Raven

Corvus corax — the common raven — is the largest passerine-adjacent bird in the Northern Hemisphere: long-lived, loud, and observant enough that human communities across three continents have attached similar meanings to it for two thousand documented years. The convergence is not mystical. Ravens follow armies because armies make corpses. Ravens congregate near settlements because settlements produce food waste. A bird clever enough to cache food, mimic sounds, and recognize individual human faces will attract the attention of anyone paying attention. The mythology is downstream of the ecology.

That said, the specific traditions layered onto the raven are not interchangeable. Roman augury, Norse court poetry, Irish battlefield theology, and Victorian tourism are all different engines. This page keeps them separate.

The Roman oscines system

Roman augury divided divinatory birds into two functional classes: alites, whose flight paths were read, and oscines, whose voices and calls were interpreted. The raven (corvus) was a canonical oscines bird. Cicero’s De Divinatione (44 BCE) provides the best source on ancient divinatory practices. In Book I, chapter 39, Cicero records the directional rule that governed corvids: a crow (cornix) calling from the left was a favorable sign, while a raven (corvus) was considered favorable if calling from the right. The distinction between species matters here — it is not simply “corvid on left = good”; the two birds occupied different quadrants of the templum, the bounded sky-space the augur marked out before reading.

Following Cicero’s De Divinatione, the messages sent by the gods through birds were divided into two types, Oscines (talkers) and Alites (flyers). The former were grounded on the songs of birds — where ravens, crows, owls, and hens were the most important species — and the latter were built on birds’ flight. Owls and ravens on the left side are inauspicious; however, ravens and owls seen on the right side can be lucky. It is all about the quadrant they are seen within.

Cicero himself was a skeptic: he writes De Divinatione partly to dismantle the system he practiced professionally. That internal tension — the state institution of augury coexisting with philosophical doubt — is itself worth noting. The raven’s ominous or favorable status in Rome was institutional, rule-governed, and contestable. It was not simply a death bird.

Huginn and Muninn

The best-documented raven mythology in the Germanic tradition belongs to Odin. The primary sources are unambiguous. Huginn and Muninn are attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, in the Third Grammatical Treatise, compiled in the 13th century by Óláfr Þórðarson, and in the poetry of skalds.

The names are compounds from Old Norse: Huginn derives from hugr, “thought,” and Muninn from munr, “memory” or “mind.” In the Prose Edda’s Gylfaginning, chapter 38, Snorri quotes Grímnismál when describing the ravens: “Two ravens sit on his shoulders and bring to his ears all that they hear and see. Their names are Hugin and Munin.” From this daily report, the Old Norse world knew Odin as Hrafnaguð — the raven-god.

In Grímnismál, Odin himself speaks the crucial lines: Huginn and Muninn fly every day over the vast earth. I fear for Hugin that he won’t return, though I fear more for Munin. The anxiety over Muninn — Memory — rather than Huginn — Thought — is the poem’s sharpest edge. According to the Poetic Edda, Odin fears losing Muninn (Memory) more than Huginn (Thought). This reflects a Norse philosophical point: you can always generate new thoughts, but if you lose your memory and accumulated wisdom, you lose yourself entirely.

In Heimskringla, specifically in the Ynglinga saga, a more euhemerized account of Odin’s life states that Odin bestowed the gift of speech upon Huginn and Muninn. The ravens in these texts are not merely atmosphere. They are the god’s epistemology made concrete — his ability to know the nine realms depends entirely on two birds who might not come back.

The raven banner (Hrafnsmerki) carried by Viking armies into battle is a related thread: it brought the bird’s battlefield presence into the field of war-magic, though the documentary evidence for specific banner-beliefs is thinner than the literary evidence for Huginn and Muninn.

The battlefield association

The raven’s association with death and war is the most geographically widespread and the most ecologically grounded of all its folkloric roles. Ravens are intelligent scavengers. They follow predators, including armies, to feed on the kill. This behavior is documented in natural history from antiquity onward, and it would have been observed by every culture that fought large-scale battles in raven territory, which is most of the Northern Hemisphere.

The Irish tradition gives this ecological fact its most developed theological form. The Morrígan is an Irish goddess of war, fate, and death, often seen on battlefields sometimes in the form of a crow or raven, either inspiring warriors or feasting on the dead. Her presence was a sign that a battle was being observed by powerful forces, and for her enemies, a foreboding of their demise. The Morrígan operates as a triple figure — the raven is the bird of the Irish battle goddesses, the trio of the Morrígan, Badb, and Nemain/Macha — known as “Battle Ravens” or “Battle Crows,” said to foretell the outcome of battles. Green’s Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend documents these figures as shapeshifting between human and corvid form at moments of martial decision.

