The TV special begins

_Elsa_

“Welcome to our special show about unicorns,” says the TV host. “We have with us tonight Sarah Laskow who wrote the book ‘Why Is Everyone Still So Obsessed with Unicorns?’ It’s amazing how many people are fascinated with unicorns. Children love them! Adults do too.”

The announcer introduces the content of this special ………………….  

‘People, in short, are absolutely obsessed with unicorns, and have been for a very long time, as Atlantic science editor Sarah Laskow writes in her new illustrated children’s book, The Very Short, Entirely True History of Unicorns. Last week, the Cut spoke to Laskow about why the myth of horses with a horn on their head has persisted for so long and across so many cultures, why narwhals are cool as hell, and even disclosed some of the more PG-13 unicorn facts that didn’t make the book.’

He now begins to ask the author some questions………………..

‘What made you want to write a book about unicorns in the first place?

Sarah Laskow: It started off as a slightly different idea. I had read something — I’m actually not sure if it’s true or not — about how there might have actually been fire-breathing lizards that inspired the idea of dragons. And the idea was that these certain types of lizards exhale methane, and if they had gotten too close to a fire, their breath would have caught on fire, and that’s where people got the idea of dragons from.

That was the germ of the idea, to write a factual book about a fantasy creature. And from there it just evolved to be a little more about history, and we decided to do unicorns instead of dragons, because unicorns are so fun and interesting. There’s much history there to talk about, so much real, actual, factual ways that people have talked about these creatures and thought about these creatures.

One of the things that stood out the most to me when reading it is how myths of this single-horned creature existed all around the world in all these different cultures.

It’s really incredible, right? That you have people all over the world coming up with this same idea that we know is fictional. I think it’s because it’s really plausible. The idea of a four-legged creature that has one horn is just slightly orthogonal to the reality that you see every day. There’s tons of creatures with two horns, there’s tons of four-legged creatures and there are creatures out there that have only one horn. So it takes a little bit of imagination, but not a ton of imagination.

It also seems like people got really creative with it. You write about one that had a horse’s body and elephant feet and the head of a stag and a long black horn and was just a mishmash of all these different creatures. People threw everything in there.

Totally. I think my favorite one is the Zoroastrian mythical one that had one horn but also six eyes and three feet and just the wrong number of everything. There was a funny detail that didn’t make it into the book, because it’s a book that’s meant for kids, but it was also supposed to have a very large number of testicles. I think, like, five? That one was a real triumph of imagination.’ (Info here) 

“We’re going to take a break here and we’ll be back shortly,” says the TV host. 

Let’s continue here - What a great interview!

Start at the beginning - Misty falls in love