The Mystical Unicorn

                                            Unicorns in the Ocean surf (Robert Vavra)

Since I was a child I always loved the idea of Unicorns. As being an equestrian since the age of seven, I remember vividly seeing a coffee table book entitled "Unicorns I have Known" by Robert Vavra. The beautiful photographs of these horned Equines captured my imagination.  Vavra has published a wide range of adult and children's books. He is the author of over 30 books accounting for more than 3,000,000 volumes in print, in eight languages. He has had more than 100 one-man gallery displays and museum shows in America and Europe. 

                            

• Tiger Flower, 1969 (with Fleur Cowles) -
• Lion and Blue, 1974 (with Fleur Cowles) -  Such Is the Real Nature of Horses, 1979
• The Love of Tiger Flower, 1980 (with Fleur Cowles) 
• Unicorns I Have Known, 1983 
• To Be A Unicorn, 1986 (with Fleur Cowles) 
• Blanquito y Toro, 1966 (drawings by John Fulton) 
• Equus: The Creation of a Horse, 1976 
• Vavra's Horses, Ten of the World's Most Beautiful Equines, 1989
• The Unicorn of Kilimanjaro, 1990His work features in and on numerous publications including:

• Iberia: Spanish Travels And Reflections, James Michener
• The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
• Russian Republics postage stamps
• Max Factor, Roche, Renault and Revlon advertisements
  
  
  • Stallions of the Quest (August 8, 2001)
  • Michener's the Name, 2007 
  • Vavra's Vision, 2007 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Two photographs from Robert Vavra's book "Unicorns I Have Known" (1983)
  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

The Unicorn is in Captivity, one of The Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries, c. 1495–1505, The Cloisters.

The first written account of a Unicorn comes from the fourth century B.C.E. 

It was written by Greek physician Ctesias, who had traveled through what is now Iran. 
 He wrote that creatures were quick and powerful. They had white bodies, red heads, 
blue eyes, and a long multi-colored horn. People in history have claimed to have seen the creature. Famous sightings include those by Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, and Pliny the Elder.Descriptions of unicorns changed with every story. Most legends said that unicorns had magical powers. Some said they gave people immortality. Others claimed they had healing powers. One traditional method of hunting unicorns involved entrapment by a virgin.In one of his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote: 
"The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears 
to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated 
damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it."

The late Gothic series of seven tapestry hangings The Hunt of the Unicorn are a high point 
There, he heard many tales of single-horned wild donkeys that were as large as horses.In European tapestry manufacture, combining both secular and religious themes. The tapestries now hang in the Cloisters division of the Metropolitan museum of art in New York City. In the series, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by huntsmen and hounds, pursue a unicorn against mille-fleur backgrounds or settings of buildings and gardens. They bring the animal to bay with the help of a maiden who traps it with her charms, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, "The Unicorn in Captivity", the unicorn is shown alive again and happy, chained to a pomegranate tree surrounded by a fence, in a field of flowers. Scholars conjecture that the red stains on its flanks are not blood but rather the juice from pomegranates, which were a symbol of fertility. However, the true meaning of the mysterious resurrected unicorn in the last panel is unclear.

Today, many experts say stories about unicorns could have been Influenced by real animals. They point to the Indian rhinoceros, which is a powerful beast with one horn. Other possibilities include the wild ox, Arabian Oryx, and narwhal. The unicorn could be a mix of many animals.

Narwhal, also known as a narwhale (Monodon monoceros), is a medium-sized toothed whale that possesses a large "tusk" from a protruding canine tooth.

After years of believing unicorns were nothing more than mystical, magical fairytale creatures, researchers definitively proved that they did once exist — though, not as pretty horses with white manes, wings, and horns. 

Thanks to a discovered skull fossil found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan, we now know that the unicorn — or "Elasmotherium sibiricum" roamed the planet roughly 29,000 years ago and looked more like a rhinoceros than a horse. 

The study, published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences, also revealed that these unicorns stood about six feet tall, measured 15 feet long, and weighed around 8,000 pounds. The discovery is a total shock to scientists who initially thought they had gone extinct 350,000 years ago.

"Most likely, the south of Western Siberia is where this rhino had preserved the longest in comparison with the rest of the range," Tomsk State University scientist Andrei Shpanksy noted in the research.

