Even now I can vividly visualize the spectacle of the Tower itself. Ask me about beforehand, and I am at a loss; question me about afterwards, and I cannot give you an answer. Only the middle part, which has forgotten beforehand and taken leave of afterwards, is unadorned and clear. It feels rather as if lightning were to tear the darkness….

Natsume Soseki, “The Tower of London” (trans. Damian Flanagan)

 

I
In Search of the Tower Ravens

The ravens at the Tower of London have a special intimacy with visitors, for whom they show off and, some believe, even pose for cameras. Most of the time, however, they play, quarrel, or simply enjoy the company of one another. Their behavior can be so lighthearted that visitors almost forget they are captive, so expressive that we almost forget they are not human. According to the guidebooks, Charles II (reigned 1660-1685) ordered that the wings of seven ravens be clipped, so they could not fly away, and their successors strut around on the field behind the White Tower till this day. But there is, as I have discovered, no reference to the ravens before the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Foreigners often take the culture and monuments of a country more earnestly than natives do. Just about every visitor to New York City wants to go up in the Empire State building, yet few New Yorkers have ever been inside it. Perhaps, then, it should not be surprising that the lore of the ravens in the Tower of London was first recorded not by a British citizen by a visitor from Japan. This was the novelist Natsume Soseki at the end of the nineteenth century, who was then an impoverished scholar but would later go on to become the most celebrated author his country produced in modern times.

In 1900 Soseki had received a request, accompanied by a small stipend, from the Japanese government to study in London. Reluctantly, he sold most of his belongings, said good-bye to his family, and embarked on an adventure overseas. London, then the leading city of the industrial world, seemed overwhelming with its crowds, its huge buildings, its steam railroads, its cable cars, and its many carriages. Soseki, though fascinated by English culture, despaired of ever truly participating in the society, and withdrew into a world of books, going without meals so that he could afford to collect the treasures he saw in London bookshops.

He returned to Japan after two years, and in 1905 published a short story called, “The Tower of London,” a fictionalized account of his visit to that castle. Soseki sets out much as knights in the old romances would seek out the castle of the Grail. He journeys without a map or even a direction, asking people he encounters to point the way to the Tower of London. Finally, he arrives, but with almost no memory of how he came or knowledge of where he is, except that the grand edifice looms in front of him.
For Soseki, the Tower of London becomes a city of the dead. The Thames becomes the river, like Styx in Greek mythology, which separates the living from the departed. Those in the rest of London are always hurrying about, obsessed by business and by deadlines, but time in the Tower has stopped. The present there blends into the past, as dreams blend into reality.

Prior to Soseki, a few authors had briefly mentioned the ravens in the Tower, but none had accorded any particular importance to them. Nobody had bothered to describe the ravens in any detail, but Soseki made them the focus of his tale. First, the narrator sees the two young princes who died mysteriously in the Tower, perhaps murdered at the orders of Richard II. The narrator observes that their tunics are “as black as “ravens’ wings” (Soseki 2004, p. 97), subtly hinting at the revelations that will come shortly.

A bit later, as the narrator witnesses an execution:

A raven descends, hunching its wings, its black beak protruding, it stares at people. I feel as if the rancor of a hundred years of blood have congealed and taken the form of a bird so as to guard this unhappy place for ever. In the blowing wind an elm tree rustles. I look over, and on the branches, too, there is a raven. After a while another one flies down. Where they have come from I do not know. Beside them a young woman with a boy of about seven is standing staring at the ravens. Her Greek nose and beautiful, polished gem-like eyes and the undulations of curves shaping her pure white neck moved my heart more than a little. The child looks up at the woman and says with curiosity, “Ravens, ravens.” Then, imploring her, “The ravens seem to be cold. I’d like to give them some bread.” The woman says quietly, “Those ravens do not want anything to eat.” The child asks, “Why?” The woman, staring fixedly at the ravens with eyes that seem to be floating in the midst of her long lashes, says only, “There are five ravens,” and does not reply to the child’s question. She looks lost in thought, as if reflecting alone over something. I wonder whether there is not some strange karma between this woman and the ravens. She speaks the raven’s mood as if speaking of her own and declares that, although only three ravens are visible, there are five (p. 102-103) .

The young woman appears to have supernatural knowledge, and she fluently reads inscriptions that the narrator cannot begin to decipher. Gradually we realize that the woman is Lady Jane Gray, the beautiful young queen of great learning and courage, who ruled England for nine days before being deposed and eventually executed on the orders of Mary Tudor. She and the boy, together with others who died in the Tower, have returned to haunt it in the form of ravens. The narrator sees Walter Raleigh, who wrote a history of the world in his cell, Guy Fawkes, who once tried to blow up Parliament, and many others who were imprisoned within the Tower walls. All of them, it appears, are spirits who have returned in raven form.

Finally, Soseki returns to his lodging and to the mundane realities of everyday life:

…I tell my landlord that I have visited the Tower today, but the landlord says, “There were five ravens there, I suppose.” Well, I wonder with great surprise, is my landlord also a relative of that woman, but the landlord laughs, “They’re sacred ravens. They’ve been keeping them there since ancient times, and, even if they become one short, they immediately make up the numbers again. There are always five ravens there” (p. 113).

