In Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies, a unicorn has escaped from Faerie and is wandering Lancre. It has already killed one man with its horn. Granny Weatherwax (being qualified) catches it and takes it to blacksmith Jason Ogg to be shod. He protests that iron shoes and nails would kill a Faerie creature; Granny supplies an old silver tea set so he can make silver shoes and nails. When the job is done, they let the unicorn go into the woods.
Well and good. But what’s the point of putting shoes on it? How is that supposed to make it any tamer or less dangerous? Horses aren’t shod to make them more tractable, they’re shod to protect their hooves – aren’t they?
If I remember right, I think the idea behind it was that shoeing the unicorn prevented the Elf Queen from possessing it. I don’t know why, though there’s plenty of superstition about horseshoes.
Horseshoes are made of iron. And the Elf Queen can’t touch iron! Remember all those legends of the past that said if you put a horseshoe over your door evil things cannot answer? Same idea.
Honestly, what have people come to these days. You guys probably have all manner of evil little Fair Folk roaming around your houses.
(Wow! Something I actually knew spot-on!) As for the silver bit, I presume it’s along the lines of silver = no werewolves. I haven’t read the book myself, not liking the witches series much.
Oh, sure. The blacksmith is Jason Ogg. He is The Blacksmith. Earlier in the story there was a reference to a time that he had shod (shoed?) an ant that his buddies had brought in as a joke. Death Himself brings his horse to be shod. Cloven hooves are not going to slow him down, let alone stop him.
The price of being able to shoe anything brought to you, is having to shoe anything brought to you.
One of the reasons the elves were forced off the Disc, obviously, was because humans discovered iron, but another reason was because, like Granny explains to the Elf Queen, the iron got into our heads. We started seeing the natural world as something we could control and tame, and we no longer had time for fantasy…we no longer had time to be afraid of elves.
When Jason Ogg shoes the unicorn, he’s imposing humanity’s sense of order onto it. and by doing so, he’s taking it out of the domain of the elves.
But those shoes (as mentioned in the OP and the book) are specifically made of silver.
So while the unicorn would be problematic to any werewolves it happened across, that explanation doesn’t answer what it does to Elf Queen.
The shoes were silver because iron horseshoes would have killed the unicorn. With silver shoes, it can’t be controlled by the Elf Queen, but it isn’t needlessly killed either. Granny can be an old softy sometimes.
