Unicorn Week – My Precious

Owing to some unicorns actually having existed over time, by whichever means, the unicorn embodies an ideal that one could say, teases us, with a possibility, a glimmer of hope that they may be real. For some, beyond doubt. It is perhaps a dream like creature, one that hints that it just may be real if the universe were perfect.

What makes it perhaps more real, is that it is not overly fantastic, but rather, a small step from the norm.

In the Song Of Alexander written by Pfaffen Lamprecht in the 12th century, a gift is mentioned from Queen Candace to Alexander, a gem more precious than a unicorn horn :

I had from this most wealthy queen
A beast of proud and noble mien
That bears in his brow the ruby-stone
And yields himself to maids alone.
But few such Unicorns are found
On this or any other ground,
And only such are ever captured
As pure virgins have enraptured.
No man yet of woman born
Endures the terror of his horn.

In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s, Parzival, the stone is mentioned as one of the remedies applied to the Grail Kings wounds ( in vain as it happens, since nothing but the attainment of the Grail can do that ) :

We caught the beast called the Unicorn
That knows and loves a maiden best
And falls asleep upon her breast;
We took from underneath his horn
The splendid male carbuncle stone
Sparkling against the white skull-bone.

In another romantic novel The Magic Horn by Achim von Arims, a young farmer sings of his dairymaid lover :

With sunbeams dazzling my pursuers
Like a unicorn free do I bound
Till even, away from my tortures
To virgins lap escape I've found
To catch me with gossamer she knew
But with the dawn she set me free
On her lashes gazed I true
But those sweet eyes she shut on me