Chris Lavers

This is one to read and mull over a chapter or two at a time. There's no rush - unicorns have been around a long time and their prescence will be desired longer yet, I think.

Here is natural history at its rich and entertaining best, not just about the science of it but the myth making. And what a rich tapestry of thought, art, commerce, exploration and natural science unicorns have allowed us to weave - always staying just ahead of the hunt, of course.

May we always seek unicorns, and not quite catch them.… (altro)

This is a strange book. Obviously it's not a natural history in the accepted sense of the term; rather, it purports to be a history of our relationship over the centuries to the unicorn legend, as well as a detection to see if the real-life animals that gave rise to it can be identified. In the latter objective, the natural-history element, the book largely succeeds -- although there's a very long and quite extraordinarily dull chapter about the possible origin of khutu horn, a tangential topic. (The chapter has the feel of adaptation from a paper Lavers had written for some other purpose, an adaptation included here simply to bump up the extent a bit. But this may be an unfounded suspicion on my part.)

In the former objective, however, the book seems to me to fail quite spectacularly. For example, I don't think you can have a proper discussion of our relationship to the myth if you entirely omit discussion of unicorns in fiction and in the movies. Like it or lump it, that's an important part of the story too. And in one or two places I found myself uneasy about some of the stuff that was included: hailing Enkidu, the wild man in The Epic of Gilgamesh, as a unicorn precursor seems a stretch too far, in that the only real similarities are a wildness and an innocence/purity.

The book is not helped by the paper Morrow chose to print it on. Although it has a lovely feel to it, and although its slight creaminess makes the all-text pages look very pretty, it's an absolute disaster for most of the book's 27 plates. On page 119, for example, we're told that osteodentine (the innards of a walrus tusk) has "an attractive porridge-like appearance (Fig. 6.2)", but because of the paper the photo at Fig. 6.2 shows the osteodentine as just a kind of grey smear. Also, the text has what I'd regard as an unacceptable number of literals, plus the misspelling Isiah for the biblical book.

All in all, I was so annoyed by this book that I bought myself a copy of its (elderly) rival, Odell Shepard's The Lore of the Unicorn, which I hope, when I get round to reading it, will fill in the gaps at least up 'til about 1930, when it was published.… (altro)