The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition, Fakelore, or Modern Myth?

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The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition, Fakelore, or Modern Myth? Author(s): Boria Sax Source: Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2010), pp. 231-240Published by: Wayne State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949136Accessed: 30-09-2015 13:01 UTC

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Storytelling, Self, Society , 6: 231-240, 2010 n~. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC |ďf .-J ISSN 1 550-5340 print / 1 932-0280 online S m Taylors. Francis Croup DOI : 1 0. 1 080/ 1 5505340.20 1 0.5044 1 3

The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition,

Fakelore, or Modern Myth?

Boria Sax

Tourists are told that ravens at the Tower of London first had their wings clipped in the reign of Charles II, who heard an ancient prophesy that Britain would fall if they left. In fact, the tower ravens are entirely a Victorian institution. This paper examines their legend as an invented tradition, as fakelore, and as a modern myth. It finds that the tale has some authentic basis in legend, but commercial exploitation has prevented it from fully developing. The paper concludes by proposing a colony of ravens might be kept in the Tower without coercion, and they could be allowed to leave or return, thus always generating new stories.

The ravens at the Tower of London are now so beloved that nobody seems to care much if they steal an occasional sandwich, and they have long been forgiven for allegedly pecking the eyes from the severed head of Lady Jane Grey. A flier entitled "A Guide to the Tower Ravens," published by the Tower of London about 1997 and distributed free to tourists, announces:

For many centuries, ravens have guarded the Tower of London and, since they are said to hold the power of the Crown, it is believed that the Crown and the Tower will fall, if ever the ravens should leave. Fortunately, these respected residents, since the reign of King Charles II, have been protected by royal decree.

Why did Charles II protect the ravens? The usual answer, as stated in one popular history of the Tower of London is that

This paper is largely adapted from a book entitled City of Ravens: How ravens came to the Tower of London, why they stayed, what they tell us about nature and humankind , forthcoming from Duckworth Publishers (London, UK), 201 1 .

Address correspondence to Boria Sax, 25 Franklin Avenue, White Plains, NY 10601-3849. E-mail: vogelgreif @ aol .com



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Charles (II) was looking through his telescopes one day, with Sir John Flamstead (the royal astronomer) by his side, when some ravens flew overhead and bespattered the telescopes. "These ravens must go!" he said. "But, Sire, it is very unlucky to kill a raven," replied Flamstead. "If you do that the Tower will fall and you will lose your kingdom, having only just got it back!" Charles, being a pragmatist, thought for a moment and said: "The Observatory must go to Greenwich and the ravens can stay in the Tower."

Ever since, six ravens with clipped wings have been kept at the Tower. This anecdote makes the domesticated ravens into a compromise between science and superstition on the threshold of the modern age, perhaps a bit like the consti- tutional monarchy. The author, a lot more cautious than others, concludes his account by admitting that he "cannot vouch for its accuracy" (Mears 78).

In fact, the anecdote is completely absurd. For one thing, ravens are diurnal, so they would not have interfered with the astronomer's observations at night. The anecdote seems to confuse ravens with bats, perhaps because both are pop- ularly associated with witchcraft and Gothic castles. Furthermore, it is hard to see how moving the observatory to Greenwich could have solved the problem, since that city has the same birds as London. Killing all the ravens in the sky at the time would have been far beyond the power even of a king. If these birds had been numerous enough to seriously impede astronomical observations, trim- ming the wings of six birds would hardly have been necessary to ensure their continued presence. The one thing that the anecdote about Charles II does reflect accurately is the difficulty of keeping ravens at the Tower, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. They are no respecters of tradition or ceremony and at times drop excrement on tools, antiquities, and heads of visitors.

On first querying the Tower authorities where I might find a copy of the decree of Charles II, I was referred to the Tower's official Web site, which simply repeated the familiar stories. Next, I searched in scholarly biographies of Charles II, but there was not any mention of the ravens. The ravens seemed to me no less magnificent than before, but I gradually became skeptical about their origin.

It was initially difficult for me to believe that all of the tourist guides, Web sites, and even scholarly books could be blatantly wrong about like the origin of the Tower Ravens. In addition, my status as a foreigner, an American, made it particularly awkward to challenge a national myth of the United Kingdom. I feared - as it turned out, mistakenly - that the British might take umbrage at the perceived challenge to one of their institutions. Furthermore, the idea that the ravens were ancient appealed to my romantic temperament. My interest in the ravens and their true story overpowered all of my hesitations, and I continued with my research.

