“Stay where you are poor beast this is no world for you, keep your trees green and your friends protected and good luck to you for you are the last.”
– The Huntsman, The Last Unicorn
This is the line that begins the titular last unicorn’s quest to figure out what has happened to all the unicorns of her world, and if she truly is the last of her kind. Right off the bat, The Last Unicorn (both the book and the film adaptation) sets their audience in a strange headspace. The world of the Last Unicorn is a world of magic, but we get a dark feeling early on that the magic is dying. It is not a world devoid of magic, and yet the real magic either seems rare and hard to come by, or it is increasingly unrecognizable by the people who inhabit this world. The unicorn is truly magical and truly immortal, but most of the inhabitants of this world are so deprived of magic that they cannot see her for what she truly is. This idea of real vs counterfeit magic is a major theme in Peter S. Beagle’s story. In this world you are far more likely to encounter counterfeit magic and illusions over the magic we might have come to expect from a story about unicorns. At the same time there is real magic in the world.
This theme of real verses counterfeit really comes to light as we continue to encounter protagonists and antagonists alike who are seemingly obsessed with living up to fantasy tropes which, if they were to be honest, they do not truly embody. It is not that these witches, wizards, heroes, and maidens are not what they claim to be, but more so that they all feel to be copies of copies that have grown somehow lesser with time. Many of the characters are either obsessed with living up to a standard they cannot reach, or they are determined to leave some sort of legacy behind them. They are all mortals seeking some sort of immortality. They want to be remembered, and yet they all secretly sense that they are forgettable and unremarkable. In this way, the people of Beagle’s story are all in some sense tragic. Just about every character suffers to some extent from this overwhelming sense that both the world in which they live, and the person they have become, are not as they should be. The only real exception is the Unicorn herself.
The unicorn of this story is one of the only characters who does not regret or feel as though she is not what she should be. Because of this, she sometimes struggles to understand the other characters and their motivations. Seeing how different characters react to the unicorn is one of the highlights of this story. Some wish to own the unicorn, as if possessing something truly magical would make them special or more worthy of remembrance. Others are motivated to protect the unicorn, recognizing that the sacred must be preserved seemingly at any cost. The most interesting characters, in my opinion, are deeply disturbed by the unicorn because she reminds them that true magic does exist, and her purity only highlights their own shortcomings and failures.
SPOILER WARNING AHEAD:
One of the most disturbing parts of the book and film occurs when, in order to save the unicorn, her magician companion turns her into a human. The unicorn is horrified by the feeling of mortality and becomes borderline suicidal at the realization that she has become less than what she was meant to be, something the other characters have been struggling with their entire lives. What is arguably even more tragic is the fact that the human who was a unicorn slowly begins to forget what being a unicorn was truly like. She begins to accept her lesser reality as normal.
Fortunately, by the end of the story the unicorn is restored to her true form and the lost unicorns of the world are all set free. We are given a sense that magic, true magic, has been returned to the world, but at the same time it came with a cost.
“I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”
– The Unicorn, The Last Unicorn
The book ends on a bitter-sweet note. Undoubtedly the world is in a better place than when the story began, but at the same time one wonders about the unicorn herself. Is she better or worse than she was at the beginning of the story? We are not left with a definitive answer.
I am not here to argue that Peter S. Beagle wrote this book as a Christian allegory. If it were, I would feel the need to question the author’s theology on several points. Beagle, however, has gone on record numerous times to say that the books “meaning” is vague and open by design. One reason why The Last Unicorn is so compelling is that it has so many opportunities for the reader or viewer to see the message they want to see. It is hard to avoid the feeling that there is a story behind the story, that “The Last Unicorn” too is but a copy of something real, but it is not easy to see what that true magic might be.
I will, however, argue that, for the discerning Christian, there are many moments in this story that feel as if they could have been taken right from the pages of The Chronicles of Narnia or The Pilgrim’s Progress. The story takes place in a world, not unlike our own, that exists in this tension between the sacred and the profane. We cannot escape this feeling that there is some true magic in this ugly world, but sometimes we are so disillusioned that we overlook the unicorn right in front of us. We sense that all is not as it should be, including ourselves, and we strive for some sense of meaning, purpose, and immortality in a world that either cannot or will not fulfill these desires. We have an innate desire to seek after something or someone greater and truer than ourselves to fix what is broken in us and in the world, and yet some of us dare not hope for what we fear is only a fantasy.
For the Christian, we know that the true and greater one has already come and has freed those in bondage, has given sight to the blind, and has resurrected those who were dead, so that the world might be restored to what it could be and should be. To do this, the true and greater one had to humble himself and become lesser. The untarnished became tarnished, and the immortal became mortal. Yet even in His death the story was not over. In fact, death was merely the beginning leading to a great restoration and rescue, the likes of which all great stories can only hope to imitate. And yet all is not yet restored. In a sense, we too are living in a story where the conflict has been resolved but the work is not yet completed. Many are sill living as if the world was as it once was, ignorant that magic has returned to the world. We find ourselves living, not in the beginning or the end, but rather in the middle of a great story, in which we all have a small part to play.
I leave you now with my favorite passage from the book:
“The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch’s door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
― Prince Lir, The Last Unicorn
May God Bless.
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