"The Man Who Loved Unicorns": Ezine article by Else Cederborg, formerly published

The museum of Ole Worm (1558-1654) was the very first museum in Denmark. It was filled with every kind of exotica from old fossils to stuffed animals and a large part of these objects exists even today. As he was obsessed by collecting artifacts of all kinds his museum is rich in details. Nothing seems too little or too shallow for him. For instance, he was interested in lemmings and succeeded in establishing the fact that they were in truth rodents. The old, alternate opinion, which still was very popular, was that they simply generated from air. Another old myth that concerned him was the one about the birds of paradise which were supposed not to have any feet. Once again he proved that the myth did not tell the truth as they indeed had feet. This he did by drawing them.
However, his most illustrious exploit was the one of unicorns. The legend went that they were magical animals, but he determined that they did not exist which was quite logical as nobody had ever seen them. He also established the truth that their famed, magical horns were nothing but narhwhal tusks. Strangely enough he himself could not shake off some other superstitious beliefs about unicorns. One of them was that the horns of these admittedly non-existent animals could heal people when poisoned. To prove that the legend spoke the truth he set out to poison pets and then feeding them ground-up narhwal tusks in order to save them. According to his reports they did indeed survive being poisoned when fed narhwal tusks.
Perhaps it is this experiment which earned him H.P. Lovecraft's interest and turned him into his notorious character Olaus Wormius who was set to translate the "Grimoire the Necronomicon" from Arabic into Latin. This literary character is rather creepy, which Ole Worm doesn't seem to have been.
When he died from a bladder-disorder his rich collection of exotica was sold to the Danish king, Frederik III, who turned it into the basis for "The Royal Kunstkammer". This collection of historical artifacts may still be seen today as part of the very fine and interesting Zoological Museum in Copenhagen.

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