Lore of the Unicorn

Anything like a full presentation of the literature devoted to the virgin-capture story would involve an intolerable amount of repetition, for all this writing was done when it was still sound doctrine that

Who-so shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce, as ny as evere he can,
Everich a word.

To take a few examples: the versified Bestiary of Philippe de Thaun tells the tale rather feebly in perfect accord with Isidore and develops the allegory at considerable length; that of William, Clerk of Normandy, carries the significatio to great length and complexity; and Richard de Fournival in his Bestiaire d'Amour manages to inject some novelty into the theme by using it as a symbol of the courtly instead of the celestial love--an audacious thing to have attempted in the middle of the thirteenth century. Richard's poem is a protracted wooing in terms of animal symbolisms, and the lady, quite as learned in the lore of beasts as the lover himself, replies in kind. The lover says in the unicorn passage: "I have been drawn to you by your sweet odour alone, as the unicorn falls asleep under the influence of a maiden's fragrance. For this is the nature of the unicorn, that no other beast is so hard to capture, and he has one horn on his nose which no armour can withstand, so that no one dares to go forth against him except a virgin girl. And as soon as he is made aware of her presence by the scent of her, he kneels humbly before her and humiliates himself as though to signify that he would serve her. Therefore wise huntsmen who know his nature set a virgin in his way; he falls asleep in her lap; and while he sleeps the hunters, who would not dare to approach him when awake, come up and kill him. Even so has Love dealt cruelly with me; for I have been the proudest man alive with regard to love, and I have thought never to see the woman whom I should care to possess . . . . But Love, the skilful huntsman, has set in my path a maiden in the odour of whose sweetness I have fallen asleep, and I die the death to which I was doomed."

In this charming passage one sees that Isidore's confusion of the rhinoceros and the unicorn has done its work: the horn of Richard de Fournival's unicorn is en la narine. Rudolf von Ems places the horn on the brow--

Emmiten an der stirnin sin
hat er ein horn reht als ein glas,
vier fuze lanc, als ich ez las--

but in other details he depicts the rhinoceros. Thus it happens again and again, as though by a fatality, that the unicorn slips back, as it were, into the rhinoceros; and even the virgin-capture story, violently incongruous as it is with that huge and ugly beast, is often involved in the confusion. It was not that these writers thought the two animals identical, for most of them were almost passionately convinced that the two were different; but no sooner have they finished insisting upon the differences than they describe the one in terms that apply only to the other. Thus the nose-horned beast of India, lumpish and gross and mud-wallowing, looms always just behind the delicate unicorn, related to it as fact to dream, as actuality to the ideal, as Sancho Panza to Don Quixote.