Fun Fact of the Week: Best Horses

By Quinn Hoop

History loves horses! You should too.

Mythology:

Sleipnir: Attested to by Snorri Sturluson in the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, Sleipnir is the 8-legged son of Loki and Svaðilfari (a horse). Sleipnir came to be when Loki had to stop Svaðilfari’s owner from making progress on building a wall, and so ‘seduced’ Svaðilfari by turning into a beautiful mare and running around for two nights. Considered to be the best of the horses. 

Uchchaihshravas: Told of in the Mahabharata, this great white horse had seven heads, could fly, and was born from a churning milk ocean. The king of the divas, Indra, claimed him to be his, 

also considered to be the best of the horses. 

Mares of Diomedes: Hercules' eighth labor was to capture these unruly, man-eating horses (which may or may not also breathe fire). Of course, for Hunkules, breaking into Diomedes’ city was the easy part. A few different stories recount the capturing of the Mares, involving henchmen getting chomped on or rapid terraforming, but usually, Diomedes ends up getting eaten.

History:

Bucephalus: The horse of Alexander the Great, supposedly was all black with a white star on his head, and was Thessilian in breed. Legend has it that Bucephalus was untamable until the 13-year-old Alexander realized that he was just afraid of his own shadow, and turned him to face the sun. 

Sergeant Reckless: The only animal to receive an official rank in the Marine Corps (Wojtek the Polish bear would be proud), she earned her title through delivering a total of 9,000 pounds of ammunition over a hilly no-man's land in the Korean War, carrying wounded soldiers to medical treatment, and receiving shrapnel wounds twice

Literature: 

Shadowfax: Gandalf the White’s Horse from The Lord of the Rings, Shadowfax was the Lord of the Mearas. Apparently, he could also understand human speech. I don’t recall the ramifications of this being discussed in the films, but I could be wrong.  

Maximums: The horse from Tangled, this loveable boy loves apples, the law, and is probably smarter than me. 

Boxer: One of the characters in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Boxer is primarily loyal and hardworking, and an allegory for the Russian peasantry. In the novel, he helps enact the revolution, and works hard to maintain it, but is eventually betrayed by Napoleon (stand-in Joseph Stalin). He is sent to the knacker.* 

Racing: 

Seabiscuit: This Parisian (Kentucky) was born in 1933, and despite his rocky start, became the face of horse racing during the Great Depression. He hated the mud and rain, which was unfortunate because he was taken to San Francisco. Secretariat apparently had a flair for the dramatic, often lagging behind until the last possible moment, then rushing forward and winning by the wire. He got a film in 2003, which has 3⅗ stars on Letterboxd. 

Secretariat: Born in 1970, he won 16 races in his 16 month career, a total of $1,300,000 for his owners (in addition to being sold for over 6 million dollars), and in ‘72 became Horse of the Year. He also got on the cover of Time magazine. 

Honorable Mentions (Mostly for cool names):

Gunpowder - Ichabod Crane’s Horse in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (1820)

Kholstomer - The main character of a story by the same name by Leo Tolstoy (1863)

Marengo - Napoleon’s Horse 

Comanche - The sole survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn / Custer’s Last Stand. His taxidermied body can still be seen in the Kansas City Museum. 

Bojack Horseman - . . . 

*Word of the Week! Knacker (noun); a person whose job is to clean up dead and unwanted animals and reuse their parts.