Where Do Unicorns Come From? The Real History and Origins of the Unicorn

By Fire Pud the Dragon (Mythical Creature Expert and Part-Time Castle Historian)

Princess Charlotte, it has been established, would have a unicorn. This is not a question. It is a certainty. Just wait until 'Do Unicorns Neigh?' gets published and you will see for yourself why everyone loves unicorns.

Now with each of The Good Knight Books a lot of research takes place to make sure they have some interesting historical facts and interesting angles, or find some amusing aspects from the past that can help bring Jack's castle to life. I advise on all mythical beast elements, so when I was asked where do unicorns actually come from I jumped at the chance to explain.

Not the pink and sparkly modern version, the sort that might fart rainbows (excuse my use of the 'f' word, a lot worse gets said in the castle).

The original.

The one that existed in the minds of the ancient world, long before anyone put it on a birthday cake or you could actually attend a Unicorn Academy - come on, we've all watched that show at least fifty times.

The answer is not what you might expect...

The Greeks thought it was real

Here is the first surprise. Unicorns are not found in Greek mythology, rather they appear in the accounts of actual natural history. They are not a myth.

Greek writers of natural history were convinced of the reality of unicorns, which they believed lived in India, a distant land and full of wonder. The explorer Scylax first visited India and made contact with the Persians in 515BC, but it wasn't for another 100 years before unicorns were actually mentioned for the first time...

I am going to repeat this...unicorns to the Ancient Greeks were not mythology, they were real. Travelling back several thousand years and you could have seen one in real life - which if the BBC ever read this blog would be an absolutely fantastic idea for a one-off series for Sir David Attenborough!

But back to the roots of the unicorn, which date back at least as far as 400 BCE, when the Greek historian Ctesias first documented a unicorn-like animal in his writings on the region of India. Ctesias was a physician who served in the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes II. A very reliable source.

In his book Indica, he wrote: "There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length."

White body. Red head. Blue eyes. Multicoloured horn. Not the white, silver, single-tone creature of modern imagination. Those who drank from its horn were thought to be protected from stomach trouble, epilepsy, and poison. It was very fleet of foot and difficult to capture.

Now the sceptic in me wants to shout "that was clearly a rhinoceros". Seen from a distance, at speed, side-on, by someone who had never been to India or never seen an India rhino. Or the nature lover may not have had his contact lenses in, been drunk as a skunk, or was just very optimistic. But that was the first recorded sighting of a unicorn. And there is no way that anyone other than the most short-sighted of explorers would mistake a rhino with a unicorn.

Julius Caesar saw one

Descriptions of the unicorn can be traced throughout history in the writings of big named historical figures, such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and even Julius Caesar. The latter claimed that similar animals could be found in the ancient and vast Hercynian Forest of Germany and described seeing a "one-horned ox." Just so you know, 'ox' was a Roman term that best described a stag.

It is very important to note that rhinos did not call the Hercynian Forest of Germany home. So this is evidence that is a lot harder to debunk.

Julius Caesar. The man who conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, and reformed the Roman calendar, wrote about unicorns in Germany with apparent sincerity. This is the kind of historical detail that makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about Roman military intelligence.

But there it was, detailed in around 50BC - just six years after seeing the unicorn Caesar was dead! Coincidence? Probably not.

The unicorn, in other words, spent centuries being reported by serious people, historians, physicians, military commanders, as a genuine creature of the natural world. Not a symbol. Not a legend. An actual animal. Marco Polo once famously remarked that it was a "passing ugly beast" that did not fit the folklore of his homeland!

The Bible aslo has one!

Some versions of the word "re'em", appearing in the Hebrew Bible, including in Psalm 92 and Deuteronomy, are rendered as "unicorn" in certain translations. The King James Bible, completed in 1611, includes nine references to unicorns. The translators were working from ancient texts and interpreting the Hebrew word for a large, powerful, wild horned animal, almost certainly an aurochs, the enormous wild cattle that once roamed Europe and Asia, as a unicorn.

This matters because it means the unicorn entered Christian tradition as a real creature referenced in scripture. Which is why it appears in medieval church carvings and manuscripts. Not as fantasy, but as a real animal that had been included in the Bible.

How it became the Unicorn we all know

For most of the time since Ctesias first wrote about it, well into the Middle Ages, people also believed unicorns to be real. It was even used as the Scottish royal family symbol was back in the 1100s (and remains the Scottish national animal to this day - you can see its importance when you view a Mercat Cross, which designated a royally approved market, in the form of a historic monument. You just need to know where to look.

Medieval bestiaries, illustrated natural history books, included the unicorn alongside lions, elephants, and whales as genuine animals of the world. The unicorn's horn, called the alicorn, was believed to have powerful medicinal properties. Ground alicorn was sold as a remedy for poison. Powdered alicorn was prescribed by physicians. Entire alicorn horns were displayed in royal treasuries as priceless objects.

These horns were, in reality, narwhal tusks. The narwhal, a real whale with a single spiral tusk, was caught in the North Atlantic, its tusks shipped south, and sold to credulous buyers as the horn of the unicorn. Medieval merchants made considerable fortunes from this arrangement. The narwhal was not so pleased with this practice. Elephant tusks were also passed off as unicorn horns!

The transformation to the sparkly pink version came considerably later.

It is not an improvement in terms of historical accuracy, but it has been commercially very successful, my daughter alone is contributing hugely to the global unicorn industry. But since the 2010s the pink sparkly version has dominated television screens, pencil cases, makeup kits, clothes and kids bedrooms. It is an impossible force, which you might as well embrace.

Although, I will end this entry on a positive note and to possibly the biggest piece of news that hit the news stands in 2012. North Korean state media reported that Archaeologists from the History Institute of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea "reconfirmed" that "lair of a unicorn" that was ridden by King Tongmyong! We can still dream, but only if we ignore the mistranslation of the word unicorn. It turns out that the North Korean 'unicorn' was in fact a beast with a dragon's head, a deer's body, had the tail of a cow and even some hooves and a mane.

An easy mistake to make. But there you go, the unicorn has survived since 400BC and is now firmly embedded into popular culture and imaginations of millions and millions of children across the globe. They existed, but not as we know them now - you'll have to wait and see what type of unicorn appears in 'Do Unicorns Neigh?'.

Join Jack's Shield Wall, the free Good Knight community, at thegoodknightbook.com/shield-wall. New members this month receive a free Guide to Medieval Insults. We have not yet found a medieval insult specifically referencing unicorns, but we are looking.