Review from The Sunday Times, January 18, 2009

The Natural History of Unicorns
Chris Lavers
Granta, pp. 272
£18.99

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The Sunday Times review by Rosemary Hill

In this beguiling book, Chris Lavers pursues the unicorn across two
and a half millenniums, from the bas-reliefs of ancient Persia to the
royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom by way of medieval tapestry.
As a scientist, his main purpose is to find out what zoological truths
lie behind the myth. But he is also a careful explorer of folklore,
sifting fact from fiction.

The first known description of a unicorn comes in 398BC from the Greek
doctor Ctesias of Cnidus, who in a book called Indica wrote about
"certain wild asses which are as large as horses" and "have a horn on
the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length". This first
unicorn was a colourful beast, white with a dark red head, blue eyes
and a crimson, white and black horn. Lavers concedes that Ctesias was
"a library type of fellow" who had never actually seen what he was
describing, but that doesn't mean he was a fantasist. He was right,
for example, about elephants, which must have seemed equally
implausible to him, and about talking birds (which we now know as
parrots).

Lavers thinks that the most obvious real-life candidate for Ctesias's
unicorn, the rhinoceros, was not the true source and traces this early
version of the legend back instead to three other animals. The horn
came from the chiru, or Tibetan antelope, whose slender pair of
antlers in the male look from a distance like a single horn (distantly
being the only way most people ever see these shy beasts). The kiang,
or wild ass, gave it its colouring, and the yak was the source of its
legendary ferocity. All three creatures can be found on the Tibetan
plateau, the site of another, equally resonant myth, Shangri-La.

More details were added to Ctesias's original picture over time, but
for more than six centuries the legend of the beast whose single horn,
if you could catch one, had curative properties remained in essence
unchanged. The very different creature of later western myth -
symbolic, semi-sacred - was born when the unicorn "popped up", as
Lavers puts it, most unexpectedly, in the Greek Old Testament. This
beast of savage power, whose name in the Greek is translated from the
curious Hebrew word "reem", rampages through the books of Numbers,
Deuteronomy, Job and several Psalms. "The unicorns shall come down
with them," Isaiah warns the enemies of God, "and their land shall be
soaked with blood."
Opinion divided sharply among early scholars as to what this Hebrew
word "reem" might have meant. St Jerome in the 4th century was among
those who thought it might perfectly well be a rhinoceros, and so it
appeared in the Vulgate. To the more metaphysically inclined, though,
something less lumbering and more spiritual seemed appropriate.
Tertullian of Carthage saw the unicorn as a precursor of Christ that
"pierces every race with faith".

From now on the unicorn had more than one life and more than one
history. As a real animal, it was pursued by hunters: Samuel Bochart,
the 17th-century French biblical scholar thought it was an Arabian
goat, and after 1835, when Henry Rawlinson deciphered cuneiform, it
gradually assumed the shape of the auroch, a now extinct species of
cow. Meanwhile, the less literal-minded admirers of the unicorn, led
by St Ambrose, followed the symbolic beast. By the Middle Ages, when
every natural phenomenon was read as a tissue of allegory, the
unicorn, usually accompanied by a virgin, who is sometimes Mary, had
been installed in the bestiary as the animal we now know from
tapestries and books of hours. The medieval myth, however, was as
hybrid as Ctesias's original. Early pagan stories about ladies whose
behaviour with unicorns was anything but virginal got caught up in
later Christian texts and lingered as if, as Lavers puts it, the male
chroniclers were simply reluctant to give up "the good bit" of the
story.

With commendable monomania, Lavers ignores great swathes of history
when unicorn scholarship was in abeyance. The entire Enlightenment
goes by as merely a "cooling-off period" and only the most dedicated
unicornologists will follow his dense and lengthy chapter on "khutu",
the substance that may or may not be the same thing as unicorn horn.
It is in the 19th century, when we encounter the romantics and then
the Victorian empire-builders, that the story picks up again with the
hunt for a real beast to account for the legend. British explorers in
India were regularly told that whole herds of unicorns were to be
found over the next hill. In the late 1840s a Frenchman, Louis
Ducoret, claimed to have seen some grazing near Lake Chad. After
obtaining generous sponsorship from the French government to search
for them, he spent the money most enjoyably without setting foot
outside Algiers.

The only adventurer to obtain any sort of result in his search for the
unicorn was Harry Hamilton Johnston, who penetrated the Congolese
forest accompanied by seven pygmies and a taxidermist named Doggett.
What Johnston found, however, turned out to be the okapi, which, if
not a unicorn, was still applauded as the most remarkable zoological
discovery of the 20th century. That was in 1901. The following year an
army officer, Lieutenant Anzelius, became the first European to kill
one. Soon the Belgian government had to put a ban on zoological
expeditions and museum scouts to preserve the new-found species from
extinction.

Pursuit and capture are essential to the unicorn story that, like all
enduring myths, embodies a changing truth that reflects back each age
to itself. The reality Lavers finds himself exploring today is
humankind's relationship with other species, a relationship from which
we do not emerge well. By the end of this wise and entertaining book,
his unicorn has ceased to be the quaint motif of nursery rhyme and
heraldry, and has become instead a symbol of the vulnerability and
co-dependence of species, including our own. As the Looking-Glass
unicorn said to Alice in Lewis Carroll's book, "If you'll believe in
me, I'll believe in you."