Wotan and Ted Hughes's Crow

Author(s): John C. Witte

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 38-44
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441239
Accessed: 11-05-2018 10:22 UTC

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 Wotan and Ted Hughes's Crow

JOHN C. WITTE

Ted Hughes has collected in Crow1 what appear to be the frag-

ments of apocalyptic experience. Everything in the world into which
Crow survives seems about to explode, compelled by intolerable inter-
nal pressures. The most trivial event might be cause for astonishing
cruelties. But unlike the brutal naturalism frequently explored in the
earlier animal poems, in "Pike" and "Hawk Roosting," the violence in
Crow has a martial character. The grass, even, "camps in its tussock /
With its spears and banners" (p. 67). And Crow's are the warrior's
traits: courage, cunning, the indomitable will to survive, and the sharp-
ness of eye and talon. Battle, furthermore, provides metaphor for the
two ideological conflicts dominating Crow's experience: first, Crow's
aversion to the Christian myth and, second, Crow's struggle to find the
words of song, of poetry in a culture loud (deafening) with the words
of advertisements and life insurance policies. Nevertheless, Crow ob-
serves from a godlike remove, unhampered by moral concerns, re-
porting the ghastliest events with the emotionlessness of an immortal.
He survives each of his own disintegrations without apparent harm.
Hughes's Cambridge study of anthropology2 must have exposed
him to numerous crow-gods and -heroes-a figure represented in the
pantheon of every major mythology-after which certain features of
Crow might have been fashioned. Raven, the trickster-god of the Ber-
ing Strait Eskimos, is a source undeniably spotlighted by the inclusion
of "Two Eskimo Songs." The influence of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a
work with which Hughes acknowledges familiarity, is often discerned
by commentators.3 These exotic intrusions notwithstanding, the mythic
system from which Crow descends seems to be that of pre-Christian
Teutonic culture. The most important model for Crow is the chief
deity of Teutonic mythology, Wotan, lord both of battle frenzy and of

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 WOTAN AND TED HUGHES'S CROW

poetry. "This particular mythology," explained Hughes in his r

a book on Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon paganism, "is muc
deeper in us, and truer to us, than the Greek-Roman pant
that came in with Christianity, and again with the Renais
severing us with the completeness of a political interdi
these other deities of our instinct and ancestral memor
false to say these gods and heroes are obsolete: they
better part of our patrimony still locked up.4
One of the many names for Wotan was Hrafndss, translated
god." Two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, perched on the go
ders and reported to him each day's observations made flying
embroiled battlefields of men. The ravens, whose names have been
interpreted to mean animus, cogitatio, and mens (courage, cunning, and
wisdom), came to be seen as animations of Wotan's spiritual qualities.5
For religious and mythological purposes, as the god's avatar, the raven
became indistinguishable from Wotan. The tenth-century scaldic poet
Thorbjorn Hornklofi, the favorite of the powerful king Harald
Finehair, wrote a long poem called Hrafnsmal, or Words of the Raven,
celebrating the adventures of the raven (Wotan), hungry for corpses,
following the battles of conquest of the young king Harald.
The "King of Carrion" (p. 81) is one of the names Hughes gives
Crow:
There came news of a word.
Crow saw it killing men. He ate well.
He saw it bulldozing
Whole cities to rubble. Again he ate well. (p. 21)
Crow, like Wotan, manages to be at the center of every fracas,
storm, or frenzy, arriving, as he does, "Screaming for Blood" (p
When the patient is about to die, "Crow makes a noise suspiciously l
laughter" (p. 55). The world of Hughes's vision, like that lorded
Wotan, is each day freshly bloodied, and Crow each day "eats w
Sharing the mythological properties of Wotan, Crow exercises the w
god's prerogatives in the ancient tales as well, "Drinking Beow
blood" (p. 50).
Wotan was notorious for the delight he took in inciting m
especially kinsmen, to strife. In "Crow Blacker Than Ever" Wo
wickedness appears in the gleeful malice with which Crow reverses
benevolent intentions of the Christian myth by leaving man and
no rest from each other: "The agony / Grew. / Crow / Grinned / Cr
'This is my Creation,' / Flying the black flag of himself' (p. 57)
agonized grimace described as a "grin" (p. 17), the scream an

