One of my children has a book - you will have seen the type of thing - called something like Amazing Facts About All Kinds of Things, or Isn't Science Amazing, Kids?, or Let's Be Amazed at How Amazing All the Amazing Things in the World Are. It's a big long list of questions, essentially, with 'expert' factoid responses. 'Does anything eat seagulls?'; 'What is the biggest number anybody has ever imagined?'; 'How do hovercraft hover?'; 'Why is Pluto no longer a planet?'; 'Why are plants green?'; 'Do pangolins poo?' etc.
Anyway, I was flicking through this book idly the other day and came across a question about unicorns - I think it was something along the lines of 'Where did the myth of the unicorn come from?' - and found myself becoming mildly irritated at the answer. What the book told me was that the myth of the unicorn most likely came from rumours about rhinos, which by a process of Chinese whispers (I don't think the book used that expression exactly) gave rise to the notion that there were horses running about with horns on their heads.
I always become mildly irritated when these sorts of explanations are offered for the origins of myths and legends - usually offered a la Michael Caine peering over his spectacles to announce that 'not many people know that', or Rafael Benitez insisting 'It's a fact'. The origin of dragons was people discovering old bones that belonged to dinosaurs. The origin of elves, dwarfs, fairies etc. was a cultural memory of other species of hominid. The origin of centaurs was the Greeks first encountering steppe nomads riding around on horseback. The origin of sea monsters was people seeing whales for the first time. And so on.
I become mildly irritated on such occasions for two reasons.
The first is that it denies to humanity its capacity to imagine, and to make up stories. Why on earth would anyone think that human beings would be incapable of dreaming up dragons, or unicorns, or centaurs, of their own accord, merely on the basis that they lived in the past? The impulse to explain mythic creatures in this way is curiously unimaginative - even imagination-denying. The entire premise seems to discount one of the most obvious features of the human intellect, which is that it can envisage things that are not real.
The second is that it is so brutally prosaic and banalifying. Do we really think that the myth of a dragon, or a unicorn, was simply created on the basis of the existence of old bones in the ground, or rhinos, and had nothing to do with the symbolic, the expressionistic, the poetic, or even the spiritual themes with which those creatures are imbued? Is the reason why the dragon myth caught on that it explained bones in the ground, or is it rather that the idea and image of the monster resonates with us somehow at a level we are not quite consciously aware of?
The reduction of unicorns to rhinos is, in other words, precisely that - a reduction. We did not dream up a unicorn because somebody's uncle Alf talked to somebody's aunt Bessie who talked to somebody's cousin Fred who talked to his sister-in-law Harriet who talked to her friend Samantha who said she had seen something running around on four legs with a horn on its head. We dreamed them up, and continue to dream them up, because they were once imagined, and because once imagined they came to mean something. We consider them significant in semiotic terms and not because of an origin story that seems neatly tied together. And our ancestors created them not because they were stupidly trying to parse rumours of rhinos, but because they were imaginative, and creative, and liked stories.
And the same is true across the piece. We do ourselves a disservice, and make the world and our place in it much less interesting, if we search for common sense or pseudo-historical explanations for why we possess the myths we possess. We possess them because creating myths is one of the things we do.
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