The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn: The Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries

Here is a little myth studies gem that came out back in 1987 (just around the time of Joseph Campbell's death). This book is a sort of belated straggler of the now long dead Iconology school founded by Ervin Panofsky, Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower back in the 1920's and 30's. Like the best books of that school -- Panofsky's Studies in Iconology, for instance -- the book is an exploration of the content, rather than the medium, of a series of paintings, for in this respect, at least, the Iconology school is totally opposed in aim and method to the Media Studies school founded by Innis and McLuhan in the late 50's, which insists that the contents conveyed by works of art are not nearly so important as their media. The seven Unicorn tapestries which Williamson analyzes in this book would, from a media studies point of view, have been looked at in terms of such questions as: what kind of space is here presupposed, perspectival or pre-perspectival? Is the sense of touch or sight or hearing predominant here? Such an approach, while important in and of itself, leaves untouched the specific dimensions of these tapestries -- and this kind of symbol-based Renaissance art generally -- such as what do the figures in the paintings mean? What were they intended to represent and what messages have been coded here for us? Such an analysis of symbolic content is precisely what John Williamson does for us here, and succeeds very well. His vision of these seven late fifteenth century unicorn tapestries is that they are allegoric of the cycle of the year and its seasons and in particular are a recycling of a much more ancient myth of a pair of battling seasonal kings known as the Oak King and the Holly King. The Oak King is associated with the summer solstice and the Holly King with the winter solstice. Gawain and the Green Knight, which opens on the winter solstice, and in which the Green Man who offers Gawain to chop off his head, is an example of this tradition (Gawain being representative of the Oak King, while the Green Man is the Holly King). According to Williamson, likewise, the unicorn was not only an allegory of Christ in Medieval and Renaissance thought, but also symbolic of the Holly King, which figure, like Christ himself, represents the waning half of the seasonal year (i.e. from summer solstice to winter solstice). For anyone who has read The White Goddess by Robert Graves, none of this will seem new, for it is Graves' essential monomyth, although he casts it in more general terms as a universal myth of the summer twin vs. the winter twin who normally slay each other every four years in their contention over the goddess who is Mother Earth herself. Williamson, who has read and metabolized Graves, brings this general myth to a specific focus on this sequence of unicorn tapestries, brilliantly elucidating it thereby. Also, like Graves, there is a keen attention to the symbolic associations of specific plants and animals. One finds out, for instance,

A discussion of the famous Unicorn Tapestries and of the many powerful symbols contained in the tapestries. Richly details the symbolic meanings of dozens of flowers and animals, as well as the Unicorn itself.