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

laughing in the cell," the desperate "laugh" after having exha

weeping (pp. 27-28), the comic-strip buffoonery of "Peoples arm
legs fly off and fly on again"6 (p. 37), the "smiles that went off w
mouthful of blood" (p. 51): these wrenching oxymorons of the hum
ous and the heartless, the playful and the savage, are a predomi
trope in Crow; herein Crow embodies the sinister aspect of W
apparent wherever he is fully characterized.
In his role as lord of the dead, Wotan is described in "Examination
at the Womb-Door" (p. 3): if death "owns the whole rainy, stony earth,"
then "who is stronger than death? / Me, evidently," says Crow. His access
to the mysterious powers of the dead made Wotan the lord of magic,
interpreter of runes and destiny, and the god of poetry and of poets,
qualities in often striking contrast to his warring proclivity. Like Wotan,
Crow has "Grown so wise so terrible / Sucking on death's mouldy tits"
(p. 84).
Crow also has "the prophesy inside him" (p. 11), is "the
hierophant" (p. 18) who sits at "the evil mirror," reading destiny:
"Crow saw / Mistings of civilizations towers gardens / Battles he wiped
the glass" (p. 33). Like Wotan, "Crow communes with poltergeists out
of old ponds," gazing "into the quag of the past / Like a gypsy into the
crystal of the future" (p. 50). In his capacity for "seeing" the spiritual
world of the dead, Wotan's eyesight was his most treasured possession.7
In pagan art he is frequently depicted with large staring eyes. This
explains the unusual concern with which Hughes treats Crow's eyes.
When Crow "started at the evidence. / Nothing escaped him. (Nothing
could escape)" (p. 9). In "Crow's Last Stand" the hero burns until
"there was finally something / The sun could not burn, / ... a final
obstacle" against which it "rages and chars": "Crow's eye-pupil, in the
tower of its scorched fort" (p. 69).
Poetry, in Teutonic mythology, is "the precious mead" that Wotan
brought from the Other World (of the dead) and gave to the gods and
to men. This is the role that Wotan played in the creation of man,
bequeathing "breath" or "spirit," and its associated gifts, including
poetry. As the god of inspired speech, Wotan himself was said to
speak only in poetry.8 In "Glimpse," it is Crow's trembling poetic
address "O leaves" that causes the metamorphosis signifying his posses-
sion of the Wotanic godhead, his own eyes staring "Through the god's
head instantly substituted" (p. 80). This is the poetizing function
appropriate to Crow as the modern avatar of Wotan, causing him to
militate against all coercive and corruptive uses of language. "Crow's
First Lesson" (p. 8) explores the disastrous effect of the language of

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 WOTAN AND TED HUGHES'S CROW

Christian "love" on Crow. The "word," or perverted logos tha

rather than creates in "A Disaster" (p. 21) similarly indict
ulary of Christianity. "The Battle of Osfrontalis" (p. 22) c
George Steiner called "the idiom of advertisement, wish-fulf
consensus-propaganda of consumer technocracies"9 over w
yawns. He wants to make poetry. About his love "He want
"He wanted to sing very clear" (p. 35). Finally, "Littleblood" i
appreciation of Crow as his personal muse, an (ironically?)
for inspiration: "Sit on my finger, sing in my ear" (p. 84
"There are now quite a few writers about who do not s
belong spiritually to the Christian civilization at all," explain
seeming to include himself in their number. "Their worl
tinuation or a re-emergence of the pre-Christian world."
conflict in Crow is between the lustily amoral hero, a mo
manifestation, and God, the tired yet powerful, inept yet k
Father of Christianity. God loves Crow as He loves all unr
children, but Crow discovers an additional possibility: "Cr
there were two Gods" (p. 24). The second is Wotan. It is Crow's
misfortune that the God of Christianity, however bumbling, is the
"bigger" of the two, has "all the weapons," and loves Crow's enemies,
presumably those people responsible for what Hughes regards as "the
oppressive deadness of civilization, the spiritless materialism of it, the
stupidity of it.""l In Wotan/Crow Hughes seems to discover an alterna-
tive in which to "have one's spirit invested"-"new Holy Ground, a new
divinity, one that won't be under the rubble when the churches col-
lapse."12 It should be clear that Hughes's intention is not to glorify the
ancient Teutonic god of battle, but to locate the descendants of Wotan
in modern culture. It is, I presume, in order to prevent identification
of Crow with Wotan that Hughes has carefully avoided commenting on
his hero's antecedents. It is the Wotan archetype that animates Crow,
the ever-present Wotanism that lies a dormant "seed in nature."
My main concern was to produce something with the minimal
accretions of the museum sort-something autochthonous and
complete in itself, as it might be invented after the holocaust and
demolition of all libraries, where essential things spring again-if
at all-only from their seeds in nature-and are not lugged
around or hoarded as preserved harvests from the past.13
Hughes rediscovers the Wotan myth in its modern context.
Crow emerges from this process as an uncontrollable monster, the
image of Wotan demented. His creative poetic capacity is repeatedly
frustrated, while his savage appetites rage. This seems to be Hughes's

