Tracing the literary history of the unicorn is an attractive task because it offers the opportunity to glimpse the ever-interesting inner workings of the human mind when it creates, transmits, or elaborates artistic creations: to observe how what was perhaps originally a product of the frightened imagination of a primitive human child terrified by the unfathomable nature and its beings, takes on a literary form in a later generation and, with more or less modifications, travels from generation to generation, from nation to nation, and still lives on in the minds of peoples even when rigorous research has long since proven the non-existence or even the impossibility of such a creation. The unicorn emerges before us from that gray curtain behind which lie times into which no written tradition shines, and it is still alive today in fairy tales, on coats of arms, as apothecary symbols, in the parables of poets, although science, which has now scoured even the most hidden corners of our globe, has not been able to discover a creature like it. ... However, since I intend to contribute to the literary history of the unicorn in the following discussion, I will exclude this question from the outset. I will also only consider the accounts of travelers, many of whom claim to have seen the animal itself, if they bear some relation to the literary tradition; they mostly only demonstrate how deeply rooted the belief was that a unicorn must exist somewhere in the world. - [Author]

Language: German