A Journey Through Care of Magical Creatures. Pottermore Publishing

      INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

      The history of magic is as long as time and as wide as the world. In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic.

      This series of eBooks will reveal the world of magic and unlock its secrets. It will go back thousands of years. It will travel to the far corners of the world. It will reach the stars. It will explore under the earth. It will decipher mysterious languages. We’ll encounter some of the most colourful characters in history. We’ll discover the curious incidents and truth behind legends. We’ll see how, in the quest to discover magic, practitioners laid the foundations of science.

      This series, structured around lessons from the Hogwarts curriculum, will show how this long and rich history has nourished the fictional world of Harry Potter.

      The starting point for these eBooks was the exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which opened at the British Library in October 2017, twenty years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in the UK in 1997. For the exhibition, curators spent over a year searching through the 150 million items that the British Library holds to find the most magical. Then they sourced special artefacts to be loaned from other notable institutions. In October 2018, the New-York Historical Society took on the British Library exhibition, adding books and artefacts from their own collection, as well as other fascinating loans.

      This series of four eBook shorts contains worldly wonders from both exhibitions, exploring J.K. Rowling’s magical inventions alongside their cultural and historical forebears. Throughout are links between ours and the wizarding world, told through extraordinary stories from the history of magic.

      CARE OF MAGICAL CREATURES

      We live in a time when we can watch, spellbound, astonishing video footage of animals from all over the world at any time: from the depths of the ocean to mountain peaks; from the heat of the desert to the cold of the Arctic; from the midst of the rainforest to an isolated island.

      However, for millennia, people could only read strange tales or hear intriguing stories of creatures they were unlikely to ever see. Even the images they saw were often painted by artists who had never laid eyes on what they were depicting.

      As the world was explored, tales of amazing new animals spread, and information – backed up by emerging scientific reasoning – was shared more widely. Books were filled with wondrous creatures and ‘cabinets of curiosity’ were created – collections of strange wonders from all over the world, mixing the real and the imagined: dragons and elephants, unicorns and narwhals.

      At Hogwarts, Harry and his friends were given Care of Magical Creatures lessons, which introduced them to all manner of fantastic beasts: from unpredictable Hippogriffs that demanded a fair degree of caution and respect, to – frankly – repellent and downright dangerous Blast-Ended Skrewts.

      People have always been fascinated with exotic animal life and strange, powerful, clever creatures with abilities that ignite the imagination, but today it’s relatively easy to distinguish truth from myth. Not that long ago, however, it wasn’t, and people were much more willing to believe in the existence of things of which they hadn’t seen any actual evidence.

      Part 1: Visions of the Unicorn

      The unicorn is a beautiful beast found throughout the forests of northern Europe. It is a pure white, horned horse when fully grown, though the foals are initially golden and turn silver before achieving maturity.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

      Unicorns have been written about in natural history books and medical texts for thousands of years as though they might have been found out in the wild. Today, we have cute, cuddly toy unicorns that sneeze rainbows. The characteristics of unicorns have varied greatly down the years: there have been fierce unicorns, luck-bringing unicorns, unicorns as symbols of purity and unicorns whose body parts have magical medical properties.

      They’ve lived in people’s imaginations through stories and myths, so much so that you might just be able to believe that these wondrous beasts roamed free in some far-off exotic land. But, if these gentle, elusive woodland creatures did exist, sadly there would probably be someone who’d want to hunt them.

      The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenceless to save yourself, and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.

Firenze – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

      In the Harry Potter series killing a unicorn is an awful thing to do, and historical traditions also underlined it as a very serious crime that resulted in sullying your soul. In the real world there are documented instances of apparent unicorn hunting. One of them appears in Ambroise Paré’s Discourse on the unicorn, published in 1582. Paré was chief surgeon to the French crown, an innovator and early adopter of evidence-based research. The book (despite its fantastical unicorns) was actually a text questioning the falsehoods in ancient medicine. His writing had been prompted by a patient asking a sceptical Paré to prescribe unicorn horn for some complaint – the image in his book showed the killing and skinning of a ‘pirassoipi’, or two-horned unicorn.

      It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead. Harry had never seen anything so beautiful and sad. Its long, slender legs were stuck out at odd angles where it had fallen and its mane was spread pearly-white on the dark leaves.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

      ‘It’s not easy ter catch a unicorn, they’re powerful magic creatures. I never knew one ter be hurt before.’

Hagrid – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

      Unicorns also appeared in On the Properties of Animals, published in Paris in the 16th century. The book was a ‘bestiary’, a compendium of animals, written in Greek by a Cypriot scribe, and produced for a European audience. Bestiaries often combined animals that were real with animals that we now know to be mythical. Along with drawings and descriptions of creatures like the heron, the pelican, a wolf, a porcupine and a cuttlefish, this bestiary had a centaur with a pair of over-extended arms serving as its front legs!

      The text accompanying the illustrations was a poem about the natural world composed by the Byzantine poet Manuel Philes, who lived at the turn of the 14th century. It was then copied out for the bestiary by a Cypriot called Angelos Vergekios two hundred years later, and illustrations were supplied by his daughter.

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