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Dave's Mythical Creatures and Places |
Unicorns
| Description | A
horse-type animal with a single horn.
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| Features | Untamable,
and difficult to capture. Its power is in its horn; the horn is also an antidote
for poison and was highly prized. The horn was called the alicorn.
An alicorn was an essential item for British pharmacies
until the mid 1700's.
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| Also called |
Qilin, Kilin, or Ch'ilin in Chinese
myth. A gentle beast. When Confucius was born in 551 B.C.,
a qilin appeared and spat out a jade tablet that said he would be an
"uncrowned emperor."
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| Might Actually be | Rhinocerous.
(Its horns were valued in Asia as an aphrodisiac.) Early
descriptions of the unicorn sound more like a rhinocerous- Marco Polo
described them as "scarcely smaller than elephants. They have
the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant's. They have a
single large black horn in the middle of the forehead... They have a
head like a wild boars...They spend their time by preference wallowing
in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at.
They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they
let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our
notions." (Latham, 1958)
It was
later that it became described as a horse-like creature. The finding of an
occasional narwhal
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| Described By: | Thomas
Bulfinch- "Pliny, the Roman
naturalist, out of whose account of the unicorn most of the modern
unicorns have been described and figured, records it as "a very
ferocious beast, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head
of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, a deep, bellowing
voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length, standing out in the
middle of its forehead." He adds that "it cannot be taken
alive"; and some such excuse may have been necessary in those days
for not producing the living animal upon the arena of the amphitheatre.
The unicorn seems to have been a sad puzzle to the hunters, who hardly
knew how to come at so valuable a piece of game. Some described the horn
as movable at the will of the animal, a kind of small sword, in short,
with which no hunter who was not exceedingly cunning in fence could have a
chance. Others maintained that all the animal's strength lay in its horn,
and that when hard pressed in pursuit, it would throw itself from the
pinnacle of the highest rocks horn foremost, so as to pitch upon it, and
then quietly march off not a whit the worse for its fall." (Age
of Fable)
William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens Act 4: Scene
3- "If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee: if
thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee: if thou wert the fox,
the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accused by
the ass: if thou wert the ass,
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| Related Creatures |
Other 1-horned creatures include: Shadhahvar- a Persian antelope with a single hollow branched horn. The wind would blow the horn like a flute and animals would be drawn towards the pleasant notes. Then the Shadhahvar would kill them. Mi'raj- a yellow rabbit with a black horn, found on an unknown island in the Indian Ocean. It too was ferocious.
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