What is a unicorn?
The unicorn is a legendary creature like a white horse with a single long, spiraled horn in the middle of its forehead. The English word comes from Latin for “one horn,” and in Greek it was called the monoceros. It was said to be fierce and swift, so it could not be caught by ordinary means.
Legends and origins
The unicorn is said to have first been recorded in an account of India by Ctesias, an ancient Greek physician of the 5th–4th century BC. He wrote that India had wild asses with horns on their foreheads, and that drinking from a cup made of the horn protected against poison and disease. It is thought that stories of the Indian rhinoceros or the oryx changed as they were passed along.
In medieval Europe, through the Physiologus, a collection of animal allegories, and the bestiaries, the legend spread that “the unicorn becomes gentle only before a pure maiden and falls asleep in her lap.” The unicorn became a symbol of Christ and purity and was depicted in works of art such as the French tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn.
What the unicorn horn really was
The unicorn horn (alicorn) was considered a cure-all that could detect poison and heal disease, and from the Middle Ages to the early modern period it is said to have sold for more than its weight in gold. However, most of what was sold as “unicorn horn” was actually the long tusk of the narwhal, a whale of the Arctic Ocean. Because Nordic merchants hid where it came from, the truth long remained unknown.
The unicorn today
The unicorn is Scotland’s national animal, and the British royal coat of arms shows a unicorn alongside a lion. Today it is a staple of fantasy, and it is also used as a metaphor for “something rare and special,” as in “unicorn companies,” unlisted startups valued at more than a billion dollars.
