Review

Books

Culture

Re-enchanting

26 December 2024

6 min read

Re-enchanting… reading lists

As a Re-enchanting series ends, here's our guests and staff book picks.

Tom Rippon

Tom studies English and French at the University of St Andrews, focusing on Older Scots.

Jodie Cook on Unsplash.

Inside a book, we find ‘a world that reflects our own, but isn’t this world’, at least that’s what David Bennett had to say when he appeared on our Re-enchanting podcast earlier this year, and given the power of books to transport us beyond the everyday, what better way to start each episode than with the question, ‘what are you reading?’

Many of our guests are self-confessed bookworms and admit to having several books on the go at once, dipping in and out according to their mood and the time of day, and a sizeable number profess a love of audiobooks. So, after a blitz of the Seen & Unseen back-catalogue – accompanied by many sidetracks into our guests’ ponderings with Belle Tindall and Justin Brierley – here’s what’s on the Re-enchanting reading list.

Chapter one: by way of introduction

At first glance, it would seem that our guests are a serious bunch, because the Re-enchanting book list is dominated by non-fiction. Works on the intersection of science, religion and society are clear front-runners, ranging from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Francis Spufford’s pick) to Charles Foster’s The Selfless Gene (Paul Kingsnorth), but more general works also abound. An interest in re-enchantment clearly involves careful study of the everyday from cradle – Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker) – to grave, for example, Stephen and Cynthia Covey’s father-daughter collaboration, Live Life in Crescendo, Your Most Important Work is Always Ahead of You (Michael Hastings). Some encouraging words at a time when questions about ageing and illness are on the national agenda.

Chapter two: heading (east) into deeper waters

As a podcast that invites its guests onto the roof of Lambeth Palace Library, it will come as no surprise that our guests’ picks also feature a selection of books on theology and spirituality. Nick Spencer recommends Prophecy and Discernment by Walter Moberly, whilst Brooklyn pastor Rasool Berry brings us back down to earth with Sam Alberry’s What God Has to Say About Our Bodies: Why the Gospel is Good News for Our Physical Selves.

Many guests, however, seem to be directing our attention eastwards towards the spirituality of Orthodox Christianity; their picks include classics such as Michael Kozlov and Arsenius Troyepolsky’s The Way of the Pilgrim (Martin Shaw); and The Art of Prayer by Hegumen Khariton (Molly Worthen); as well as a newer work by the twentieth-century saint, Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wounded by Love (Paul Kingsnorth). But this road of literary spirituality doesn’t stop in Eastern Europe, it keeps going until our arrival in Nepal via the memoirs and meditations of Tenzin Palmo in Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman’s Quest for Enlightenment (Sabina Alkira). Stories of global faith for a globalised world indeed.

Chapter three: story of my life

It is said that the best stories are the real ones and our guests apparently agree: biographies and memoirs pop up repeatedly throughout their picks. Sticking with the theme of spiritual journeys, our guests are reading works which recount journeys away from faith communities, such as Megan Phelps-Roper’s Unfollow (Glen Scrivener), as well as ones deeper into faith. One of the most striking of these is James Pennington’s nineteenth-century abolitionist pamphlet Two Years Absence (Esau McCaulley). Pennington was a self-taught pastor who left his church community following his re-enfranchisement to study theology at Princeton. His pamphlet was adapted from a sermon given to prepare his congregation for the journey which would take him deeper into his faith, but away from the community in which he lived it out. Many stories begin with a ‘setting out’ only to ‘return home’ in the closing pages, and perhaps this structure bears a closer resemblance to real life than it may initially appear?

Venturing away from the spiritual, but remaining in the political vein, perhaps the most frequently mentioned book so far has to be Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge, himself a Re-enchanting guest way back in series 2. Alternatively, readers who have had their fill of politics may wish to try the memoirs of polar explorer Robert Bartlett, as recommended by Molly Worthen, or, to take a leaf from Milton Jones, the equally fascinating and no-less-hair-raising Windswept and Interesting: My Autobiography by Billy Connolly.

