History of Unicorns
How long have there been unicorns? Possibly as long as there have been humans to tell stories about them.
In Dordogne, France, some of the world’s oldest cave paintings are preserved at Lascaux. Giant animals, painted about 17,000 years ago in bold lines of black, brown, and red, sprawl across the ceilings and walls of a system of underground caverns. Among the oxen, stags, deer, horses, and big cats, there is one mysterious creature archaeologists nicknamed the “unicorn,” because of the long, straight horn that juts from its forehead.
Many people insist that Lascaux’s unicorn actually has two horns, but unicorn lovers are free to draw their own conclusions about what the ancient painters intended. Even so, few people would recognize the creature in the caves as a relative of the animals we see in art today. Lumpy and spotted, with a short tail and a blunt nose, the Lascaux unicorn is a far cry from the graceful white horses that unicorns would later become.
When most people think of unicorns, they imagine a creature from a much later time: the Middle Ages. With flowing manes and spiral horns, they belong to the world of knights in armor and maidens in flowing gowns. And they come from a very specific place, too. The shining white horse-like unicorn that we know and love was first described in Europe. But unicorns throughout history and around the world have taken on many different forms.
And, truth be told, a lot of them looked more like the strange creature at Lascaux than the beautiful equines in our imaginations.
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The history of the unicorn in Europe began around the fourth century BCE, in Greece. At the height of ancient Greek civilization, many scholars were interested in understanding and describing the natural world. Almost two thousand years before the printing press would be invented, they collected stories that described cultures and wildlife from other parts of the world in handwritten scrolls that could be copied by scribes and shared with other scholars.
Since it would also be thousands of years before cars, trains, or airplanes were invented, few scholars actually saw the creatures they were describing. Instead, they collected stories from travelers who spread out from Greece, mostly to trade with other cultures. This kind of information gathering allowed the ancient Greek philosophers to gain knowledge on subjects far beyond what they could have gathered on their own. But it also left room for a lot of mistakes. Stories were passed from one traveler to another, and like anyone playing a long game of telephone, scholars were likely to misinterpret at least some of the information.
One of those Greek scholars was a physician named Ctesias, who wrote about Persia and India. Ctesias was appointed as physician to the court of a Persian king (in what is now Iran), and lived there for seventeen years learning about Persian history and culture. When he returned to Greece in the year 398 BCE, he began writing two enormous scholarly works. One of them, called Indica, described what he had learned about India. (Although he called it India, Ctesias was probably referring to the region around Tibet.) While Ctesias had never made it to the land he was describing, he met travelers who had. Based on their stories, Ctesias wrote what was probably the first European story of a unicorn.
Ctesias’s unicorn shared some qualities with the unicorn of today: It was about the size of a horse and had a straight horn, about one and a half feet long, jutting from the middle of its forehead. But Ctesias’s unicorn was a wild donkey, and while its body was white, its head was deep red and its eyes dark blue. Weirder still, its horn was three different colors: white at the base, black in the middle, and vivid red at the tip. It was an impressive beast. Ctesias said that the unicorn was “exceedingly swift and powerful” and no other animal could catch it. Strange though Ctesias’s creature might seem to us today, it was the first many Europeans heard of the unicorn, and many, many later tales would be based on his description.
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For more than 400 years, philosophers and scholars who mentioned unicorns mostly used Ctesias’s description. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder included a unicorn in his Naturalis Historia (Natural History). Pliny was still working on Naturalis Historia when he died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, but he had already created thirty-seven books in which he described animals from around the world. His unicorn was an “exceedingly wild beast called the Monoceros.” According to Pliny, it had a stag’s head, a horse’s body, an elephant’s feet, and a boar’s tail. Its horn was solid black and more than two feet long. Like Ctesias’s unicorn, it was also a fierce beast, and could not be captured alive.
For centuries, the animal remained pretty much the same: A strange mash-up of stag, horse, and elephant continued to be described in texts. But with each new account, the unicorn gained more detail—and it became wilder. The length of the unicorn’s horn grew over the years, and its temperament became more ferocious.
In the third century CE, a Roman named Aelian agreed with Pliny’s description of the stag-headed, elephant-footed horse, but gave his unicorn the tail of a goat. He also added two important details: a mane and tawny coat. Aelian’s unicorn was a solitary creature. Known to be gentle with other species, it would fiercely attack any other unicorns that came near it. Its horn, too, was deadly. It was almost three feet long, solid black, “not smooth, but covered in certain natural rings,” and came to a wicked point.
A century later, another Roman scholar named Julius Solinus described the unicorn as the “cruelest” monster. Although it looked much the same as the creature Aelian and Pliny described (except that it had the tail of a pig, rather than a boar or a goat), its behavior was far more ferocious than either of the earlier writers had believed. It “bellowed horribly,” and its horn, now four feet long, was brightly colored and so sharp that it would instantly pierce anything the unicorn stabbed. It could be killed but was far too ferocious to ever be captured.
With its oversized horn, mix-and-match body, and cantankerous nature, it’s not so surprising that the unicorn of the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t really catch on. The idea of the unicorn as a brightly colored Frankenstein’s monster faded over time. But those early descriptions played a big part in shaping ideas about the unicorn’s fierce and solitary nature, and also passed on an indispensable piece of information about unicorns: the magical properties of their horns. All the Greek and Roman scholars believed that drinking from a cup made of unicorn horn would heal epilepsy and neutralize poisons. That belief would last for thousands of years.
