Alicorn

Also Known As: Italian *alicorno*, from the 13th century, first the unicorn itself and by the 16th century its horn sold as a drug; Latin *verum cornu monocerotis*, “true horn of the one-horn”
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Medieval Mythology, Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: The horn was held to sweat, boil, or grow warm in the presence of poison and to draw the venom out of anything it touched.
Role in Mythos: It was the working end of the unicorn, the part of the animal that made the animal worth hunting, and the only part of it that Europe ever actually handled.
Relation to Humans: Kings kept it on the table in the form of cups, spoons and salt-cellars, and paid more for a good specimen than for a castle. The poor bought scrapings of it for plague and gout long after the wealthy had given up on it.

On the twenty-second of July, 1577, a party of Martin Frobisher’s men found something washed up on an island in the strait that would carry his name. It was ivory, twisted like a rope, and longer than a tall man. It went home in the hold with the ore and the ice-damage, and when it reached England it was reserved as a jewel by the Queen’s Majesty’s commandment and put away in her wardrobe of robes. Twenty-one years later a German traveller named Hentzner saw it at Windsor and set its worth at one hundred thousand pounds. Nobody in that room was looking at a whale’s tooth. They were looking at the horn of a unicorn, and it was, at that moment, one of the most valuable objects in Britain.

The horn had been worth something for a very long time. Ctesias, a Greek physician who spent years at the Persian court and wrote up what travellers told him, described wild asses in India as large as horses, white-bodied, dark red about the head, blue-eyed, with a horn a foot and a half long on the forehead. The horn was ringed white and red and black, and whoever drank from it was safe from poison. That last clause did more work over the next two thousand years than the rest of the description put together. The *Physiologus*, copied and translated and added to across the whole of the Middle Ages, gave the idea its enduring picture: serpents come down to the water at night and foul it, and the unicorn comes at dawn and dips its horn and makes the pool clean, and only then do the other animals dare drink. The unicorn tapestries woven around 1500 put that scene in wool and silk, the beast kneeling at the stream with its horn in the water while the hunting party stands about talking.

What Europe wanted was not the beast. It was the horn, in pieces, in powder, in a cup. Powdered alicorn cost a little over ten times its own weight in gold, and a whole horn could fetch twice that rate again. The most precious thing Lorenzo de’ Medici owned, after the Tazza Farnese, was an alicorn three and a half braccia long that his inventory valued at six thousand gold florins. Around 1560 a syndicate of German merchants toured Italy asking ninety thousand scudi for one and eventually sold it to the Pope. Venice offered thirty thousand ducats for a whole horn in 1597 and was refused. Dresden kept its own horn under guard in the municipal cabinet of wonders, and city regulation required that two persons of princely rank be standing in the room whenever raspings were taken off it for a patient.

Money that size attracts fraud, and the literature on how to test an alicorn is longer than the literature on where it comes from. David de Pomis, a Hebrew physician writing in three languages in a book paged backwards, warned that the usual bubble test was worthless and offered his own: shut the horn in a covered vessel with three or four large live scorpions, and if they are dead or nearly dead four hours later the horn is genuine, and there is not money enough in the world to pay for it. The apothecary Laurens Catelan, who owned a whole horn himself, listed five signs in apparent good faith. True horn thrown into water sends up little bubbles like a pearl. The cold water seems to boil, and you can hear it. Burned, it smells sweet. Poisonous plants and animals brought near it burst and die. And in the presence of poison, it sweats. There was a related trick with a spider: draw a ring on the table with the powder, or with water the horn had steeped in, put the spider inside it, and watch it refuse the line and starve. Ambroise Paré records the method. John Webster put it into a play.

Explaining the sweat was harder than demonstrating it. Catelan’s account is a small masterpiece of confident reasoning. Horns concentrate whatever the animal eats, horned animals have an appetite for poisonous plants and creatures, and therefore all horns are poisonous; a beast with one horn instead of two concentrates twice the dose into a single point. So the alicorn is among the deadliest substances on earth, and it sweats toward poison because like seeks like. Why the deadliest substance on earth could safely be worn at the throat or dropped into the soup, Catelan does not say. Andrea Marini took the whole structure apart with a single observation: poisons are hot and cold and wet and dry, and no one substance can be in sympathy or antipathy with all of them at once. Andrea Bacci, publishing the same year, abandoned the theory, substituted an Aristotelian form and essence that explained nothing, and quietly declined to answer the question about the sweating at all.

