The Sea Inside

said, ‘be off with you as quick as ye may, and never more presume to abide in the place which ye have spoiled.’ They flew away, with a dismal look, ashamed of what they’d done.
    Three days later, as Cuthbert was digging in his field, one of the pair returned, ‘with his wings lamentably trailing and his head bowed to his feet, and his voice low and humble’, as Bede relates. The bird begged forgiveness, and Cuthbert gave the pair permission to return. When they did, they brought with them ‘a good sized hunk of hog’s lard such as one greases axles with’, which Cuthbert gave to his visiting brothers to waterproof their shoes. ‘Let no one think it absurd to learn virtues from birds,’ he declared, ‘for as Solomon says, “Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways, and learn wisdom.”’ The reformed ravens remained for many years on the island, rebuilding their nest each year without recourse to Cuthbert’s roofing materials, nor ‘wrought annoyance upon any’.

    Ravens were not the only feathered inhabitants of the Farnes that Cuthbert took into his care. Eiders, with their pistachio-green necks and wedge-shaped bills, their oddly reassuring call –
a-hoo, a-hoo
– and their solemn, sturdy presence, became particular favourites because of their seeming tameness: Cuthbert’s successor on Inner Farne, Bartholomew, would allow the birds to lay their eggs beside the chapel’s altar, and even under his bed. In fact, eider females appear approachable only because they remain at the nest to protect their brood no matter how close a predator may get; it is one reason why raiders were able to steal their soft down. But Cuthbert’s ascetic life had no need for feather quilts; instead, he instituted a law to protect the birds, the first such legislation in England.
    At least, that’s the story. It is not mentioned in either of the two earliest hagiographies of Cuthbert, although a fourteenth-century manuscript does refer to twelve pence paid to a Newcastle artist for painting
volucer S. Cuthberti
(medieval Latin for ‘Cuthbert’s bird’) on Durham cathedral’s reredos, perhaps prompted by Reginald’s chronicle of the saint, in which he mentions ‘certain creatures … named after the blessed Cuthbert himself’. Yet the legend suited what we knew, or wanted to know, of the man. It has persisted for a thousand years, earning the eider its endearment, Cuddy’s duck, in honour of this northern St Francis.
    After doing his duty as bishop of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert returned to Inner Farne, where he died in 687. Reluctant to leave the island in life, in death his remains, like Oswald’s, were rendered refugee by invading Vikings, wandering from place to place in the care of his fellow monks. When Cuthbert’s body finally came to rest at Durham in 1104, it was found to be miraculously intact, with his gold and garnet pectorial cross concealed in the folds of his cloak. It was even said that the saint’s blood still ran fresh in his veins, and that he was gently breathing. His bird-entwined legend would remain potent, to be commemorated by another Newcastle artist, the Pre-Raphaelite William Bell Scott, whose mural at Wallington Hall depicted Cuthbert with terns hovering over his tonsured head and a loyal eider at his feet.

    By that point, birds had assumed the shape of new familiars, from Coleridge’s ominous albatross to Poe’s gothic corvid, created by an author who took on the persona of The Raven, forever clad in black from frock coat to silk cravat and, according to Tennyson, ‘the most original genius that America has produced’. Poe’s ‘ghastly, grim and ancient raven’, always croaking ‘Nevermore,’ was invested with the same sense of foreboding as Melville’s White Whale. Both were inspired by
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, and both acted as fated antidotes to muscular Christianity or evolutionary rationality.
    In an industrial era, the raven had come to embody a new, unnerving myth. In 1813 Caspar David Friedrich painted
The Hunter in the Forest
, a diminutive figure dwarfed by massive firs while a raven sits on a stump as an augury of defeat; Friedrich’s
Raven Tree
, a tangle of branches and black wings against a lurid sky, conjured up a similarly gloomy scene. And in one of my favourite, if obscure, paintings, an 1868 watercolour by another Pre-Raphaelite and naturalist, Robert Bateman, the body of a dead knight lies in a shadowy forest glade in whose dark