A Crow Dictionary
Feannag – black asterisk of the sky,
fitheach – a quartz-glinting raven’s eye,
starrag – the hoodie prowling the shore,
cathag – the sea-eyed jackdaw,
cnàmhach – blood-billed chough of the machair,
pioghaid – chuckling, piebald joker,
ròcas – the belfry’s raucous rook,
garagg – what the carrion bird took,
sgreuchan-coille – my own oak-guide jay,
we look to each to show us the way.
In their very names the Scottish hills call out the dwelling place of birds. A toponymical survey of most Scottish mountain ranges or lochs reveals the legacy of Scotland’s familiar montane birds. Around Loch Lomond and its parent hill we have: Meall an t-Seabhaig (mound of the peregrine), Creag na h Iolaire (rock of the eagle), the high stony Ptarmigan Ridge on Ben Lomond, or Coire na Baintighearna (corrie of the mountain linnets). By far the most common toponym is for crags and hills named after the ubiquitous mountain sentinel – the raven (Corvus corax). The loch is surrounded by prominences known (and spelt) variously as Tom an Fhitich (knoll of the raven), Creag an Fhitheach (rock of the raven), Maol an Fhiteach (mound of the raven), Stob an Fhithich (peak of the raven). For centuries, this bird has carried a resonant and liminal presence over human life and death. It floats between animal and human consciousness and shapeshifts into folkloric tales with the capability of human speech, giving it a totemic allure of magical capability as a boundary crosser. The raven’s world is its own but to us it appears like a winged messenger from the mountains, a dark and alluring presence, a conscious viewing of all of us with its honking ‘I see you’ call. All corvids exhibit singular intelligence and intentional consciousness. They watch, they learn, they remember. I used to leave a colourful spinning top on an open window shelf. One day it was gone, and I never saw it again.
In Scottish and Irish folklore, the raven often appears as a mythically knowledgeable and shapeshifting creature, such as in W. Grant Stewart’s The Popular Superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland (1851), also rewritten from this source into the collection Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales (1900) by Sir George Douglas. In Chapter IV on witchcraft practices (‘MacGillichallum of Razay’ in Douglas), the ‘Goodwife of Laggan’ – a woman believed to be a cailleach or witch (indeed in Douglas’s titled tale she is the ‘Witch of Laggan’) – arrives out of a storm into a hunter’s hut as a black cat. She warms herself by the fire and transforms into the Goodwife, then escapes from the hunter’s violent assault by transforming into a raven and tearing out the teeth of his hunting dogs. This small moment of ecological fury, where the natural world (and womanhood) appears so alienated from the hunter, is in folklore a perpetual place where a cailleach can find both hidden shelter and agency, shapeshifting between the human and the non-human. It is a separation moment, a caesura, which characterises both a man’s fearful alienation from the Earth-mother figure, and an ecological separation manifesting as an excuse for gender violence and witch-hunting.
The most common Scottish folktale about shapeshifting ravens relates to a king’s son. John Francis Campbell’s version of this from 1860 (Popular Tales of the West Highlands) gives the raven the secret of knowledge and command over the landscape. Having won ‘The Battle of the Birds’ against a snake with the help of a king, the raven offers the king various gifts of sight, carrying him over the land and showing him the best of its hospitality and scenery. But on the third day the raven appears as a young man with a backpack, saying he was the raven and has shifted shape to a man. His gift is the backpack in which is a neatly packed castle and garden paradise which the king misplaces on the landscape. A local giant does a deal whereby he will pack up the land into the backpack again if the king promises the giant his firstborn son at the age of seven. But the gift turns evil as the king conspires to give the giant dressed up sons from the working staff of the castle, and eventually, despite the visionary gift from the original raven, the king loses his son to the giant. This boy is raised by the giant and on adulthood plans to win his daughter in marriage, but first he must perform several arduous tasks, one of which includes stealing a magpie’s eggs from a tree. The daughter aids him by wedging her fingers in the tree to use as a ladder but loses her little finger. Cunningly he uses this knowledge to choose her from her identical sisters in a marriage ‘line-up’ and the new couple elopes from the giant. Unfortunately, the king’s son, on returning home to his castle, bizarrely it seems due to a ‘kiss’ from his favourite greyhound licking his face, he forgets all about the giant’s daughter. During his amnesia, the true wife is trapped as an image of a reflected woman in a well, sitting in a tree. A cruel shoemaker discovers her and she bargains her way to the king’s son’s new marriage ceremony, where she transforms into a golden pigeon and speaks of the king’s son’s previous tasks done for her, and he remembers her, the true couple are wed, and all is good. Phew!
It is a rip-roaring tale of magical transformation, complex fetch-quests and repetitive behaviours. It all reads as an infuriating hallucinogenic narrative, like a misremembered dream, but contains a symbolic core of clear-sightedness. In such fairy tales the clear-sighted are ravens, birds, other beasts and even trees, which harbour the secrets of magical transformation in the life of human ambition, of changing your lot from bad to good (and back again). But only the raven and the birds seem to grasp the full teleology of the crazy human story, for the humans never seem in control in these tales and seem only ever eager for the threads of opportunism rather than the full tapestry of the world. So, to John Francis Campbell and other collectors of folk tales, ravens are more than just birds of prophetic doom – they are transformative and give us encounters that are at once surreal, unnerving, magical and instructive.
Ravens attend us in the mountains more often than we know. Their seeing and watching is only announced by a sudden ‘cronk cronk’, or a wheeling dive overhead. Maybe this knowledge that they always see us first gives rise to the personification of their prophetic powers. But their behaviour is of course their own and oftentimes is well beyond our own imagination and ability to see their world, despite some claims of ‘second sight’ or even deep ecological understanding. The raven’s world is in the end its own, famously described as a uniquely specific ‘umwelt’ by the nineteenth-century ecologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll.
A good example of human assumptive nature, which Uexküll always challenged – our inescapable magical realism – happened to me early one May morning. I am awoken by a knocking sound. Like someone at the door or window, rapping insistently. Sourcing the sound to the kitchen window, I see a crow pecking at the glass. Ah ha I think, that is the source, the crow is trying to communicate something to me, because I hear its insistence and demand on me to open, to give, maybe to feed. Like a child’s cry for food, I think. But then I notice as I wave at the window that the crow can’t see me, for the window, on the other side, is mirrored by the morning light and the crow is seeing only its alien reflection. It dawns on me the crow’s world does not overlap in any way with mine, my experience has been entirely symbolic and anthropocentric, entirely my own terminus of vision and sound as my idea of ‘crow’. The crow it turns out is pecking at an ‘other’ crow, as a territorial reaction, seeing its own reflection as crow-world threat. Its umwelt is in this instance entirely an instinctive response to the crow emotion of ‘chase away this intruder’. The reflected crow stands between my vision and the crow’s, existing in neither but standing in for the gap between this encounter, this mistaken identity of contact on both our parts. This is where the world lives, between perceptions and bodies, a continuum of interpretation, real and imagined. And it seems, this imagining is perhaps told better in folk tales, with its surreal twists and magical transformations – a separate space where both the raven and the human can merge and co-exist for a while.