So far, fiction has not featured much amongst our guests’ recommendations, but tentative favourite would be the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead. Set in present-day Appalachia and inspired by Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead touches on the poverty and struggles of America’s left-behind communities, who today find themselves worlds away from the glitz of global politics, yet wielding a political influence that extends far beyond their own borders.

Chapter four: A whole new world or the world reimagined?

In the instances when fiction has appeared in our guests’ bed stands, it seems that they have a taste for fantasy and science fiction. The favourite by far here is C. S. Lewis, with several guests reminiscing of their experience of reading Narnia, but for Jack Palmer-Wright the experience of rereading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe took special significance this year as he introduced it to his five-year-old for the first time. Adult readers looking to relive the experience of discovering Lewis for the first time should check out Lewis’ lesser-known Space Trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairytale for Grown-Ups, recommended by Holly Ordway as a prophetic tale for today’s world.

Other stalwarts of the fantasy genre also made an appearance, such as J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, but perhaps the most surprising recommendation to come out of Re-enchanting would be Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (Frank Skinner). Published in 1666 and considered to be perhaps the first science-fiction novel, The Blazing World is set in a parallel world with fantastical technologies reached via the North Pole. The characters, including Cavendish herself, criss-cross between worlds as the novel moves through its three sections, ‘Romancical’, ‘Philosophical’ and ‘Fantastical’, exploring questions of social organisation, governance, and whether it is really possible to create a new religion complete with a fully fledged religious literature. Given the ongoing conversations about the place of religion in the twenty-first century, perhaps it’s time for Cavendish to make a comeback.

Chapter five: what next?

Stories are made of words but they are also made of silences, and these narrative gaps are just as key to getting a story to take flight as the most well-chosen, well-balanced phrase. The biggest gap in our Re-enchanting reading list is poetry. Books about poets – the Romantics, Seamus Heaney, to name a couple - have made an appearance, but we have yet to receive a straightforward poetry recommendation from any of our guests. So, should you feel the need to fill this gap, here’s a few from us for anyone looking for something to dip into over the coming year.

Sara Teasdale
Mary Oliver
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Jackie Kay
Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
Victor Hugo

Happy reading and see you in 2025 for more Re-enchanting.

Explore Re-enchanting episodes

2024 staff picks

And here’s the picks from the rest of the Seen & Unseen editorial team.

Graham Tomlin, editor-in-chief

Sally Rooney: Normal People.
Jessie Childs: The Siege of Loyalty House: A New History of the English Civil War.

Belle Tindall, staff writer

Selina Stone: Tarry Awhile .
Sally Rooney: Intermezzo.
Frank C. Laubach: Letters from a Modern Mystic.

Nick Jones, senior editor

Jon Fosse: A Shining.
Mary Millar: Jane Haining – A Life of Love and Courage.
Peter Ross: Steeple Chasing.

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Review

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

11 April 2025

5 min read

Here’s what Death of a Unicorn gets very wrong

‘The unicorn was a Christ-allegory’ and other lies.

Iona Curtius

Iona is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, studying how we can understand truth.

A tapestry depicts a unicorn resting within a fenced enclosure.

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries).

Public domain, The Met Museum.

I don’t do horror or gore. And yet, I just saw the gory creature feature comedy horror Death of a Unicorn. I have not seen such a clichéd movie in a very long time (probably since Don’t Look Up…). Death of a Unicorn gives us a strained father-daughter relationship, the artsy young girl with silver rings on every finger and dyed hair, cartoonishly evil rich people, their creepy but stupid blonde son, the put-upon butler… and… the unicorn. However, the biggest cliché of them all is perhaps the desperate attempt to subvert expectations and tell a new story about a familiar trope… and failing.

Given the title of the film, one would be forgiven for assuming that unicorns play a significant role in it. One would be mistaken. The conceit of killer-unicorn is a fun one. I wish the film had played with it more. Instead, the unicorns themselves barely feature and are not particularly interesting or subversive. The perception of the unicorn that is put forward by the characters likewise is trite and tired.

