Pegacorn

Also Known As: also winged unicorn, flying unicorn, alicorn, unisus, unipeg, cerapter; a modern English portmanteau of Pegasus and unicorn
Region/Culture: Global
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A horse that combines the feathered wings of Pegasus with the single spiralled horn of the unicorn, and with them the purity and poison-detecting virtue attributed to unicorn horn.
Role in Mythos: It carries no myth cycle of its own and functions instead as a symbol, inherited whole from the two older creatures whose parts it borrows.
Relation to Humans: Where it appears at all it is benevolent, a bearer of visions, riders and good fortune rather than a threat. Its chief modern habitat is children’s fiction, toy lines and tabletop gaming, which is where most people meet it.

Pliny the Elder kept a running list of the things Africa was supposed to produce, and somewhere between the sphinxes and the monstrous hyenas he set down winged horses armed with horns. He called them pegasi. He gave them nine words and moved on, which is nine words more than any other ancient writer spent on the animal that would one day be called a pegacorn.

That name is not old. It is a portmanteau of Pegasus and unicorn, assembled in English within living memory, circulating in tabletop gaming and on early internet message boards by the start of the 1990s and settling from there into toy catalogues, cartoons and birthday cakes. No Greek said it. No Roman wrote it. The creature it names is genuinely older than the word, but the two have to be kept apart, because almost everything charming about the pegacorn was borrowed from somewhere else and then given a new label.

Start with the body, since that is the only part everyone agrees on. A horse, usually white, of ordinary equine build. Feathered wings, not membranous ones, growing from behind the shoulder where the muscle would have to anchor them, broad enough to make the animal look slightly overbuilt at rest and entirely right the moment it opens them. A single horn on the brow, tapering, spiralled, hard as bone and cold to the touch. Nothing about the arrangement is anatomically plausible and nothing about it ever needed to be. The pegacorn is a picture before it is a creature.

The oldest images are older than any of the names. Cylinder seals cut in the ancient Near East and catalogued from museum collections in the twentieth century show winged quadrupeds with a single horn alongside the winged bulls, and the reading of them has always been contested: in some hands the winged unicorn stands for evil, in others for light. The seals are the size of a thumb. Whoever pressed them into wet clay was not illustrating a story anyone has recovered.

Pliny’s Aethiopian pegasi at least came with a location. They belonged to the far south, beyond the reach of anyone likely to check, on the improbable margins of the Red Sea where Roman natural history kept its stranger inventory. Medieval copyists inherited the line and had to do something with it. In a manuscript of Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme made around 1350, now in the National Library of the Netherlands, an illuminator faced the problem directly and solved it the obvious way: a horse, wings out, horn forward, ground unspecified. The pigment is still bright. He had never seen one, and neither had Pliny, and neither had the traveller Pliny was quoting.

The word alicorn belongs to this tangle too, and it does not mean what most people now think it means. Odell Shepard introduced it into English in his 1930 study The Lore of the Unicorn, taking it from the Italian alicorno, and he said plainly why: he was writing at length about the unicorn’s horn and wanted to stop repeating the phrase. Alicorn meant the horn. That horn had a job in medieval and early modern Europe, where powdered or carved alicorn was believed to detect poison and purify tainted water, and cups made of it sold for the price of estates. Only much later, once Latin ala had been noticed sitting inside the first syllable, did the word slide across to mean a horned horse with wings.

W. B. Yeats gave the creature its one moment of real weight. He had been imagining a winged beast associated with ecstatic destruction, and in the 1907 play he wrote with Lady Gregory, The Unicorn from the Stars, it takes the form of a unicorn. The visionary Martin Hearne comes out of a trance in a coachbuilder’s workshop, still full of what he has seen, and reads the vision as a command to tear the world down before it can be rebuilt. The wood shavings are underfoot, the work is unfinished, and the man is no longer interested in it. A decade or so later the same imagined beast resurfaced, stripped of its horn, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Everything after that is commerce and affection. Piers Anthony used alicorn for a winged unicorn in his fiction in the 1980s; She-Ra rode one; the 2010 relaunch of My Little Pony made the winged unicorn a rank rather than a species and fixed the word alicorn in the minds of a generation of children, which is why the term now means the animal and almost never the horn.

Its powers are simple and entirely inherited. It flies, on wings that make it the fastest thing in whatever sky it occupies. Its horn carries the old unicorn virtue: it detects poison, cleanses water, and stands for a purity that cannot be counterfeited. Being a compound of two creatures that both signified innocence, it doubles the signal rather than complicating it, and the doubling is the whole point of the design.

The weaknesses follow just as directly. It has no myth of its own. There is no pegacorn hero, no pegacorn adversary, no story in which one is captured, bargained with, ridden into battle or killed, because no tradition ever needed the animal to do anything. It cannot be defeated because nobody has written the encounter. Pliny’s version was one line in a catalogue of marvels, the seals are mute, and Yeats’s unicorn was a symbol that dissolved the moment he found a better one. Strip away Pegasus and strip away the unicorn and there is nothing underneath but a very good drawing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Pegacorn?

A Pegacorn is a winged unicorn: a horse with the feathered wings of Pegasus and the single horn of a unicorn. The word is a modern English portmanteau of the two names and is used interchangeably with alicorn, flying unicorn, unisus and unipeg. The creature carries the symbolism of both parent animals, chiefly purity and flight.

Is the Pegacorn an ancient myth?

The word is modern, but the image is not. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, described winged horses armed with horns in Ethiopia and called them pegasi, and winged single-horned quadrupeds appear on ancient Near Eastern seals. What no ancient culture left behind is a story about the creature, which is why the Pegacorn has iconography but no myth cycle.

What is the difference between a Pegacorn and an alicorn?

They now mean the same animal, but alicorn originally meant something else entirely. Odell Shepard introduced alicorn into English in 1930, from the Italian alicorno, to mean the unicorn’s horn itself, the substance believed to detect poison and purify water. The word only came to mean a winged, horned horse much later, and My Little Pony fixed that sense in popular use from 2010.

What powers does a Pegacorn have?

A Pegacorn can fly and carries the traditional virtues of the unicorn’s horn, which was held to detect poison and purify tainted water. Because it is a composite of two creatures that both stood for innocence, its symbolism is intensified rather than mixed. It has no attested weapon, weakness or death.

Did W. B. Yeats write about a winged unicorn?

Yes. Yeats imagined a winged beast connected with ecstatic destruction, and it appears as a unicorn in The Unicorn from the Stars, the 1907 play he wrote with Lady Gregory. The same imagined creature later reappears, transformed, as the rough beast of his poem “The Second Coming”.