The comparatively prosaic explanations of the landlord seem so far from his experience that the narrator resolves not to talk about or visit the Tower of London again.
Soseki made no claim to have provided an objective description of the Tower or its history. He often relied on sensational Victorian sources and made a few mistakes, for example by greatly exaggerating the number of people executed within the Tower. Contrary to what Soseki, or at least his landlord, says about the ravens, they had not been in the Tower since ancient times but only about two, at the most three, decades. If the ravens were considered sacred or believed to represent the spirits of the dead, no other writer, so far as I can tell, would even indirectly allude to this for more than another decade.

Soseki’s tale of his visit to the Tower is by far the most important early account of the Tower Ravens in terms of its detail, its insight, and also its literary quality. To the extent that its descriptions can be confirmed, this is certainly our major source for information about the early history of the Tower Ravens. Soseki was a major authority on English literature and culture in Japan, and soon to become one of Japan’s leading novelists. Was the account an accurate description of the Tower of London and, most specifically, of the ravens? Soseki has obviously taken pains to research the history of the Tower in detail, since he cites many historical and literary sources, all of them in English. In addition, he refers not only to many historical events but also highly specific locations and inscriptions.

But what is most likely to place his account in question is its literary and imaginative nature. Like several other modern novelists, Soseki often blends reality with fantasy, as well as the present with the past. To learn about the Tower of London and its ravens from Soseki’s account, might be a little bit like trying to learn about Dublin in the early twentieth century from the famous novel Ulysses by James Joyce(1990), a writer roughly comparable to Soseki in reputation.

Like Soseki, Joyce described certain locations with great care and exactitude, yet he also depicted them in a context that is obviously fictional. Like Soseki and other artists, Joyce endeavored, in a broader way, to be faithful to his experience. But how could one separate the fantasy from reality in his novel? A scholar studying Dublin in the early twentieth century would probably do that by confirming whether elements in the description of a locale in Dublin by Joyce could be confirmed by other sources. If so, he would probably regard the novel Ulysses as a generally reliable source of at least certain kinds of information. As I will show in the course of this book, other early accounts, sketchy though they may be, are very consistent with the descriptions of Soseki.

It is unlikely that Soseki could have substantially contributed to the myth of the ravens, since his account was not available in English until the twenty-first century. He represents the lore of the Tower Ravens in part as a legend told to him by his landlord. The landlord could conceivably be simply a fictional device, but Soseki, as evidenced by his careful attention to detail, was attempting to describe the Tower and its environment for his contemporaries in Japan. Inventing characters and events, even supernatural ones, is easily consistent with the artistic fidelity to experience demanded by an artist such as Joyce or Soseki, but changing the ambiance of a time and place is not. A reader of Joyce’s Ulysses in the twentieth century would probably not have traveled to Dublin expecting to meet the character Leopold Bloom, but he might well have gone looking for the River Liffey. While the landlord may well be either invented or fictionalized, the legend that he tells, part of the environment in London, is probably recorded accurately. Soseki, despite his aloofness from the society of London, was documenting things that had already begun to circulate in oral traditions.

As a man of great sensitivity, he might also have picked up on associations and implicit ideas that had not been clearly articulated by the British themselves. Perhaps his religious background enabled him to speak openly of ideas that were blasphemous to Christians and superstitious to rationalists. Soseki’s Buddhism, which traditionally entails belief in reincarnation, might have given added dimensions to relatively casual sayings about the ravens by people like his landlord. The idea that people might be reborn as birds did not seem strange to him. Perhaps Soseki identified Lady Jane Gray at least in part with Amaterasu, the Japanese goddess of the sun, from whom the Emperors of Japan claim their descent. Amaterasu, like Lady Gray in his story, is sometimes depicted in the form of a giant raven.

Most significantly, Soseki was, as an outsider to London society, not blinded by ideologies of progress or appeals to rationality. He could clearly see the mythic dimensions of the Tower of London, which residents of that city were barely half aware of. It is not hard to imagine that Japanese readers might have been intrigued by such accounts. The British, could they have read them, might possibly have felt either offended or amused, but the account by Soseki anticipates the imagery that they themselves would use in describing the ravens in years to come. The idea that the ravens were prisoners executed at the Tower, for example, would, as I will describe later, again emerge a little over a decade after Soseki published his story.

Soseki decided not to make a second visit to the Tower, so as not to interfere with his memories of the first. It had, apparently, not even crossed his mind to buy a souvenir. I wonder, though, what he might think if he were to return there today. The ubiquitous tourist shops constantly remind one of the world of commerce, and it would certainly not be easy, even for a poet, to slip into a reverie. Everything is brightly lit and well-organized; the dust of centuries has been cleaned away. And yet despite the commercialization, or perhaps because of it, the Tower still blends fantasy and reality in uncanny ways.

Keeping ravens in the Tower is, as Soseki intimates, an attempt to stop the passage of time, to hold on to glories of ancient Britain, of the Middle Ages, and even the British Empire. As such, the institution can offend the modern sensibility, which is based on the ideal of progress, and the postmodern sensibility, which is based on that of eternal change. But the idea of stopping, or at least transcending time, is at the least too deeply embedded in human culture to be dismissed glibly. It is arguably the impulse behind most lyric poetry from Sappho to Shakespeare and the present. 

I have tried to reconstruct the story of how the ravens came to the Tower. Even more important, though, is the logic of history that has brought them to the Tower, and made people believe that Britain would fall were they to leave. The legend may seem, when we achieve a bit of distance from it, strange and exotic, but something similar may be said of all our everyday routines. On one occasion in the Tower, I saw a man reading to a little girl on his lap, and a raven, unknown to them, perched on the fence behind them and peering over their shoulders at the book. “Perhaps,” I thought for a moment, “that raven is Natsume Soseki?”

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