Unicorn Rant, sort of...

[capri0mni]

snowgrouse's question about my favorite mythological beasts reminded me of my first fantastical love: unicorns (it got so bad, in my teen years, that my high school art teacher eventually told me I wasn't allowed to choose unicorns as a subject, any more, at least for class -- and she was very liberal).

I've especially been pondering the Unicorn Tapestries, which were my first big exposure to the myth, and how they shaped my unicorn prejudices and attitudes ever since (and I mean big -- each individual tapestry is about 12 ft square).

Here then, is my mini-essay and sort-of rant about them. I've linked to each of the tapestries I'm talking about, so you can see a picture, and zoom in on any detail you want a closer look at (and I may do some of that later make some new lj icons).

There are seven tapestries in the series, and like panels in a comic book, they tell the story -- in this case, of a unicorn hunt.

My favorite of the seven is the second one: "The Unicorn is Found". Here, the unicorn is kneeling down by a fountain that's flowing into steam, dipping his horn into the water to purify it of poison. The wild animals are gathered around, waiting for it to be safe to drink: leopards and weasels, and deer, and bunny rabbits, and birds and wolves (compare to Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom, that I wrote about here).

But this world is not exactly peaceable. The hunters are there, too, with their hounds already sniffing at the unicorn's heels. But they hold back, knowing that what the unicorn is doing is sacred and important.

But even though they recognize how sacred and magical and important the unicorn is, that doesn't stop them from chasing it down, and finally killing it, and bringing it home as a trophy for their king and queen, as seen in the penultimate tapestry: "The Unicorn is Killed, and Brought to the Castle,", which is really like a comic book illustration in that it shows the two moments overlapping in a single panel (just a word of warning: this tapestry [and the 4th, too] shows blood and guts pretty graphically, and the unicorn is very dead, so it may be triggery).

But oh, look! The story has a happy ending after all, here is "The Unicorn in the Garden"! Its wounds are all healed, and where there had been blood, there's now just the dripping red seeds of over-ripe pomegranate. The unicorn is collared and fenced in, but the collar isn't even buckled, so it must be happy to be in captivity -- after all, it's alive again, and it could jump the fence, if it wanted too, probably... right? What an idyllic scene!

[/skewer of irony]

Even as a wee little girl, seeing it for the first time, this final image struck me as deeply tragic. Yes, he was alive again, and seemingly pampered. ...But he's also, for the first time in the story, completely alone -- even the king and queen, for whom he had been captured, seem to have forgotten him. And what about the wild animals, back in the forest? If they relied on the unicorn to keep their stream free from poison, what would happen to them, now?

So it's always been one of my pet peeves that this is the most famous of all the images from the tapestries, and how, by extension, all magic in our culture has been domesticated and prettified. That's why, I think, the "My Little Pony"-type versions of unicorns annoyed me: So often, they had golden bridles and saddles, and were the pets for Princess Barbie. A unicorn that's pure horse is easily domesticated, but with a little bit of goat, and stag, and lion mixed in ... Not so much.

(okay, I'm off to make icons now ;-))

Comments

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

So it's a wild, free animal to be chased, and is the ultimate prize to be bloodied by a spear. It turns out that being speared isn't so bad after all, because it gets better and stops hurting, and the unicorn spends the rest of its life in pampered captivity.

I am having all kinds of new thoughts regarding the unicorn as a symbol of virginity. Is this whole thing a metaphor for marriage and becoming a woman?

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I am having all kinds of new thoughts regarding the unicorn as a symbol of virginity. Is this whole thing a metaphor for marriage and becoming a woman?

Well, as with all art, if your mind suggests a meaning to you, the answer is "Yes, it means that."

But back in the time and place where these tapestries were first woven, the unicorn was seen as a symbol of male sexuality and power. And sometimes, the phallic symbolism of that horn was underlined by making it black at the base (where the pubic hair is), white in the middle, and red at the tip (for the blood-engorged head). And the only way the unicorn could be captured was to have him lured to a quiet spot by a beautiful and pure virgin; as soon as he lay in her lap, his horn would loose all its power, and the hunters would finally be able to overpower it (that scene is in the 5th tapestry, of which only two fragments survive).

...That has all sorts of mysogynist "beware a woman's wiles" overtones.

In the original version of this post, I wrote a paragraph about the Christian iconography of the medieval unicorn, and how that final panel represents the resurection of the Christ, but I took it out to avoid tl;dr. But in the scheme of Christain symbolism, the unicorn being lured into the lap of a virgin is interpreted as Christ becoming incarnate through the womb of the Virgin Mary (and because he had become incarnate in mortal flesh, that enabled God to be tortured and crucified).

And if that final panel represents the resurected Christ at the service of the Church, there's another whole problematic layer of the Noble classes "owning" a people's salvation...

The whole unicorns-are-girly-innocence is a modern thing. I'm not sure when the modern unicorn fad began.

[barbarafett.livejournal.com]

"So it's always been one of my pet peeves that this is the most famous of all the images from the tapestries, and how, by extension, all magic in our culture has been domesticated and prettified."

You make me want to write about non-domesticated magic. That sounds like fun. Sometimes I like writing about phenomena in a way that shows them not to line up with the common expectations for the genre. For example, I recently decided that my sci-fi novel Vescaris will prominently feature space elevators, instead of ships that take off and land from planets.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Isaac Asimov is likely smiling, wherever he is in the Otherworld...