DNA analysis of collagen extracted from the bones of a fossil showed that the Siberian Unicorn belonged to a sister taxon to Rhinocerotinae, the group to which all modern rhinoceros belong. The two were thought to have split about thirty-five million years ago but may even have been as late as forty-seven million years ago.

The unicorn might not be very old at all and might have still been kicking until 39,000 years ago. This places its extinction “firmly within the late Quaternary extinction event”, between 50,000 and four thousand years ago, in which half of the Eurasian mammalian megafauna died out. Interestingly, this adds to the evidence of the decline of megafauna just before the ice sheets of the last ice age reached their maximum extension.

This might help us to understand the reasons for the unicorn’s demise.

The shape of, and the isotopes within, the remains of E. sibiricum suggest that it found its home in herb- and grass-covered steppes, with an extreme adaptation for feeding close to the ground. Perhaps it dug up vegetation to consume its roots and all.

However, starting about 35 thousand years ago, as the deep cold extended further south, the steppe became more like a tundra, denying the unicorn its primary food source, and this was perhaps a decisive factor in its extinction.

The researchers also speculated that humans might have had something to do with it, although they acknowledge a dearth of supporting evidence. “The extinction of E. sibiricum,” they write, “could, in theory, have been exacerbated by human hunting pressure, given the replacement of H. neanderthalensis by H. sapiens in Eurasia around 45–40 [thousand years ago]”.

The ancient rhino has been dubbed the Siberian unicorn due to the large single horn it may have once sported © W S van der Merwe.

While no horn has ever been found, it is thought that the large boss on the head supported one ©  Igor Doronin/Kosintsev et al. 2018

Sources

https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/are-unicorns-real

https://www.ancientmedicine.org/home/2019/3/26/aristotle-on-ctesias-on-the-manticore-and-unicorn

https://magazine.washington.edu/studying-narwhals-is-no-easy-tusk/

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/november/the-siberian-unicorn-lived-at-the-same-time-as-modern-humans.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Vavra

The peculiar case of the Cottingley Fairies

 

Frances Wright with the fairies taken by Elsie Wright (1917)

December 1920 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave credence to one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th Century when he published the Cottingley Fairies photos. I remember watching Arthur C Clarke's World of Strange Powers at age seven when I first heard of this story and was fascinated by the photographs. 

One summer's day in July 1917 nine-year-old Frances Griffiths came back into the house she shared with her cousin Elsie Wright, 16, and their two families during the First World War.

Her shoes and clothes were soaked from playing in the stream at the bottom of the garden. When her mother demanded to know why she said: "I go to see the fairies".

Determined to support her cousin, Elsie convinced her father to lend her his camera, saying she would bring back proof of Frances's claim.

When the girls returned an hour later, Elsie begged her father to waste no time. He had a dark room in the cupboard under the stairs. She remembers how she waited anxiously while he developed the plate and was excited about how it was going to come out. Elsie's father said "I'll tell you how that picture is coming out. It's very untidy, you've been eating sandwiches and the sandwich papers are all sticking up. Then he said, "what are these little leg things down here?" Elsie shouted, "They've come, they've come out!" The picture showed Frances surrounded by four prancing sprites, they were adamant the image was real.

Elsie with a winged Gnome. 

A few weeks later they snapped another photo showing Elsie with a dancing gnome.

Dr. Merrick Burrow, guest curator of a forthcoming exhibition on the Cottingley Fairies, said the girls made a pact never to confess how they had taken the photos but with their parents stumped for the next three years the pictures were nothing more than a puzzling family anecdote.

"I do not think anybody believed it," he said.

"But they couldn't explain how it had been done either." 

Then in 1919, Elsie's mother took prints of the photographs to a talk about fairies by the Theosophical Society in Bradford.

The pictures then came to the attention of the society's president Edward Gardner, who gave a series of lectures on the photos in London in 1920.

Their word passed to Conan Doyle, who at the time was researching an article about fairy life as he looked to prove the case for his long-standing interest in spiritualism.

Dr. Burrow, Head of English and Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield, said the author was initially suspicious the pictures might be a hoax and feared he was being set up by those keen to prove him "gullible" and to debunk his beliefs.

He said from Conan Doyle's point of view, however, "if these photos proved the existence of fairies, and that you could photograph the supernatural, then they were a staging post in the argument for spiritualism".

