A mistranslated Hebrew word put a unicorn into the King James Bible
Medieval bestiaries filed griffins and unicorns right beside lions and lambs, with no separate shelf for the imaginary. What mattered was meaning, not anatomy. The unicorn stood for Christ, the basilisk for the devil, and one translation slip turned a wild ox in the Psalms into a horned emblem of purity.
Folklore is crowded with beings that nobody has ever shown to exist scientifically: dragons, griffins, centaurs, hybrids stitched together from several animals. Some were taken as real by the people who told of them. Others grew from muddled travellers' reports, like the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a sheep-like creature said to sprout from the ground on a stalk.
In classical epics monsters mostly exist to be beaten. Odysseus faces the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis; Perseus overcomes Medusa; Theseus kills the half-bull Minotaur; Heracles slays the Hydra. Their job is to make the hero look magnificent. Some of these shapes travelled a long way: Pegasus, centaurs and Triton surface in Indian art, where sphinxes take the form of winged lions.
Medieval Europe used such animals chiefly as allegory. A unicorn was thought too fast to hunt, catchable only if it came to a virgin, fell asleep in her lap and let a hunter take it. It signified innocence and Christ, and its small size his humility. The King James translators rendered the Hebrew re'em as unicorn in Psalm 92:10, a choice later versions corrected to wild ox. Dragons, pictured as super-sized serpents that killed by crushing rather than venom, stood for sin and the devil and were supposed to live in hot lands such as Ethiopia and India.
Bestiary artists cared little for accurate likeness. Even real creatures were drawn fancifully, because their moral lesson outweighed their appearance. In Christian imagery the lamb meant Christ, the dove the Holy Spirit, the griffin a guardian of the dead and the manticore temptation. The historian Nona C. Flores notes that by the tenth century illustrators had largely given up naturalistic drawing in favour of allegorical rules.
Source: Legendary creature
