by Owen Sheers
‘Then Bendigeidfran ordered his head to be cut off. ‘And take my head,’ he said, ‘and carry it to the Gwynfryn in London, and bury it with its face towards France.’
As long as Bendigeidfran’s head was concealed within the Gwynfryn in London, ‘no oppression’ the myth tells us, ‘would ever come across the sea’ to the island of Britain.
The Gwynfryn (White Hill) is the site of the Tower of London. Given the translation of Bendigeidfran’s name as Blessed Crow or Magnificent Crow, these lines from the myth of Branwen immediately put me in mind of the well-known superstition about the Tower ravens. Should the birds ever leave, the superstition runs, the kingdom of Britain will fall. It was while I was researching this superstition further that I came across a suggestion that, during the Second World War, the Tower had been restocked with new ravens from Wales, allegedly under great secrecy for fear of disturbing a fragile public morale.
The idea of this mission fascinated me. It seemed to form a glittering thread across the centuries, one which ran between an ancient British king and his 1940s wartime equivalent, the latter investing in the myth of the former as a talisman to protect their land. It was then that I realised: here it was, my story – rooted to the original and yet not, a journey that could begin where Branwen’s myth ended, at the Gwynfryn in London, before taking us back to Wales and the echoed world of the Mabinogion.
Just like the original myth, I hope that White Ravens is a story about many things at once, one being the nature of stories themselves: why and how we tell them, and why and how we use them. I should have known, therefore, that the true story about what happened to the ravens in the Tower of London during WWII, would, in its way, be even more suggestive of a wartime investment in an ancient myth, even as it proved that very same myth to be false. This below is an email I received from Bill Callaghan, a Beefeater at the Tower of London whom I contacted after writing White Ravens.
‘In late September 1940 three ravens died of stress due to their inability to escape the bombing; the remaining four were sent to a sanctuary in Norfolk under great secrecy. Public mood and morale is a fickle thing and as a mass we British are a superstitious bunch so the propaganda value of such an event would have been pure gold for Goebbels. Not a lot exists about the story, it is my understanding though, that the secrecy was so great that the D notice was not removed until 2004. Compare that with the much more pragmatic Enigma secret which was released into the public domain in 1976!’
Owen Sheers
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Sioned Davies for her excellent modern translation of the Mabinogion (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007) which I used as my primary source. I’d also like to thank Penny Thomas at Seren for her judicious eye and patience, Zoe Waldie for her speedy reading of an early draft and Fflur Dafydd and Rebecca Jenkins for their emergency translation advice. Most of this story was written at the window table of Petal Belle café on Sullivan Street, New York – thanks to Lara for supplying the coffee and Huw M for the soundtrack.
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE
www.seren-books.com
© Owen Sheers
First published 2009
Reprinted 2011
ISBN 978-1-78172-126-1
The right of Owen Sheers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Mathew Bevan
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.