He said Conan Doyle had several experts look over the photographs before publishing them in The Strand magazine in December 1920.

 Conan Doyle said the images if proven to be real, would "mark an epoch in human thought" and argued that "after carefully going into every possible source of error, a strong prima facie case has been built up" for their veracity.

He wrote: "The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life. 

"Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which have already been so convincingly put before it."

Following its publication in Britain the article went on to be published in Australia and the US and the images achieved worldwide notoriety and debate.

Dr. Burrow said despite attracting "widespread skepticism" Conan Doyle bought cameras for the two girls and asked them to take further photos.

He said Conan Doyle's support for the images left the girls feeling "painted into a corner" and unable to say no and, in 1921, a second set of images was published. 

Elsie with the winged fairy, offering a posy of flowers. 

"I think he believed it," said Dr. Burrow, "but he was also being strategic.

"I do not think he was that interested in fairies per se but he was enormously invested in the idea that there was more to the world than what we consider normal reality."

The author went on to write a book about the Cottingley Fairies and even discussed with Gardner a film on the subject. 

He died in 1930 but the debate about the photos he had brought to the attention of the world continued for decades until in 1983 Frances and Elsie confessed the photographs had been faked using nothing but cardboard cutouts traced from the book  Princess Mary's Gift Book", London, 1914 and long hatpins. 

Dr. Burrow said he viewed the story of how the photos came to prominence as an "accidental conspiracy" but that without Conan Doyle's involvement, there would have been no story.

The cardboard cutouts were traced from the book  Princess Mary's Gift Book", London, 1914 

                           Frances with the leaping fairy. 

"When the girls took the photos there were a few prints made at the time by the family but that would have been it," he said.

"[Without him] I imagine they would have been lost in a drawer somewhere, just a quirky family story."

Speaking to the BBC in 1983, Frances Griffiths said: "I never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. 

"I can't understand to this day why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.

"People often say to me 'Don't you feel ashamed that you have made all these poor people look like fools? They believed in you.' But I do not, because they wanted to believe."

The first photo The case was finally solved in 1982 with evidence from the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University. It holds what is supposed to be the original negatives and prints. Geoffrey Crawley editor of the British Journal of Photography soon realized that the Midge camera the girls used and the simple lens could not have produced such a sharp negative. The original print was much softer in appearance. Crawley believed that the photograph was retouched by an expert. On the negative plate, he found evidence that the face had been subdued probably by using Brasso. He believes the man behind this was Edward Gardner, a believer in fairies and a friend of Conan Doyle. When Crawley published his findings, the girls confessed that the photographs were fakes. 

Frances's daughter, Christine Lynch, appeared in an episode of the television program Antiques Roadshow in Belfast, broadcast on BBC One in January 2009, with the photographs and one of the cameras given to the girls by Doyle. Christine told the expert, that she believed, as her mother had done, that the fairies in the fifth photograph were genuine. The expert estimated the value of the items at between £25,000 and £30,000. The first edition of Frances's memoirs was published a few months later, under the title 

The "Fairy Bower" which is the fifth photo and only photograph that Elsie and Frances stood by as being authentic. 

Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies. The book contains correspondence, sometimes "bitter", between Elsie and Frances. In one letter, dated 1983, Frances wrote:

"I hated those photographs from the age of 16 when Mr. Gardner presented me with a bunch of flowers and wanted me to sit on the platform [at a Theosophical Society meeting] with him. I realized what I was in for if I did not keep myself hidden." The 1997 films Fairytale a True Story and Photographing Fairies by the events surrounding the Cottingley Fairies were inspired.

"The Beck" today where the first fairy photograph was taken. 

The Wright home is now owned by the graphic novel artist Luke Horsman who was unaware of the house’s history of fantasy and pictorial artifice when he bought it.

The only access to the beck is in the back gardens of houses of Main St and of the new housing estate nearby, making it hard for anyone wanting to re-enact the Great Fairy Photo Hoax. The only public glimpse of the watercourse is from a bridge (pic) on Lysander Way, in that new estate.

Sources

https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/375/the-cottingley-fairies-a-study-in-deception

http://yorkshireridings.blogspot.com/2019/10/cottingley-fairy-story.html

Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers