Discussion: Did 'The Last Unicorn' change our views on single-horned horses?

I don't know about others but I've never heard of The Last Unicorn so it certainly didn't directly influence me at all. I'm not sure if anyone else knows about it but if not it probably didn't change too many people. Maybe it's ideas were adapted by other people that used unicorns but since I'm not sure who all those people are and what they have read and watched I really can't say.

Not much. I have been reading s-f & fantasy since the 1950s, and many of the stories have featured unicorns, usually as minor background characters. There is "The Silken-Swift" by Theodore Sturgeon, "The Well of the Unicorn" by George U. Fletcher (Fletcher Pratt), and I think there was a unicorn in "Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson. (Ooops -- no; "The Well of the Unicorn" was the name of a magic well; there is no actual unicorn in the story. I highly recommend it as a fantasy adventure novel anyway. Not anthropomorphic, though.) The unicorn was usually such a minor character that its sex was not mentioned. "The Last Unicorn" was different in that it was the first novel to make the unicorn its protagonist, and to make her clearly a female, but I just took this as Peter Beagle being very imaginative; not as revolutionizing the standard image of unicorns. There have been other stories since with female unicorns, like "The Unicorn Girl" by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball, but I have not thought of them as particularly influenced by "The Last Unicorn".

Two things; I do not think the male version of the unicorn has ever gone away, so Beagle may have created a concurrent myth rather than replaced it, though we admittedly prefer our unicorns girls now. I think the unicorn you could encounter if you were very lucky (literally, luck is a levelable stat) in "The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion" was male, and kinda fit the old legend.

Second, how am I gonna categorize this?

I'd say it didn't change the mythos but just updated it, like werewolf and vampire movies did for those creatures. The book is very self aware about it's relation to mythology (kind of a post modern take on fairy tales, such as, the Princess Bride). It's full of references to fairy tales, Robin Hood, etc. and their relation to the modern world, and will they still be remembered or cared about? That's what the book is about, the mortality of an immortal. It asks, if a unicorn lives alone in the woods forever, won't she get lonely? - Then it puts her in a world full of lonely people. Very 1960's (in the best way.) Viet Nam war allegory, even.

Beagle had a set of stories for various creatures like this- my other favorite being his first novel about ghosts, "A Fine and Private Place". It is really excellent, even as a very early work- he was something of a prodigy. The nonsensical but secretly wise poet butterfly that briefly appears in The Last Unicorn is meant to be Beagle.

I was going to guess the unicorn myth came from a source similar to fauns and satyrs (woodland creatures related to fertility) but then wiki tells me the ancient greeks took unicorns as part of natural history, not mythology. They believed they were literal horned horses far away in India.

So the mythology came later out of stuff like Physiologus (ancient proto-furriness? neat trivia for furries to know about, so thanks for posting this :). The mythology seems mainly out of medieval europe, and christian symbolism, with the virgin as virgin mary.

I could say a lot of stuff about business dealings with Beagle's publisher, but that's kind of off topic. I got a ton of dealer stock from them, and permission to animate his work.

Not me personally, at least not directly.

I tend to have a proportionate ration of male/female characters in my stories, however, the protagonist is male only 33% of the time, so, as obviously I've written stories that involve unicorn characters (what kind of fantasy-equine fan would I be if I haven't?) I am not unfamiliar with female unicorns.

The reality of it is: there never really WAS a solid concept of what a unicorn was "supposed to be".

Throughout its mythological development, the unicorn has been a great many things --- savage or gentle, benign or malicious, good or evil. There are legends of kings having dreams where they are chased into a pit of death by a unicorn, others where unicorns purify stagnant pools with their horns or just by being nearby, others where they are an utterly destructive force to be feared instinctively.

Just as varied are the unicorn's physical descriptions. Whether you want to say the "real" unicorn was a gazelle, a bison, a horse or a rhino, you have virtually equal footing for your position. Pure white, as in the medieval tapestries, or multicolored as in Aristotle's description?

The only central tenet to all of the descriptions is "free-spirited". Oh, and the whole one-horn thing.

Perhaps the most "accurate" myth is also the oldest and least-well-known: in the Harappan civilization, trading tokens depicted the unicorn as a stocky, free-ranging ungulate. While some theorize that it's a gazelle and not a unicorn at all, the other horn being "hidden" by the use of the art-in-profile style, the same civilization was entirely capable of depicting depth-of-field in its other tokens.

We may never know exactly what they meant, because the Harappan language remains untranslated.

But what we DO know is that the depictions show garlands around its neck, and offerings of food in what looks to be a wedding-style feeder.

This could be the origin of the "gentled beast" and "wedding hunt" tales which surround unicorn mythology. A prospective groom would show his prowess, in both hunting and gentility, by luring the wedding feast's main course. The garlands, indicating the animal itself was revered to some extent (this being prior to development of the Indian karmatic system which ultimately psuedo-deifies cattle), could also suggest the animal was a rare one. Certainly, there are a number of beasts which have a similarity to the Harappan Unicorn, but none appears to be an exact match. The fact that the Harappans were very consistent with how they depicted their Unicorn also suggests they were either referencing a real one, or had developed a stylized ideal of it.

I consider it a possibility, though admittedly a remote one, that the "historical" unicorn may have been a one-horned ungulate, an offshoot of the gazelle family which had a single horn and greater mass for conducting devastating goring charges. This would have given it a limited advantage in terms of evolutionary development, so it may have occupied such a niche --- until driven to extinction by one of humanity's earliest examples of social hubris.