“In some parts of Germany,” Miss Walker records, “these birds are believed to hold the souls of the damned, while in other sections wicked priests only are supposed to be so re-incarnated. In Sweden the ravens croaking at night in the swamps are said to be the ghosts of murdered persons who have been denied Christian burial.” A local and humorous touch is given to this conception by the Irish in Kerry, who allege that the rooks there are the ghosts of bad old landlords, because they steal vegetables from the peasants’ gardens—“Always robbin’ the poor!”
This eerie feeling is of long descent. The supreme war-goddess of the Gaels, as Squire[74] explains, was Morrigu, the Red Woman or war-goddess, who figures in the adventures of Cuchulain, and whose favorite disguise was to change herself into a carrion-crow, the “hoodie-crow” of the Scotch. She had assistants who revelled among the slain on a battlefield. “These grim creatures of the savage mind had immense vitality ... indeed, they may be said to survive still in the superstitious dislike and suspicion shown in all Keltic-speaking countries for their avatar—the hoodie crow.”
In Pennant’s _Tour in Scotland_ (1771) is described a curious ceremony in which offerings were made by Scottish herdsmen to the hooded crow, eagle and other enemies of sheep to induce them to spare the flocks. A Morayshire saying in old times ran thus:
The guil, the Gordon, and the hoodie crow, Were the three worst things Murray ever saw.
(The guil, Swann explains, is an obnoxious weed, the Gordon refers to the thieving propensities of a neighboring clan, and the crow killed lambs and annoyed sickly sheep.) “It is interesting,” says Wentz,[62] “to observe that this Irish war-goddess Morrigu, the _bodb_ or _babd_, ... has survived to our own day in the fairy-lore of the chief Celtic countries. In Ireland the survival in the popular and still almost general belief among the peasantry that the fairies often exercise their magical powers under the form of royston crows; and for this reason these birds are always greatly dreaded and avoided. The resting of one of them on a peasant’s cottage may signify many things, but often it means the death of one of the family or some great misfortune, the bird in such case playing the part of a _bean-sidhe_ (banshee).” In the western Highlands “the hoody crow plays the same rôle; and in Brittany fairies assume the form of the magpie.”