I searched for the references to them which might be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier in old books of history, ornithology, folklore, and, most especially, any early guides to the Tower I could locate. I have looked in books



THE TOWER RAVENS 233

from the Renaissance and Web pages and databases from the twenty-first century; I have looked at graphics from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. I have also spent days at the Tower of London, talking with the Warders, who very graciously provided me with what records were at hand. I have been unable to find any references, either literary or visual, to the ravens in the Tower of London that predate the close of the nineteenth century.

On first realizing that the ravens were not ancient, I initially felt disappointed. I expressed something of that to Jeremy Ashbee, former curator of the Tower of London. I quote with permission from his reply:

I was at the Tower for more than seven years and the sensation you describe is very familiar! - "so you mean this wasn't Anne Boleyn's cell after all?" Eventually I found that the only way to save my sanity was to invent something called 'The Legendary Tower of London; in which Richard III personally smothered his nephews in the Bloody Tower, Henry VI was stabbed while at prayer in the upper chamber of the Wakefield Tower (almost certainly full of documents in the fifteenth century, more's the pity), untold thousands were racked in the dungeons under the White Tower and so on. Most of the legends, on close examination, tended to have at least an element of truth behind them (i.e., a genuine event in a fabricated location, a rare event presented as common), and it's fascinating to find one which appears to be almost completely invented. . . . But having said that, as with some of the military traditions and ceremonies, there is something so inherently appealing about the idea that the place is too important and too ancient for the modern mind to comprehend it, that I can quite see how a legend of this kind can take hold so pervasively in such a short period of time . . . (2004)

The story of the Tower Ravens is most definitely not historically accurate, but is it in some sense authentic? If it is not history, does it have any legitimacy as a tradition, legend, or myth? In attempting to answer such questions, we run up against the limitations of our taxonomies.

The story of the Tower Ravens is at least close to being folklore. It does not have any single identifiable individual or corporate author, nor does it have any specific date of inception. Rather, it developed gradually over a century or more, slowly adapting to British practices and traditions. I have elsewhere already traced this process in considerable detail and, consequently, will only summarize it briefly here.

When the ravens were brought to the Tower around 1883, they were used by the Yeoman Warders as props to illustrate tales of Gothic horror based, often loosely, on English history. Most specifically, they were said to have devoured the bodies of Lady Jane Grey, Anne Boleyn, and others who were executed at the Tower (Sax, How Ravens 274). Meanwhile, the Earls of Dunraven, who appear to have supplied the initial ravens, saw them as avatars of the raven-god Bran, who they believed had originally built their castle in Wales. For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic



234 sax

people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain (Sax, Medievalism 71-73).

The legend that Britain will fall if the ravens leave the Tower of London began in summer 1944, when ravens were used as unofficial spotters for enemy planes and bombs (Sax, Medievalism 73-74; Sax, Jackie 29). It took something like its present form just before the Tower reopened for visitors in January 1946. One of the two remaining ravens, Mabel, managed to escape the Tower, and her mate, Grip, followed soon after, creating a panic among the authorities (Anonymous), who promptly imported a full contingent of new ravens for open- ing day. References to the legend, based largely on rumors, began appearing in American papers, and a bit later in British ones (Sax, Jackie 29).

Once again, this is only a brief summary, but I think it is enough to show that the standard narrative of the ravens, while untrue, is more than a simple fabrication. It incorporates archaic myths such as that of Bran and recent crises such as the Blitz.

AN INVENTED TRADITION?

An example of what historians call an "invented tradition" is the wearing of kilts in Scotland, which was once widely supposed to be an ancient practice but only goes back to the latter eighteenth century (Trevor-Roper 18-29). Typically, invented traditions serve to encourage social cohesion, consecrate institutions, or promote beliefs (Hobsbawm 9). As Hobsbaum has put it, . . modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so 'natural' as to require no definition . . ." (14). Traditions are invented especially during abrupt transitions from one era to the next, and they serve to create continuity, or at least the illusion of continuity, with earlier times.

