The Crow: Gothic Fiction’s Perfect Symbol

They’re the flash of shimmering shadow on a gloomy day, the guttural cry echoing out of the mist, the ever-present watchful dark eyes peering down from above, the hobbling figure feasting on death. Crows are as prevalent as pigeons, yet they fascinate us in a way comfortably fat pigeons never have. Whether they delight or revile, crows—and other corvids, of course—are part of our human consciousness, culture, and mythologies going back to the time man first painted on cave walls.

(Using Absurdity to Tackle Darker Themes in Fiction.)

And yet, for most of human history, corvids have had a bad rap. Not surprisingly, they are viewed as omens of death. As scavengers they will, of course, be found around battlefields (a feast), gallows (a tasty treat), and cemeteries (a larder). They are black—apart from a few pied or grey variants—a color most often associated with death and grief. Crows are highly intelligent and conduct crow funerals—not to mourn as some might suggest, but to assess the death of one of their own as a potential threat to them all.

Because of their renowned intelligence (they have the biggest brain to body ratio of all birds), crows have long been seen as symbols of prophecy. Corvids can be found in almost every mythology across the world; in Norse, the ravens Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) whispered knowledge into Odin’s ear. The Irish have a saying, ‘a crow on the thatch, soon death lifts the hatch.’ The Tibetans used crows’ flight patterns to predict the future. The Romans believed crows were Apollo’s creatures of prophecy. And of course, crows were often viewed as a witch’s familiar, providing predictions of the future.

In our everyday lives, corvids infest our little superstitions, the harbingers of good or bad luck. We even have a term for it: corvidomancy—an offshoot of orthinomancy. In Britain counting magpies is a common childhood nursery rhyme for predicting one’s future: One for sorrow, two for joy, etc. In Wales, it’s believed a single crow crossing your path is bad luck, but two is good. In North American indigenous cultures, crow sightings are regarded as heralds of profound life changes. In Japan, an unusual gathering of crows is deemed a portent of an impending natural disaster.

As symbols of death, grief, and fear, it’s no wonder crows have become the perfect symbols in gothic fiction. Specifically, in modern gothic fiction, crows are portrayed as symbols of decay, surveillance, and forbidden knowledge. Their intimacy with death, their black feathers, and watchful presence evoke liminality: creatures perched between civilization and wilderness, life and death, reason and madness.

The symbology goes deeper than that; crows reflect the despair of the gothic characters, their grief, their madness, their fear. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is perhaps the most famous example, where he uses the raven as a haunting embodiment of grief and obsession, its repeated “Nevermore” trapping the narrator inside his own despair. In Emilia Hart’s novel, Weyward, crows are mediums of revenge for men’s cruelty to women. In Sarah Pinborough’s We Live Here Now, the raven is portrayed as a watcher, a protector, whose grief at the loss of his mate reflects the crumbling of the main characters’ relationship.  

But there’s another side to corvids, crows in particular, that is often overlooked: their loyalty. While solitary creatures, these birds mate for life, and they have been known to form strong bonds with humans who have shown them kindness and respect. Crows have exceptional memories and can recognize faces and voices. Whether it’s the more prosaic and scientific reasoning that the bond is based on strategic mutual trust rather than a deeper connection, crows identify these kind humans as friendly, showing their appreciation with gifts of shiny objects, learning their daily schedule and following them around, even warning them of danger.

There’s a downside to the crows’ excellent memory; they bear grudges for those who have harmed them and are not shy to spread the word amongst their feathered brethren—and rightly so.

It was crows’ loyalty that I leant towards in my gothic novel, A Penance for Crows; the relationship the crows had formed with the islanders and the main character, Grizela Urquhart. The Beanna Dubh crows are woven into the island’s folklore as birds of prophecy, watchers, and protectors that, it is said, warn the islanders of looming danger. These warning are taken very seriously, and the crows are both feared and revered in equal measure.

Grizela’s relationship with the crows is deeper and more personal; she provides a safe place for the birds to nest on the roof of her home, and they, in turn, are a feathered alarm system, keeping watch on the path leading up to her isolated cottage, ensuring she has ample warning of approaching danger. She is the outsider, an outcast, and like the crows, lives on the fringes of the small island community. And because of her enforced solitude, the crows have become her friends, her family, in the way humans have never been, these birds have protected far more than her own species ever has.

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