Man-eating Unicorns and Alexander the Great

I just found this illustration and I have to share it with you guys! So as many of you know, I’ve got this book about killer unicorns coming out next month. I may have mentioned it once or twice. The premise of this book, which I also may have mentioned once or twice, is that the people who have special powers to hunt unicorns all share the same three qualities: 1) female, 2) virgin, 3) descended from Alexander the Great.

Now, when you read the book (which I know you’re all going to do next month), you’ll find out why this is, but meanwhile, I wanted to share with you some of the interesting, unicorn-related facts about Alexander the Great.

You may already know that Alexander the Great was a great conqueror and Macedonian king who lived in the 4th century, BC. He conquered half the known world and died by the time he was 32. Alexander is most often pictured astride his beloved warhorse Bucephalus, whom he first trained as a child and who he rode almost his entire life (Bucephalus allegedly died in battle at the age of thirty). In fact, Alexander was so distraught when Bucephalus died that he named one of the cities he conquered after this brave horse.

One of the most famous stories about Alexander (next to the story of the Gordian Knot), was that when he was a child, he saw Bucephalus about to be put to death. Seems the horse, which was living in Alexander’s father’s stables, was deemed completely untrainable. On top of this, he was described as “anthrophagos” — man-eating. Obviously, they couldn’t keep a man-eating horse around. But Alexander saw potential in Bucephalus, and bet his father, King Philip, that he could train the horse himself. He did, and thus was formed a lifelong bond.

Great. So where do the unicorns come in? Well, back when Alexander was alive (and for centuries after), there was a popular book out about his life called the ALEXANDER ROMANCE. It was one of the greatest bestsellers in all of history. Imagine Harry Potter times Twilight, and you get the idea. Some of the information in the book was what we would today call true, and some of it is more like the legend of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. One of the legends about Bucephalus was that he wasn’t a horse at all — he was a special kind of Turkish-peninsula (where Macedonia is) unicorn called a karkadann.

Like Bucephalus, the karkadann was known to be absolutely untameable, man-eating, and, incredibly fierce. Also, In Greek, Bucephalus meant “ox-head,” which some believed to describe the fact that this animal had horns. In most
classical and medieval manuscripts of the Alexander Romance, Alexander is depicted as riding a horse with either one horn or two. In many, many versions, he’s shown riding a unicorn.

Pictured here is a page from an illuminated Medieval biography of Alexander that shows the scene in which King Philip lets the young Alexander tame the man-eating unicorn, Bucephalus. It quite clearly shows a “traditional” looking unicorn surrounded by the bones of its victims, and a bunch of scared courtiers huddled behind the brave unicorn tamer Alexander the Great.

And that’s from the middle ages! So much for the idea of innocent fluffy unicorns.