So, why title my blog, ‘Four and Twenty Dead Crows’?

You might have been reminded of the English nursery rhyme, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, the common version of which goes like this

‘Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of rye.

Four and twenty blackbirds

Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,

The birds began to sing.

Wasn't that a dainty dish

To set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,

Counting out his money.

The queen was in the parlour,

Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,

Hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird

And pecked off her nose.

The ‘dainty dish’ set before the king is known as an ‘entremet’ which, in Medieval French cuisine, referred to dishes served between the courses of a meal, often illusion foods and edible scenic displays. By the end of the Middle Ages, entremets had also evolved into dinner entertainment in the form of inedible ornaments or acted performances. In English, such displays were more commonly known as a subtlety and did not typically include acted entertainment, but did include culinary jokes like live blackbirds flying out of a pie.

Next comes the supposed origin of the word ‘pie’.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pie gives us the following definitions

pie (n.1)

c. 1300 (probably older; piehus "bakery" is attested from late 12c.), "baked dish of pastry filled with a preparation of meats, spices, etc., covered with a thick layer of pastry and baked," from Medieval Latin pie "meat or fish enclosed in pastry" (c. 1300), which is perhaps related to Medieval Latin pia "pie, pastry," also possibly connected with pica "magpie" (see pie (n.2)) on notion of the bird's habit of collecting miscellaneous objects.

pie (n.2)

"magpie," mid-13c. (late 12c. as a surname), from Old French pie (13c.), from Latin pica "magpie"  

Simultaneously, when referring to ‘magpie’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magpie informs us

‘References dating back to Old English call the bird a "pie", derived from the Latin pica and cognate to French pie; this term has fallen out of use. The tendency in previous centuries was to give birds common names, such as robin redbreast (which now is called the robin) and jenny wren. The magpie was originally variously maggie pie and mag pie. The term “pica" for the human disorder involving a compulsive desire to eat items that are not food is borrowed from the Latin name of the magpie, pica, for its reputed tendency to feed on miscellaneous things.’

So, a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients becomes conflated with a ‘nest’ of treasured items collected by a member of the corvid family of birds.

So, why, for my own literary convenience do I replace the ‘blackbirds’ of the English rhyme with black birds, specifically crows? And why four and twenty dead ones?

Crows are widely recognised for their intelligence. In modern western culture they symbolise death, the afterlife, transformation and the future and can be seen as both good and bad omens because they are considered prescient.

In Irish mythology, the Badb is a war goddess who takes the form of a crow and is often referred to as the Badb Catha, the battle crow. In Norse mythology, ravens and crows are associated with prescience, or fortune telling. The Norse god, Odin sacrificed an eye for wisdom and relied on two ravens, Huginn ( thought ) and Muninn ( memory ), who flew across the world and brought tidings to Odin. The Norse mythology of Odin is reminisce of the oldest myths of Ancient Egypt: The fight between Horus and Seth, in which Seth gouged out Horus's left eye.

'The maid was in the garden,

Hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird

And pecked off her nose.'

From a folklorish tradition, the blackbird taking the maid's nose has been seen as a demon stealing her soul which reminds me of the sluaghs of Celtic Folklore.

In Irish, sluagh means 'host’. They were the spirits of the restless dead - so evil they were even banned from hell, therefore, they just roamed around in groups, coming from the West, to try to enter a house where a person had just died, to steal their souls. They either appeared as flocks of birds(ravens) or beasts, hunting for the weak or sickly people who were to die soon, waiting to devour their souls.

Lewis Spence writes in 'The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain'; "In the Western Isles of Scotland the Sluagh, or fairy host, was regarded as composed of the souls of the dead flying through the air, and the feast of the dead at Hallowe'en was likewise the festival of the fairies."

The celts believe in Sluagh – the dead Irish sinners though they're not so much “demons,” as scary creatures that hunt down souls. According to Irish folklore, sluagh are dead sinners that come back as malicious spirits.

Most importantly, for me, Crows hold significant spiritual meaning, embodying themes of transformation, wisdom, and communication. Their multifaceted roles have made them symbols of profound insights and connections between the material and spiritual realms.

Apparently, crows carry different meanings depending on their numbers. "Seeing just a single crow is considered an omen of bad luck. Finding two crows, however, means good luck. Three crows mean health, and four crows mean wealth. Yet spotting five crows means sickness is coming, and witnessing six crows means death is nearby." There doesn’t seem to be an exact spiritual meaning for more than thirteen crows seen together. The four and twenty blackbirds referred to in the nursery rhyme sang when the pie was opened. The crows of my imagination are comatose dragons, crucibles of transformation. In the Old Norse mythologies, the hero Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, drains his blood and drinks it, giving him the ability to understand the language of the birds.     

 ‘All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.’ - Robert Louis Stevenson

In the meantime, beware the murmuration of the Celtic sluagh and the rustle of the thousands of pairs of wings of the Unseelie Court.