As They Ought to Be

THE BOOK OF BEASTS (296 pp.)--Translated by T. H. White--Putnam ($5).

How does one catch a unicorn? Simple. "A virgin girl is led to where he lurks, and there she is sent off by herself into the wood. He soon leaps into her lap when he sees her, and embraces her, and hence he gets caught."

This helpful hint is offered by a 12th century bestiary, compiled by an anonymous monk and dusted off by British Novelist T. H. White (The Sword in the Stone). The work is a charming illustration of how medieval man's other-worldly eye rested on the wonders of nature. As natural history, the book shows astonishingly small powers of observation of even familiar barnyard animals ("the virility of horses is extinguished when their manes are cut"). Armchair hunters will be pleased to read that lions use their long tails to rub out their tracks, that when an elephant pair wishes to have a young one, they first eat of the mandrake (representing Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge), and that whales will let sailors settle on their backs, but dive from under them if they light campfires.

Readers may also join the lively game that Translator White plays among the footnotes and try to puzzle out what animal, vegetable or mineral the Middle Ages mistook for unicorn, dragon, griffin, basilisk, etc. White guesses that the poison-breathing basilisk was very likely the cobra, but thinks the griffin was strictly mythological, in fact "something of a Hieroglyphin."

Any 20th century reader who wishes to feel superior in his shining science to the credulity of the Middle Ages will have an easy time of it. Scholar White insists, however, that a bestiary is no fairy tale, but a serious scientific work with kernels of fact in most of the fantastic legends. The remarkable thing, says White, is not that most of the observations were wildly distorted, but that they were made at all, across continents and centuries. Science aside, who would want to miss the 12th century hedgehog model that "provides itself with double breathing holes, so that, when it suspects the north wind is going to blow, it can shut up the northern one"? Or the camel which, when sold to a stranger, falls ill in disgust over the price? Animals may not be what the bestiary says they are, but obviously they ought to be.

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