informed the unicorn myth - anything large and formidable with a single horn seems like it ought to have done at some point. My own understanding there (which I checked against this particular Natural History translation) was that the Romans did compile a lot of myths in their encyclopedias, and didn't fact-check Herodotus nearly as much as they ought to, but there was that distinction in their minds — or at least Pliny's — between the flesh-and-blood rhinos which shared a good amount of said blood with their arena sands whenever the opportunity arose, and the monocerous attested to by Ctesias, of which they had only anecdotes and understood to have never seen captivity. If that understanding's agley, do correct me — it'd be fascinating (and the kernel of a good story, potentially) if the Romans thought they truly were sending unicorns into the arena.
(I'd also seen speculation that the unicorn was also inspired by sights of oryxes standing in profile, which didn't seem quite so likely.)
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Hell yeah, unicorns.
Good blog, and sounds like you had fun at the exhibit!
Also relevant:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/10/30/1284462.jpg
Aw, no love for the Ethiopian unicorn as described by Cosmas Indicopleustes?
And this is why the unicorns built Canterlot on top of a mountain.
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Much obliged, and can confirm, it was a fun exhibit! Good to see artists taking notes from the old tapestries, much as Rarity seems unimpressed with them.
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Today I've learned about the Ethiopian unicorn! Didn't come up in the exhibition, which was a unfortunate omission, because that's a marvellous use of a horn, right there. Excellent means for unicorns to both avoid hunters and quickly get away from awkward conversations.
Thanks for the wonderful blog post! Fun and informative.
*Smiles in (probably inappropriate) Ancestral Smugness*
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Now I'm imagining a threatened herd of unicorns raining down like lawn darts! I guess the lesson is don't live beneath a height in unicorn country.
Perth museum is in my list of places I must visit before the world ends. Good to see that they put on such good exhibits; just a pity I missed this one, but you've certainly done it justice.
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Any time you ask "what the Romans really thought about X", you will get a dozen answers depending who you talk to, and which particular Romans they've read. It can be very difficult, when reading the Roman writers, to differentiate between what was intended as history, myth, propaganda, and ripping yarns. Especially when it comes to enemies or subjugated peoples and their "exotic" environments. I know most of this from my reading into ancient Celtic peoples, as what few records we have of them are from Roman conquerors and colonialists. Romans had a habit of both lionizing and vilifying other peoples and cultures. Lionizing them so their conquests would seem more heroic, feats of incredible strength and cunning; and vilifying so that their conquests would seem more necessary. Carthago Delenda Est!
Regarding the rhinoceros/monoceros, not all that many people would have actually seen one of the rhinoceri in the arenas, and the majority of the population outside the elite class would not have been highly literate (or indeed, literate at more than a barely functional level), and therefore would not have read Pliny or his contemporaries or sources. Also, exaggeration is not particularly unheard of either. One can see similarly how depictions and descriptions of various "exotic" beasts were exaggerated to almost ludicrous degrees by travelers in the various pilgrimage accounts from the late Medieval period up through the Rococo, so this is a phenomenon that persisted very near to present day. People didn't necessarily expect naturalistic scientific accuracy; especially when they lived at a time when all sorts of supernatural phenomena were presumed to be commonplace. So there wasn't as much opportunity to contrast their experience observing a real rhinoceros, and Pliny's description of the monoceros, as we would have available to us today.
Paint them camo colors or red and black, attach an armoured saddle with spikes and mounted rocket launchers and you have a beast that any soldier would be proud to ride into battle. They would fly off the shelves.
I may just bookmark this for the Farmer Bruener story. Unicorns going to an art show that features unicorns.
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I'm partway through George MacDonald Fraser's The Steel Bonnets, and my god, the Anglo-Scottish border was an exciting place to live back in the day. A place best viewed from a safe distance, far out of riding reach.
Whenever we uncover a large crater, we shouldn't just assume a meteor did it. Possibly what happened was that the unicorn attached to the photographed alicorn was high up one day and got spooked.
5806019
It's definitely worth a visit! Even if the unicorns have since fled, they seem to do a nice rotation of fun exhibitions - the next one coming up looks to be all about legendary, historical, and contemporary floods.
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Gotta make the dreadful barbarian foe simultaneously tricky to conquer and worth conquering, for the greater glory of the conquering general. I don't suppose you've come across A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry during your readings? The author focuses on Rome, but he's delved into the workings of the Celtic peoples, and he's got a post series which touches upon this sort of behaviour by the Romans - villifying, lionizing, and often using their foes as a mirror with which to reflect upon and tut at fellow Romans: The Fremen Mirage.
And cheers for that detail on rhinoceros/monoceros-ology. That's the trick when asking about what Romans thought, to try and bear in mind that what Pliny reckons would be fairly far removed from the majority of the human experience wherever Roman territory roamed - and that a lot of our natural phenomena was, to them, everyday supernatural phenomena (and therefore perfectly natural.)
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That is a trick being missed by Hasbro, potentially. Just release that figure and accessory kit where you can both brush Twilight's mane and give her a saddle-mounted bazooka, and it'd definitely find a market.
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The Steel Bonnets is a great history of the border and borderers. Somewhat unkind to my kin, but admittedly not inaccurate. To this day, when asked what my favorite meal is, I reply, "Other people's cattle!"
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Equestria at war! Strategic unicorn bombardment! Paratroopers and bunker-busters in the same quadrupedal ordnance package.
5806119
I'm familiar with the site, but haven't read much of it. If you're interested in Roman stuff, and haven't seen them yet, there are a handful of really good BBC documentaries on ancient Rome hosted by Roman classicist Mary Beard. The two big ones are Meet the Romans and Rome: Empire Without Limit, the former of which concentrates on the lives of ordinary citizens.
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Cheers for the recommendations! I'll look out for them.
Wonderful blog. I wonder if Lauren Faust or whoever designed Celestia originally used Narwhal tusks as inspiration.
Did the museum have any reference to Legend? That's what always made me think unicorns were awesome as a child.
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I wouldn't put it past her. There was certainly a fair amount of mythology and nods to history in the first season; possibly she also saw a narwhal tusk when composing the show bible and thought, "Yes, good, we'll give that to their Queen. That'll do for poking miscreants on the other side of Equestria, and in neighbouring timezones for that matter."
Not that I spotted, though I've never seen Legend myself. There was a room dedicated to modern representations of unicorns (and Sunny), so it's possible some piece of Legend-related art or merchandise was present without my realising.