7 Mythical Horse Variants I Wish I Could Ride Off Into the Sunset On

7 Unicorns

The patron saint of spiral notebooks everywhere, the beautiful unicorn. I’m not going to waste much space explaining what exactly one is, since anyone who doesn’t know at this point would be a form of cryptid themselves. One on hand, riding a unicorn would probably be the most similar to riding a regular horse. It would feel a lot more like you were a wizard, though, which would be huge for my mental health. Historians say that the unicorn myth might have come from poorly-observed rhinos, to which I say: Shut up!

6 Pegasus

The second classic imaginary horse variety is, of course, the pegasus. An animal arguably even more majestic than the unicorn, and maybe 10 percent less likely to get you shoved in a locker via an appearance on your T-shirt. Sometimes people even combine the two, but I find that greedy. The huge selling point here is obviously the secondhand ability of flight. Would it still be able to take off with my frame atop it? Maybe not, but if you’re going to get into an argument about the lift of a pegasus’ wings, you’re probably one of those pedants who mentions that there’s no sound in space during every sci-fi movie.

5 Hippalectryon

The Greeks gave us the pegasus, but they also gave us a second stab at a winged horse — one that was a whole lot less regal. The difference in cool factor between the names “pegasus" and “hippalectryon” is also borne out in their appearance. The hippalectryon’s wings came from the fact that it was the front half of a horse with the back half of a rooster. Illustrations do show humans astride them, so in theory they were ridable, but I feel like they weren’t getting you a lot of positive looks in the town square. Real “we have a pegasus at home” vibes.

4 Hippocampus

Man, the Greeks couldn’t get enough of magic horses, which is great news for this article, but worth a psychological deep dive. Now, the word hippocampus still exists today, but if you happen to see one, it’s usually very, very bad news, being a portion of the human brain and all. The mythological hippocampus was both cooler and, surprisingly, wetter than the brain matter in question, being a combination of a horse and a fish. They also had a pretty prestigious gig pulling the chariot of Poseidon. Apparently, some ancient people thought they were the fully-grown form of the seahorses we know today, which is stupid as shit. Would be cool, though!

3 Kelpie

Scottish legend gives us another aquatic horse, known as the kelpie. Now, technically, they’re shapeshifters, so they might not always be a horse, but it does seem to be their default setting. They’re also the first and only magical horse on this list that’s, well, kind of evil. Something you might realize if you actually do try to ride one, at which point you’d grasp that you were magically, permanently stuck to its back — a body part it uses to drown and eat children. Yeesh. 

Apparently, though, if you can get hold of a kelpie’s bridle, you’ll receive full power over all kelpies, so thatss nice.

2 Sleipnir

Trying to ride Sleipnir is hugely inadvisable. First of all, Sleipnir is a massive, divine, eight-legged horse said to have carved a canyon with a single hoofstroke. That means, if he bucks, you’re probably going to fly off his back in a vaporized form like fine pink dew. The other is that Sleipnir is Odin’s horse in Norse mythology, and he’s probably the number one guy you don’t want to piss off within that entire belief system.

1 Centaur

This one is tricky for a whole different reason. Talk about a weird power dynamic. Time to climb onto the world’s weirdest carpool!