The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle: A Full Summary and Guide
What it is about
Peter S. Beagle published The Last Unicorn in 1968, with Viking Press in the United States and The Bodley Head in the United Kingdom. It has since sold more than six million copies worldwide and been translated into at least 25 languages. The premise is simple and the execution is not. A unicorn living alone in her forest overhears two hunters saying there are no unicorns left in the world. The idea lodges in her. She leaves the forest to find out whether it is true.
What she finds first is not danger but invisibility. Humans no longer see a unicorn when they look at her. They see a pretty white mare. The age that believed in her has passed, and she walks through it unrecognised. A talking butterfly gives her the one piece of information that turns the story into a quest: the other unicorns have been driven away by something called the Red Bull, which serves King Haggard in his castle by the sea.
Along the way she is captured by Mommy Fortuna's travelling carnival, a shabby show in which ordinary animals are dressed up by illusion to look like creatures of legend. The unicorn is one of only two genuine marvels in the whole collection, the other being the harpy Celaeno. A failing magician named Schmendrick sees her for what she is and sets her free. From there the book becomes a journey toward Haggard's castle, with a growing band of companions and a prophecy waiting at the end of it.
The main characters
The unicorn herself is the strangest protagonist in the book, because she is not human and Beagle refuses to pretend otherwise. She is immortal, beautiful and essentially without pity. Her education, such as it is, comes from being forced into human company and eventually into human shape.
Schmendrick is the magician who cannot reliably do magic. He is also immortal, which is both a curse and a joke at his expense, since he has been told that only mortals can work real magic. His incompetence drives much of the plot, including the central transformation.
Molly Grue joins the group after the unicorn rescues Schmendrick from bandits. She is the mistress of the bandit leader, worn down and middle-aged, and her reaction to finally meeting a unicorn after a whole life of waiting is one of the book's sharpest moments. Molly becomes the practical heart of the company.
King Haggard is the antagonist, a man who has conquered and collected and found that nothing gives him pleasure for long. Prince Lír is his adopted son, a foundling from the town of Hagsgate, raised as a prince and caught in a prophecy he knows nothing about. The Red Bull is Haggard's instrument, enormous and blind and unanswerable.
The themes
Identity runs through everything. When Schmendrick turns the unicorn into a human woman to hide her from the Red Bull, she is horrified by the sensation of being mortal. She takes the name Lady Amalthea, and as the human form settles on her she begins to forget what she is and why she came. The book asks a hard question: if you forget your purpose, are you still the thing that had it?
Then there is the question of what people can and cannot see. Beagle keeps returning to this. The hunters, the villagers, Mommy Fortuna's paying crowd who need fake horns glued on a real creature before they will believe. Molly and Schmendrick see truly, and that is what qualifies them as companions.
Haggard supplies the theme of appetite that cannot be satisfied. He has trapped an entire species in the sea purely for the sake of looking at them, and admits plainly that nothing else brings him joy. The town of Hagsgate has made the same bargain in miniature, accepting prosperity on terms it knows are rotten, which is why Drinn abandoned a baby in the marketplace rather than risk the town's fortune.
How it ends (spoilers)
Following clues from a cat, the company finds the Red Bull's lair beneath the castle, joined by Lír. Schmendrick restores the unicorn to her true form and becomes mortal in the act. Lír confronts the bull and is trampled. Grief turns the unicorn ferocious, and she drives the Red Bull into the sea. The trapped unicorns come out of the waves and run for home as Haggard's castle collapses.
She revives Lír with her horn. He is king now, and he learns in ruined Hagsgate that Drinn was the father who left him in the marketplace. He chooses to stay and rebuild. The unicorn returns to her forest, telling Schmendrick that she is unlike any of her kind now, because she knows love and regret. Schmendrick and Molly walk on, meet a princess in trouble, and send her to Lír.
Why it still matters
In 1987 a poll of Locus subscribers ranked The Last Unicorn fifth among the 33 all-time best fantasy novels, and it was still at number eighteen when the poll was repeated in 1998. In 2024 Palgrave Macmillan placed it in a "New Canon" of fantasy literature with the publication of a critical companion devoted to it. The novel suits readers who want fantasy that is funny and self-aware without being cynical about its own magic, and who do not mind an ending that gives the heroine her victory and a permanent wound in the same breath.
