In English folklore, Herne the Hunter is a ghost associated with Windsor Forest and Great Park in the English county of Berkshire. He is said to have antlers growing from his head, ride a horse, torment cattle, and rattle chains. The earliest mention of Herne comes from William Shakespeare's 1597 play The Merry Wives of Windsor, and it is impossible to know how accurately or to what degree Shakespeare may have incorporated a real local legend into his work, though there have been several later attempts to connect Herne to historical figures, pagan deities, or ancient archetypes.
Legend The earliest written account of Herne comes from Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor (believed to have been written around 1597). Officially published versions of the play refer only to the tale of Herne as the ghost of a former Windsor Forest keeper who haunts a particular oak tree at midnight in the winter time. He is said to have horns, 'blasts' his oak, shake chains and cause cattle to produce blood instead of milk:
The first quarto of the play from 1602 includes a different version of this text, which states that the ghost (spelled "Horne" in this version) was invented to scare children into obedience, and that mothers tell their children the tale of a ghost who walks the forest in the form of a great stag. Because it is a common surname, it is not possible to further identify Shakespeare's Herne, and no earlier references to his legend exist.Westwood, J. Haunted England: The Penguin Book of Ghosts. Penguin UK, 2013.
Nearly two hundred years later, in 1792, Samuel Ireland slightly expanded on Shakespeare as follows:
There is little written evidence for Herne the Hunter before the 1840s, and the details of his original folk tale have been filtered through the various versions of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.
It has been noted that the reference to Herne's death as a suicide fits a traditional belief that this sort of death is more likely to produce a haunting. Shakespeare's reference to rattling chains also fits a very common ghostly motif. However, other elements of the tale are unusual for other ghost stories of Shakespeare's era. Ghostly cattle or dogs were common, but there are few contemporary examples of a ghostly stag. It is possible that Shakespeare invented this detail to better fit the forest setting, or to lead into the humorous image of a character wearing antlers, which would have resembled cuckold's horns to an Elizabethan audience. It was also unusual for ghosts of this period to produce such damaging effects. Herne is described bewitching ("taking") cattle, bloodying their milk, and causing trees to wither.
Herne's Oak
Herne became widely popularised after his appearance in Shakespeare's play, and the supposed location of Herne's Oak was, for many years, a matter of local speculation and controversy. Some Ordnance Survey maps show Herne's Oak a little to the north of Frogmore House in the Home Park (adjoining Windsor Great Park). This tree was felled in 1796. In 1838, Edward Jesse claimed that a different tree in the avenue was the real Herne's Oak, and this gained in popularity especially with Queen Victoria. This tree was blown down on 31 August 1863, and Queen Victoria had another tree planted on the same site. The Queen's tree was removed in 1906 when the avenue was replanted.
One of the new oaks planted in 1906 is currently given the title of Herne's Oak.
Later additions Further details have entered the folklore from even later sources and reported sightings, such as those in the 1920s.R. Lowe Thompson, The History of the Devil 1929 p. 134 William Harrison Ainsworth's 1843 novel Windsor Castle featured Herne and popularised his legend. Ainsworth's version of the tale added a number of new details, including having Herne being gored by a stag, only to have the Devil save him on the condition that he wear the stag's antlers. Jacob Grimm was the first to suggest, very influentially, that Herne had once been thought of as the leader of the Wild Hunt, based on his title.
In the 20th century, further details were added to Herne's legend, including the idea that his ghost appears shortly before national disasters and the deaths of kings. It was also during the 20th century that incidents of personal encounters with the ghost, or of people hearing his hounds and horn in Windsor Forest, were first reported.
Possible origins Various theories have been proposed to account for the origin of the character, none of which has been proved conclusive, and the source for many of the tales told of Herne remains unknown.
Palaeolithic origins and association with the date In his 1929 book The History of the Devil – The Horned God of the West R. Lowe Thompson suggests that "Herne" as well as other Wild Huntsmen in European folklore all derive from the same ancient source, citing that "Herne" may be a cognate of the name of Gaulish deity Cernunnos in the same way that the English "horn" is a cognate of the Latin "cornu" (see Grimm's Law for more details on this linguistic feature) explaining that "As the Latin cornu changes into horn so might Cerne change into Herne." He adds, "In any case the reader may also be prepared to recognize Cernunnos and the older magician, who emerge as the Wild Huntsman. My assumption is that these two forms have been derived from the same Paleolithic ancestor and can, indeed, be regarded as two aspects of one central figure, will help us to understand the identification of Herlechin and Herne, whom I will take as the most familiar example of the huntsman."The History of the Devil by R. Lowe Thompson, 1920, page 133 Margaret Murray also identified Cernunnos with Herne in her 1933 book The God of the Witches.Callow, John. Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. (pg. 212, 246) Some modern Neopagans such as Wiccans accept Lowe Thompson's equation of Herne with Cernunnos (which they further connect to the Greco-Roman god Pan).'Simple Wicca: A simple wisdom book' by Michele Morgan, Conari, 2000, , Herne however is a localised figure, not found outside Berkshire and the regions of the surrounding counties into which Windsor Forest once spread, and clear evidence for the worship of Cernunnos has been recovered only on the European mainland, and not in Britain.Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy, People of the Mist (ch. 5) "Herne" could be derived ultimately from the same Indo-European root *ker-n-, meaning bone or horn, from which "Cernunnos" derives. However, a more direct source may be the Old English hyrne, meaning "horn" or "corner",Shipley, Joseph Twadell. 'Dictionary of Early English'. Philosophical Library, 1955. Page 330.Bosworth, Joseph. A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language, Containing the Accentuation—the Grammatical Inflections—the Irregular Words Referred to Their Themes—the Parallel Terms, from the Other Gothic Languages—the Meaning of the Anglo-Saxon in English and Latin—and Copious English and Latin Indexes ... Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1838. Page 189. which is inconsistent with the Cernunnos theory.Petry, Michael John (1972). Herne the Hunter: A Berkshire Legend. William Smith (Booksellers) Ltd. .