In reaction to the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, many in Britain were nostalgic for a more stable, uncomplicated, and unhurried way of life. Even as Britain led the world in industrialization, the British Empire was driven in large part by an ideology of romantic anti-capitalism (Cannadine 128). The Victorian era was a great period of invented traditions, as the British tried to sanction their Empire through the creation of impressive titles, uniforms, and genealogies. All of this quasi-Feudal pageantry was intended, at least unconsciously, to give the impression that the elaborate hierarchal relationships within the Empire were part of a timeless order (148).




The fabrications were not just confined to prominent officials but also reached into the lives of the middle classes. Breeds of dogs and other animals, for example, were sometimes alleged to go back to the medieval or ancient times, even to the Stone Age (Derr). Great antiquity was claimed, on doubtful evidence, for a wide range of customs, dances, and other practices (Hutton 30). The Tower Ravens was only one of hundreds, even thousands, of such traditions in the period.

The Tower of London itself, as we know it today, is in large part a Victorian fantasy. Much of it was created by the romantic architect Anthony Slavin, to whom Prince Albert entrusted the task of restoring the Tower to its ancient grandeur. Under Slavin's direction, centuries of offices and architectural features were destroyed, while new windows and turrets were added in a neo-Gothic style (Impey and Parnell 1 1 7-2 1 ). The Victorian era also established the mystique of the Tower, still used to market it as a tourist attraction, as a place of intense passions and bloody deeds.

Today, we are almost as far from the Victorians as they were from the Tudors, perhaps further in terms of cultural and technological change. If age conveys authenticity, the Victorian embellishments have it now. What visitors to the Tower experience is a genuine Victorian fantasy of Tudor England, which, in turn, was pervaded by nostalgia for the Middle Ages. By linking Britain and the monarchy with the remote past, the ravens in the Tower dramatize the antiquity of both institutions.

In a sense, the ravens do not seem to belong to any real nation but rather to a storybook world, where the monarch governs not through force or intrigue but through the magic of ceremony. This impression of timelessness is itself a response to historical contingencies. Above all, it reflects a longing for stabil- ity amid the upheavals created by the Industrial Revolution. The tales told of the Tower Ravens have, in fact, changed greatly, if unobtrusively, during the odd century and a quarter that they have been kept. If the day comes when the ravens no longer seem needed, no prophesy will keep them from being released.

The stories of the Tower Ravens differ from invented traditions in some important respects. Hobsbawm has written that old traditions tend to be "specific and strongly binding," while invented traditions are "quite . . . vague as to the nature of the values, rights, and obligations of the group membership they inculcate: 'patriotism,' 'loyalty,' 'duty,' 'playing the game,' 'school spirit,' and the like" (Hobsbawm 10). An example of an old tradition might be the fairy flag in Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, which will produce victory for that side that displays it in battle. A recent tradition tends to be something like waving the national flag at sporting events. The legend that Britain will "fall" if the ravens leave the Tower is very clear about its strictures, and it does not appeal to any fuzzy ideals.

There is no sharp separation between invented and spontaneous traditions, and the legend of the Tower Ravens may lie around the middle of a long continuum.



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Some ancient folktales may initially have been consciously invented, often for pragmatic purposes such as, say, as legitimating a dynasty or drawing pilgrims to a site. Glastonbury, for example, became a place of pilgrimage at the end of the twelfth century, after monks dug up what they took to be the skeletons of Arthur and Guinevere. From the start, the monks have been suspected of faking the find for financial gain. The area, however, is now regarded as holy by people of many faiths. The two bodies have long been lost, and it hardly even seems to matter if the monks were sincere or not.

FAKELORE?

In the mid-twentieth century, the American folklorist Richard Dorson coined the term "fakelore" for deliberately fabricated works of folklore. Dorson was particularly dismissive of many favorite American tales such as those of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, which he considered literary or, even worse, commercial (Dorson 1-5).

We might consider the stories of the Tower Ravens to be fakelore, except for a few considerations. For one thing, if they were first told by Yeoman Warders giving tours of the Tower, they did actually appear first in an oral medium. Second, it is likely that they arouse spontaneously, even if they were later exploited by commercial interests. In any case, the distinction between folklore and fakelore is actually far less clear than Dorson wanted to acknowledge.

