Sleek waterbirds with dense smooth plumage, long necks and pointed bills. They swim low in the water and dive for their food. Their legs are set very far back on the body, which means that they are extremely ungainly on land. They nearly all have wild, haunting cries.
It is often quite difficult to ascertain which myths refer to which species of diver. In the case of stories originating in the far north and North America, one can generally assume they refer to great northern or white-billed divers – known as loons – while tales from Scotland or the Faeroes (volcanic islands between Iceland and the Shetlands) are more likely to be about red-throated divers.
In many cultures, divers have been closely associated with both the beginning of the world and the end of life. Some tribes living along the Yenesei River in Siberia believed that the red-throated diver brought mud from under the waters to build the earth. The Yakuts (Turkic people from Yakutia, now part of Russia) had a similar belief, and their traditional story tells how the mother goddess sought out the white-billed diver and ordered it to collect mud to form the earth. The sneaky bird, however, tried to deceive the goddess by claiming that it could find none. Noticing that it still had mud sticking to its bill, the mother goddess uncovered the deception and condemned divers to live perpetually on the water. Other stories about the part played by the diver in making the earth are to be found all over northern Asia and North America.
Siberian shamans were fascinated by the bird’s ability to dive beneath the surface of the water and, since they believed that the spirit world existed down there, they believed that divers could journey with humans to the other world. Wooden replicas of divers were therefore placed on tall posts at the corners of graves, and shamans not only wore ornaments in the shape of divers as part of their regalia, but also replicated their falsetto cries during the performance of rituals.
Soul birds
The belief that the soul migrates from the body after death is an ancient one, and a recurrent tradition in Eastern and Western mythology is that it takes temporary refuge in a bird. At sea, storm petrels and seagulls were said to house the souls of lost sailors, while shearwaters were said to carry damned souls. On land, ravens and crows were often thought to be inhabited by the souls of the dead, and there is even a tradition that King Arthur took the form of a raven when he died, as Cervantes records in his novel Don Quixote (1605–15):
Have you not read, sir … the famous exploits of King Arthur … of whom there goes an old tradition … that this king did not die, but that by magic art he was turned into a raven; and that … he shall reign again … for which reason it cannot be proved, that, from that time to this, any Englishman has killed a raven?
Sometimes the souls of the dead were thought to be actually carried off by birds rather than simply transferred to them. An ancient Chinese tradition held that storks carried souls up to heaven, and there is a popular story of a young man called Lan Ts’ai-ho, a talented flute-player and wandering minstrel, whose beautiful songs caused a stork to snatch him away to the heavens.
The diver was a sacred bird to the Buriats, the Yakuts and the Tungus (from western Siberia), and none of these peoples would kill or injure one. The Buriats (Mongolian people living near Lake Baikal), in particular, revered the bird as they believed that the spirits of the dead would often reappear in the form of a diver. In fact, this reputation for sacredness was widespread throughout the northern reaches of the northern hemisphere. In Canada, for example, the aboriginal Algonquin tribe held that divers were the messengers of the gods. In Norway, it was thought very unwise to kill or injure a diver, and in the Faeroe Islands it was believed until the nineteenth century that divers accompanied departed souls to the next world. At Ipiutak in Alaska, ancient burial grounds have been discovered in which the graves contain skulls with ivory eyes and the skeletons of loons with similar eye plugs. It would seem that these ancient people were convinced that divers escorted and guided the dead on their last journey, rather as shamans in Siberia were later to believe.
Not only were divers thought to guide the dead, they were also believed to heal the living, and there are many tales of their restorative powers. One such tale, found in eastern Greenland, Atlantic Canada and parts of Alaska, recounts how a loon came to a blind boy and told him it had the power to make him regain his sight. It had the boy led to a lake, and then instructed him to dive in three times. The boy’s sight was duly restored. The Inuit similarly believed that loons were health-giving birds, and many tribal leaders wore a loon head as a charm to endow the wearer with manly qualities. Newborn babies would be touched with a loon’s skin to ensure that they would have a long and healthy life.
As well as directly aiding humans through their magical and restorative powers, divers were also thought to help humans more indirectly by forecasting the weather. The red-throated diver, which is not uncommon in Shetland, is known as the rain goose because of the noise it often makes before the arrival of bad weather. In Norway, both the black-throated and great northern divers are also credited with the ability to foretell coming storms by their calls. Strangely, the calls which the Faeroese interpret as a warning of storms are interpreted by the Shetlanders as marking the onset of fine weather.
Inevitably, given the bird’s rather unusual appearance, there are a handful of legends that seek to explain why it looks the way it does. One comical explanation as to why its legs are set so far back on its body comes from Finnmark in the far north of Norway. Here it was believed that at the beginning of the world the diver was created without any legs. When the earth mother saw her mistake, she was furious at her own stupidity and threw a pair of legs after the bird. Unfortunately, they landed in the wrong place. The Norwegians also thought that the positioning of the bird’s legs made it so difficult to walk that it only came ashore in the week prior to Christmas. Accordingly, they named the fourth Sunday in Advent ‘Ommer Sunday’, ommer being a corruption of immer, the dialect name for diver.