The unicorn and the virgin: the most mysterious hunt of the Middle Ages
Only a virgin can capture the unicorn: from the Physiologus to the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, the history and meanings of a famous legend.
No fabulous animal has crossed the centuries with the success of the unicorn. Even today it is everywhere, in children’s books as in national coats of arms. But the figure handed down by the medieval bestiaries was very different from the gentle white horse of the modern imagination: it was a small, extremely fierce animal, impossible to capture by force, that let itself be taken only by a virgin girl. Behind this hunting scene lay one of the most intense allegories of medieval theology.
The origins: from India to the Bible
The first descriptions of a one-horned animal come from Greece. Ctesias of Cnidus, a physician at the Persian court in the fifth century BC, speaks in his work on India of wild asses with a horn on their foreheads. Aristotle names the oryx and the Indian ass as one-horned animals, while Pliny the Elder describes the monoceros, a beast with the body of a horse and a long black horn. These reports perhaps reflected confused accounts of the Indian rhinoceros.
A decisive contribution came from translations of the Bible. The Hebrew term re’em, which probably meant a wild ox, was rendered in the Greek Septuagint as monokeros and in the Vulgate often as unicornis. So the unicorn entered the Psalms and the Book of Job, acquiring a scriptural authority that no naturalist could have challenged.
The hunt in the Physiologus
The Physiologus describes the unicorn as a small animal, like a kid, but so strong that no hunter can get near it. To capture it, a pure virgin is brought to the place where it lives. As soon as the animal sees her, it leaps into her lap and falls asleep in her arms, and only then can it be seized and taken to the king’s palace. Isidore of Seville, who identifies the unicorn with the rhinoceros, reports the same stratagem.
The interpretation is Christological. The unicorn is Christ, whose single horn signifies his unity with the Father. No power in heaven or on earth could compel him, but he came down of his own will into the womb of the Virgin Mary and, made man, was captured and led to the Passion. The hunting scene thus becomes an image of the Incarnation, and the king to whose palace the animal is taken is the earthly power that condemned him.
From tapestries to narwhal tusk
In the late Middle Ages the theme reached its artistic peak. The six tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn, woven around 1500 and now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, and the series of the Hunt of the Unicorn, roughly contemporary and kept at the Cloisters in New York, show the animal with extraordinary refinement, in settings where religious meaning intertwines with courtly and amorous meaning. Richard de Fournival, in the thirteenth century, had already used the unicorn as an image of the lover.
Meanwhile precious ‘unicorn horns’ circulated in the courts of Europe, credited with extraordinary powers against poisons. They were in fact the tusks of the narwhal, the Arctic whale. In 1638 the Danish naturalist Ole Worm publicly demonstrated this origin, contributing to the slow decline of the belief. Until then those horns had fetched very high prices.
The unicorn of the bestiaries was therefore not a fairy-tale creature, but a precise theological figure, born from the meeting of travel reports, biblical translations and Christian allegory. Its lasting fascination perhaps lies precisely in this paradox: the strength that no one can tame lets itself be overcome only by purity and gentleness.