The film features another classic scene: the ‘plucky young woman digs out her laptop and falls down a google rabbit hole to research paranormal/fantastical phenomenon’. In her research Ridley comes across a set of medieval tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt. These tapestries do exist in real life and are indeed now housed at The Met. The Met’s fictional website in the film informs Ridley that the fifth tapestry in the series ‘The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden’ only survives in fragments (true) and that scholars believe the missing part of the tapestry most likely showed the unicorn going on a murderous rampage (very much not true). From this, Ridley deduces that, since unicorns do indeed appear to be real, the warnings of old ought to be heeded. In the film, Ridley is proved right, the unicorns do turn out to be murderous monsters out for the blood of those who would abuse the remains of their dead foal.

While the real Met website does indeed show us the torn tapestry, it features no such conjecture about the gory violence the unicorn might have inflicted prior to being subdued by the maiden.

In one of her desperate attempts to reason with the megalomaniacal pharmaceutical tycoons, Ridley slips in a sentence about the unicorn serving as an allegory for Christ. This is a claim that is repeated all across the internet in various fora, fan sites, even some old scholarship. But that is exactly what this theory is: outdated scholarship… mixed with a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of paternalistic attitudes towards the past and half-misremembered folklore about Christian symbolism. It is true that medieval art is rich in symbolism. It is also true that medieval European cultures were deeply steeped in Christian religious traditions. However, as Barbara Drake Boehm writes in her recent book on the tapestries ‘the Cloisters Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries have … fallen victim to a tendency to perceive Christianity in every stitch’. The fact that one of the hunters has a scabbard that invokes the ‘Queen of Heaven’ (the Virgin Mary), or that another carries rosary beads, are most likely simply indicative of the fact these were common items ‘within the majority-Christian society in which the tapestries were created’. (A Blessing of Unicorns, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020).

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past.

One doesn’t need a degree in art history to figure out that such an allegorical relation would make no sense either. If the unicorn was representative of Christ and the hunt of his Passion, why does the unicorn fight back? If the untouched maiden in whose lap the unicorn reposes is the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, why does she help the hunters trap and kill the unicorn? The tapestry that supposedly shows the unicorn resurrected and at peace in its captivity does not even appear to belong to the same narrative as the other tapestries. And why would a resurrected Christ-figure be shown in supposed captivity?

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past. ‘Ah, well, back then they were all religious fanatics that believed in silly things like Jesus and unicorns.’ The implication being that in our modern, enlightened state we couldn’t possibly be accused of believing in silly simplistic mythical accounts of the world… Yeah. Not only is this of course false, it also distract from the very real things we could learn from the past.

The film in the end wants to have it both ways. It wants to ridicule medieval people (based on lazy stereotypes) as well as perpetuating some of the most backward attitudes woven into the tapestries. So, what is the real true meaning of the tapestries and of unicorns? I don’t know. I can’t offer ‘real true’ interpretations (because they don’t exist). What I can offer is a careful and close engagement.

What strikes me about the myth of the unicorn is what the unicorn does stand for. Over the centuries the unicorn has been used as a symbol for purity, innocence, humility, and sometimes fertility. In medieval poetry the (male) bard would often cast himself as the unicorn, beguiled by his beautiful lady, desiring nothing more than to rest his head in her lap. Little of this particular metaphor has survived into the modern pop-culture. What seems to have survived is the strong connection with young virgins. This particular trope features heavily in the film too though the film makers attempt to gloss over the sexual implications of ‘virgin’ by speaking only of ‘maidens’ (which still means the same thing but doesn’t have the same sexual baggage for modern ears).

Now, that is indeed an interesting aspect worth unpacking. Why is it that unicorns are so attracted to young women who have not had sex? Why the obsession with virginity and the implied association that – for a woman! – having sex sullies something pure? What does it mean that both the hunters in the tapestries and the rich people in the film use a woman’s body and sexuality to trap the unicorn and commit their violence? Where’s the film that deals with those questions? Until they make that one maybe I’ll stick with My Little Pony, I’m told that has significantly less disembowelment.

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