The Sea Inside

into carrion for the real corvids that would soon descend on the scene.
    At sea, Norse sailors carried ravens as navigational aids as they sailed from one northern island to the other, as they would otherwise have become lost under the starless skies of high summer latitudes. Released, the birds would rise up looking for land. If they didn’t find it, they’d return to the ship. The north was the home of such resonant creatures of the forest and the sea, their names eliding with internal rhythms – ravens, wolves, whales and bears – a zoomorphic cast endowed with all manner of semi-human characteristics. In his
History of the Northern Peoples
, Olaus Magnus maintained that there were ‘extremely savage ravens, including white ones’, that lived in the icy lands, capable of ‘clawing out the eyes of babies as they lie squalling in their cradles’. He also claimed that the birds could make sixty-four different sounds, from
Cras, cras
, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ to
Erit, erit
, ‘It shall be, it shall be,’ although neither of these messages could be trusted. ‘And so it is with all the other calls which ravens babble, cluck, bark, croak, gargle, and wheeze, telling of fierce and terrible storms, rains, and other disasters.’ The raven was a liar and a trickster, the bird who cried wolf.
    Such myths merged with the coming of Christianity. In early English churches, stone porches were carved with rows of raven beaks, reminders of Odin’s servants as well as of the brutal behaviour of the tattooed Vikings, said to have flayed Christians alive and nailed their skins to church doors, as witnessed by fragments of human tissue found under nail heads driven into the oak. (My own ancestors may have been among those raiders: my mother’s red hair inherited from her illegitimate grandmother, and my crooked little fingers, bent by Dupuytren’s contracture, betray our Nordic roots.) Along with the wolf and the eagle, the raven was one of the Beasts of Battle, haunting emblems of death and destruction in Germanic, Norse and Old English verse.
‘
The Battle of Brunanburh’ recorded corpses left ‘for the dark/Black-coated raven, horny-beaked to enjoy’. In ‘Judith’, the raven is ‘the slaughter-greedy bird’ that rejoices at the coming feast. And in ‘The Fight at Finnsburh’, the raven circles, ‘swarthy and sallow’, over the fallen heroes: the original Anglo-Saxon expresses it better, in alliterative half-lines that emphasise the bird’s eerie blackness:
Hræfn wandrade sweart and sealobr ū n
.
    St Oswald, the Dark Age king of Northumbria, was often portrayed with a pet raven which carried his ring to the Wessex princess he intended to marry. Later, the bird performed a posthumous service for its master, when in 642 Oswald was slain in battle and his body dismembered by Penda, the pagan ruler of rival Mercia. In order to propitiate Odin, Penda had the saint’s head, hands and arms hung on stakes, but this macabre display had the opposite effect of spreading his opponent’s cult throughout England. Oswald’s raven flew off with one of his master’s arms to a sacred tree – an echo of Yggdrasil, the heavenly ash which bound all time and space – where a holy well promptly sprang from the ground. One limb ended up in Ely, another in Peterborough, and in Durham, Oswald’s head was placed in the coffin containing the incorrupt remains of a yet more revered saint, one with his own extraordinary relationships with animals.
    There might not be much room in the modern world for monks and their miracles, but who could not love the story of St Cuthbert? His name alone sounds comforting, northern and true; he was also one of the most powerful men of his time. Born around 634, he grew up as an adopted child, and at one point seems to have served as a soldier. He entered holy orders in 651, partly as a result of the turbulent aftermath of Oswald’s defeat and the death of the bishop, Áedán, whose soul Cuthbert had seen in a vision as it was carried up to heaven.
    This fair-haired, athletic man, ‘a conspicuous left-hander’, grew to be as great a lover of birds and beasts as he was a devoted missionary to the north of England and Scotland. Stories of remarkable miracles would grow up in his wake, as related by his hagiographer, the Venerable Bede. Once, when stranded by a storm on a Pictish beach for three days, Cuthbert and his hungry brothers found three pieces of dolphin flesh laid out and ready to