The horn was narwhal. It had almost always been narwhal, hunted in the North Atlantic and traded south through Scandinavia, with elephant and walrus ivory making up the difference. A few dealers could tell them apart by the finer threading of the grain and the greater weight. Caspar Bartholin, examining the horns in Europe’s cabinets of wonder, concluded they had to be marine and said nothing about which animal. His brother-in-law Ole Worm finished the job in 1636 by laying narwhal skeletons beside the horns and showing they were the same object, a single overgrown tooth. That should have ended it. Instead Caspar’s son Thomas published *De Unicornu Observationes Novae* in 1645, accepted every word of the identification, and insisted the medicine worked anyway, rebranding the narwhal as the Greenland Unicorn and shoring up both his practice and the Danish export trade. He believed he had stopped a fever epidemic in Copenhagen with unicorn rubs.

Prices fell after 1625 and kept falling. Charles I’s horn at Somerset House, seven feet long and thirteen pounds in weight, was valued at five hundred pounds. By 1734 a horn that would once have bought an estate could be had for twenty-five dollars, and the trade had moved down-market to people who could not afford to be sceptical. Paré, who served kings that kept alicorns and bezoar stones on hand, spent years trying to convince them the things were useless, and mostly failed. The narwhal kept the name in the end: *monoceros*, one-horn, still sits in its scientific title, attached at last to an animal that exists.

One more thing has happened to the word, and it happened recently. Since the 1980s “alicorn” has been widely used to mean a winged unicorn, a sense with no medieval ancestry at all. It reads as Latin *ala*, wing, welded to unicorn, and it was carried into general fantasy usage by Piers Anthony’s *Bearing an Hourglass* in 1984. Anthony has been straightforward about where he got it: he saw a winged unicorn statuette advertised under that name and assumed it was correct. Two entirely separate objects now answer to the same word, and only one of them was ever sold by the ounce.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an alicorn?

An alicorn is the horn of the unicorn as it was understood in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and specifically the substance sold by apothecaries as a drug. The word comes from Italian *alicorno*, which originally meant the animal itself and by the sixteenth century had shifted to mean the horn. Nearly every alicorn that changed hands in Europe was a narwhal tusk.

What was the alicorn supposed to do?

It was believed to detect and neutralise poison. A piece placed near a poisoned dish was said to sweat, and powder from the horn was taken or applied as a remedy for plague, fever, gout and venomous bites. The idea goes back to Ctesias, who reported that anyone drinking from the horn of the Indian one-horned ass was safe from poison.

How did people test whether an alicorn was genuine?

Laurens Catelan gave five tests: the horn should send up bubbles like a pearl in water, make cold water appear and sound as though it were boiling, smell sweet when burned, kill poisonous plants and animals brought near it, and sweat in the presence of poison. David de Pomis dismissed the bubble test and recommended sealing the horn in a vessel with live scorpions for four hours instead. Another common demonstration was drawing a circle with the powder and watching a spider refuse to cross it.

How much was an alicorn worth?

In its best period, powdered alicorn sold for a little over ten times its weight in gold, and whole horns could fetch twice that rate. The Horn of Windsor, brought back from Frobisher’s Strait in 1577, was valued at one hundred thousand pounds in 1598. Prices collapsed after 1625, and by 1734 a horn could be bought for twenty-five dollars.

Why does alicorn now mean a winged unicorn?

That is a modern reinterpretation, reading the word as Latin *ala*, wing, plus unicorn. It entered wide fantasy usage through Piers Anthony’s novel *Bearing an Hourglass* in 1984, and Anthony has said he took the name from an advertisement for a winged unicorn statuette. The sense has no connection to the medieval drug trade in unicorn horn.