An old oral legend from Southern Europe says that a virgin girl became the bride of a unicorn.
As the legend goes, a ruthless king had grand ambitions to expand his kingdom which, however, was surrounded by four other realms to the North, South, West, and East. Wanting to expand in all directions, the evil king planned to kill all the neighboring kings and acquire their vast lands.
The perfect chance to poison the four monarchs would have been in occasion of his own upcoming seventh wedding when, according to a tradition long honored in those lands, all kings would have been invited to drink from the same wine barrel. The wine of choice, Prunelle, was obtained by fermenting wild plums and its great sweetness would have perfectly concealed the bitterness of the poison.
His plan was to poison the whole barrel, but somehow he needed to prevent the cup-bearers from testing the drink ahead of their kings, a common practice among royalty to confirm the safety of a beverage.
If he, the hosting king himself, drank first and managed to remain immune to the poison, he figured, every other king would have trusted the safety of the wine and would have drank it without the need for testing it first.
Adaptation from Image source
At that time, the only known way to become immune to poison was to consume the ground tip of a unicorn's horn beforehand. The unicorn's horn was in fact believed to have miraculous medicinal properties.
The most eminent scholars had written about it since antiquity, for example a book from the Greek physician Ctesias, written in the fourth century B.C., reported that anyone who drank out of the horn or directly consumed it, would be protected from harm "by disease or poison".
For this reason the king summoned his very best hunter, and ordered him to catch a unicorn and bring him its horn. The problem is that unicorns are nearly impossible to catch.
As seventh-century writer Isidore of Seville explains:
"The unicorn is too strong to be caught by hunters, except by a trick:
If a virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and she bares her breast to it, all of its fierceness will cease and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus quieted is easily caught.”
Undoubtedly, a virgin was needed in order to tame the unicorn. So the hunter roamed the small villages scattered in the countryside, until he found a beautiful virgin girl who, having recently lost her father, lacked protection and could be easily taken away. He dragged her deep into the forest and forced her to lay, undressed, near the lake where all the wild creatures went to drink at least once a day.
At sunset also the unicorn approached the lake and, upon seeing the girl, he was captured by her purity and beauty. He kneeled, placed his forelegs and head on her lap, and closed his eyes. The girl soon forgot why she was there, as a strange sense of peace and happiness pervaded her soul. She started to caress his white mane, into which she braided wild carnation flowers, and kept humming lullabies from the heart. The trusting unicorn fell into a deep sleep.
As soon as the sun went down, the hunter who had been waiting for the right moment, viciously attacked with his sword, directly aiming at the unicorn's heart. But the girl who was still awake, didn't hesitate to stop him with her bare hands. Angry at her, the hunter drove his sword into her heart instead.
The unicorn immediately woke up, but it was too late. Seeing his beloved bleeding to death, he tried to use his healing powers to save her, but in vain, as the wound was way too deep.
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Realizing that the dying virgin could no longer offer protection against the fierce unicorn, the hunter swiftly fled the scene.
Unknown to everybody, an ancient and powerful nymph lived under that lake. Having witnessed everything, she took pity on the two lovers. As the girl's blood flowed into the lake, the nymph did the only thing she could do to save her: she transformed her human blood into that of a female unicorn, who could heal her own body from within.
In the restored MedievalMade design, the moment of the transformation is shown. The girl awakens and she starts transforming into a female unicorn. Her body starts growing hair and her head is crowned with red wild flowers, symbols of her spilled blood. She offers a carnation to the unicorn, regarded as a symbol of eternal love and marriage.
In the meanwhile the hunter, who was like his king a man of tricks and not a man of honor, decided he could not show up empty handed. So on his way to the castle, he killed a dear and cut off the tip of its antler, pretending that was the tip of the unicorn's horn.
The nuptials day came and the king, confident in his plan, ordered the wine barrel to be poisoned.
Then he consumed the ground horn. But upon drinking, the fake horn didn't provide any immunity against the poison, therefore the evil ruler died on the spot, before any other king could taste the same drink.
As for the hunter, the voice quickly spread among all the nymphs of the forest. When the hunter went to a nearby stream to wash off the blood from his sword, his feet became firmly planted into the ground, his body stiffened, as the nymph of that stream slowly transformed him into a pomegranate tree. His bloody sword is believed to be the reason why the pomegranate tree bears red fruits, from the blood of a virgin.
As for the unicorn and his bride, it is said that they continued to live happily in the forest, in harmony with nature and in love with each other. It is also believed that the flower festivals celebrated in many Southern European towns, originated from wanting to honor a virgin girl, the unicorn's bride, who through her sacrifice saved the known world from a great evil.
