Of the many things that confuse visitors to England – and there are many indeed – the centrality of tradition and story in the way so many things are arranged, organized, and performed is very near the top of the list. An ancient nation with standing human-made structures dating back to well before the time of the Roman conquest – and a body of literature and legend dating nearly as far back, and topically reaching much further into the very mists of the island’s very existence – it is a veritable mythologist’s treasure box. Wherever one turns, if something is older than The Beatles, it somehow has a link to the Norman Conquest, the War of the Roses, or one of many other significant events in English history – a link upon which not everyone necessarily agrees and for which there are often conflicting, or absent, written records.
Thus it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that when Dr. Boria Sax, noted intellectual historian and adjunct instructor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield, set out to discover the truth behind the famous ravens that inhabit – indeed, are kept at – the Tower of London, he almost immediately encountered divergent and conflicting histories pertaining to them. Long said to have been first introduced to the Tower by King Charles II, Dr. Sax could find scarcely a feather’s trace of them being formally established there prior to the late Nineteenth Century. Nevertheless, he managed to collect what he could reliably discover in his British-published 2011 book City of Ravens: The Extraordinary History of London, the Tower and its Famous Ravens
Given the challenges Dr. Sax faced in searching for the actual time of the ravens becoming official residents of the Tower and as a result entered into the modern English mythology as symbolic defenders of the realm, it is not surprising that only half the book is actually filled with the discoverable stories of the ravens themselves. The remainder – and substantially more interesting – of the material is found in the second half of the book, in which Dr. Sax more liberally employs his scholarly analysis of the ravens not as living creatures but as active symbols of everything from England’s geo-political history to its social psychology.
While the reader seeking only information about the natural history of ravens in England might find City of Ravens a bit thin in relation to their interests, those with more broad-ranging intellectual curiosities may be expected to find it to be far more compelling. In many ways, it is, in itself, a replica in miniature of England’s overall vast, sometimes conflicting, and often half-veiled history, in which the truth of the story occasionally becomes less important than the story itself.
Author: Boria Sax
Publisher: Overlook Press
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-13/ EAN: 978-1-59020-777-2
Published: 5 July 2012
This review was originally published in the March / April 2013 edition of Bird Watcher’s Digest.
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
