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One of the Unicorn Tapestries at The Cloisters.

Chris Lavers has written A Natural History of Unicorns.

The book is studded with fetching pictures of creatures which may or may not have combined chimerically to create the mythic beast, described in early days at greatest length by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court, in 398 BC. Its coat is white, its head dark red, and its eyes dark blue; it is swifter than all beasts, and impossible to capture alive. Its horn, crimson, black and white, confers immunity to disease and poison when carved into a drinking vessel. And so the image recurs in varied forms through antiquity, endorsed by Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and the Septuagint translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Greek. This Biblical authority derives from the arbitrary translation of the Hebrew reem (‘large, horned, domestically useless’) as monoceros. Read the review by Elspeth Barker.

Unicorn story I cannot forget: that part in The Once and Future King where young Gawaine, Agravaine, Gareth and Gaheris hunt a unicorn for their horrible mammy, Queen Morgause.

Here’s an old New Yorker story about how two mathematicians, the Chudnovskys, assisted the Metropolitan Museum in producing a high-resolution digital image of the Unicorn Tapestries. The Chudnovskys, subject of an earlier profile, are number theorists who had tried to calculate the value of pi beyond two billion decimal places.