The Natural History of Unicorns, by Chris Lavers
‘A long time ago, when the earth was green,/ There were more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen./ They’d run around free while the earth was being born,/ But the loveliest of all was the unicorn.’ So Shel Silverstein’s saccharine ditty informed generations of kiddies. As Chris Lavers’ whimsical, scholarly and continually absorbing book tells us, there’s a lot more to unicorns than that.
The first mention of a unicorn in literature appears four centuries before the birth of Christ, in a ‘mess of a book’ called Indica by the Greek orientalist Ctesias of Cnidus. Ctesias reported that in India there existed ‘certain wild asses’ of unexampled speed and ferocity, sporting horns on their foreheads. The horns were brilliant white at the base, black half way up, and bright red at the sharp end; and if you made them into drinking vessels they would neutralise the effects of poison, and give you immunity from epilepsy.
Yeah, right. Pull the other one; it’s got Pliny the Elder on it. So, roughly, has been the view for many years since. Lavers, though, takes as his epigraph the wise words of one Harold Mellersh: ‘There are two things to avoid in dealing with a legend. The first is to make too much of it, the other is to disbelieve it entirely.’
What if, he asks, Ctesias was describing a real creature, or more than one real creature? With exemplary skill and patience, Lavers sets about trying to establish how the legend grew up from a game of Chinese whispers played along ancient trade routes. This fantastical chimera, he argues plausibly, was actually compounded from three or four real animals — the rhinoceros among them — found in North India and the Himalayan plateau.
More than that, though, Lavers offers an irresistible teaser in his introduction. ‘For most of recorded history people thought that the unicorn existed. Recently we have come to know that it never did: So this book must end in disappointment. Not so. Unicorns did exist. There are photographs.’
There are, too. But this book doesn’t have a separate section for photographic plates, so you can’t just cheat by opening it in the shop and finding the pictures. You have to join the hunt — and it’s well worth your time doing so.
Hunting the unicorn, as it turns out, requires a wonderful interdisciplinary stew of natural history, philology, scriptural exegesis, chemistry, archaeology, comparative anatomy, anthropology and ancient history. The curious pilgrim will learn the uses of words like ‘alexipharmic’, ‘alicorn’, ‘Artiodactyl’ and ‘lustration’. And into this bubbling mixture Lavers stirs good humour and a grounding dose of common sense.
At the end of a long and intricate discussion of how several references to unicorns made their way into the King James Bible — to cut a long story short, it involves the Septaguint’s struggle with the mysterious Hebrew word ‘reem’, takes in the Arabian oryx as a red herring, and lands finally on an ancestral ox called the auroch that died out in Poland in 1627 — Lavers sums up his findings thus:
After more than 2,000 years of semantic confusion it is comforting to know that Judaism’s and Christianity’s spiritual forefathers, who bequeathed their descendants such joy and inspiration, and upon whose words so many people in our troubled world rely, were the sort of folk who could count up to two and who knew a big cow when they saw one.
Nicely put. The same drily debunking spirit is in evidence in one of his many footnotes, referring to the oblong animal ankle-bones, or ‘astralagi’ used by the ancients to play dice:
They often turn up in disproportionately large numbers in archaeological excavations, which suggests either that astralagi were commonly used by people for some purpose, or that sheep and goats once had more legs than they currently do.
The story of the unicorn — and the story of various crazed attempts to find it — is a way of looking at the exchange between myth and natural history, at the proliferation of travellers’ tales and the curious endurance in them of germs of truth, and of the way in which religious mythologies hungrily co-opt the next-door legends and repurpose them.
You can find versions of the unicorn in the Mahabharata and in the work of medieval Christian mystics. It gores hunters to death, leaps horn-first off cliffs, and curls up on the laps of winking virgins. It makes its way through classical antiquity, and shuttles between the bestiaries and pharmacological texts of the Islamic and the western worlds.
It rattles in the toolboxes of medieval cutlers, alongside narwhal tooth, mammoth ivory, walrus tusk and the mysterious ‘khutu’. It schleps across the Bering Strait with ancient travelling salesmen, and plunges into darkest Africa with 19th-century adventurers and their caravans of pygmies. It acquires and sheds the characteristics of a dozen or more real and imaginary creatures — of land, sea and even air — along the way.
Lavers follows all these transformations with patient and sympathetic attention. And just when you think that he’s pursuing a completely absurd line of inquiry, he’ll produce — with a delighted flourish and a cry of ‘aha, BUT!’ — the clinching piece of evidence that makes sense of nonsense.
I won’t spoil the punchline by telling you how real unicorns are found, or made. But it is a wonderfully satisfying discovery, giving you the sense of something that was once known, then forgotten, then painstakingly rediscovered.
By the end of the book, Lavers invites you to reassess your mental unicorn:
If your unicorn shifts disconcertingly between a goat, a horse, a rhinoceros, a marine mammal from the North Atlantic, assorted Tibetan ungulates and a six-eyed ass whose ears will terrify, the work of this book is almost done.
This highly original and stylish volume does just that work, and more. Everything you need to know about unicorns is here. Lovely.
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