Greenland Unicorns and the Magical Alicorn | The Public Domain Review

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“This shift from terrestrial horse to sea beast is one of the many changes the meaning of “unicorn” has undergone over time. For a short while in the seventeenth century, the “Greenland Unicorn” — a strange northern sea creature that few Europeans had seen — displaced their obscure hoofed cousins in Asia as the source of the wonderful, spiralling tusks valued by collectors and physicians. Thomas Bartholin’s sleight of hand maintained popular faith in the potency of alicorn until the early eighteenth century, when pharmacists became disenchanted. More reliable experiments proved the powder was not all that useful for curing disease or protecting against poison. In his Systema Naturae (1735), the most prominent taxonomist in history, Carl Linnaeus, would reject the “Greenland Unicorn” once and for all (though the narwhal’s scientific name remains Unicornu groenlandicus). Still, there was a time when unicorns existed both in the sea and on the land, before the medicinal magic of their horns was dispelled and they retreated to the world of pure fable.”