The legend of the Tower of London ravens: younger than you'd think

What does the legend say?

The version you'll hear most often has all the makings of a fine old tale. There's a warning: if the ravens go, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall with it. There's a king, Charles II, back in the seventeenth century, who's supposed to have heard the prophecy and ordered the birds to be protected. And so there's a solemn duty: keep the ravens in place and you keep the Crown safe.

It's a beautifully rounded story. It has a setting, a monarch and a threat. The trouble starts when someone goes looking for it in seventeenth-century documents. Nobody has found it there.

How long have there been ravens at the Tower?

One of the Tower's historians, Geoff Parnell, set out to find the ravens in the records. He began in the most sensible place: the royal menagerie once kept at the Tower, the kings' own collection of animals. He found hawks, lions, leopards and monkeys, and even a polar bear. Not one raven.

According to the scholar Boria Sax, the ravens don't enter the record until around 1883, well into the Victorian age. And the first written mention Parnell tracked down dates from 1895. It appeared in The Animal World, the magazine of the animal welfare society, and there's nothing grand about it. No prophecies, no kings. Its stars are a pair of ravens, Jenny and a companion with no recorded name, who made a habit of driving the Tower cat up the wall.

So that, as far as anyone knows, is the first written chapter of the legend that supposedly holds up a kingdom: a neighbourly squabble between two birds and a cat.

Is the Charles II story true?

Not according to those who've studied it. Sax puts it bluntly: the Charles II story is "most definitely not historically accurate". The title of his article on the subject almost says it all, asking whether the Tower ravens are an invented tradition, fakelore, or a modern myth.

Sax links them to a very nineteenth-century fantasy: the Tower as a dark, mysterious medieval castle, put back together to suit Victorian taste. And few things suit that kind of stage set better than big black birds strutting along the battlements.

Who brought the first ravens?

Nobody knows. But there's an appealing theory. Parnell suggests that some of those Victorian ravens may have been a punning gift from the Earl of Dunraven, or from his son. The earl was an aristocrat with an interest in Celtic raven myths who, to top it all, had added ravens to his family coat of arms. His title is a handy reminder: Dunraven.

It's worth stressing that this is only a theory. Nobody has found a letter, a receipt or any other paper to confirm it.

Why did the legend become so famous?

Because of the war. According to Sax, the belief that Britain would fall if the ravens left the Tower began during the Blitz itself. The Tower, closed to visitors, lost all its ravens, and bombs accounted for some of them. On 1 January 1946, the day the Tower reopened to visitors, the black birds were back.

It makes sense. London was coming out of the war with many of its streets in ruins, and seeing the ravens back at the Tower was a simple way of telling yourself the country hadn't fallen. A superstition that sounds centuries old made its name only after the Second World War, just when the city needed a good omen.

So is it all made up?

That depends on what you're asking. The legend is real as a legend: it exists, it gets told, and it's as much a part of the Tower as its walls. What doesn't hold up is its age.

And here it pays to be precise. The lack of any trace of ravens at the Tower before Victorian times doesn't prove there were never any. An older document may turn up one day. But on what we know, "since Charles II" and "for centuries" are claims with nothing behind them. And the prophecy of the falling kingdom, according to Sax, goes back no further than the Second World War.

If you're near the Tower, scan the grass and the tops of the walls. From outside it's easy not to spot a single raven. If that happens, console yourself with the thought that the written history of these guardians of the realm begins with a cat at the end of its tether with its feathered neighbours.

Fact or legend.

• Legend: that the kingdom will fall if the ravens leave the Tower. According to Sax, the belief began during the Second World War.
• Not historical, according to the scholars: that the ravens have been there since Charles II because of a prophecy.
• Fact: the ravens don't appear in the records until around 1883; the first written mention found so far, from 1895, describes two ravens tormenting the Tower cat.
• Fact: the Tower lost its ravens in the Second World War and had them back when it reopened on 1 January 1946; that's where the legend's fame comes from.
• Theory: that some of them were a gift from the Earl of Dunraven or his son.
• Caveat: the lack of an earlier trace doesn't prove there were never any ravens.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "The Tower of London and Pepys's Diary", at the stop "When the raven legend began", facing the Tower walls. The route circles the Tower without going in, from the Tower Hill scaffold to the crown stolen by a fake parson, and then carries on into Samuel Pepys's neighbourhood, between the plague of 1665 and the fire of 1666. It's one of the routes in the theme Legends and ghosts with a date.

If you're planning your trip, our London guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• Matthew Wills, "Fakelore? The Tower Ravens", JSTOR Daily, 2015 (on Boria Sax's article). https://daily.jstor.org/fakelore-tower-ravens/
• Boria Sax, "The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition, Fakelore, or Modern Myth?", Storytelling, Self, Society, vol. 6, no. 3, 2010, pp. 231–240.
• Rebecca Maksel, "The Tower Ravens", Air & Space Magazine (Smithsonian), 2 July 2012 (on Boria Sax's book City of Ravens, 2012). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-tower-ravens-140643/
• Maev Kennedy, "Tower of London's raven mythology asserted to be fantasy", The Guardian, 15 November 2004 (reproduced by History News Network). https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/8617