During the furious storms of midwinter, the country peoples of Britain and Northern Europe, especially France and Germany, would cower in their homes when above the tumult of the gale could be heard the sound of hunting horn and the pounding of hooves, accompanied by the dreadful baying of hounds...Those unlucky enough to be outside in the forest were sometimes afforded a glimpse of a macabre company of huge, black horses, ridden by ghosts on the very air, with monstrous, howling black dogs alongside; dogs with red eyes large as saucers, or perhaps, even with human heads. This retinue would be led by a grim and fearsome spectre in the robes of a king, jet-black as the rest, and crowned with antlers.
This was the Wild Hunt.
A strange and awesome folk belief with many variants, the Wild Hunt was endemic to the area described in the early Middle Ages. The Wild Huntsman who led them was at first believed to be the Norse god Odin, in his aspect as God of the Dead, at his *psychopompos* function of guiding souls to the Underworld. His horse Slepnir is eight-legged and rides on the air (a death allusion might be made from the manner in which a dead man is borne in his coffin, through the air, by four pallbearers with two legs each). Later the Huntsman is identified as the Devil himself.
His fellow horsemen are spirits of the dead, his hounds are demons, or the souls of unbaptized children. In the west of England they might be known as the Yeth Hounds or Wisht Hounds; in Durham or Yorkshire they were Gabriel's Hounds or Gabble Ratchets, from the medieval word for dogs, 'ratchets,' and 'gabares,' which means corpse.
In France they were called Hellequin's Hunt, and consisted of not only hunters but an entire parade of the damned, first commoners and tradesmen, then monks and clerics, then knights, all suffering various tortures according to their sins on earth. The purpose of the Wild Hunt in all its incarnations was essentially the same: to collect the souls of dying or newly-dead sinners and drive them to Hell.
It was unwise to look upon them or attempt to speak to them; one ran the risk of being swept away in their midst, never to return, or to be driven mad. Orderic of Vitalis, cleric of the abbey of St. Evroult in the diocese of Liseaux in Normandy wrote in 1133 of the priest Walchelin's encounter with them on the night of Jan. 1, 1091 near the church of Bonneval. Walchelin was petitioned by some of the spirits to deliver messages to their surviving loved ones, but refused to heed them; foolishly he attempted to steal one of the riderless horses to bring back as proof of his experience, but was burned by the horse's red-hot bridle, and again by the hand of a knight who caught him at it. The scar on the back of his neck proved to be the only souvenir he was able to show to Orderic. Walchelin was saved only by the intercession of his own brother, lately dead, who was part of the procession.
In 1123 in Saxony, Germany, in the diocese of Worms, the residents witnessed nightly a multitude of armed horsemen leaving in troops from a nearby mountain, only to return to it at the hour of nones. Bearing a cross before them, they questioned one of the riders, who said he and the rest were indeed dead, the souls of knights killed in battle.
In England, the Peterborough abbey account says that on February 6, 1127, hideous black hunters astride horses, goats, and rams rode through the forest at night blowing their horns, with their loathsome, black, huge-eyed dogs, for a period that lasted through Lent and Easter.
Walter Map wrote in 1155 that the Wild Huntsman was a King Herla of the ancient Britons who received many gifts from the King of the Dwarves, including a small bloodhound which he was to carry on his saddle with him. Upon his return however, he and his party were not to dismount before the dog did so first, or else they would all turn to dust; Herla came back from three days in the dwarves' cave to find that two centuries had passed, but worse, to find that the dog would not jump to the ground. He and his followers were thus doomed to wander the earth forever.
In another tradition of naming the Huntsman after well-known departed nobles of the time, an account of the late 1100s identifies him as King Arthur, a version corroborated by Gervase of Tilbury in the 13th century, who says that Arthur and his knights regularly hunt an ancient trackway between Cadbury and Glastonbury which is still known as King Arthur's Causeway.
In Scotland, an old rhyme goes:
Arthur o' Bower has broken his bands
And he's come roaring owre the lands
The King o' Scots and a' his power
Canna turn Arthur o' Bower.Connection is sometimes made between the Wild Hunt and the legend of Herne the Hunter, a forest keeper of either Richard II or Henry VIII's time who was charged with poaching and witchcraft, and hung upon an oak in Windsor Forest. Shakespeare's Mistress Page refers to this in *The Merry Wives Of Windsor*, Act 4, Scene 4. He too is accompanied by the sound of his horn and the noise of baying hounds, and is a malignant phantom causing ailments of cattle and local misfortune. This legend is treated fictionally in William Harrison Ainsworth's WINDSOR CASTLE (Henry Colburn; London 1843, with a more attractive edition by Routledge in 1889, with Cruikshank plates and woodcuts by Delamotte).
