Where Do Unicorn Legends Come From? Rhinos, Narwhals and a Mistranslation
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The unicorn is unusual among mythical animals in that for most of its history nobody thought it mythical. Greek writers described it as an animal of India, the Bible appeared to mention it, medieval scholars catalogued it among the beasts, its horn was sold by apothecaries at ten times the price of gold, and it was only in the eighteenth century that naturalists concluded it had never existed. It was assembled over two thousand years from a rhinoceros, a whale's tooth, a mistranslated ox and a story about a virgin, and every piece can be traced.
The Greek rhinoceros
The first unicorn is in a book by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC, who described among the marvels of India a wild ass the size of a horse, with a white body, a dark red head, blue eyes and a single horn a cubit long on its forehead, white at the base, black in the middle and crimson at the tip, from which cups were made that protected against poison. Ctesias had never been to India and was reporting what Persian travellers told him, and the animal behind the description is the Indian rhinoceros, whose horn was and is carved into cups, blurred with the wild ass and the antelope in the telling. Aristotle accepted it, listing the Indian ass and the oryx as the only one-horned animals, and Pliny in the first century AD described a monoceros with the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant and the tail of a boar, which is a rhinoceros seen by someone who had heard of one.
The Bible's re'em
The Hebrew Bible mentions an animal called the re'em nine times, a creature of great strength and untameable, and when the scholars of Alexandria translated the scriptures into Greek in the third century BC they rendered it as monokeros, one-horn, since they did not know the animal and the Greeks had one to hand. The Latin Bible followed with unicornis, and the King James Bible of 1611 has the unicorn in Job, in the Psalms and in Deuteronomy. The re'em was the aurochs, the wild ox that the Assyrians hunted and that survived in Poland until 1627, and its two horns had been lost in a dictionary. The translation gave the unicorn scriptural authority, and for a medieval reader an animal in the Bible existed.
The virgin and the hunt
The medieval unicorn came from the Physiologus, a Greek Christian text of the second or third century that read the animals as allegories, and its story fixed the creature's character. The unicorn is small, fierce and cannot be taken by hunters; but if a virgin is placed in its path it comes to her, lays its head in her lap and sleeps, and the hunters take it. The Physiologus explains that the unicorn is Christ, the virgin is Mary, and the horn is the one power of God, and the bestiaries repeated the story with pictures for a thousand years. The elements that accumulated:
- •The form: from Ctesias's ass and Pliny's composite to the white horse with a goat's beard and cloven hooves of the tapestries
- •The spiral horn, which arrived in the twelfth century when narwhal tusks began reaching Europe and were sold as the genuine article
- •The virgin capture, from the Physiologus, and the Christian allegory built on it
- •The purifying horn, dipped in water to cleanse it of poison, from Ctesias's cups, which made the horn a medicine and a treasure
- •The heraldic beast, chained and collared, that Scotland took as its national animal in the fifteenth century
The horn trade
Narwhals are Arctic whales whose males grow a single spiral tusk up to three metres long, and Norse traders brought the tusks south from Greenland from the eleventh century without saying where they came from. Sold as unicorn horn, they were among the most valuable objects in Europe: Elizabeth I kept one worth a castle, the Danish throne was made of them, and pharmacists shaved them into powder to cure poison, plague and fever. The trade lasted until 1638, when the Danish physician Ole Worm displayed a narwhal skull with its tusk attached and the price collapsed, though apothecaries went on selling the powder for another century. The last serious search for the animal was by a Danish zoologist in the eighteenth century; the rhinoceros had been exhibited in Lisbon in 1515 and drawn by Durer, and once Europe knew what a rhinoceros looked like the unicorn had nowhere to live.
Why it lasted
The unicorn survived its own exposure because it had stopped being an animal and become a meaning. It stood for purity, for Christ, for the untameable thing that could be won only by innocence, for Scotland, for a medicine against every poison, and each of those uses had a constituency that did not care about zoology. The Unicorn Tapestries woven around 1500 and hanging in New York show the hunt as a courtly allegory of love and the resurrection; the unicorn in the Harry Potter books has blood that saves and curses; and the pastel unicorn of children's merchandise, a phenomenon of the 2010s, is a beast of pure wish. The rhinoceros of Ctesias, the ox of the Bible and the whale of the Norse traders are all still in it, and none of them is what anyone means.
The takeaway
The unicorn was assembled from a Greek physician's second-hand account of the Indian rhinoceros around 400 BC, a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for the wild ox that put a one-horned beast into the Bible, and a Christian allegory in which only a virgin could tame it; narwhal tusks sold as its horn made it a treasure and a medicine until a Danish anatomist exposed them in 1638. It survived the loss of its existence by becoming a symbol, and it has been one ever since.