Ravens in Myth and Lore

Thursday, August 7, 2025

Ravens in Myth and Lore

Today we return to the common raven, Corvus corax. Ravens are significant figures in many cultural traditions around the world. This reflects their very wide range — basically worldwide north of the equator — and their distinctive qualities such as size, color, intelligence, “talking,” and eating dead stuff. Common roles for ravens in mythology and folktale are prophet, messenger, and intermediary between the living and the dead.

In Greco-Roman mythology, ravens are associated with Apollo, the god of (among other things) prophecy. The ravens typically bring notice of future bad events. In one legend, Apollo sends a white raven to spy on one of Apollo’s girlfriends. When the raven reports that she is cheating, the anger of Apollo (also the sun god) scorches the bird’s feathers and turns him black.

In several Germanic cultures, ravens are believed to be the ghosts of murder victims or dead sinners. The most famous Germanic tradition of ravens is their association with Odin (Wotan, etc.), the chief god of ancient Germanic societies. Odin is attended by two ravens, Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory), who sit on Odin’s shoulders to whisper the news of the world they have collected for him.

The famous ravens of the Tower of London may be associated with the Welsh mythological figure Bran the Blessed, whose name meant “Raven”. After his head was cut off, Bran could still talk, and he told his friends to take his head and bury it at the site that was, it was said, now the site of the White Tower in the Tower of London complex. The legend that the presence of the ravens was associated with the survival of the British Crown seems to be of fairly recent origin. However, England’s empire rapidly fell apart after a brief period at the end of World War II when there were no resident ravens.

For indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, including the Tlingit, Haida, Salish, and Inuit, the raven is both a creator figure and a trickster. Legends include Raven’s forming the earth by dropping a rock into the primordial sea, discovering human beings in a clam shell, and stealing the sun from a box kept by another god, putting it in the sky to warm the people. Native peoples of Siberia have a very similar Raven figure in their traditional stories.

In the novel Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley (2020), a raven named Sir Raoul Corvus Corax is one of several animals who help the runaway racehorse Perestroika survive in the city. Perestroika’s other friends are a dog and a duck, and among them — plus some humans — everything gets nicely sorted out by the end. I recommend this book to my TSAF readers: try your local library!

The raven series is wrapped up, and something new — perhaps a mammal or two — will turn up next week.