Dorson was trying to give folklore the full status of an academic discipline at universities. To do this, he realized, it was necessary to more sharply differenti- ate folklore from other disciplines such as literature and anthropology. Although he wished to put folklore on a scientific basis, Dorson was overly influenced by the romantic idea of a culture of the common people, uncontaminated by literary influence. But oral and literary traditions have been intertwined since ancient times, and it is impossible to study either in isolation from the other. Furthermore, no matter what academic standards they aspire to, those who tell folktales (Dorson included) do so mostly because they love them as stories. To put it another way, folklorists, from the Brothers Grimm to the present, almost inevitably start to become "folk."

Though no folklorist to my knowledge has ever studied it, the Tower of London is one enclave where oral traditions are very much alive. The Yeoman Warders who lead tours at the Tower of London are, like all good storytellers, alert to how their audiences are responding and ready to alter a tale accordingly. They may take tales about the ghost of Anne Boleyn or Henry VIII from one another, as well as from books. Some can become so caught up in the drama of their tales; they may not always be aware of what is borrowed or invented. They are, in other words, not entirely different from those who told stories in a medieval village on long winter nights.




The storytellers of old often set their tales in distant times and places, but few locations have such glamour as the Tower of London. It is enough to add an uncanny significance to the mundane details of everyday life. Things that elsewhere might be instantly forgotten can be recalled, brooded over, altered, passed on, and perhaps even find their way into articles or television programs.

A MODERN MYTH?

Myth and history are surprisingly difficult to untangle. Historians are forever trying to purify their discipline of myth, to demythologize it, yet with no more than partial and temporary success. Even in the work of respected historians, I regu- larly encounter erroneous notions that have achieved something like the status of myth, for example, that Cromwell invited the Jews back to Britain or that Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. In so far as we use history, like mythology, to generate heroes, villains, moral precepts, practical lessons, and tribal identity, we inevitably undermine the objectivity of the field. Without such purposes, history would be uninteresting at best, perhaps even inconceivable. Myth, under- stood broadly, provides the impetus and direction for most historical investigation. Lévi-Strauss wrote, "I am not far from believing that in our societies history has replaced mythology and fulfills the same function . . ." (42-43). With these diffi- culties in mind, I would like to consider some of the categories that might be at least partly applicable to the Tower Ravens.

The word "myth" usually suggests exotic times and places, a story of gods and heroes told by an ancient people such as the Egyptians, Greeks, or Maya. The superhuman characters of comic strips and popular melodramas may superficially resemble those of myths, but they are formulaic. They do not help us to come to terms with our morality, only to escape it. Ideologies such as Communism or Fascism may at times resemble myths in the dramatic simplicity of their claims, but these, despite their epic sweep, are usually quite abstract. It is hard to recognize a modern myth, in part because we have only a fragmentary knowledge of the ancient ones. We know almost nothing about their origins and little more about the way they were integrated into the social institutions of their times.

The term "myth" is used broadly in many senses, including that of a widely accepted falsehood or an intellectual paradigm, but the meaning of the word is more specific among folklorists. Myths are narratives that are set in the remote past, are accepted on faith, and tell how the world as we know it came to exist (Bascom 9). Mircea Eliade defines myth as "sacred history" which "narrates an event that took place in primordial time, the fabled time of 'beginnings'" (5). Myths can tell of the creation of the cosmos but more often simply of a fundamental change such as the emergence of human beings, the origins of language, the birth of civilization, or the beginnings of a people. Myth often humanizes natural



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forces, which become deities, and it grants prodigious power to heroes and their adversaries.

Myth does not assume the accepted laws of reason, since it takes place before these were established. Although myth is altered by scientific investigation, it may never be disproved because it is prior to the methods and assumptions of scien- tists. Even physicists cannot account for the creation of matter and the universe without becoming entangled in contradictions, for example, speaking of events in the last seconds before the start of time. Myth subtly pervades every aspect of culture including academic study and marks a limit that we encounter when fundamental concepts are intensely scrutinized, thus undermining the foundations of research. Abstractions become increasingly rarified and finally give way to images and stories.

