Not so fantastic

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.