The Unicorn

All of you must have heard legends before, and you must know about some legendary creatures like the Pegasus, the dragon and the phoenix. Well, today I am going to tell you more about the Unicorn.

The word “Unicorn” comes from Latin, in which unus means “one” and cornu means “horn”. The Unicorn looks exactly like a white horse, but it has a single horn on its head. It is a legendary creature whose power exceeds only by its mystery. However, traditional unicorns have a billy-goat beard, a lion’s tail, and cloven hooves.

The Unicorn is a fabulous beast which is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysterious beautiful. Also, its single horn is said to be able to neutralize poison. Normally, the Unicorn is very gentle and mild-tempered, but when provoked, it will let out loud neighs and attack ferociously with their horns.

However, not all Unicorns are good-hearted. The Shadhavar, a type of unicorn in Persian folklore which resembles a gazelle with a single hollow horn, produces music with its horn and attract animals. Once an animal is near, the Shadhavar will use the opportunity to attack its prey. Thus, the Shadhavar is also known as the “Evil Unicorn”.

Although Unicorns are mystical and magnificent creatures, they get caught easily however. A traditional way of hunting Unicorns involve the entrapment of a virgin. The Unicorn, not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens, or virgins, lets it loses its ferocity and wildness, and laying aside all its fear, it will go up to a seated damsel and sleep in her lap, and then the hunters will come and take it. Of course, in the end, the Unicorn will always find a way out.

In heraldry, a Unicorn is often depicted as a horse with a goat’s cloven hooves and beard, a lion’s tail, and a slender, spiral horn on its forehead. Perhaps du to the reason that it was an emblem of the fearsome animal passions of raw nature, the unicorn was not widely used in early heraldry, but became popular from the fifteenth century. Though sometimes it is shown collared, which may perhaps be taken, in some cases, as an indication that it has been tamed or tempered, it is more often shown collared with a broken chain attached, ehich indicates that it has broken free from its bondage and cannot be taken again.

By now you should be wondering about the origins of Unicorns. As mentioned earlier, the Unicorn is a legendary creature, but there are fossils found which is related to the Unicorn. Among numerous finds of prehistoric bones found in “Unicorn Cave” of Germany’s Harz Mountains, some were selected and reconstructed by the mayor of Magdeburg, a town in Germany then, as a unicorn in 1663. However, it was claimed that the so-called Unicorn had only two legs.

Another origin is that the unicorn is based on an extinct animal known as the “Giant Unicorn” but known to scientists as Elasmotherium, a huge Eurasian rhinoceros two meters high and six meters long, with a single two-meter-long horn in the forehead.

Another possible origin of the Unicorns is the oryx. It is an antelope with two long, thin horns projecting from its forehead. Some have suggested that seen from the side and from a distance, the oryx looks something like a horse with a single horn, although the horn actually projects backward, not forward as in the classic Unicorn. Even so, travellers in the Arabia could have derived the tale of the Unicorn from these animals. However, classical authors are able to distinguish clearly the differences between oryxes and Unicorns.