MYTHOLOGY: ALAN O'RIORDANreviews The Natural History of Unicornsby Chris Lavers, Granta 258pp, £18.99
WE ALL CARRY around a well-defined picture of a unicorn in our heads, but probably give no thought to how it got there, listing the unicorn as a mythical creature that mankind dreamt up along the way. But if this book answers a question few of us would have thought to ask, it is for that reason an unexpected pleasure and its subject affords the chance to marvel at, not only the natural world, but also humanity in all its wisdom, myth-making, gullibility and glorious folly.
It is people who emerge as the most fabulous beasts in this book, as the exigencies of everything from Christianity to trade cemented the unicorns’ place in our collective imagination (selling horns derived from one-horned animals did the price no harm either in 400 BC or AD 1400).
Chris Lavers ends a remarkable journey over thousands of years having shown the unicorn can have no single point of origin, but his book has to start somewhere, and he begins with a Greek writer named Ctesias who recorded his experiences in Persia some 2,400 years ago. We are invited to imagine his wonder at the stories brought back by traders from the east; at Persian histories never before read by a Greek. The result of all this was Indica, a mishmash of geography, zoology, anthropology and nonsense that contained detailed accounts of a Tibetan one-horned ass – impossible to capture, but with a horn of curative powers. In this was enough to sustain the myth of the unicorn in the West for more than 2,000 years. Ctesias's unicorn is a chimera whose origins lie in the combined traits of exotic oriental animals: the Indian rhino, the chiru, the kiang and the yak. Hence the subtitle of this book, "a natural history". But like any creature, the genealogy of the unicorn is extraordinarily complex, the animal without one single ancestor. Lavers pursues his quarry from Tibetan plains to medieval marketplaces and the jungles of the Congo. He constructs the most unlikely family tree: the unicorn is a narwhale, a forest-dwelling horse, a walrus, a mammoth, an ox, a khutu, a reem, an oryx, an okapi, Christ.
That final manifestation is perhaps the most important reason for the unicorn’s cultural centrality. The question of how unicorns got into the Bible is a most interesting case of mistranslation, a mistranslation that enabled a sub-genre of Christian allegorical art arising from bestiaries that sought God’s teaching in the natural world but unwittingly transmitted into the Christian imagination myths of pagan sexual sublimation, by which winding road we arrive at the ironic coupling of the unicorn and the Blessed Virgin in medieval art.
The Christian, though, is just one of many strands in what could be a very tangled web. To Lavers’s credit, we get a rich tapestry instead. His narrative is full of anecdote, historical eccentrics, no little zoology, and, in the right places, guesswork that is allowed to remain, tantalisingly, just that. While Lavers refuses to reduce the unicorn by giving it a sole ancestor, he does arrive at an explanation for “real-life” unicorns: the ancient art of horn manipulation. But he allows this again to “dissolve into a global milieu of human imaginings” content with parallel lineages and diverse explanations of why unicornity had a particular hold on the human imagination.
His one moral is that the unicorn myth binds our own history to the natural history of the earth. Given the debased natural world and our increased alienation from it, he is right to say, “if the beast is to stand for anything in the modern world, it could do worse than stand for that”.
- Alan O'Riordan is a journalist, editor and theatre critic