Welsh mythology preserves a linguistic trace of the same association: the name Brân, borne by the giant king Brân the Blessed of the Mabinogion, means “raven” or “crow” in Welsh. The decapitation motif in Brân’s story — his head buried under London’s White Hill to ward off invasion — is one of several threads later writers tangled together with the Tower of London legend. The two traditions are not the same.

British folklore: the ambivalence

In Britain, raven omens are remarkably regional and often contradictory, which is typical of animal folklore collected before the twentieth century smoothed everything into uniform symbolism.

The death associations are the most widely documented: seeing a raven tapping on a window foretold death; if a raven is heard croaking near a house, there will be a death in it; if a raven flies around the chimney of a sick person’s house, they will die. These patterns appear in Irish and Scottish folk records from the nineteenth century onward. Venetia Newall’s Discovering the Folklore of Birds and Beasts (1971) surveys the British regional material and shows that the omen tradition is both real and inconsistent.

The luck traditions run in the opposite direction just as confidently: in Shetland and Orkney, if a maiden sees a raven at Imbolc she can foretell the direction of her future husband’s home by following the raven’s flight. In Wales, if a raven perches on a roof, it means prosperity for the family. In Scotland, deerstalkers believed it boded well to hear a raven before setting out on a hunt.

This ambivalence is the honest folkloric position. The raven is not simply a death bird in British tradition. It is a bird that signals significance — that something is about to happen — and whether that something is good or bad has depended on region, context, and century of collection.

The Tower of London legend — properly dated

The Tower of London’s raven legend is among the most widely repeated pieces of British “ancient” lore, and among the most thoroughly documented invented traditions.

The received story: if the ravens leave the Tower, the Crown and kingdom will fall. King Charles II was warned of this prophecy by his astronomer John Flamsteed and ordered that six ravens be kept at the Tower in perpetuity. This supposed seventeenth-century royal decree is cited in tourist materials and repeated in otherwise careful reference works.

The Tower of London has had resident ravens since the 1870s, when a few pet birds became minor visitor attractions. At some point between 1895 and 1903 — nobody is quite sure when — someone decided to tell tourists that these birds had been here for centuries, and that their departure would spell catastrophe for the realm.

Charles II did not protect the ravens. The prophecy did not exist in his time. The entire apparatus of ancient superstition was assembled, quietly and efficiently, during the reign of Queen Victoria. Boria Sax’s research in City of Ravens (2011) establishes that the birds only enter documentary evidence around 1883, and that the story about Charles II ordering that six ravens be kept in the Tower cannot be traced back any earlier than 1944. The legend entered wide circulation largely after the Tower’s reopening in January 1946 — a moment when living, un-fled ravens carried obvious symbolic utility in post-war Britain.

Julia Pardoe’s The Tower Menagerie (1829) recounts stories of ravens at the Tower but makes no reference to the dire consequences of their absence. The “kingdom will fall” element appears nowhere in the nineteenth-century sources.

Sax argues that the Tower Ravens are “a mixture” of invented tradition, fakelore, and modern myth — deliberately shaped, organically embellished, and now entirely believed. The raven’s genuine folkloric authority, accumulated over two millennia, made the legend credible. The specific prophecy is Victorian tourism.

In modern practice

The modern Wiccan correspondence system assigns the raven to themes of magic, transformation, shapeshifting, and communication with the dead. These are not entirely unmoored from older tradition — the Morrígan’s corvid transformations, Odin’s intelligence network, and the omen traditions all feed this cluster. But the specific association of the raven with the witch’s familiar, and with a kind of mystical messenger role in personal practice, owes more to mid-twentieth-century revival writers than to any pre-modern source. Practitioners should know what they are drawing on.

What is genuinely old: the battlefield association (scavenging behavior, death proximity), the prophetic or ominous quality of the call, the association with a deity of war and wisdom (Odin, the Morrígan). What is more recent: the smooth identification of “raven = death” without regional qualification, and the Tower legend as ancient authority.

Correspondences (modern practice summary)

For reference, not citation as history:

• Element: air or water (sources disagree)
• Planet: Saturn (modern majority) or associated with Odin/Mercury in some systems
• Direction: west or north
• Themes: prophecy, death and transformation, intelligence, communication between worlds
• Associated deities: Odin (Norse), the Morrígan (Irish), Apollo (Greek — the god’s sacred bird in some accounts)

Cross-references: Cat — the other primary British familiar animal; Hare — shape-shifting omen animal and witch-companion; Toad — the third leg of the familiar triad in English cunning-craft records.