Creatures of Story and Song
Lee Raye, London: Reaktion, 2026, 312pps., hb., £16.95
In 2023, the State of Nature Report reported that Britain is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries – scarcely surprising to anyone who knows the ever-emptier countryside, indeed predictable for the small island that birthed the Industrial Revolution. Dr. Raye consults a plethora of sources to reveal that the process long predates the steam engine, with far-reaching effects not just on the natural world, but also national psychology.
The fourteen species featured in this book once bulked large in British consciousness not just as living beings, but also as metaphors, morals, similes and symbols. They gradually vanished from view, impoverishing both the environment and our imaginations. We long for them strangely; as amputees get ghost pains in their missing limbs, we feel the absence of animals once central to our culture.
Such absences are usually because of our own actions – extirpations, over-exploitations, and collateral damage as we increasingly devastated the demi-Eden. But the author is no misanthropic deep ecologist, and knows human needs must be considered when seeking to restore nature, to avoid “environmental colonialism”, when arrogant or unthinking outsiders impose unjust or unrealistic notions onto established communities and landscapes. Sometimes the prose becomes empurpled – “sources can disgust us…please care for your mental health”, while The Song of Roland is apparently “problematic” – but the book’s heart is sensible as well as sensitive.
The grey whale was familiar enough to the Romano-British for its bones to be carved by soldiers garrisoning Hadrian’s Wall. Whales also feature in Celtic Christianity – St Columba warned of one lurking off Iona, and St Brendan landed on another, believing it an island – while one Old English name for the sea was hwœles éðel (‘whale’s home’). Whales were terrifying Leviathans and wonders of Creation for centuries before less poetic ages started to see them as sources of lamp-oil or corset stays, to destructive and dislocating effect; grey whales had been eliminated from the Atlantic by the nineteenth century (they persist in the Pacific).
The great auk – possibly the original ‘penguin’, from Welsh words for ‘white’ and ‘head’ – traditionally became extinct in 1844, when the last birds were killed on an islet off Iceland. They were flightless, so vulnerable to hungry humans, while their beautiful eggs were eagerly sought by oologists. No sooner had they gone than they were rued; in Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies (1863), the chimney-sweep Tom meets the sole survivor, a “grand old lady” sitting on “Allalonestone” who tells him of their extinction, then weeps tears of oil. In another tradition, the last auk was killed as a witch by St. Kildans. In Ruthven Todd’s surreal 1943 novel The Lost Traveller, the hero seeks the last auk, only to become the poor bird just as the frightened fisherman’s bludgeon descends.
Eagles too could shapeshift, as in the Mabinogion, when Blodeuwedd’s husband Lleu is magically translated into eagle form in the moment of his murder, to become human again through the power of poetry. They were simultaneously snatchers of lambs and symbols of kingship, like Tolkien’s Gwaihir the Windlord, who saves Frodo from Mount Doom. The wolf was regarded as a menace to livestock, devourer of battlefield dead, and even a demon – but Wulf was also popular as a Christian name connoting chivalric warriorhood, as in Beowulf or St. Wulfram, and one wolf legendarily guarded the severed head of St. Edmund.
Wild swine could damage crops, but they were also worthy quarry for the likes of Sir Gawain, and spirit-guides for churchmen siting monasteries. Darnel-grass was a notorious weed of wheatfields – the ‘tares’ of Matthew 13, and part of King Lear’s madcap crown, symbolizing his disorder – but it could also be a medicine or hallucinogenic intoxicant. Beavers were hunted for fur and an under-tail secretion called castoreum, but St Felix of Dunwich legendarily made one a bishop after it saved him from shipwreck.
Raye relieves stories of man’s inhumanity to animals by turning the viewing point around, so we see through a “lens of animality”. In a sixteenth century poem, ‘Marchan Wood’, Cymric squirrels scold Elizabethan English for cutting down Walian woods, while in the 1611 ballad ‘The Powt’s Complaint’, ‘powts’ (burbots) bewail the draining of the Fens.
Britain still suffers losses, with nearly one in six of all species threatened with extinction. But some of the animals in this book are coming back to claim their own – cranes, great bustards and wild boar – and beavers are starting to refashion the thirsting land in an older image. With luck (and assistance), sturgeons may one day again surge up into the Humber, and the lynx slink back in from history, to deal with our deer, and satisfy a psychic yearning for big cats beyond the ‘Beast of Bodmin’. By looking back at our old co-existence with such creatures, Raye is helping us look forward to such times.
This review first appeared in the Spectator, and is reproduced with permission