When it comes to making mythical beasts based on real ones, the horse is a popular candidate. It’s easy to see why. They’re seen as swift, strong, graceful, and essential for the livelihoods of many cultures. Thus, horses have made a natural starting point for tales of larger-than-life creatures for countless generations. It’s perhaps inevitable that one of the most famous mythical creatures, the equally graceful unicorn, would be such an equine. Easy enough start for your story’s magical bestiary, right?
But here’s the funny thing about unicorns: they aren’t always quite as equine as what we’re familiar with. One of the oldest examples of a unicorn or unicorn-like beast, found on numerous seals from the ancient Indus Valley civilization of South Asia, looked more like a one-horned bovine. And in ancient Greece, where unicorns were believed to be exotic animals from India, they were frequently described as a kind of large wild donkey. (Still equine, but you know what I mean.) One account from Pliny the Elder even claimed them to resemble “in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar,” along with the requisite horse-like body and long horn.
The “chubby unicorn”
Does that last description sound a bit familiar to anyone else? Like the Greeks, some Medieval scholars attributed the name “unicorn” to what sounds like a very real family of animals.
So, article complete, just make your fantastical unicorns a kind of magical rhino, right? Well, you certainly can. I’m debating using the extinct wooly rhino as a unicorn base in one of my own book series, in fact. But the old literature has plenty of the more slender, horse-like unicorns as well. And that’s not even getting into some of their other traits, like cloven hooves and a goat-like beard.
So, what are other ways that you might “build” a unicorn for your own fantastical world? The best place to start might be deciding just where it lands in the family tree.
Horned Horses
Let’s start with the “classic” unicorn base that is the horse itself. Horses, and their equine relatives the donkeys and zebras, are “odd-toed ungulates” or perissodactyls. Anatomically, they have one hoofed toe at the end of each foot. Meanwhile, their fellow perissodactyls the tapirs and rhinos have odd numbers of toes as well.
If we take the classic Medieval image of unicorns as “cloven hoofed” to mean they have two hoofed toes per foot, like deer and antelopes, this becomes one of our first problems. These animals, the “even-toed ungulates,” are far more distant cousins to horses than they look. But the cloven hooves aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker. While the proto-horse eohippus wasn’t built with two toes, it did have three or four depending on the foot. Perhaps your unicorn could be a relative of modern horses rather than a horse itself. Another branch of the eohippus family tree, if you will. Such descendants’ small front hooves could have fused into two rather than one, while their back hooves remained at three.
This kind of family divergence also gives us the wiggle room to deal with our other, bigger problem: the horn. No equine has ever had horns, and one as prominent as the unicorn’s is unlikely to show up any time soon. But notice how I earlier mentioned that the rhinoceros family is one of their close relatives?
Rhinos use their horns for territorial defense and sparring, particularly among males during the mating season. Horses don’t need them because they live in herds, but unicorns tend to show up as more solitary animals. They would have developed horns separately than the rhinos, which split from a common ancestor before eohippus showed up. But that just gives us more room to design the horns for the unicorns themselves.
Rhinos and antelopes and goats, oh my!
Of course, there’s always the option of going with a different ungulate entirely. Along with rhinos, I’ve always thought that goats make a solid non-equine candidate. They have two-toed feet, the requisite horns, and unicorn-like beards. Some Medieval descriptions even leaned into the goat-like characteristics!
Antelopes like the gazelle make for another, less conventional option. Many species have that long-legged grace associated with unicorns, and some have mostly straight, spiraling horns as well.
In these cases, the single horn becomes the main sticking point. Goats and antelopes naturally develop two horns, one on each side of the head, or none at all. Still, genetics are a finicky thing. Again, your unicorn might be a relative of the goat, rather than a goat itself, that ended up with a single horn somewhere down the evolutionary line. Or in more magical works, the single horn could serve as an identifier. Perhaps, once in a long while, ordinary antelopes bear a calf blessed with magic by the gods or somesuch. The young unicorn would then be “revealed” when it begins to grow a single, magnificent horn from the center of its forehead in place of its parents’ two.
Unicorn traits and powers
Speaking of the magical side of things, you’ll also need to figure out what your unicorn actually does. Most of the oldest known myths centered their fantastical properties around the horn, which people believed prevented poison and some diseases when used as a drinking vessel. Later, this association with purity was extended by the allegorical bestiaries to a claim that the swift unicorn could only be tamed and captured by virgin women.
Now, the mystical side of things will depend more on how magic works in your world than the unicorn’s biology. But these myths still provide some useful tidbits. Since the horn’s material, called “alicorn,” was said to be the source of its purifying properties, it often becomes the source of a unicorn’s power in more modern works. The alicorn could even have a mundane explanation, perhaps producing some oil or other substance that helps with disease resistance or neutralizes certain poisons. Such a property would certainly benefit the unicorn, if found throughout the body or useable without breaking off the horn.
The unicorn’s other traditional traits mostly come down to behavior. Swiftness and aggression, both common traits of the “difficult/impossible to hunt” variety of unicorn, could easily come down to a territorial animal built to run. And as for the whole “friendly to maidens” thing, that’s easy to reinterpret as unicorns only approaching the pure of heart, so to speak. Perhaps your unicorn is highly intelligent and wary of others. From there, it could have either a mundane or magical way of sensing a person’s intentions.
At the end of the day, there are plenty of ways to make a unicorn. Whichever you choose, equine or otherwise, natural or mystical, is sure to leave its own special something in your story.
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