A Raven's Story
“History
is written by the victors” they say. But I say that it’s the stories that
endure that define what is. Take the story of old Brân the Blessed, for example.
Oh, you haven’t heard of him?
He was a mighty king once; so mighty he could wade across the sea to Ireland to rescue his sister. But he was also unlucky too, because for all the men he took with him, “except seven, none rose up”. Sound familiar?
Even Brân himself (mighty as he was) fell there.
“Cut off my head” he’d said as he lay dying (or words to that effect).
“Bring me back and feast with my head. Get Rhiannon to send some of those birds to sing to us and we’ll have a grand old time - it’ll be great! Head Brân will be just as fun as full Brân, and I won’t even rot as long as you keep that there door closed!”
And so they’d taken Brân’s head and returned home to Harlech. The seven feasted and the head spoke, laughed, told stories and jokes. The birds sang the sweetest of melodies ever heard, and for years, people forgot their grief.
Well, until someone opened “that there door”, that is.
We’ve all heard of what happened when Pandora opened that box. About how all the evil things came flooding out into the world to darken the days and hearts of man.
They should have left the door closed.
Because that was when they felt their loss, and the head that had spoken with them so eloquently for years, fell silent and began to rot.
So they set off for London, to the place they called Gwynfryn. Because that was the next bit of what Brân had asked.
“Bury my head in that there white hill and have it facing France. Aye, that should stop some bother.”
Which is how the head of Brân came to be buried under what is now the White Tower on Tower Hill, London.
But this is where story becomes twisty, because another story tells of how Arthur couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else defending the “Isle of the Mighty”. So true to form, Arthur had it dug up and removed.
It was probably no coincidence that years later an invasion did come from France, and that this new ruler would build that White Tower. Not only that, but society would be forever changed. For while the French poets sang of Arthur and further fleshed out his mythos, the small folk - now serfs -would toil for the profit of their lords.
And for a while, the story of Brân lay dormant.
There have been wild ravens at Tower Hill for as long as anyone can remember. Some say it was the executions that brought them, the easy availability of fresh blood and viscera to feast on. Lore holds that the ravens behaved abominably after the execution of Lady Jane Grey, but far better when Anne Boleyn met her end.
I mention this because Brân is usually taken to mean “raven”, and it’s important to understand this if you want to understand how the story twists next.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, the ravens came to be seen as a nuisance and people started to chase them away for their scavenging. Here the stories differ. Sometimes it’s a wizened old Soothsayer who tells King Charles II that the kingdom will not outlive the last raven. Other times it’s the astronomer John Flamsteed who prevents the king from clearing them from Tower Hill for more or less the same reason. Either way though, tradition and law has held it to be a necessity that there would always be no fewer than six ravens resident at Tower Hill.
No one knows if Arthur really dug up Brân’s head anyway. It doesn’t matter either way though, because whether drawn by the blood or the Blessed Raven himself, the ravens say otherwise. Eventually the story of Arthur even digging up the head would come to be just a footnote.
Not many people remember Arthur for his conquest, plundering, and seeing others as resources. But the inhabitants of Annwn do, they remember what was taken, and the small folk have always held more in common with the Annuvian powers than their leaders in ThisWorld. Unfortunately, the fruits of Arthur’s tree would come to poison the world once more
In May 1979 Margaret Thatcher swept to power and began to implement some of the most destructive policies imaginable. A year later in the United States, Ronald Reagan would do the same. Where Arthur’s spoils were of Annwn, the spoils of this new regime would be of the ThisWorld.
Thirty years of plunder later and we sit upon a ruined and scarred planet. The insatiable inheritors of Arthur now build shelters for themselves where they hoard their wealth like the most miserly of dragons. (Like Arthur and the tales of his return, they aren’t building anything but burial mounds for themselves.)
The ThisWorld is dying, but the empire is crumbling to ashes, and the White Christ falls from dominance. The old stories too are returning and so too the Annuvian powers with them. Those that stories killed are being reborn in new-old stories (the magic of a literate population), and the barriers between Annwn and ThisWorld fall.
On St George’s Day, a day named for a man who killed a dragon that could never be sated, the Tower saw something it hadn’t seen for those thirty years: the birth of new ravens. Four in number and born to ravens whose names mean “thought” and “memory” – I can almost hear Brân laugh.