Over the years, unicorn horns were associated with all kinds of healing powers. See here to learn more about alicorns!
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In the end, the unicorn that endured was far cuter than Ctesias and Pliny had imagined. Diminutive goatlike creatures with snowy coats and graceful, spiraling horns, some were small enough to climb into a child’s lap. It’s not clear when these more friendly unicorns first appeared. But they probably owed some of their attributes to Julius Caesar.
In the first century BCE, the Roman ruler wrote a series of reports describing his exploits in Gaul, an area that included much of modern-day Europe. In the sixth report, he listed some of the animals that could be found in the mysterious Hercynian Forest, a vast, dense wilderness that ran across what is now southern Germany. Along with the other creatures, Caesar described a stag that had a single long, straight horn on its forehead between its ears.
A similar creature made it into the bestiaries—collections of moral stories featuring animals—that began to pop up all around Europe two hundred years later. The first bestiary was probably created in Alexandria, Egypt. Copies of that original, called the Physiologus, would be created throughout Europe for centuries.
Unlike the stories of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who were trying to provide naturalistic accounts of animals found in the east, the bestiaries were designed to teach moral values. The books were much more popular than the writings of Ctesias and Pliny, and began to spread far and wide.
It would be more than a thousand years before the printing press was invented, so every copy of the bestiary was written out by hand. As each copy was made, the scribes who created it made changes, large and small, to the stories—many new bestiaries meant many new versions of the animal tales they told.
But all the bestiaries shared the same basic story about the unicorn: They described it as the size of a kid, or baby goat, with cloven (two-toed) hooves. Like earlier unicorns, this version was exceedingly fierce and couldn’t be captured by men. But the bestiaries gave the key to trapping the wild beast: Hunters would leave a maiden alone in the woods where the unicorn was known to live. When it came across her, it would be so smitten that it would lay its head in her lap and allow itself to be captured.
As time went on, the unicorn became part of the culture and soon began to appear widely in art, often as a Christian religious symbol. By the Middle Ages, unicorns were often used as ornamentation (called illuminations) on religious manuscripts and in Bibles. They were carved into furniture, woven into tapestries, and worked into stained-glass windows.
The animals themselves continued to look quite different, depending on the artist who created them. Probably the best-known works of unicorn art from the Middle Ages is a series of tapestries known as the Unicorn Tapestries, woven in the Netherlands beginning in 1495. They show a white unicorn with a goatlike beard, cloven hooves, and a spiraling horn. But in a bestiary from the fourteenth century, the unicorn looks incredibly catlike. A tapestry woven in Switzerland around 1420 shows a spotted animal with the body of a horse, cloven hooves in the front, lion’s paws in the back, and feathers around its neck. Another, created in Strasbourg, Germany, around 1500, shows a unicorn that looks a lot like a deer fawn, with long, spindly legs and a speckled brown coat.
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Around the same time the Unicorn Tapestries were created, a boom in exploration began. Seeking new trade routes to Asia, European adventurers set out by ship to Africa, Central America, and North America. As they traveled through new lands, the explorers encountered plants and animals they had never seen before. Some were similar to the animals they had at home, but others were entirely different from European animals. They looked so outlandish, and behaved so oddly in the explorers’ eyes, that they seemed a bit like mythical beasts. It wasn’t such a stretch, then, when explorers began looking for unicorns wherever they went. (After all, if you put a unicorn next to a giraffe or an ostrich, it doesn’t seem so unusual.) During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, reports of unicorns came in from all over the world.
The New World was supposedly full of them. In 1539, Friar Marcus of Nizza reported that he had seen the hide of a unicorn during a journey near Mexico. It was “half as big again as an ox,” he said, and “had but one horn on his forehead, bending toward the breast.”
Thirty years later, Sir John Hawkins reported that the indigenous people of Florida wore beads of unicorn horn around their necks. In 1673, Dr. Olfert Dapper reported seeing unicorns on the Canadian border, insisting that they had cloven hooves; rough manes; long, straight horns; black eyes; and necks like a stag’s.
The possibility that unicorns might be found in Africa captured the imaginations of naturalists. Stories of one-horned antelopes, amphibians with cloven hooves in the front and webbed feet in the back, horned pachyderms, and, of course, one-horned equines continued to be told by travelers for hundreds of years.
In the 1620s, a missionary named Jerónimo Lobo returned from Abyssinia (what is now northern Ethiopia) with reports of having seen a unicorn that was the exact size and shape of a beautiful horse. It looked much like the unicorns we see in movies and artwork today, but was bay-colored and had a black mane and tail.
In 1800, Sir John Barrow returned to England from South Africa with a story about finding a cave painting that depicted a unicorn. He was just one of the many travelers to Africa who insisted they had heard stories of unicorns from indigenous people there, or had even seen a one-horned animal themselves. The fourth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica insisted, “There can, we think, be little doubt that the unicorn exists in Africa, not far north of the Cape of Good Hope, and perhaps, at some distant period it may be as well-known as the elephant or the hippopotamus is at present.”
Unicorns were everywhere. No one could agree on what they looked like, but they were clearly here to stay.
Text copyright © 2020 by Penelope Gwynne
Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Katie O’Neill
