I’ll honor you so much as save your throat
From the Ravenstone by choking myself?
We read that the old Welsh king Owein, son of Urien, had in his army three hundred doughty ravens, constituting an irresistible force; perhaps they were only human “shock” troops who bore this device on their targes. Cuchulain, the savage hero of Irish fables, had, like Odin, two magic ravens that advised him of the approach of foes. Old-fashioned Germans believe that Frederick I (Barbarossa) is sleeping under Raven’s Hill at Kaiserlauten, ready to come forth in the last emergency of his country. There in his grotto-palace a shepherd found him sleeping. Barbarossa awoke and asked: “Are the ravens still flying around the hill?” The shepherd answered that they were. “Then,” sighed the king, “I must sleep another hundred years.”
Waterton[[73]] tells us that a tradition was once current throughout the whole of Great Britain that King Arthur was changed into a raven (some say a chough) by the art of witchcraft; and that in due time he would be restored to human form, and return with crown and sceptre. In Brittany, where Arthur and his knights are much more real than even in Cornwall, the sailor-peasants will assure you that he was buried on the little isle of Avalon, just off the foreshore of Tregastel, but they will add very seriously that he is not dead. If you inquire how that can be, they will explain that the great king was conveyed thither magically by Morgan le Fay, and he and she dwell there in an underground palace. They are invisible now to all human eyes, and when Arthur wants to go out into the air his companion turns him into a raven; and perchance, in proof, your boatman may point your gaze toward a real raven sitting on the rocks of the islet.
Ravens figure in many monkish legends, too, usually in a beneficent attitude, in remembrance of their friendly offices toward Elijah. Saint Cuthbert and several lesser saints and hermits were fed by these or similar birds. One hermit subsisted many years on a daily ration of half a loaf of bread brought him by a raven, and one time, when another saint visited him, the bird provided a whole loaf! Fish was frequently brought: and once when a certain eremite was ill, the bird furnished the fish already cooked, and fed it to the patient bit by bit. Miss Walker[[39]] shows that as a companion of saints this bird has had a wide and beneficent experience, which may be set against the more conspicuous pages of misdeeds in his highly variegated record. Thus we learn that St. Benedict’s raven saved his life by bearing away the poisoned loaf sent to this saint by a jealous priest. “After his torture and death at Saragossa, when the body of St. Vincent was thrown to the wild beasts it was rescued by ravens and borne to his brothers at Valencia, where it reposed in a tomb till the Christians of that place were expelled by the Moors. The remains of the saint were ... again placed in a tomb [at Cape St. Vincent] to be guarded forever more by the faithful ravens.” Have you doubts about this story? Go to that wild headland, where Portugal sets a firm foot against the Atlantic, watch the ravens hovering above it, and be convinced! And to many other holy men did these noble birds render substantial service—to St. Meinrad especially, as is affirmed by no less an authority than the great Jerome.
“In some parts of Germany,” Miss Walker records, “these birds are believed to hold the souls of the damned, while in other sections wicked priests only are supposed to be so re-incarnated. In Sweden the ravens croaking at night in the swamps are said to be the ghosts of murdered persons who have been denied Christian burial.” A local and humorous touch is given to this conception by the Irish in Kerry, who allege that the rooks there are the ghosts of bad old landlords, because they steal vegetables from the peasants’ gardens—“Always robbin’ the poor!”
This eerie feeling is of long descent. The supreme war-goddess of the Gaels, as Squire[[74]] explains, was Morrigu, the Red Woman or war-goddess, who figures in the adventures of Cuchulain, and whose favorite disguise was to change herself into a carrion-crow, the “hoodie-crow” of the Scotch. She had assistants who revelled among the slain on a battlefield. “These grim creatures of the savage mind had immense vitality ... indeed, they may be said to survive still in the superstitious dislike and suspicion shown in all Keltic-speaking countries for their avatar—the hoodie crow.”
In Pennant’s Tour in Scotland (1771) is described a curious ceremony in which offerings were made by Scottish herdsmen to the hooded crow, eagle and other enemies of sheep to induce them to spare the flocks. A Morayshire saying in old times ran thus:
The guil, the Gordon, and the hoodie crow,
Were the three worst things Murray ever saw.