Connor: Examples, please?

Peter: When the dialog in The Last Unicorn occasionally slides into rhyme, that’s Thurber. The anachronisms, those come from T. H. White. The points where I’m simply letting language flow for its own sake, more than anything that is James Stephens. And the sprinkling of songs and lyrics is the one debt I feel I owe to Tolkien. I liked the way he did it in The Lord of the Rings, and I wanted to do that too. They were always fun to write, probably the only real joy I ever felt in the process. I played games with the songs‌—‌consider the fact that the lady blue jay’s lullaby was deliberately written to fit the melody of “My Favorite Things.” There are several old private jokes in the book. The butterfly’s speech goes back to that cabin in Cheshire. I can look at it and pinpoint things that were cracking Phil and me up that summer. “You don’t get no medal” means absolutely nothing to anybody, except that it’s the punch line of a mildly dirty joke about Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip which we kept telling people. Then there’s a line, a fragment of a line, “where once he could not go,” which is a phrase from a beautiful old folk song that Phil and his girlfriend Joan used to sing together.

Connor: And the Dunsany influence you mentioned? I don’t really see that.

Peter: Dunsany was a great namer. He knew very clearly that if you could pick the right name for a place or a character, you could suggest an entire culture. It’s like Japanese brush painting‌—‌five, six, seven brushstrokes in a precise manner, and there’s a bird in the reeds, or somebody fishing.

Connor: Let’s talk about character names, then. Your readers have been speculating about them for decades. When the unicorn becomes human, and Schmendrick calls her the Lady Amalthea‌—‌where did that come from?

Peter: It’s funny about the names, because at the time they just came to me, and mostly I didn’t realize why they were appropriate until later. Amalthea sounded good, and I had some vague recollection that it came from Greek mythology‌—‌it’s the name of the goat who nursed the infant god Zeus when he was being hidden from his father, who wanted to eat him. This wise goat fed the baby, sheltered him, and played with him. But at the time I decided to use the name, I’d forgotten the rest of the story‌—‌that when Zeus got older and was acquiring his full godly strength he became too much for the goat to romp and wrestle with, and at some point he accidentally broke off one of her horns. He was immediately apologetic, of course, and turned the broken-off horn into the cornucopia‌—‌the Horn of Plenty. But Amalthea only had one horn from then on, so in a real sense she was the first unicorn.

Connor: What about Mommy Fortuna and Rukh? Are those as resonant?