Possible Historical individual Samuel Ireland claimed that Herne was based on a real historical individual, saying that this person died an unholy death of the type that might have given rise to tales of hauntings by his unquiet spirit, but he had no proof of this. The fact that Herne is apparently a purely local figure supports this theory. One possibility is that Herne is supposed to be the ghost of Richard Horne, a yeoman during the reign of Henry VIII who was caught poaching in the wood. This suggestion was first made by James Halliwell-Phillipps, who identified a document listing Horne as a "hunter" who had confessed to poaching.Hedley, Windsor Castle, 93. The earliest edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor spells the name "Horne".Jeffrey Theis, The "ill kill'd" Deer: Poaching and Social Order in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43.1 (2001) 46–73.
Post-Shakespearean adaptations
Music François-André Danican Philidor's lost opera, Herne le chasseur (1773), is an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor giving Herne the title role. Carl Otto Nicolai's opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1845/46) includes Falstaff, disguised as Herne, on the musical stage. Arrigo Boito, composing a libretto for Verdi's opera Falstaff by improvising upon materials in Merry Wives and Henry IV, built the moonlit last act set in Windsor Great Park around a prank revenge played upon the amorous Falstaff by masqueraders disguised as spirits and the spectral "Black Huntsman", in whom Herne the Hunter is recognisable. Carlo Prospero Defranceschi wrote a similar libretto for composer Antonio Salieri that specifically mentions Herne. Ralph Vaughan Williams' opera Sir John in Love, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Merry Wives, feature an impersonation of Herne the Hunter to misguide Falstaff. "The Legend of Herne the Hunter" was part of Sir Arthur Sullivan's ballet Victoria and Merrie England of 1897, which portrayed various scenes from British folklore and history. In the light opera Merrie England by Sir Edward German (1902), the librettist Basil Hood introduces another impersonation of Herne as a device to induce a change of heart in Queen Elizabeth I. One of the earliest recordings by British progressive rock band Marillion is an instrumental song titled "Herne the Hunter" based on the legend. Herne is a track on the 1984 LP Legend by Clannad, the soundtrack album to the ITV television series Robin of Sherwood (q.v.). Herne the Hunter features in the lyrics of the song "English Fire" by Cradle of Filth on their album Nymphetamine. On the 2008 album Blessings by S.J. Tucker, a song is titled "Hymn to Herne". On the 2014 EP Just Let Go by Hadley Fraser, a song is titled "Herne and the Red Kite".
Literature Two characters in Lloyd Alexander's high fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain seem to have been inspired by Herne the Hunter. The villainous Horned King wears an antlered skull mask, and Gwyn the Hunter is a supernatural herald whose horn and baying hounds are heard when a few characters meet their deaths. Herne appears in Harrison Ainsworth's Windsor Castle. Herne the Hunter, leading the Wild Hunt, appears in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, where he plays a key part in the end of the book by the same name and in the series' ending Silver on the Tree. Eric Mottram's A Book of Herne (1975, 1981) Poetry exploring the myth. The villainous Master Forester in Sarban's novel The Sound of His Horn (1952) is an incarnation of Herne the Hunter.Mike Ashley, John Clute, Peter Nicholls, "Sarban" The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 12 August 2018. Retrieved 9 July 2019. The tradition that Herne was in the employ of Richard II was used for the fresh retelling of the legend in 2019's Tales of Britain, by Jem Roberts. In Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, Hern the Hunter founded the proud woodland kingdom of Hernysadharc, its people, the Hernystiri, ruled by the House of Hern whose emblem was a White Stag. The Hernystiri shared a special bond with the Sithi – an elvish-like people otherwise referred to as the Fair Folk. Herne the Hunted is a parody of Herne the Hunter in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. He is a small god and the patron of those animals destined to end up as a "brief, crunchy squeak." Herne the Hunter is a key figure in Ruth Nichols' children's novel The Marrow of the World. His character has no supernatural attributes.