There is an old tale which goes, that Herne the Hunter, sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
does, 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 milk 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 old,
received and did deliver to our age this talk of Herne the Hunter for a truth.”
Herne the Hunter was a ghoulish creature first seen in William Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives
of Windsor”. The legends say he is a mysterious horned man who roamed the Windsor Forest at night,
rattling chains, withering trees, tormenting the local wildlife, and bewitching cattle,
causing their milk to be replaced with blood.
But who is Herne the hunter, a myth or a man?
William Harrison Ainsworth called him a myth, nothing more than a paranormal figure.
In his 1843 “Windsor Castle”, Herne was a featured legend, a hunter who had been impaled by a stag.
Before his death, however, the Devil appeared and offered to save him,
on the condition that he bore the stag’s antlers. This has been the most
popularized version of the legend of Herne the Hunter, ever since. Now Samuel Ireland
said Herne was a man, " a keeper of the forest, a hunter named Horne, who in the time of Elizabeth
had “committed some great offence, for which he feared to lose his status and fall into disgrace.
He hung himself on a tree in Windsor forest, a tree known till today as Herne's
Oak.” This tree was cut down in 1796, however, in 1838 an author Edward Jesse claimed that another
oak was the true Herne’s Oak. The tree was blown down by a strong wind in 1863,
and replaced by another tree known as the Queen Victoria’s tree. Years later,
after the avenue was replanted in 1906, a new oak tree was given the title of Herne’s Oak,
in commemoration of the hunter; and this oak still stands today.James
Halliwell-Phillips, an English Shakespearean scholar, supported Samuel Ireland’s claim
of the hunter, suggesting that Herne was indeed a real hunter named Richard Horne.
According to a document found, Richard Horne was caught poaching in Windsor Forest.
After confessing to his crimes, he was punished,
and the most common punishment for this crime at time, was hanging. An early copy of Shakespeare’s
“The Merry Wives of Windsor” was even written with ‘Horne the Hunter’ in place of ‘Herne the Hunter’.
The unholy circumstances of his death are likely what caused the legend of his hauntings to appear.
But R. Lowe Thompson called Herne a god, a wild huntsman, a patron of the wild. In Thompson’s
“The History of the Devil – The Horned God of the West”, he suggests that Herne,
as well as other Wild Huntsmen all come from the same ancient source, Cernunnos. Cernunnos
is an ancient Gaulish deity, known as the God of the Forest, and has a similar
legend of residing within forests, bearing a similar appearance, and sporting stag horns.
However, in contrast to Herne, Cernunnos is known to protect wildlife and nature.
An oddity that separates this god from Herne’s origins
is that there is yet to be any evidence of people worshipping Cernunnos in Britain..
In the Early Middle Ages, Windsor was ruled over by the pagan
Angles who worshipped a unique pantheon. A god called Woden, popularly known as Odin,
was known to ride across the night sky with his own Wild Hunt.
Odin also hung himself on the world tree Yggdrasil to learn the secret of the runic alphabet,
drawing ties to all the accounts of Herne. It is sometimes claimed that Herne was
derived from the word Herian, a title for Odin as ‘the Leader of Fallen Warriors’.
This suggests that Herne the hunter might have as well been the Norse god Odin.
Nonetheless, one detail agreed upon by these accounts is that Herne was the guardian of
the Windsor Forest, who protected all that was in his presiding, but would also torment
the local and wildlife if provoked. Alas! due to the diversity of these accounts of origin,
the true origin of Herne the Hunter remains shrouded, and much is left to interpretation.