The Bird That Watches the Fall

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Tower Hill, London, deep winter

I went to the Tower at first light, before the crowds, when the ravens are still hunched and silent on the green and the wardens have not yet come round with the meat. There are always ravens there, and there is always someone to tell you why: that the kingdom will fall if they ever leave the walls, that a certain king ordered them kept after an astronomer complained they blocked his view of the stars and threatened doom if they were sent away. I could not settle, going through the record, on how old the story actually is — it reads to me like a Victorian graft onto older stock, but the older stock is real enough, and darker.

The darker root is Welsh. In the second branch of the Mabinogi, Brân the Blessed — his name means raven outright — commands that his severed head be buried facing France beneath the White Hill, to guard the island from invasion for as long as it stays covered. The White Hill is where the Tower now stands. Whether the caged birds on the green are a folk memory of that older head-burial, or simply a coincidence that later storytellers were glad to seize on, nobody I have spoken to will say with confidence. The two stories fit together too neatly to be entirely unrelated, and too neatly to be entirely trusted.

Away from London the raven's reputation needs no royal warrant. Go into the hill farms of the Marches, or up into the Highland glens, and you will still hear it called the corpse bird, and you will still find people — not many now, but some — who will tell you that a raven settling on the roof of a house, or croaking three times over it and turning back the way it came, means a death inside before the year turns. The counting mattered: three croaks was worse than one, and the direction of the flight — toward the house or away from it — could apparently be read either as warning or as reprieve, depending on which county you asked. County folklore collectors of the last century wrote down dozens of these small local grammars, no two quite alike, all agreeing only that the bird meant something, and that the something was rarely good.

Older still, and harder to date properly, is the raven's place on the battlefield in Irish tradition, where the war-goddesses Badb and the Morrígan — and Macha with them, the triad often blurring into one another in the telling — were said to appear over the slaughter in raven or scald-crow form, shrieking above the dying before the fighting had even finished. It is not hard to see the practical seed of that image: ravens follow armies because armies leave the dead for them, and a bird that gathers before a battle rather than after it would have seemed, to men waiting in the ranks, like a bird that already knew the outcome. Whether the omen grew out of that grim observation, or whether the observation was fitted afterward onto an older belief that birds carried some knowledge the living lacked, is one of those questions the sources simply do not answer, and I have stopped expecting them to.

By the time I left the Tower the light had gone properly grey and the ravens had moved to the wall, hunched, watching the ground the way they are said to have always watched it — patiently, and with what people have for a very long time chosen to read as knowledge.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.