The black lamb and grey falcon are two important symbols that appear in the travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, written by Rebecca West and published in 1941. This massive book, over 1,100 pages long, recounts West’s extensive travels through Yugoslavia in 1937 and delves deeply into the history, culture, and politics of the Balkan region. The black lamb and grey falcon emerge as recurring motifs throughout West’s epic account.
The Black Lamb
The black lamb symbolizes the history of oppression, violence, and sacrifice experienced by the South Slavic people who inhabited Yugoslavia. Black is a color associated with death and grief, while the lamb is an innocent creature that suffers. West writes, “The black lamb and the grey falcon, they are found everywhere in Yugoslavia. Black lamb and grey falcon, they haunt every junction on the Yugoslav journey.” The black lamb appears repeatedly in the dark folklore and bloody legends told to West as she travels through the region. It comes to embody a shared trauma and tragic destiny of the Yugoslavs.
The black lamb first appears early in the book, in two tales West hears when visiting Old Serbia. She is told of the “Sheep’s Weill,” a sacrificial lamb slaughtered each year by the Serbs during their rebellion against the Turks. The tale emphasizes voluntary sacrifice and suffering for a higher cause. Black lambs are also mentioned in the legend of a young man who unwisely ignores his mother’s advice, is seduced by three Turkish maidens, and is forced to slaughter his beloved black lamb, representing the loss of his innocence. West concludes, “The black lamb and the grey falcon had established their predominance. Our journey took on the character of an excursion into that part of the mind where certain symbols have their habitation.”
Throughout her travels, West encounters the black lamb again and again. It is a central image in the story of Prince Marko, a folk hero who defends the weak but makes a reckless error that contributes to defeat by the Turks. On another occasion, West sees peasants in a festival costume with fleeces dyled black and lamblike fringes on their sleeves, once again evoking the sacrificial animal. She muses, “This custom is said to be grounded on an old belief that once God favored the race of men and sent them a black lamb which should be their salvation, and man sacrificed it to deceive God.”
Meaning of the Black Lamb
For West, the black lamb comes to symbolize several intertwined ideas about the history of the South Slavic people:
- The oppression and violence repeatedly perpetrated against the Slavs, especially by outsiders like the Turks but also by other warring factions within the Balkans themselves.
- The tendency of the Slavic people to sacrifice themselves and engage in reckless, self-defeating acts of martyrdom.
- The tragic sense of destiny and dark view of human existence embodied in South Slavic folklore and epics.
The black lamb represents a desolate fatalism and melancholy innocence that West sees as a key to the Slavic character. She contrasts this with Western ideas of rationalism and progress. However, she also finds nobility in the black lamb; it is a powerful cultural metaphor conveying deep psychic wounds but also resilience forged through suffering.
The Grey Falcon
The grey falcon is a companion symbol to the black lamb in the book’s title. The falcon is associated with freedom, vision, and transcendence. West sees the bird as representing aspects of the Slavic soul that counterbalance the darkness and sacrifice symbolized by the lamb. The falcon is a creature of the air, able to see the big picture and soar above its environment. Yet it is also a creature of gray ambiguity, uniting light and darkness.
West recounts a folk song about a Turkish emperor who asks a Slavic chieftain why he has not paid tribute lately. The chieftain replies that his grey falcon has killed and eaten the imperial falcons. He goes on to explain that the grey falcon represents his soul, which needs freedom and will resist domination. This mythic encounter suggests the unconquerable nature of the Slavic spirit.
When West finally sees a gray falcon on her journey, the sight of the regal bird soaring over a line of people at a train station inspires an epiphany about Yugoslavia:
I looked up and saw that a grey falcon was passing across the sky, floating on rigid wings. Now I knew that I should come some time to Yugoslavia on a journey that mattered little to me because it was so clearly prescribed.
Here, West implies the gray falcon represents Yugoslavia itself and its destiny to maintain its freedom and unity despite surrounding threats. She sees deeper meaning in her own journey, which takes on mythic connections to the history of the Balkan people. The falcon symbolizes this land and culture, to which West realizes she has always been bound.
Meaning of the Grey Falcon
As a symbol in the book, the grey falcon suggests:
- The unconquered spirit of the South Slavic people, which has persisted despite centuries of domination by outsiders.
- A visionary aspect of the Slavic mind that transcends earthly constraints.
- The ambiguous nature of Yugoslavia itself, poised between Europe and Asia, caught between light and darkness.