By the criterion of Eliade, we can consider the story of the Tower Ravens, in its various versions, a modern myth. Unlike the other attractions at the Tower, they do not belong to any fixed chronology but to a loosely defined period when the nation was established. That is, the ravens connect the Tower with the dimension of mythic time. Britain has been often recreated, and ravens are constantly associated with eras of foundation, for example, the building of Stonehenge, Roman walls, the White Tower, a new London after the Great Fire of 1666, and the British Empire.

CONCLUSIONS

Depending on context, the story of the Tower Ravens can legitimately be viewed, with a few reservations, as an invented tradition, as fakelore, or as a modern myth. The labels are not necessarily exclusionary; in fact, they here seem to designate different aspects of a single phenomenon. As a distortion of history, the story can legitimately be called an "invented tradition," while as a commercial institution it is "fakelore." However, the thematic significance of the story, as well as the way it is now integrated with both ancient and modern lore, gives it something of the dignity of myth.

The prophesy that "Britain will fall" if the ravens leave the Tower is by now strongly etched in the awareness of the public, and people are no more likely to abandon it than to, for example, plan a wedding for Friday the 13th. So, let us say for the sake of argument, that the saying is, or at least could be, true. We can approach it as an earnest game and play along. The prophesy will, like other sayings, stand in need of interpretation. The lore of the Tower ravens, as a national myth, reflects all the changes in British identity over the past century and more. As the country enters a new millennium, it is time for yet another transformation.

What, after all, is "Britain"? It is not an empire or even a piece of land. The boundaries of Britain have fluctuated greatly over the centuries, sometimes including what is now Ireland and leaving out Scotland. Britain is also not a




government, for that has altered even more. Nor is Britain a people, for it embraces Celts, Romans, Saxons, Indians, Africans, and far more. At a most fundamental level, Britain is a story, and stories do not "fall"; they do not really even end, but simply move on to new episodes and forms.

The problem with the tradition of the Tower Ravens is not primarily a lack of authenticity. It is that commercial exploitation has frozen the legend in time, not allowing it to adapt to a changing world. The ravens have, in the course of their relatively short history, gone from being the demons that pecked at the eyes of severed heads to guardians of their nation. They have now ended up as cuddly national pets, used by the tourist industry to sell everything from toys to mugs and pencils.

Much like a human being, a story must be able to change and develop to retain its vitality. Folklore loses its depth and its power when forced to serve a government or even a just cause. Perhaps, however, a colony of wild ravens might be established in the heights of the Tower of London. Supplied with food so they would return, they might then fly out in search of adventure, facing new perils but generating new stories as well.

Boria Sax lives in upstate New York and teaches at Sing Sing prison. His books include Animals in the Third Reich (2000), Crow (2007), and City of Ravens (forthcoming).

WORKS CITED

Anonymous. "Craven Ravens Fly Their Bower at London Tower." Council Bluffs Nonpareil (1945, November 17). 1. Print.

Anonymous. A Guide to the Tower Ravens. London: HM Tower of London, ca. 1997. Print. Ashbee, J. E-mail to the author. 20 May 2004. Bascom, W. "The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives." Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Ed. A. Dundes. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. 5-29. Print.

Cannadine, D. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Derr, M. "The Politics of Dogs." The Atlantic Monthly Mar. 1990: 49-72. Print. Dorson, R. M. Folklore and Fakelore: Essays Toward a Discipline of Folk Studies. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 1976. Print. Eliade, M. Myth and Reality. New York: Harper Colophon, 1963. Print. Hobsbawm, E. "Introduction: Inventing Traditions." The Invention of Tradition. Eds. E. Hobsbawm

and T. Ranger. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1994. 1-14. Print. Hutton, R. The Stations of the Sun. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Impey, E., and G. Parnell. The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History. London: Merrell, 2000. Print.

Lévi-Strauss, C. "When Myth Becomes History." Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. 34-43. Print.



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Mears, K. J. The Tower of London: 900 Years of English History. Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1998. Print. Sax, B. "How Ravens Came to the Tower of London." Society and Animals 15.3 (2007a): 267-281.

Print. Sax, B. "Medievalism, Paganism, and the Tower Ravens." The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 9.1 (2007b): 62-77. Print.

Sax, B. "Jackie the Lucky Raven (title tentative). History Magazine Mai". 2010. Print. Trevor-Roper, H. "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland." The Invention of

Tradition. Eds. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1994. 15-42. Print.



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