Virgins, Unicorns and Medieval Literature (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Virgins, Unicorns and Medieval Literature (2017)

bowdoin.edu

11 pointsmooreds8 comments

Author suggests unicorns were after African/Asian rhinos, but there is another genus that better fits the description "forest-dwelling creatures with this monstrous four-foot long horn that they used to stab the wombs of elephants, and they were regarded as the most dangerous beast in the forests” and may have existed alongside humans- https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-11-27-extinct-siberian-unicor...

yeah I don’t see why not, maybe they were hunted to extinction, maybe they even had medicinal properties, heck the most mythical part of the fable might be the virgin

Because 100,000 years is rather extreme to have any kind of myth survive. Instead the ultra long spiral horn likely comes from narwhal as in people could hold and sell “unicorn” horns.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/23/in-medieval-europe...

Accounts of unicorns in antiquity had rather different horns.

Woolly rhinoceroses (related to the Sumatran rhinoceros and a different species from the one from the link in the posting above) have continued to live in Europe and Asia until much more recently, i.e. until around ten thousand years ago (i.e. around the same time when humans were forced to switch from hunting to eating seeds, presumably because of the depletion of the big animals that made hunting profitable).

That is certainly recent enough for their memory to persist in myths.

As you say, the narwhal tooth is indeed the source used for most medieval illustrations of unicorns, but not the source of the legends about them.

That’s more plausible especially when you consider people would find skeletal remains long after the animal went extinct. However, Occam's razor points to African rhinos as a more reasonable source for keeping this myth alive vs thousands of years of oral tradition.

Even just goats seem useful here to explain the often depicted medieval unicorns beards compared to earlier sources.

As a Catholic, the part discussing Mary's role in the story is quite at odds with what I read, both from medieval times and more modern.

I wonder if the perspective in the article comes more from a Protestant understanding of Mary?

In Catholic teaching at least, Mary's "fiat" ("Yes") was one of the most pivotal moments in salvation history, and Mary is regarded as the "Queen" of all saints, for her role and her personal decision to say yes.

I think Dungeon Soup nailed it with their unicorn video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vulJTr8u2gc

This is a strange article to show up on the front page of hacker news.

A couple of paragraphs on a profound subject and reductionists feel the need to talk over it as if they have a better idea.

If this stuff interests you, get out of the shallow end of the pool.

https://archive.org/details/loreofunicorn00shep

https://archive.org/details/oakkinghollyk00will

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283172/page/n1...

There's no map, just fields of doors. You get nowhere by arguing about the look of the doorknobs.

One thing is for certain: there are no unicorns in Silicon Valley, no matter how much it has loved to profess as much.

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