The Ravenmaster Read online

  Observing the ravens over many years, I suppose I’ve become accustomed to their feeding methods. Their bills are like Swiss Army knives: they can use them to pick things up, rip things open, carry, probe. If you look carefully you’ll see that the upper bill is ever so slightly hooked at the end, making it an even more effective weapon. You hear of ravens in the wild eating rodents and ducklings, and I know that in the United States they’re particularly partial to baby desert tortoises. I can only comment on what I’ve seen. When they’re eating a mouse, for example, they’ll usually remove the head first, the head being the most nutritious part, of course, and you never know how much time you’re going to have with a meal in the wild, or in the wilds of Tower Green. It’s just like being in the army, really.

  Experts in avian cognition have designed all sorts of tests and experiments to measure birds’ cognitive abilities and behavior, and I’m proud to say that our ravens at the Tower have assisted in many a scientific study. The consensus among the experts seems to be that ravens can carry out all sorts of tasks that it was previously thought only primates could handle. They exhibit tool use, for example, employing twigs or leaves held in their beaks to get at what they want. They have their own language. And they have a specific pecking order. Many renowned and respected scholars from all around the world have published and shared their reports of ravens showing off their extraordinary intelligence in the lab and in the wild. These various feats include snow bathing, assorted aerial acrobatics including flying upside down and doing barrel rolls, using objects to displace gulls from their nests, using rocks in nest defense, carrying food with their feet rather than with their bills, carrying their nestlings, catching doves in midair, and, incredibly, attacking reindeer!

  The naturalist and keen observer of animal behavior Bernd Heinrich has spent his life studying ravens. In his book Mind of the Raven he writes, “Having now lived on intimate terms with ravens for many years, I have … seen amazing behavior that I had not read about in the more than fourteen hundred research reports and articles on ravens in the scientific literature, and that I could never have dreamed were possible.… Ultimately, knowing all that goes on in their brains is, like infinity, an unreachable destination.” And the bestselling author David Quammen claims that what he calls the corvid “clan” is “so full of prodigious and quirky behavior that it cries out for interpretation not by an ornithologist but a psychiatrist.”

  I am not a zoologist, ornithologist, or psychiatrist, thank goodness, but as an amateur who’s spent much of my adult life with ravens, I couldn’t agree more: ravens are phenomenally intelligent and we will never know all of what goes on inside their heads. “Tha gliocas an ceann an fhitich,” goes the old Scots Gaelic proverb—there is wisdom in a raven’s head. I’m sure there is. I often try to see the Tower through the ravens’ eyes: the sheer looming mass of the buildings, like cliffs, and the continual hubbub of sound, like the howl of the tundra; all that massive potential of playmates and the ever-present threat of predators. I try to imagine all the neurons firing in their brilliant little brains. I don’t know but I’m guessing they stay put here, like me, partly because they get such a buzz out of the place.

  * * *

  I also often wonder about their emotions. They certainly seem to have the capacity to remember. When the former Ravenmaster Derrick Coyle visited the Tower some seven years after leaving, for example, Merlina came straight over to him. It was as if he’d never been away. Seven years! There’s doubtless some obvious explanation for this extraordinary behavior—something that Derrick did that attracted Merlina to him. But it also makes me wonder if she felt his absence, and what that feeling might be like for a bird. During my time as Ravenmaster I have seen ravens express joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. I have seen them learn and remember and solve challenges involving principles of cause and effect. I know them to be capable of self-sacrifice, of caring, chivalry, and great courage. So do they possess complex cognitive abilities? Clearly. What is the exact extent of these abilities? I’m still finding out.

  19

  RAVENOLOGY

  I see a large part of my role here as educating the public, which is perhaps ironic, given my own lack of formal schooling. This is not to say that I didn’t go to good schools—to all my teachers in Dover, fair play to you for making an effort—but, as I mentioned, by the age of about fourteen I was barely attending. As a boy soldier in my teens, I still had to go to school two afternoons a week, though most of our lessons were what was called Military Studies, where we learned about the Cold War and the history of Russia’s 3rd Shock Army, which might at any time attack the West. That was the only time in my life when I didn’t bunk off school.

  And yet now somehow I’m here, in a castle in the middle of London, and every spare moment I get, if I’m on a break, or early in the morning or late at night, I like to pore over histories and guides to the Tower and books about ravens. I’ve become a bit of a bookworm. I like nothing better than to be able to retreat to my little library in the Casemates in order to work through some raven-related three-pipe problem or concern. Why is Munin being aggressive? Why is Harris spending time on Tower Green? What new noise is Merlina mimicking?

  The Yeoman Warders’ houses in the Casemates are a bit like little dens or warrens—the word casemates literally refers to a fortified gun emplacement, consisting of rooms set deep within a defensive wall which are usually used as storerooms or strong rooms, and from which weapons are fired. No cannon is fired from here now, of course, nor are our homes used for the storage of weapons. These days, that would present some serious health and safety concerns for the Tower! No, an old gun emplacement may be an appropriate home for an old gunner, but I’m happy to say that our house, tucked into the northwest corner of the outer defensive wall, is a tranquil oasis of calm in the heart of London’s metropolis. And in one little corner of this cozy corner is my office and library, what I think of as Raven HQ: my little nest.

