Well there is a controversy between Peter S Beagle and Granada Media at present. You can read about it here and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is leaking over into the production of the movie.
I’ve been watching for this one for a good long while and maybe one day it will get made, but to be honest I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Something closer to a goat, or an antelope - the Medieval conception (or at least the heraldic one) has cloven hooves and a beard, and also a long tail that only has a tuft at the end. Also more gracile than your average horse.
We’ll have to disagreeon “pretty” or “good” - I’ll spot you the “darn” though.
While the detailing of tail etc. is OK, the body shape is still that of a large-ish horse. And don’t get me started on the colour…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a period depiction of a unicorn that wasn’t white or close to it - they’re Christ symbols after all! The tapestry unicorns, for instance, are a colour I like to think of as “champagne”. A pied unicorn is just…wrong.
All that goes out the window when you consider Marco Polo’s “unicorn”, of course, better known as the “rhinoceros” - that would make for one cool unicorn film
As a classic unicorn, that picture is just wrong. It appears to be a pied horse, with the addition of a beard and something like a unicorn’s tail. The feet are hidden, so we cannot see whether the hooves are cloven or not, nor can we see the fetlocks. Apparently, this is a depiction of a specific unicorn in a book, but all told, it’s a bad example of what a unicorn should look like.
My guess is the myth of the unicorn actually stemmed from the birth of mutated goats. For some reason, despite the beard and horns, they gained a mythic quality of goodness and not evil.
Thanks, guys. I didn’t know they couldn’t be different colours. The picture I submitted was from a book I’d recently read (well, the artist was inspired by the book, it’s not associated with the book in any legal way), and they came in all kinds of colours. The book had no pictures, of course, but described them pretty much the same way Lynn did, only with various colours and patterns. It was new to me, and I was a little captivated by it. I see I was woefully misguided. Thank you for your help!
Todays Unicorn is almost universally the One Horned Horse, coming in all colors and possibly with wings to be a Pegacorn. Todays version has little to do with the classic unicorn. It was a woodland creature and very shy. The greatest beast to hunt as one medieval bestiology described it.
Many modern artists simply stick a spiraling horn onto an image of a horse. Unicorns are classically depicted as having a single horn, cloven hooves, and a tufted lionlike tail. I was fascinated by unicorns when I was a preteen, and my daughter went through the same stage.
…so, they’re My Little Pony - with a horn!
OK, I know some of the MLPs* had* horns
I think one advantage of living in this provincial backwater is that only (I’m pulling a figure out of my arse) 10% of the possible fantasy books make it to the brick-and-mortar stores where I get my F&SF fix. I’m slowly coming to realise (via the 'net) what horrors I’ve been spared thanks to the winnowing effect of distance coupled with Sturgeon’s Law.
If only Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan were in that 90%…
