Herne the Hunter
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, shake chains and cause cattle to produce blood instead of milk: There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter (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.
[1] Nearly two hundred years later, in 1792, Samuel Ireland slightly expanded on Shakespeare as follows: The story of this Herne, who was keeper in the forest in the time of Elizabeth, runs thus: – That having committed some great offence, for which he feared to lose his situation and fall into disgrace, he was induced to hang himself on this tree.
[2]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 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.
[1] 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.
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.
[6] 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.
[12] In the Early Middle Ages, Windsor Forest came under the control of the pagan Angles who worshipped their own pantheon of gods, including Woden, whose Norse equivalent Odin rode across the night sky with his own Wild Hunt and hanged himself on the world tree Yggdrasil to learn the secret of the runic alphabet.
[14][15][16][17] Samuel Ireland identified Herne as a real historical individual, saying that he died an unholy death of the type that might have given rise to tales of hauntings by his unquiet spirit.
