The Last Unicorn, or Loving Molly Grue

I’m going to wax eloquent about this book. I’m going to try to explain the magic of this story. Be warned! I may inspire you to read The Last Unicorn and you may not see any of the things I do, so read it at your own risk, remembering I work extra hard to see HearthKeepers and I’m a romantic with a heavy background in fantasy and fairy tales.

I wear Christian-tinted glasses when I take in stories, and thus I often see metaphors, illustrations, and analogies that the creator may not have intended. I enjoy this as an act of rebellion: the creator can’t escape being made in God’s image. And as RC Sproul said, “All truth is God’s truth.” No matter how hard they try, no matter how much they hate God, God wins. They can’t escape Him. And so I actively look for God’s truth in all stories.

I also often wear my HearthKeeper sunglasses. I look for and notice the tending and keeping being done by women. This is why I adore Aliens and even Fury Road and Eowyn (who became a happy HearthKeeper). I love women being women and not just being men in tight suits with boobs.

Hold on to this as I talk about my newest love: Molly Grue in The Last Unicorn. 

The Last Unicorn is a fairy tale about a unicorn who realizes she’s the only one of her kind left and embarks on an adventure to find the unicorns or at least find out what happened to them. On a deeper level, this book is a fairy tale about a world with no magic left in it except for this one being and what happens to us when magic re-enters our lives. It is told through The Unicorn’s perspective but slowly switches, almost imperceptibly, to Schmendrick and Molly’s perspective, two of the humans touched by magic.

When we first meet Molly she is a snappy, bitter, biting woman. When the story ends, she is the most beautiful woman in the book.

How? How did she go from this ragged camp-cook for a bunch of worthless bandits to a happy beautiful woman? Did she save herself? Did she throw off the patriarchy? Did she refuse her femininity and find happiness in becoming the hero who slew monsters? Did she make herself Queen so she could make everyone safe?

No. She saw the unicorn, followed the unicorn, and lived in service of it.

When we meet Molly, she’s cooking bad soup for a bunch of rather inept bandits with dreams of Robin Hood-esque levels of adventure. After Molly sees and follows the unicorn, she doesn’t abandon her cooking, she gets better! She stops complaining, stops whining, stops bitterly biting, and starts tending the hearth of this cold, horrible castle. Then magic happens! All the men gather to her light and her food. Instead of berating the men, she takes the young prince under her wing and loves him. She listens and serves the guards. She encourages and helpfully challenges Schmendrick. Her cooking improves even though her ingredients are horrible.

They had a moment to look at each other, the two women: the one fair and foreign in the cold, low room; the other appearing quite at home in such surroundings—an angry little beetle with her own kitchen beauty.

She has this beautiful line about tears and hands: “Any woman can weep without tears…and most can heal with their hands.” Then proceeds to bandage and help with her hands while carrying great sadness over the plight of the unicorn and for her friends.

By the end of the story she is described as more beautiful than the unicorn in her human form, the unicorn she can no longer see but still follows.

This. This story. This story is like a fairy-tale version of Martha learning to be Mary. Molly is Martha at the beginning of the tale with so much bitterness, and by the end of the book, she is calm and beautiful, all without trying to be a man, lead, or leave her hearth. It’s refreshing to read a story where a woman grows while still being a woman.

I love that quote about tears and hands because it accepts the burden and sorrow of our feminine labors. It accepts being the tender while your man is off fighting and the children grow up and our elderly pass away. Our job is often filled with sorrow — deep sorrows we hold in our hearts.

I love the metaphor of the magic of the unicorn bringing peace, hope, light—SPRING—to Molly Grue, and from that Molly is set right. This is such a wonderful picture of what Christ does for us. He is the one we “see” and follow, who makes us beautiful, who sets us right, who brings spring to our forever wintery hearts. Not by rescuing us from our work, but by healing our hearts so we can do our work in a way that blesses those around us.

I found Molly Grue’s personal journey to be beautiful and refreshing. (In fact, I think after consideration, the story isn’t about the Unicorn, the Unicorn is the impetus. The story is about Molly and Schmendrick.) Here was a woman I could relate to, admire, and embrace. This isn’t a warrior woman, but a hearthkeeper by nature and then by nurture.

The meeting of the unicorn, if I can say this without being sacrilegious, was a salvific moment. It saved Molly from herself. It brought the true magic, the deeper magic, the old magic which the White Witch never understood, into Molly’s heart. It turned her nagging to tenderness, her gruel into a heartwarming stew, and her hearth into a man-welcoming place instead of pushing men away, not because it changed her circumstances (in fact, they got worse) but because it changed her.

As you can tell, I love this book, and I love Molly Grue. She’s up there with Mina Harker and Ripley as fictional women I love. Training yourself to see the truth, to see Christ, to see Christianity in the stories around you will encourage your heart, and seeing HearthKeepers, even unintentional HearthKeepers, will encourage you in your everyday dishes, laundry, husband-tending, children-tending work.

Molly inevitably came to care for anyone she fed.