Middle Ages

The Middle Ages gave the narwhal tusk a second identity: beyond being an animal’s tooth, it became Europe’s supposed unicorn horn, a legendary object whose scarcity, trade, and imagined powers joined natural history to political prestige. The belief outlasted the medieval period, shaping the tusk’s later use as a royal gift and sceptre.

The tusk and the unicorn

A narwhal’s tusk is an overgrown living tooth that pierces the animal’s upper lip on the left and can spiral to nine feet or more. For centuries, however, Europeans interpreted it as the horn of a unicorn. That identification transformed a striking part of an Arctic animal into evidence of a legendary creature, giving the tusk a value and symbolic life detached from its biological source.

The tusk was also prized as a supposed antidote to poison and melancholy. Such beliefs describe historical claims about its powers, not demonstrated medicinal effects. Its reputation joined physical rarity to hopes of protection and relief, making it valuable both as a substance and as an object invested with extraordinary meaning.

Trade, scarcity, and royal power

A medieval alliance between Arctic hunters and apothecaries helped pass the tusk off as a unicorn’s horn. It was worth twenty times its weight in gold; Crusaders stole tusks, which then circulated across Europe as state talismans. By the middle of the sixteenth century, only fifty were known to exist, a scarcity that amplified their prestige.

The tusk’s political afterlife carried medieval legend beyond the period itself. After returning from a 1577 expedition to find the North-West Passage, Sir Martin Frobisher presented Elizabeth I with a supposed sea-unicorn’s horn valued at £10,000—more than the cost of a new castle. She used it as a sceptre. An animal tooth had become a royal emblem: its authority depended not only on its rarity but on the legendary identity assigned to it.

A legend that outlasted the period

The tusk’s association with melancholy also links its material history to later literary interpretation. The account connects its supposed medicinal use to the “English malady,” whose anatomy Robert Burton documented and which Herman Melville had studied. It also notes a modern writer’s reading of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia as a kind of secret code for Moby-Dick. These later associations do not belong to the medieval period itself; they show how the period’s lore about the tusk and melancholy continued to be reinterpreted.

The medieval story is therefore not simply one of mistaken classification. It traces how a rare animal object could pass through hunting, commerce, religious and political exchange, and royal ceremony, accumulating new meanings at each stage. The later sceptre preserves that history in concentrated form: a narwhal tooth displayed as a unicorn’s horn and wielded as a sign of sovereignty.