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Concerning Unicorns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

W. H. Riddell
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Extract

‘To travel hopefully’ says Robert Louis Stevenson ‘is a better thing than to arrive’: and whoever would track a legend to its source must needs be an optimistic traveller, for his prospects of reaching his destination are remote. The man who indulges in this form of sport—and it has its fascinations—soon becomes aware that amid the records of the Ancients, which form his Happy Hunting-ground, inaccuracy and credulity abound; whereas dependable facts are few and far between. Somewhere or other a story starts—the narration of some actual incident or spectacle outside the common run. It passes from mouth to mouth, amassing a gradual increment of falsehood as it goes; until, by the time it crystallizes into legend it has become a fabrication inseparable from fiction, except perhaps for the survival within it of some chance and apparently superfluous detail, which gives us a clue to its origin and to the incident which give it birth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 19 , Issue 76 , December 1945 , pp. 194 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1945

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References

1 Or whoever the author of the Odyssey was.

2 There is, be it observed, no hint of fire or volcanic action.

3 When the strong outward-going Mediterranean current meets the incoming Atlantic tide, whirlpools are liable to occur in the Straits; as more than one long-distance swimmer has discovered.

4 Many fighting bulls today show the typical aurochs coloration—black with a pale or white streak along the back.

5 The horn or rather tusk of the narwhal (monodon monoceros) was at one time offered for sale by unscrupulous dealers as the horn of a unicorn. As an instrument of magic it fetched enormous prices in the Middle Ages and later. The tusk is straight, hollow, of fine ivory, and has a spiral twist. The narwhal can have no connexion with the birth of the unicorn legend. It is exclusively an inhabitant of Arctic seas which were entirely unknown until a much later date.

6 As a coincidence but no more, I might mention that in 1906 my old friend Abel Chapman, the hunter naturalist, shot at Elementeita, Kenya Colony, a bull rhino which, in addition to the normal two nasal horns, had a third small rudimentary horn on its forehead above the eyes. Its head is now in the Hancock museum, Newcastle-on-Tyne.

7 Even so late as the mid-içth century geographers hesitated a long while before accepting the reports by missionaries of permanent snow on Kenya and Kilimanjaro.

8 Aelian gives Carcazonon as one of the unicorn’s names, a word possibly connected with Carcadan which according to the Revd. W. Haughton was an Arabic name for the rhinoceros. The current Arabic name for the rhinoceros in the Sudan is Khartit or Abu gam : the Swahili Faru or Kifaru.

9 If the fragmentary Precepts of Chiron are in truth Hesiod’s work the legend of the Phoenix must have ‘gone west’ a long time ago.

10 They probably got them, as I have done, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ART : unicorn.

11 At one time dealers in oriential porcelain were very apt to confuse Ki Lin (unicorn) with the curly-haired mythical Chinese lion, which is an emblem of royalty, and is called by the Chinese Shi tzu, a name which suggests its title of King of Beasts. The Pekin-palace dogs, now so popular in the west as pets, were deliberately bred to resemble the Shi tzu. The breed dates back to the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960–1280). In both the characters Ki and Lin the radical part (reading Luh) means a deer, and evidently the Chinese pictured the unicorn as some strange species of cervine.

12 With reference to PLATE II, FIG. 1 it would be as well to add that in the process of copying much of the fire, brilliance and expression of the original has disappeared.

13 Otto Kummel, Die Kunst Ostasiens, plate 27.

14 René Grousset, Civilisations of the East, III, fig. 300.