The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers

Enter the word "unicorn" in an internet search engine and an astonishing quantity of fantasia emerges. A unicorn, armed, crined and unguled Proper, appears as the sinister supporter of the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom. The dexter supporter is a lion rampant, whence the 17th-century nursery rhyme, and the lion and unicorn chapter in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, illustrated by Tenniel with a vignette in which the unicorn, resembling Disraeli, languidly confronts a moth-eaten Gladstonian lion.

So far, so heraldic, but look at more recent unicorn-related websites and you find that the beasts occupy a place in wafty, New Age spirituality similar to that of angels or Father Christmas: surprising numbers of people wish that they were real, and are half-convinced that by wishing, they can make them so.

Into this realm of heraldic beast and supercharged My Little Pony steps the refreshingly un-wafty figure of Chris Lavers, a lecturer in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.

Lavers is only peripherally interested in the encrustation of myth surrounding the image of the unicorn. What really concerns him is why, since no one has ever seen one, humankind should have remained convinced for the best part of two millennia of the existence of the unicorn as a real creature.

"Many," Lavers remarks, "have tried to track the unicorn's progress and a few have glimpsed madness along the way." His own aim, he states, is not to attempt a complete history, merely to "say a few things about the unicorn that have not been said before ... and to draw attention to the myth's natural history." The story begins in 398 BC when Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician to the king of Persia, gave an account of "certain wild asses" native to India, with white bodies, red heads, dark blue eyes and a single 18-inch horn, nattily striped in red, black and white. They ran fast and tasted terrible. From this exotic fragment, Lavers embarks on a painstaking matching exercise, considering the possible candidates — rhinoceros, walrus, deer with very long horns standing sideways on a mountain-top a vast distance away from its human observer, and so on.

In chapters on the Judaeo-Christian Unicorn and the Iconic Unicorn he pauses to examine the extraordinary grip on the human imagination of the quasi-equine unicorn — the white one with a weakness for virgins — before returning to the hunt for the real thing, which continued well into the 19th century, captivating such scholarexplorers as the diplomat Harry Hamilton Johnston, who roamed the Congo Basin in search of a creature known as the "atti" (after frightful hardships, he found it. It was an okapi).

Lavers claims in his introduction that "Unicorns did exist" but he produces no amazing revelation. All he seems to mean is that it is possible to create unicorns artificially by manipulating the horn buds of cattle; and they do (rarely) occur naturally — a unicorn deer was born in Italy in 2007. It's not what most people understand by a unicorn, however, and the lack of a more conclusive finale lends the narrative a speculative and rambling quality, into which an irritating facetiousness sometimes creeps. Still, if this is a journey of detours, it is a very engaging one and we fall in with some fascinating companions, both human and animal, along the way..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

For two and a half thousand years, unicorns have inspired, enchanted and eluded humanity. The beast appears in Old Testament texts and Greek and Roman natural histories; Christians adopted it as a symbol of Christ, the middle-ages as a symbol of courtly love. A brisk trade was had in unicorn parts in Medieval and Renaissance times and travellers reported sightings into the modern era. Where did the unicorn come from, and how was it accepted as part of the animal kingdom for so long?