Unicorns
The unicorn is Scotland’s national animal, and whoever wonders how an animal that doesn’t actually exist can become the official animal of a nation that actually exists, should consider that Scots apparently do have a weakness for
animals that don't actually exist
. This was enacted in the 16th century, when the royal arms of Scotland – the one with the red lion on a yellow background (pardon,
gules
and
or
) – acquired two unicorns as supporters. (When James VI of Scotland also became James I of England in 1603, the new “combined” arms of the monarch of England and Scotland – “Great Britain” as a “united” kingdom had not yet been invented – meant that one of the unicorns had to be removed to make room for the English lion, and this is still the case today. However, there are subtle differences between the royal arms in Scotland and those the king uses elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Perhaps most obviously: In the Scottish version the lion stands on the right and the unicorn on the left, and both animals are wearing a crown. The other version has the lion on the left with a crown and the unicorn on the right without. A more detailed analysis of the differences, however, would be beyond the scope of this article.)
Even though the unicorn has been Scotland’s national animal only since the early Renaissance, unicorn mythology can be traced back all the way to Bronze Age civilisations in the Indus valley around 2000 BCE. In the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the unicorn was a symbol for chastity and marital fidelity. It was considered untameable, and the most efficient hunting method – as described, e.g., by Leonardo da Vinci – involved using a virgin as bait, because the unicorn has a known weakness for those. Once a unicorn espies a virgin sitting in the forest, it approaches her, puts its head in her lap, and falls asleep, which makes it easy prey for the hunters. Another suggestion was that a hunter should stand in front of a tree and provoke the unicorn to attack. The hunter should then jump aside at the very last moment, such that the wildly charging unicorn’s horn would get stuck in the tree and render it helpless. How often these strategies were successfully employed in the complete absence of real unicorns remains an open question. Europe’s forests were probably teeming with bored virgins and frustrated unicorn hunters. The unicorn hunt, however, was still a popular motif in contemporary arts and was commonly conflated with the annunciation to the virgin Mary, until in the mid-16th century the council of Trent put a stop to such over-the-top depictions.
Magical and medicinal properties were ascribed to a unicorn’s horn, but in 1638 the Danish physician Ole Worm demonstrated that the purported unicorn horns then in circulation were, in fact, the tusks of narwhales (not that these would be much easier to bag for the average hunter than unicorns).
Actual unicorn encounters were obviously rare and possibly surprising for the observer, as a report by Marco Polo illustrates, who described unicorns as follows: “They are little smaller than elephants. They have the coat of a buffalo and feet like elephants. They have a single black horn in the middle of their forehead … They have a head like a boar … They prefer to spend their time wallowing in the mud. They look like extremely ugly monsters. They are not in the least like we describe them when we say they let themselves be caught by virgins, but completely opposed to our conceptions.” Perhaps the Venetian tourist had really seen an Asian rhino?
From “Anselm's Notes on Dances”, by Anselm Lingnau
(Used by permission.)