- A kind of precarious destiny that West senses has long linked her to the Balkan region.
The falcon embodies freedom without innocence. Its predation represents the more brutal side of Slavic resistance and ethnic conflicts through the centuries. Yet its noble bearing also hints at the cultural virtues and enlightened potential of the region. Overall, the gray falcon represents the complex soul of Yugoslavia – covetous of liberty but tinged with the darkness of its tumultuous past.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Together
As a pair, the black lamb and the grey falcon symbolize the two contrary impulses that Rebecca West discerns within the Slavic character in Yugoslavia. On one hand, there is a resigned acceptance of tragedy, darkness, and sacrifice – the black lamb. On the other, there is a passion for freedom and resistance, colored by mysticism and vision – the gray falcon.
By intertwining these two contrary animal symbols, West creates a complex metaphor for the whole of Yugoslavia and its people. The civilization she explores exhibits both mourning passivity and defiant zeal. It accepts dominaion at times and rebels furiously at others. West is fascinated by these tensions between fatalism and idealism, brutality and lyricism. She senses throughout her journey that to understand Yugoslavia, one must come to terms with the country’s dual nature – hence, the black lamb and the grey falcon.
Some key passages reflect how the two animal symbols work together:
I think often of the black lamb and the grey falcon, they are so different in their loveliness. It is strange, too, that the lamb, which is a gentle creature, should be all black and sinister as if made guilty by sacrifice, and the falcon, which lives by mastery and attack, should be proud with shining white and grey feathers.
When I saw the name Uzhitse, a word full of the sunken blades of yesterdays, I was reminded of that black lamb and grey falcon who, it seems, follow the procession of history, bound to repeat the same pattern till life is extinct, shared between sin and expiation.
The black lamb and the grey falcon had been there ever since the beginning of time, walking undespairing in the blood-painted corridors of history, hiding in the long grasses of legend.
Conclusion
In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the two creatures represent the dualistic essences of trauma and transcendence that Rebecca West perceives in the cultural soul of Yugoslavia. The black lamb embodies resignation, sorrow, and willing self-sacrifice – it is the dark, delicate, and melancholy aspects of the Slavic spirit. The grey falcon embodies unconquerable defiance, mystic vision, and passion for liberty at any cost – it represents the bold, cunning, and ambitious aspects of the Slavic character.
Together, these two powerful symbols encapsulate the tension between fatalism and idealism that fascinated West in Yugoslavia. She sensed these contrary forces warring in the region’s rocky history and in the spirited character of its diverse people. The black lamb and the grey falcon offered poetic metaphors to convey the beautiful and terrifying truths West uncovered on her Balkan journey through destiny’s dark corridor.
The black lamb and the grey falcon function as South Slavic counterparts to the West’s traditional symbols of the innocent dove versus the wily serpent. West presents the lamb and falcon as ancient tribal totems that still haunted the Yugoslav landscape in the 1930s. Through these vivid images drawn from local legends, she builds a rich symbolic language to convey the essence of a fascinating yet war-torn land.
Symbol | Represents |
---|---|
Black Lamb | Sacrifice, oppression, resignation, folkloric mysticism and fatalism of Slavic culture |
Grey Falcon | Vision, defiance, thirst for freedom, cunning and brutality in resistance to oppression |
Significance of the Symbols
West’s use of the black lamb and grey falcon had several important effects:
- The symbols gave coherence and poetic resonance to West’s sprawling travel narrative. They unified what could have been simply a collection of observations and stories.
- They allowed West to hint at a psychic landscape beneath the physical terrain she crossed – the mentalities and mythologies that shaped Yugoslavia.
- The contrasting animals added depth and ambiguity to West’s portrait of the Slavic character as both brooding and passionate, world-weary and wisdom-seeking.
- Her animal symbols reflected West’s own European orientalism and romanticization of the exotic “primitive” Balkan world.
Overall, the black lamb and the grey falcon became West’s central poetic conceits in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These recurring symbols encapsulated her impressions of the South Slavic soul and gave metaphorical shape to the contradictions she saw in Yugoslavia’s history and collective psyche. The vivid yet enigmatic creatures haunted West’s epic travelogue and lent it a mythopoetic atmosphere that helped make the book a classic. Through the lamb and falcon, West expressed symbolic truths about human existence itself – the constant shadows cast, she believed, by the black lamb of resignation and the dazzling lights reflected by the grey falcon’s wings along destiny’s convoluted path.