Because he won this battle of the stories, and the dragon may yet be killed.
Oh, you haven’t heard of him?
He was a mighty king once; so mighty he could wade across the sea to Ireland to rescue his sister. But he was also unlucky too, because for all the men he took with him, “except seven, none rose up”. Sound familiar?
Even Brân himself (mighty as he was) fell there.
“Cut off my head” he’d said as he lay dying (or words to that effect).
“Bring me back and feast with my head. Get Rhiannon to send some of those birds to sing to us and we’ll have a grand old time - it’ll be great! Head Brân will be just as fun as full Brân, and I won’t even rot as long as you keep that there door closed!”
And so they’d taken Brân’s head and returned home to Harlech. The seven feasted and the head spoke, laughed, told stories and jokes. The birds sang the sweetest of melodies ever heard, and for years, people forgot their grief.
Well, until someone opened “that there door”, that is.
We’ve all heard of what happened when Pandora opened that box. About how all the evil things came flooding out into the world to darken the days and hearts of man.
They should have left the door closed.
Because that was when they felt their loss, and the head that had spoken with them so eloquently for years, fell silent and began to rot.
So they set off for London, to the place they called Gwynfryn. Because that was the next bit of what Brân had asked.
“Bury my head in that there white hill and have it facing France. Aye, that should stop some bother.”
Which is how the head of Brân came to be buried under what is now the White Tower on Tower Hill, London.
But this is where story becomes twisty, because another story tells of how Arthur couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else defending the “Isle of the Mighty”. So true to form, Arthur had it dug up and removed.
It was probably no coincidence that years later an invasion did come from France, and that this new ruler would build that White Tower. Not only that, but society would be forever changed. For while the French poets sang of Arthur and further fleshed out his mythos, the small folk - now serfs -would toil for the profit of their lords.
And for a while, the story of Brân lay dormant.
There have been wild ravens at Tower Hill for as long as anyone can remember. Some say it was the executions that brought them, the easy availability of fresh blood and viscera to feast on. Lore holds that the ravens behaved abominably after the execution of Lady Jane Grey, but far better when Anne Boleyn met her end.
I mention this because Brân is usually taken to mean “raven”, and it’s important to understand this if you want to understand how the story twists next.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, the ravens came to be seen as a nuisance and people started to chase them away for their scavenging. Here the stories differ. Sometimes it’s a wizened old Soothsayer who tells King Charles II that the kingdom will not outlive the last raven. Other times it’s the astronomer John Flamsteed who prevents the king from clearing them from Tower Hill for more or less the same reason. Either way though, tradition and law has held it to be a necessity that there would always be no fewer than six ravens resident at Tower Hill.
No one knows if Arthur really dug up Brân’s head anyway. It doesn’t matter either way though, because whether drawn by the blood or the Blessed Raven himself, the ravens say otherwise. Eventually the story of Arthur even digging up the head would come to be just a footnote.
Not many people remember Arthur for his conquest, plundering, and seeing others as resources. But the inhabitants of Annwn do, they remember what was taken, and the small folk have always held more in common with the Annuvian powers than their leaders in ThisWorld. Unfortunately, the fruits of Arthur’s tree would come to poison the world once more
In May 1979 Margaret Thatcher swept to power and began to implement some of the most destructive policies imaginable. A year later in the United States, Ronald Reagan would do the same. Where Arthur’s spoils were of Annwn, the spoils of this new regime would be of the ThisWorld.
Thirty years of plunder later and we sit upon a ruined and scarred planet. The insatiable inheritors of Arthur now build shelters for themselves where they hoard their wealth like the most miserly of dragons. (Like Arthur and the tales of his return, they aren’t building anything but burial mounds for themselves.)
The ThisWorld is dying, but the empire is crumbling to ashes, and the White Christ falls from dominance. The old stories too are returning and so too the Annuvian powers with them. Those that stories killed are being reborn in new-old stories (the magic of a literate population), and the barriers between Annwn and ThisWorld fall.
On St George’s Day, a day named for a man who killed a dragon that could never be sated, the Tower saw something it hadn’t seen for those thirty years: the birth of new ravens. Four in number and born to ravens whose names mean “thought” and “memory” – I can almost hear Brân laugh.
Because he won this battle of the stories, and the dragon may yet be killed.
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