Valravn

Also Known As: Danish, “raven of the slain”; also recorded as Volffuer vilde ravn, villen vallen-ravn, Vilden Verne-ravn and Salman vilde ravn; Grimm proposed an Old High German cognate *walahraban
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scandinavian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A speaking raven that flies only by night, strikes bargains with mortals, and can be released from its raven shape by drinking the heart-blood of a child.
Role in Mythos: In the Danish ballad tradition it is the supernatural adversary who ferries a woman to her betrothed in exchange for their firstborn son.
Relation to Humans: It approaches people in distress, offers them exactly what they want, and names a price they will not understand until years later. It keeps its side of the bargain precisely, refuses to renegotiate, and is never bought off with land or gold.

The raven flies at night. During the day he must not. Some Danish singer set that line down in the middle of the sixteenth century and then hung it at the end of every verse, the way you repeat a rule you would rather not test.

The bird in that song has no settled name. Across the six surviving versions of the ballad he is Volffuer the wild raven, or the wild vallen-raven, or Vilden Verne-ravn, or Salman the wild raven, each of them a man’s name bolted onto a bird. Only once, in the oldest and strangest text, is he called a valravn at all. The word comes apart cleanly. *Val* is the slain, the ground after a battle, the same syllable standing at the front of Valkyrie and Valhalla; *ravn* is raven. Jacob Grimm proposed an Old High German cousin, *walahraban*, and noted that this wild raven fills exactly the slot the diabolical troll fills in other Danish songs. Svend Grundtvig, who gathered the versions into print in 1856, wondered whether the *Verne* of one manuscript was kin to the Old English *were*, meaning man, the same *were* that walks in front of wolf. Nobody has settled it. One philologist looked at *vallen*, discovered it meant nothing whatsoever, and suggested the creature’s name might have begun as alliteration that hardened into a monster.

The song itself is quick and merciless. A girl named Elver is walking into town on an errand, crying as she walks, and the raven comes down out of the high cloud to ask why. Not for her father, she says, and not for her brothers. For her betrothed, who is far away, and if she could only reach him the ache would stop. The raven’s offer is immediate: the first son the two of them have together, given to me, and I will carry you to his country. She agrees. He sets her on his back and flies, and the ballad allows itself one dry aside about how much trouble this puts him to. He does not set her down at the gate. He puts her on the roof ridge of the very house her man is sitting inside, so that the first thing the betrothed sees on coming out of his own door is his bride on the thatch above him, delivered by something black and enormous.

The wedding is held in peace and gladness. Ten weeks later she gives birth to a son, and she beats her hands together and weeps, because a daughter would have been safe. The raven comes over the roof. Women and girls wring their hands, and the nobleman walks out into the yard and offers castles, and then half his land, if he may keep the boy. The raven tells him that if he does not get the child he will kill the man himself and lay waste to the whole kingdom. So they carry the baby out from his mother’s breast, still feeding, and everyone in the house is crying. The raven strikes him through the chest and drinks half his heart-blood, and stands up out of the wreckage as the fairest knight ever to walk on earth. The household drops to its bare knees and thanks God. The child is given his life back. Both of them are saved.

It is a bargain, and the song treats it as one.

What the thing actually looked like, the ballads decline to say. The bird is *leedt*, loathsome, and it flies so high it touches the cloud, and that is the whole inventory. The half-wolf, half-eagle creature that most people picture is a different animal with the same name: the valravn is a heraldic charge, a wolf’s body carrying an eagle’s wings and beak, borne in red on a white field by the Ulfeldt family, whose crest was a wolf cut off at the waist. The shield-mark shows up on a seal used in 1230 by Peder Strangesen; the family only took its surname from the beast in the sixteenth century. That composite is why the internet’s valravn has fur. The ballads’ valravn has feathers and nothing else.

There is a second valravn, and it stands on a much thinner floor. In 1893 the Jutland collector Evald Tang Kristensen printed a short account among his roaming horrors: when a king or a chieftain fell in battle and his body was never found and buried, the ravens came and ate him, and those ravens became valravne, and whichever one swallowed his heart gained human understanding, the power to do harm, the power to change people into other things, and strength beyond anything human. They were terrible animals. The man who told him this was Peder Johansen, a mill worker from Skanderborg, an eccentric and a performer who told his best stories after a few drinks and had most of them from his grandfather; Tang Kristensen seems to have caught him at a Shrovetide party. It is the only known record of a valravn made out of carrion rather than out of a curse, and the only one that connects the creature to a battlefield at all, which is awkward given that the battlefield is sitting right there in the name.

Its powers follow from what it is. It speaks, and it speaks well enough to find the exact shape of a stranger’s grief within three lines of meeting her. It flies with a full-grown woman on its back. It can be neither bribed nor frightened by a nobleman with an armed household. In Johansen’s version it also has the trick of turning people into other things, which is the same power that put it in a bird’s body in the first place, handed back the other way round.

Its limits are just as tight. It is bound to the dark and cannot fly by day. It cannot lift its own curse, and it cannot simply take what it needs: the child has to be promised first, by a mother who does not yet have him, and then carried out of the house by the family themselves. It will not accept substitutes, not castles, not half a kingdom, because the bargain is the only thing holding the shape of its release. And the release ends it. The moment the heart-blood goes down, there is no valravn left in the yard, only a knight, blinking, in a country he has probably not seen in daylight for a very long time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Valravn?

A Valravn is a supernatural raven from Danish folklore whose name means “raven of the slain.” In the ballad tradition it is a man trapped in a raven’s body who can only be restored by drinking the heart-blood of a child. Its earliest written appearance is in a Danish manuscript of 1555 to 1559, and six independent versions of the ballad survive.

How does the Valravn become human again?

The Valravn regains human form by drinking half the heart-blood of a newborn boy, which it must first obtain by bargain rather than by force. In the ballad it carries a grieving woman to her betrothed in exchange for their firstborn son, then returns years later to collect. After it drinks, it stands up as the handsomest knight on earth, and the child is restored to life.

Is the Valravn half wolf and half raven?

No. That image comes from Danish heraldry, where a valravn is a charge combining a wolf’s body with an eagle’s wings and beak, used in red on white by the noble Ulfeldt family. The valravn of the folk ballads is simply a raven, described only as loathsome and as flying very high.

Why does the Valravn only fly at night?

The Danish ballad states the rule plainly in its refrain, that the raven flies at night and must not fly by day, without explaining why. The refrain also links the bird to bad luck, saying it can only have ill fortune and never good. Nothing in the surviving texts describes what would happen if it broke the rule.

Is the Valravn connected to battlefields?

Only in one late account. In 1893 the folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen recorded a Jutland story that ravens which ate the body of an unburied king became valravne, and that the one which ate his heart gained human understanding and superhuman power. That story came from a single teller, a Skanderborg mill worker named Peder Johansen, and no other source repeats it.