Summary
With about three million visitors per year, the Tower of London is one of the most popular tourist attractions in London or the world, and the ravens rival the Crown Jewels and the Yeoman Warders as its most popular feature. The ravens have a special intimacy with visitors, for whom they show off and, some believe, even pose for cameras. 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.
This is the first book to reconstruct the history of the famous ravens, how they actually came to the Tower of London, and how they gained legendary status. It is based on extensive research in British archives, as well as on many conversations with the Ravenmaster, the Yeoman Warders, the historians at the Tower, and others. In addition, it is a meditation on the ways in which stories of animals are used by human beings in the construction of personal, and collective, identity.
The author has found that the ravens at the Tower are neither ancient nor domesticated under Charles II, but their true story has more high drama than the standard narrative. They were brought in to dramatize tales of Gothic horror based on historical events and told to tourists at the Tower of London in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The ravens initially presented ats demonic creatures that had pecked out the eyes of severed heads, thus deflecting anger of visitors away from the British monarchy. The legend that Britain will fall if the ravens leave the Tower dates only to the end of World War II, when the experience of shared peril during the Blitz bonded Londoners to the ravens. The idea that ravens protected Britain was inspired by their use as unofficial spotters for enemy planes and bombs during the Blitz, particularly one known as “Jackie the Lucky Raven,” who was the mascot of a nearby brewery.
For the approximately 140 years that the ravens have been at the Tower, they have been variously viewed as symbols of cruelty, avatars of fate, bearers of prophesy, and cuddly national pets. In the twenty-first century, it will be more appropriate to regard them instead as symbols of our ecological inheritance. The book concludes with an proposal that the ravens continue to be kept as a colony at the Tower but no longer deprived of flight. It, in any case, will prove impossible to keep them with clipped wings when, as now seems inevitable, wild ravens return to London. Furthermore, the adventures of the ravens that can move at liberty will continually generate new stories, and provide a far more dynamic symbol of Britain.