  I’m very lucky because a lot of people send me pictures and photographs and paintings of ravens. (I also get sent all sorts of raven lucky charms, badges, cups, wood carvings, raven-inspired clothes and calendars, Game of Thrones three-eyed raven toys, and some very nice raven-style decorated cakes and confectionery.) I keep all the paintings and pictures—every single one, right here. I could open a raven art gallery. Perhaps one day I will. I’ve got everything from children’s drawings to big oil paintings and collages and sculptures—even one or two portraits of me with the ravens. The artist and sculptor Tim Shaw has spent quite a bit of time here over the last couple of years with the ravens and produced some amazing work inspired by them. They’re that sort of bird. They just demand your attention.

  One of the classic images of ravens in art is by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in his painting The Triumph of Death. A raven sits perched on Death’s horse as it pulls a cart along, crushing the bodies of the dying under its wheels. It’s not a very cheery image. Shortly before he died, the famous French illustrator, printmaker, and engraver Gustave Doré, best known for his illustrations of the work of Dante and Milton, produced a series of engravings for a special edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” They’re also rather disturbing. And when Lou Reed produced an album reimagining Poe’s poem, he worked with the Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti on an accompanying graphic novel: also distinctly weird. I’ve tried to do my own bit over the years to redress the balance, spending a lot of my time photographing the ravens and sharing them online, to show the birds in all their complexity and beauty.

  But of all the images of ravens that I’ve ever come across, if you’d like to see some really astonishing raven art, I’d suggest looking at the work of the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase. His book The Solitude of Ravens consists simply of black-and-white photographs of ravens. Fukase uses his incredible skills as a photographer to produce images that are often so blurry and murky and smudged that they could almost be charcoal sketches. I think they come very close to
capturing the true majesty and mystery of the birds.

  (And yes, in case you’re wondering, I do have raven tattoos. And no, I’m not going to show them to you. I’m rather fascinated by tattoo artists: the skill, the imagination, the attention to detail. Suffice it to say that one of my tattoos depicts the raven as trickster, surrounded by the skulls of those executed on Tower Green, and the other is of a raven in a bowler hat, smoking a pipe, the raven as English gentleman. If you’re going to go to the trouble of getting a tattoo, you may as well go the whole hog. I’m not one for the subtle tattoo—what’s the point?)

  So when I’m not with the ravens, I’m in here reading about them. As Ravenmaster I have long been collecting legends and stories about ravens from around the world. I have books, files and files of raven-related newspaper cuttings, photocopies of articles, notes from Ravenmasters past, letters from ornithologists, animal behavior scientists, and raven researchers from around the world—in my amateur ornithological endeavors you might say that I have been ornithivorous, studying ornithomancy, ornithophily, and all things ornithic. There are stories and legends about ravens from North America, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa. The raven features in the myths and legends of the Romans, the Greeks, the Celts, the ancient Egyptians, the Native Americans, and the Scandinavians. There are more learned books and articles on what I call Ravenology than anyone could possibly read in a lifetime. But as far as I can tell, the one thing that unites all these stories is the paradoxical nature of the raven—paradoxical in a sense that, say, puffins or nightingales simply are not. (And the Tower ravens are more paradoxical than most: birds who live in a palace, waited on by human servants. I mean, come on!) Ravens are associated with evil as much as they are with good. They are harbingers of doom, yet they are creators and protectors. They are double-hatted in their very nature. Perhaps this is why so many cultures throughout history have been fascinated by the figure of the raven: in their capacity for good and ill, they remind us of ourselves.

  The stories and legends of the raven are so beautiful and so strange. I think of them often when I’m out observing Merlina and the others. Very often ravens are figured as agents or messengers of God, or of the gods. In the Bible, there are ravens who bring the prophet Elijah bread and meat. In Tibet, ravens and crows are regarded as messengers of the Supreme Being. In the mythology of the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Raven created the world and made humans out of rocks and leaves. In other Pacific Northwest cultures—among the Tlingit—it is believed that wearing the headgear of ravens and crows enables the wearer to journey to the land of the dead and return with a person’s soul. Noah sent out a raven to scout for land, just as in the Epic of Gilgamesh (in a brilliant story in which Utnapishtim and his wife survive a flood and send out a dove, which returns, and then a swallow, which does likewise, and then finally a raven, which never returns, and so Utnapishtim knows that he and his family will be saved). According to the Saga of Flóki, the Vikings discovered Iceland after Flóki released three ravens from his ship: the first never returned, the second came back to the ship, and the third flew west and Flóki followed. Odin, the Norse deity, had a pair of ravens, one named Hugin (from the Old Norse, meaning “thought”) and the other Munin (from the Old Norse, meaning “memory”—fitting for our Munin, who never forgets that she doesn’t like me), and every day he sent out his two ravens to see what was happening in the world and then they’d report back. They were like his secret police.

