Herne the Hunter
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In English mythology, Herne the Hunter is a ghost or monster associated with Windsor Great Park. It is frequently claimed he is a manifestation of the Horned God based on connecting his name to the Gaulish deity Cernunnos which was shortened to Cerne then Herne. This theory was one of the many questionable ideas of Margaret Murray, in her 1931 tome The God of the Witches. The earliest account of Herne, from Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor in 1597, bears little resemblance to a deity:
- Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
- Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
- Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
- And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
- And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
- In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
- You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
- The superstitious idle-headed eld
- Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
- This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.
- — William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Herne is a local legend not found outside Berkshire. This area was settled by pagan Anglo-Saxons who worshiped different gods of the Wild Hunt such as Woden, so a Celtic survival is unlikely especially as it did not occur anywhere else in England or Wales and as Cernunnos only seems to have been worshiped in Gaul. The other problem is that according to local legend the name Herne appears to have come from an actual local Hunt Keeper who was unjustly killed and became a ghost. It seems more likely that the Wild Hunt concept was added to an actual local spectre, as this seems to have happened in elsewhere with Wild Edric, Herla, and others.
Harrison Ainsworth's Victorian romance of Windsor Castle also featured Herne and popularised him.
Janet and Stewart Farrar, in "The Witches' God," claim that the name Herne is Onomatopoetic for the call of a doe to a stag.
Arrigo Boito, making 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 we recognize Herne the Huntsman.
Herne was portrayed as a pagan priest and embodied spirit of the woods in the British television series Robin of Sherwood.
Herne the Hunter appears in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence where he plays a key part in the ends of the book by the same name and the series' ending Silver On The Tree.