Molly Grue is a Hero. I don’t just mean she’s heroic; I mean that The Last Unicorn in book form explicitly defines what a hero should be, and she meets that definition. Specifically, she’s Lír’s mentor in what it means to be a hero. The book doesn’t explicitly say this about Molly, and I don’t know that this is something Beagle was conscious of as he wrote; and yet. There’s this scene in the book:
[Lír said,] "I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and likethem it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts […] the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. […] Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. Schmendrick asked, “Why not? Who says so?”
“Heroes,“ Prince Lír replied sadly. “Heroes know about order, about happy endings – heroes know that some things are better than others. Carpenters know grains and shingles, and straight lines.”
Molly spent a long time thinking her role in life was the Hero’s Lady. She shacked up with Captain Cully because she thought he was a hero and that was her role, but over time as she came to understand how un-heroic he was, she became bitter and derisive, pointing out what the true order of things was. Like, let’s go back to her first scene where Cully is explaining to Schmendrick how he and his men all hate King Haggard, and one day Haggard will have to pay “such a reckoning”:
A score of shaggy shadows hissed assent, but Molly Grue’s laughter fell like hail, rattling and stinging. “Mayhap he will,” she mocked, “but it won’t be to such chattering cravens he’ll pay it. His castle rots and totters more each day, and his men are too old to stand up in armor, but he’ll rule forever, for all Captain Cully dares.”
Schmendrick raised an eyebrow, and Cully flushed radish-red. “You must understand,” he mumbled. “King Haggard has this Bull –”
“Ah, the Red Bull, the Red Bull!” Molly hooted. “I tell you what, Cully, after all these years in the wood with you I’ve come to think the Bull’s nought but the pet name you give your cowardice.If I hear that fable once more, I’ll go and down old Haggard myself, and know you for a –”
“Enough!” Cully roared. “Not before strangers!” He tugged at his sword and Molly opened her arms to it, still laughing.
And within a day Molly Grue has met the Unicorn, set out on a quest with her (and doesn’t bat an eyelash when she learns they’re going directly to Haggard’s castle), and becomes a pivotal player in destroying King Haggard and the Red Bull.
Molly understands “the order of things” when Schmendrick doesn’t. When the Red Bull is about to beat the Unicorn, Schmendrick’s all, “Welp, shit happens, so long,” and it’s Molly who yells and screams at him that this must not happen, how he might have been an inadequate charlatan all his life before this, but this is the moment when he HAS to draw deep on his true power and save her. So he does. And when he does, Molly understands how absolutely terrible becoming human is for the Unicorn, which Schmendrick doesn’t–even though he heard the Unicorn say that Nikos would have done better to let a unicorn die than make it into a man, and she didn’t.
Molly’s work in Haggard’s castle is fairy-tale like in nature, somewhere between Cinderella (”My father sets you to the weariest work there is to do, and still you sing”) and the labours of Hercules or the Biblical Israelites. According to the novel, “Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”
In reward for her work, several unprecedented things happen. Lír comments that “There has never been singing in this castle, or cats, or the smell of good cooking,” but now that Molly Grue has come, all these things have come to pass. And in the end, this work is pivotal–if Molly weren’t there, the cat wouldn’t have come; and without the cat, they never would have known how to find the Red Bull.
The point of fact is, Molly is able to do what she does for the Unicorn because she’s older, she’s more experienced, she’s weathered hardship and seen dreams broken, and knows what to hold on to and what to give up on. She knows that love is a very fine thing, but unicorns are something else.
And in the end, her reward is that her meeting with the Unicorn wasn’t the end of her story, when she had reached the end of her suitability for fairytales; The Last Unicorn is Molly and Schmendrick, who have lived for some time already, coming to their beginnings, and setting them on the path for their next story, for the real work of their adult lives.
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