The Wild Hunt
Herne the Hunter is not the only ghostly huntsman in English folklore. Lone travelers on certain nights of the year must be careful that they are not seized by a whole troop of ghostly huntsmen and dragged to the pit of hell. The Wild Hunt, as the tradition is called, is common throughout Northern Europe, and is believed to have a pre-Christian origin. As the illustration above suggests, with its clear depiction of Thor and his hammer Mjölnir, the Wild Hunt probably comes from Germanic Folklore, a remnant of the pagan beliefs of the Anglo-Saxons before their conversion in 597.
The first English account of the Wild Hunt comes in an 1127 entry to the Peterborough Chronicle, a historical document compiled between the 9th and the 14th centuries: ‘many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting. The huntsmen were black, huge, and hideous, and rode on black horses and on black he-goats, and their hounds were jet black, with eyes like saucers, and horrible’. This continued every night for 9 weeks and was heard by monks. Orderic Vitalis records a similar encounter from Normandy of 1092 in which the hunters were recognized as recently-deceased parishioners.
As in the tales of Herne and, more remotely, Judas, the people recognized by Orderic Vitalis in the ghostly troupe was known to have been sinners in their mortal time, and so their nightly exercise was seen to be a part of their punishment. The tradition, henceforth, deemed the huntsmen to be demons accompanied by the damned. Usually, however, the Wild Hunt was heard rather than seen, as in Wordsworth’s Sonnet VII (1815): ‘He oftentimes will start/ For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s Hounds’. ‘Gabriel’s Hounds’ is a term for the Wild Hunt most common in the North of England.
One identification of the leader of the Wild Hunt, first mentioned by the twelfth-century courtier Walter Map, is King Herla. Herla was an ancient British King, who once granted an audience to a dwarf riding a goat, and agreed to allow the little man to attend his wedding in exchange for attending his guest’s a year to the day afterward. Herla enjoyed the dwarf’s wedding, and departed with gifts of ‘horses, dogs, hawks, and every appliance of the best for hunting or fowling’. Upon returning, he found that centuries had passed, and his wife was of course dead.
One of the gifts given to Herla was a fine bloodhound, and the dwarf commanded that none should dismount until the dog leaped from its bearer’s lap. In shock at finding that centuries had passed while they were attending the wedding, some men forgot the warning and turned to dust. The rest waited for the dog to leap down, and are waiting still, for the bloodhound never left its bearer. King Herla and his men are yet wandering, waiting for the dog to leap, and in the meantime frightening all who come across them on their timeless march.