![]() ![]() The link between this handsome carrion bird and the dead is a strong one and can be found throughout Europe. Cicero, of course, was warned of his impending death by a raven and legends tell that if the famed murmur of ravens leave the Tower of London, it will fall. Back in the annals of ancient tales, the goddess, An Morrigan, took the form of a raven whilst Welsh god, Bran the Blessed, also appeared as the iconic bird. Melusine was not alone in her belief that birds could carry the spirits of the dead both to and from the afterlife, and ravens in particular loom large in folklore. Over the years that bird has been everything from a swift to a dove yet the most popular telling of the story casts the creature, unsurprisingly, as a raven. Wherever Melusine went, the creature was with her and she sat up into the night talking to it as though it was George, convinced that, as long as she had her pet, she had not lost the man she loved. The heartbroken Melusine was convinced that the bird contained the spirit of her dead beloved and she made a pet of it. She was adrift, bereft with grief and when a bird flew through the open window of her chamber one day and settled there with no intention of leaving, the despairing duchess took it as a sign from beyond. She had been at George’s side for most of his adult life and, when her lover died after a massive stroke during a trip to Hanover, Melusine simply couldn’t bring herself to admit that he was gone. That woman was Melusine von der Schulenberg, Duchess of Kendal, devoted mistress of George I and mother to that king’s three illegitimate children. A murder of crows gather at dusk © Jesse Weinstein Far from queens and guillotines and glittering palaces, this was the small, apparently inconsequential story of a woman with a broken heart. Whilst researching my book, Life in the Georgian Court, I found myself embroiled in many glamorous and iconic love stories yet it was one of the less famous that fired my imagination. Whatever the cultural background to the raven’s place in the psyche of western Europe, it is not the only avian creature that enjoys or on occasion, suffers from this association with death. ![]() Perhaps this is thanks to Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic poem of the same name, perhaps to the legends of the Tower of London, perhaps even to the very trappings of cinema and literature. The image of the raven, black-winged, glassy-eyed as it picks at the bones of the dead, calling its carrion cry across a Gothic graveyard, is one that is indelibly linked with horror in the public psyche. I hope this dip into just a few of those beliefs, some common, some less so, will help your imagination to take flight! One could write an encyclopaedia on the appearances of birds in folklore and their association with death and mortality, travelling from Japan to Scandinavia, France and beyond. ![]() From ancient times to the twenty first century, death and the avian have found themselves inextricably linked across cultures, continents and creeds. ![]()
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