I guess I’m taking another hiatus, though it took me a couple of weeks to figure that out. I’ve got a really busy teaching schedule coming up this semester. If you want to “like” or “follow” or whatever it is one does, you’ll get a notification next time I post. Hoping to get back to it in a few months.
In the meantime I’ll leave you with a puzzle: why were there so few unicorns in children’s books and fantasy books before the mid 1970’s? It wasn’t until this sort of thing:
became all the rage that unicorns started making their way into fiction with any regularity.
Dragons, in contrast, were everywhere, starting with Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon (1898) and E. Nesbit’s dragon short stories collected as The Book of Dragons (1900).
So where were the unicorns?
not really a kid’s book, but 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Unicorn
still, hardly matches your Victorian dragons.
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You’re right – and it wasn’t just in the kids’ books. Unicorns have always been more reclusive: http://bit.ly/UnicornsDragons
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Game on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Horse
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I loved and still love that book. It is like poetry in prose format.
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Well, dragons are infinitely cooler. And they generally seem to have more personality. I wonder if unicorn books were just people realising they could attract fantasy lovers to the horse-book market?
The Little White Horse is one of my favourite books, but the fact that the titular horse is in fact a unicorn is of no relevance to the plot – merely highlights the magic and fey-ness I reckon.
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