Unicorn

The unicorn enters European writing as ethnography rather than fantasy, and it enters through one man.

Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician who served at the Persian court in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, and who wrote an account of India, the Indica, assembled from what he heard there rather than from travel. His description is specific: a wild ass, the size of a horse or larger, with a white body, a dark red head, blue eyes, and a single horn on the forehead about a cubit and a half in length, coloured white at the base, black in the middle and crimson at the tip. It is exceptionally fast and cannot be taken alive. Drinking vessels made from the horn protect against poison and convulsions. The flesh is too bitter to eat.

Every recognisable element of the later unicorn except the maiden is in that paragraph, including the horn as antidote, which is the detail that would eventually be worth more than its weight in gold.

Pliny the Elder repeats a version in the Natural History, describing a monoceros with the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a single black horn two cubits long, which cannot be captured alive. Aelian and others follow.

What is being described is almost certainly a real animal or a conflation of several, the Indian rhinoceros is the usual candidate, and the horn-as-antidote belief attaches to rhinoceros horn in Asian pharmacology to this day. Ctesias was not inventing. He was reporting, at several removes, something that existed.

The unicorn's religious career rests on a translation decision, and it is a good example of how much a single word can do.

The Hebrew Bible refers several times to an animal called the re'em, in contexts emphasising its strength and its untameable horns, Job asks whether the re'em will consent to serve, and Psalms and Numbers invoke its horns as an image of power. The animal is now generally identified as the aurochs, the enormous wild cattle of Eurasia, hunted to extinction in the seventeenth century.

The translators of the Septuagint, rendering the Hebrew into Greek in Egypt from the third century BCE, gave it as monokeros, one-horned. The reason is not recorded. It may reflect the standard side-on depiction of a horned bovine in ancient art, in which one horn hides the other. The Vulgate followed with unicornis, and the King James Version of 1611 followed the Vulgate, so English readers for three centuries encountered unicorns in scripture.

The consequence was substantial. An animal that would otherwise have remained a curiosity of Greek travel writing became a creature vouched for by God, and could not simply be dismissed. Medieval and early modern naturalists who doubted its existence had scripture to contend with, which is a large part of why the unicorn remained in serious natural history long after comparable creatures had been dropped.

Modern translations render re'em as wild ox and the unicorn has quietly left most Bibles.

The image most people carry, the white beast laying its head in a virgin's lap, comes from one text and one purpose.

The Physiologus, a Greek Christian compilation of late antiquity that became one of the most widely translated books of the Middle Ages, describes each animal and then reads it allegorically. Its unicorn is small, fierce and impossible for hunters to take; it is caught by seating a virgin in its path, whereupon it comes to her, lays its head in her lap and is captured. The allegory is stated outright: the unicorn is Christ, the horn is his power, the virgin is Mary, and the capture is the Incarnation. This is not a folk tale that acquired a Christian gloss. It was composed as a Christian gloss.

From the Physiologus the scene passes into the bestiaries and out of them into tapestry, of which the Cluny and Cloisters hunt cycles are the famous survivals, and into heraldry, where the unicorn is chained, a detail that only makes sense if you know it cannot otherwise be held.

The alicorn trade is the strangest chapter. Powdered or whole unicorn horn was sold in Europe as an antidote to poison, and cups reputedly made from it were royal treasures; sums involved were enormous, and testing food with alicorn was a court practice. Most of what was sold was narwhal tusk, brought south by Scandinavian traders who had good reason not to explain their supply. The Danish physician Ole Worm demonstrated the identification in 1638, and yet false alicorn powder was still being sold medicinally in Europe as late as 1741.

The unicorn remains in the royal arms of the United Kingdom, where the Scottish unicorn has stood beside the English lion since the union of 1707.