  Great stories all.

  But the raven legend closest to my heart is obviously the story of the ravens of the Tower. This is a story that’s been told and written about many times—though never, I think, by a serving Ravenmaster. It is as strange and perplexing in its way as any of the great legends of the raven from around the world.

  What follows is my take on the legend of the ravens at the Tower.

  20

  THE LEGEND OF THE RAVENS AT THE TOWER

  The story goes that Charles II was once visiting the Tower of London after the restoration of the monarchy to survey a new building. At the time, a young astronomer named John Flamsteed was using a room in the round turret house at the top of the White Tower for his observations of the stars and the moon, but he had found that the nesting ravens rather obstructed his view and interfered with his work. Flamsteed asked Charles II if he might be able to get rid of “those confounded ravens.” Charles, being a decent sort of a king, readily agreed, until someone pointed out that the birds had always been at the Tower and were an important symbol of the city and the monarchy, and that getting rid of them would therefore seem like rather a bad omen. Mindful no doubt that both the city and the monarchy had had a bit of a run of bad luck recently, what with his father Charles I having been executed, and there having been a terrible plague in London in 1665, and then the Great Fire of London in 1666, Charles promptly issued a royal decree, commanding that instead of banishing the birds, at least six ravens should be kept at the Tower forevermore. If the ravens should ever leave, the kingdom would fall.

  I tell this wonderful story to visitors. The other Yeoman Warders tell this wonderful story to visitors. The story is repeated in books and articles. It’s a good story. It’s a great story. It’s an important story. It is a part of our national heritage. But in all my research over the years in Raven HQ, assisted by the incredible resources of the Tower’s library and my archives, in all the years I’ve been looking and searching, and with all the experts I’ve consulted, I have been able to find no mention whatsoever of the legend of the ravens at the Tower before the late nineteenth century. Let me just say that again: no mention of the legend of the ravens at the Tower until the late nineteenth century. Nothing, nada, zilch. Not a croak. Nothing about Charles II and his decree. Nothing about Flamsteed and the confounded ravens. Nothing about the kingdom falling if the ravens should ever leave the Tower.

  The truth is that there was no Royal Decree protecting the ravens issued by Charles II, though there was admittedly a Royal Warrant issued in June 1675, which provided John Flamsteed, who became the first Royal Astronomer, with the funding to set up a proper observatory in Greenwich. The Royal Observatory was established for the purpose of “rectifieing the Tables of the motions of the Heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired Longitude of places for Perfecteing the Art of Navigation”—so it’s possible that the confounded ravens played a small part in the history of astronomy and navigation in this country, simply by being so bloody annoying that Flamsteed had to move out to Greenwich to get away from them!

  Not only is there no evidence of ravens having played an important part in the history of the Tower before the late nineteenth century, there is barely any mention of the ravens at the Tower in the historical record before then at all. Take the old Authorized Guide to the Tower of London by W. J. Loftie, published in its second edition in 1888. Any mention of the ravens? No. Nothing. The ever popular and magisterial Her Majesty’s Tower, by William Hepworth Dixon, first published in 1869? Nothing. Even William Benham’s The Tower of London, published in 1906, mentions not the mighty raven. One of the first official Tower guidebooks to mention the birds is Colonel E. H. Carkeet-James’s His Majesty’s Tower of London, which wasn’t published until 1950, and even then the birds are seen largely as an annoyance. “They are not popular with the residents of the Tower,” according to the Colonel. “They tear up the grass, flowers create an urge to destroy, they pick out the putty from windows and the lead from the diamond leaded lights in the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula. Few motor cars are safe from their marauding and they find a strange fascination in ladies’ silk stockings.”

  As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, from my own research and from the work of various historians and scholars, the first significant depiction of the ravens at the Tower wasn’t until 1883, in an article in the Pictorial World newspaper on July 14, which has a drawing of what certainly looks like a raven by the entrance to the Chapel of
St. Peter ad Vincula, near the plaque commemorating the executions on Tower Green. In the same year there was also a children’s book, London Town, by Felix Leigh, illustrated by Thomas Crane and Ellen Houghton, which tells the story, in verse, of a young girl named Prue touring London with her parents. The book includes a drawing of Prue and her parents at the Tower, observing a little girl outside Beauchamp Tower, looking rather frightened at the sight of two ravens and clinging to a Yeoman Warder. The text accompanying the drawing seems to be the first significant mention of the ravens at the Tower.

  Among the sights of London Town

  Which little visitors wish to view,

  The Tower stands first, and its great renown

  Has, you will notice, attracted Prue.

  At a well-known spot, to Miss Prue’s surprise,

  Some fine old ravens are strutting about.

  If upon the picture a glance you cast,

  You will know the ravens next time, no doubt.

  The red-coated guard who’s watching here

  Is called a Beefeater—fancy that!

  And Prue discovers, as she draws near,