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

view of the shape in which Wotan survives into the presen

pressive Christian culture allows only this limited, neurotic ma
of Wotanism, tolerating the somewhat scrofulous Crow ra
taking the brunt of "Wotan-the-awe-inspirer." Jung, likewise
that it was the Christian missionaries who made Wotan into a minor
devil.14 In this degenerated condition Crow is unaware that he is hims
Wotan made manifest, "the Black Beast" (p. 16), discovering to his ala
"his every feather the fossil of a murder." He ends confused, "Trying
remember his crimes" (p. 36). Crow, like Hughes's jaguar, a symbol f
man's baser nature, is "shoved down into the id and growing cann
murderous with deprivation."15 "Crow's Account of St. George" trace
the occupation of the saint's mind by Wotan grown murderous,
longer to be repressed by "numbers," the categories of scientific rat
alism.
History, according to Jung, has undergone repeated cycles of
pression and explosion of the energy of the Wotan archetype; "w
ever else the gods may be," he observed in 1937, "they are past
doubt personifications of psychical forces." In times of spiritual
mental confusion and revolution, Wotan emerges as the ruling
chetype.
The Hitler movement literally brought all Germany to its feet
and gave us the old spectacle of a migration of the peoples-
marking time. Wotan the Wanderer was awake.... Unless you
wish absolutely to deify Hitler ... you must fall back on Wotan
as the force which seizes and possesses.'6
Hughes is conscious of the Wotanic character of the Nazi movement.
He explains having written "another jaguarish poem ... that actually
started as a description of the German assault through Ardennes."17
He has exorcized this devil/god before. From this point of view Crow is
a study of the violent eruptions of the irrational that have shattered
Western culture, and a warning of the consequences of repressing the
Wotan archetype. Because poetry, says Hughes, "is nothing if not ...
the record of just how the forces of the Universe try to redress some
balance disturbed by human error." What Hughes's inquiry has un-
covered is grimly set forth in Crow: "we are dreaming a perpetual
massacre."18 Instead of appraising the Wotanic presence and con-
sciously controlling his tremendous energy, directing it to the revi-
talization of our "spiritless" civilization, we have become victims of his
sudden detonations.
The alternatives that Hughes seems to suggest are either to pursu
to their cataclysmic finale cultural fluctuations from periods of "op-

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 WOTAN AND TED HUGHES'S CROW

pressive deadness" to periods of bloody upheaval and revol

boldly address ourselves to the Wotan archetype and achie
with him, enjoying his inspiration rather than fearing
Hughes borrows a metaphor from quantum mechanics to d
encounter with such an archetypal image.
Any form of violence ... invokes the bigger energy,
mental power circuit of the Universe.... If you refus
ergy, you are living a kind of death. If you accept the e
destroys you. What is the alternative? Accept the en
find methods of turning it to good, of keeping it under
control-rituals, the machinery of religion.19
George Steiner has directed us to the late poems of Sylvia Plath for
an answer to the question "What poetry after Auschwitz?", to poems
like "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" as moral witness of the inhuman
behavior of "cultured" individuals.20 The poems in Crow may be in-
cluded in this category of literature-necessarily risking the offense of
sensibility-poems that nevertheless attach themselves to us by means
of the sheer intensity of their vision, and the insistence with which they
ask: What has gone wrong? "Blood was too like water / Cries were too
like silence / . . Blasting the whole world to bits / Was too like slam-
ming a door" (p. 15). Reality has made a nightmare of the civilization
built on Christian scripture and the physicist's determinism:
Reality was giving its lesson,
Its mishmash of scripture and physics,
With here, brains in hands, for example,
And there, legs in a treetop. (p. 14)

Hughes has recognized the need of Western culture to integrate the

Wotan archetype if we are to be spared his periodic bloodlettings.
Crow's quest, in Hughes's words, "to locate and release his own creator,
God's nameless hidden prisoner,"21 is finally the quest of all of man-
kind. Because Wotan, the source of devastating energy, "his mere
eyeblink / Holding the globe in terror" (p. 72), is also the source of
creative energy: "Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O Littleblood" (p.
84).

1 Ted Hughes, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (New York:
Harper, 1971). All quotations from poems in Crow will be designated within the
text according to their page number in this edition.
2 Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1975), p. 9.
3Ibid., pp. 105-110, 114, for this and other possible sources.
4 Daniel Hoffman, "Talking Beasts: The 'Single Adventure' in the Poetry

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

of Ted Hughes," Shenandoah, 19 (Summer 1968), 52, quoting Hugh

Listener, 19 Mar. 1964.
5 E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Vlyth and Religion of the North: The Reli
Ancient Scandinavia (New York: Holt, 1964), p. 58.
6 David Lodge, "Crow and the Cartoons," Critical Quarterly, 13
1971), 37-42, 68, examines the comic-strip qualities of the poems.
7 Turville-Petre, Vyth and Religion of the North, p. 63.
"Ibid., p. 35.
9 George Steiner, "The Language Animal," in Extraterritorial-
Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1975),
10 Egbert Faas, "Ted Hughes and Crow, an Interview," London Mag
10 (Jan. 1971), 15-16.
l Ibid., p. 9.
12 Ibid., p. 19.
13 Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes, p. 107, quoting Hughes.
14 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe (N
Random House, 1961), p. 313.
15 Faas, "Ted Hughes and Crow," p. 8.
16 C. G. Jung, "Wotan," the Saturday Review of Literature, 16 (Oct.
3-4.
17 Faas, "Ted Hughes and Crow," p. 9.
18Ibid., p. 7.
9 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
20 George Steiner, "Dying Is an Art," in Language and Silence-Essays o
Language, Literature, and the Inhumane (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 295 ff
21 Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes, p. 118.

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