Just to the north of the village of Scharzfeld in central Germany is a stunning cave system in the highlands of the West Harz. Formed over the millennia as water carved away the soluble rocks, these caves are spectacular and draw in thousands of tourists each year.
Perhaps the most spectacular of all the caves, and certainly the one which draws the most visitors, is named the Unicorn Cave. For, you see, this cave has a very long history, and has become associated with a particular misconception.
Known since at least 1541, this cave has held a special part in the legends of the area. For, it is believed, this cave was once home to unicorns.
Two Legs, One Horn, Zero Logic
In 1686, the German polymath (and scientific rival to Isaac Newton) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz visited the site of the cave. Intrigued by a local trade in unicorn artifacts, he wrote a report about the cave where he mentioned locals had found the bones of a unicorn inside.
The locals were apparently industriously employed in grinding up the “unicorn” bones they kept finding in the cave system, and selling the powder to visitors. The bones of a unicorn at that time were thought to have potent medical benefits, much like the horns of rhino do today in traditional Chinese medicine.
Often such powders are cut with just about anything and entirely fake. It seems that this cottage industry had sprung up to exploit the legends of the cave, but from where did those legends come?
The bones were real, but the association with unicorns apparently grew in parallel. The story goes as follows: a wise woman living nearby had once been threatened by a monk in the company of some warriors. A unicorn had appeared to defend the woman, and the monk had been swallowed up into the cave system.
Otto von Guericke, another German scientist, had also visited the site earlier in the 17th century in his capacity as the mayor of Magdeburg, the provincial capital. His report went even further than that of Leibniz: he had seen the bones themselves.
Guericke’s opinion was firm: these were indeed the bones of a unicorn. And he went even further, proposing a reconstruction of the mighty beast, although it would be Leibniz who finally completed the drawing of what this unicorn would look like.
The beast was certainly odd looking. It did have a single horn, but it also had only two legs, disproportionately long compared to the body and tail. The reconstruction suggested that this animal would have dragged itself along the ground with its huge horn jutting forward.
Hardly the idealized image of a graceful unicorn, but the reconstruction stuck and it would be a further two centuries before the egregious errors of Guericke and Leibniz were exposed. In 1872 Rudolf Virchow, known today as the “father of pathology”, visited the cave with a rather more enlightened and scientific eye.
Virchow carried out an excavation and (correctly) identified the bones he recovered from the caves as belonging to extinct species of bears, as well as mammoth and cave lions. In all, over 70 different types of animal bones have been found there. The horn of the unicorn is a narwhal tusk.
To a modern viewer the Magdeburg Unicorn, as the reconstruction came to be known, is clearly ridiculous. One can immediately tell that the animal proposed could never have existed, and that the reconstruction is clearly derived from multiple species.
But for two centuries the idea of unicorns living in the caves grew from local rumor, to profitable business venture, to (not very) scientific reconstruction.
There exists one small wrinkle to the story, regarding the caves themselves. In 2021 something truly unusual was found in there, worthy of much more attention than the fictitious unicorn.
Known as the Giant deer bone of Einhornhöhle, it is the oldest piece of European art ever found. Nor was it made by man, with experts believing that the carved antler was the work of Neanderthals.
There is magic in the cave, after all. However it looks nothing like the vision of Guericke and Leibniz.
Top Image: Reconstruction of the Magdeburg Unicorn, based on the known species in the cave and Leibniz’s conjecture. Source: Corradox / CC BY-SA 3.0.
By Joseph Green
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