The Cornish legend of Tregeagle tells of a cruel and diabolical landowner in life whose spirit is placed in the charge of priests at his death, and who must perform impossible tasks like bailing out the bottomless pool of Dosmery using a limpet-shell with a hole in it, or fashioning ropes of sand, else be chased to Hell by the Devil and his hounds. Tregeagle howls in dismay at his continual failures, and is finally taken to Land's End, where his cries cannot be heard. 'To roar like Tregeagle' became an expression in Cornwall, and there is a Tregeagle ghost story called 'Nights On Roughtor' by Donald Rawe in the Denys Val Baker-edited HAUNTED CORNWALL (William Kimber; London 1973, and a UK Heritage paperback from 1980).
The similarity of names associated with the legend-- Herla, Hellequin (or Herlequin), Herne-- tends to point to a common root, perhaps that of Cernunnos, the Horned God of the witches; prehistoric paintings in the cave of Trois Freres in Saint-Giroud in Ariege, France depict, in the midst of a group of various animals, the figure of a man clad in an animal skin, with horns. Similar cave paintings in South Africa and other places, including one remarkable one from Oued Djaret in the Sahara showing a hunter with an animalistic head followed by a dog, seem to reinforce the image.
Robert Graves in THE WHITE GODDESS (Farrar, Strauss, and Cudahy, 1948) mentions the *Cwm Annwm*, the Hounds of Hell with white bodies and red ears, from a Welsh myth that also names the Hunter as Arawn, king of Annwm, and draws some other possible conclusions equating certain details with Hermes, and even Anubis of Egyptian myth. The Cwm Annwm (pronounced 'koon anoon,' and also spelt with 'n's in place of the 'm's), and other local terms for the Wild Hunt-- 'The Devil's Dandy-Dogs,' 'Herla's Rade,' and the Sluagh or the Host, are elaborated upon in intriguing detail also in Katherine Briggs' fascinating and comprehensive AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES (Pantheon; NY, 1976).
Sources and further recommended reading:
Man, Myth, and Magic, vols. 10 & 22 (Cavendish; NY, 1070)
The Minor Traditions of British Mythology- Lewis Spence (Benjamin Blom; NY 1972)
Ghosts In The Middle Ages- Jean-Claude Schmitt (Univ. of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1998)
Gods and Myths of Northern Europe- H.R. Ellis Davidson (Penguin; 1964)
John Masefield's poem, 'The Hounds of Hell,' in GHOSTS, ed. by Marvin Kaye (Doubleday; NY, 1981)www.orcades.dircon.co.uk/hunt.htm
www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/3532/hunt.htm
rbadac, who loves a parade
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John Pelan (May 13, 1999)
rbadac wrote an excellent essay on The Wild Hunt.
Excerpted for the sake of brevity:> Sources and further recommended reading:
>
> Man, Myth, and Magic, vols. 10 & 22 (Cavendish; NY, 1070) The Minor
> Traditions of British Mythology- Lewis Spence (Benjamin Blom; NY 1972) Ghosts
> In The Middle Ages- Jean-Claude Schmitt (Univ. of Chicago Press; Chicago,
> 1998) Gods and Myths of Northern Europe- H.R. Ellis Davidson (Penguin; 1964)
> John Masefield's poem, 'The Hounds of Hell,' in GHOSTS, ed. by Marvin Kaye
> (Doubleday; NY, 1981)And to this list, allow me to suggest the chapbook "The Dark Satanic" by Paul Finch from the Enigmatic Novellas series. An excellent tale featuring the "Dandy Dogs".
John (considering that the sound of hooves on the rooftop isn't always indicative of reindeer....)
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rbadac (May 14, 1999)
Cool ! Thanks, John ! Hoping Paul can make something good out of something with one of the silliest names I've heard in awhile-- "Dandy Dogs'-- it just seems to take to wind out of the sail somehow.Now if I can get out of this without Bill B. suggesting 'Ghost Riders In The Sky,' I can consider myself lucky.
rbadac
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Bill Barnett (May 15, 1999)
I'll second John's suggestion (Paul Finch is on a tear!), and add another one: "Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwm Annwm" by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, from his collection TERROR BY NIGHT. It's one of his stories that demonstrates how good he can be when he doesn't just go for yucks.Bill B.
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Robert Suggs (May 15, 1999)
This is interesting. I don't know anything about Paul Finch, but I was assigned to illustrate one of his tales and found myself looking up other efforts by him in All Hallows and Enigmatic Tales. A pretty terrifying writer in a studied Edwardian style.Rob
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Randy Money (May 13, 1999)
Thanks much, rbadac. That was very informative.Randy
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rbadac (May 14, 1999)
As always, you're welcome, Randy ! If it wins you any money on Jeopardy, however, we'll have to talk...rbadac
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Randy Money (May 14, 1999)
If that should happen, call my agent. We'll do lunch.Randy
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