The Raven in Mythology

Few birds carry as much weight in human imagination as the raven. Its black plumage, its hoarse voice, its taste for carrion, and its startling intelligence have made it, in nearly every culture, a being of the in-between — a creature of the dead, a messenger of the gods, a watcher at the edge of the world. The figure of the raven is one of the deepest in world folklore.

Huginn and Muninn, the Ravens of Odin

In the Norse tradition, the great god Odin kept two ravens on his shoulders. Their names were Huginn (“thought”) and Muninn (“memory”), and each morning they flew out across the world and returned at evening to whisper in Odin’s ear the news of all that they had seen. Odin, in the Grímnismál of the Poetic Edda, expresses a touching anxiety about the two: “Huginn and Muninn fly each day / over the wide earth; / I fear for Huginn lest he come not back, / but for Muninn I fear yet more.” The two ravens are the eyes and the memory of the All-Father.

The two ravens, with the two wolves Geri and Freki, are Odin’s constant companions. They sit on his throne, Hliðskjálf, and they watch the Nine Worlds. The figure of the two ravens has been a powerful one in the modern imagination, from the works of Tolkien to the images of modern fantasy.

Branwen of the Welsh Tradition

In the Welsh tradition, the great figure of the raven is Branwen, the white raven, the sister of Bendigeidfran, the giant of the second branch of the Mabinogion. Branwen was given in marriage to the Irish king Matholwch, and when she was mistreated by the Irish court, Bran crossed the Irish Sea to rescue her. The seven survivors of the war brought the head of Bran back to Wales, where it was buried beneath the White Mount in London as a protection against invasion. As long as the head lay there, the island would not be conquered.

The Welsh name Bran means “raven,” and the great family of the Bendigeidfran was the family of the raven-god. The London connection is preserved in the story of the ravens of the Tower of London, and the older tradition is the ancestor of the later custom. The ravens of the Tower are still kept by a Royal Ravenmaster, and the kingdom of England is said to fall if they leave.

The Pacific Northwest Raven

The Pacific Northwest of North America is the home of the great Raven tradition of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples. The Raven is the trickster-creator, the being who brought the sun out of the box, who made the rivers and the mountains, who taught the people how to fish and how to make a fire. He is not a god in the usual sense; he is a transformer, a being who walks through the world and changes it. He is also a trickster, a glutton, a lover, a father of children who often turn out to be the rocks and the tides.

The Raven is carved on the great totem poles of the Pacific Northwest, painted on the house-fronts, and sung in the great potlatch ceremonies. The Raven is the figure of the being who could change the world by his own act, and he is the friend of the human.

The Morrígan and the Irish War-Goddess

In the Irish tradition, the great figure of the raven is the Morrígan, the war-goddess, the phantom queen. The Morrígan appeared on the battlefield in the form of a raven, and her cry was the cry of the slaughter. She is sometimes a single being, sometimes a triple figure of three sisters: Morrígan, Badb, and Macha. She was the prophetess of the battle, and the figure of the raven on the shoulder of the dying warrior was the figure of the Morrígan claiming her due. The figure of the raven is one of the most constant figures of the Celtic folk imagination.

The Ravens of the Bible

The biblical ravens are figures of the providence of God. The ravens fed Elijah by the brook Cherith, carrying bread and meat to the prophet each morning and each evening. The ravens of Noah were sent out from the ark to see whether the waters had abated; the first returned, and the second did not return, and Noah knew that the earth was drying. The raven of the Hebrew Bible is largely a figure of the divine care, and the figure passed into the Christian monastic tradition as the figure of the hermit, the desert father, the solitary prayer.

Apollo and the Roman Augury

The Greek god Apollo had a raven, and the figure of the raven is one of the oldest of the Greek religious images. In the most familiar story, the raven was sent to fetch water for Apollo’s sacrifice, was delayed, and brought back a water-snake instead. Apollo, in anger, turned the raven from white to black. The Roman tradition took the raven into the formal practice of augury: the flight of birds was one of the great signs by which the gods were consulted, and the raven was one of the most important of the birds.

The Raven in Modern Fantasy

The raven has migrated into modern fantasy in a striking way. Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1845 poem, made the raven the figure of lost love and of the unavoidable return of the past. The raven of Poe sits on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door, and its single word, “Nevermore,” is the word of a loss that cannot be consoled.

Tolkien, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, made the raven a figure of the wise, a messenger of the king. The ravens of the Lonely Mountain, the great rooks of the Old Forest, the three great ravens of the siege of Gondor — all are figures of the watcher, the messenger, the bird that knows. The same figure can be seen in Game of Thrones, where the ravens of the Citadel carry the messages of the kingdom, and where the three-eyed raven is the figure of the deeper sight. The raven, in every form, is the figure of the in-between, the messenger of the gods, the bird that carries the news from one world to another.

Sources and Further Reading

Armstrong, Edward A. The Life of the Raven. R. M. McBride, 1920. (Reissued by Comstock, 1994.)
Sax, Boria. Crow. Reaktion Books, 2017.
Dementiev, G. P., and Gladkov, N. A. Birds of the Soviet Union. Translated by E. D. Gordon. Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1970.
Birkhead, Tim. Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird. Bloomsbury, 2012.