The Wild Hunt

       At the Midwinter solstice, the longest night of the year, the Wild Hunt sweeps through the land, scattering animals and snatching souls of the unwary.  The Hunt is led by a mounted horned figure embodying the wild magic of ancient untamed forests.  This coming solstice, keep your pets inside and your doors closed when the otherworldly hounds bay like thunder and the Wild Hunt rides.

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       According to The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, the idea of otherworldly fairy folk snatching people and carrying them away is common in Celtic folklore. 
​       “In Wales the leader of the Wild Hunt was Gwynn ap Nudd, king of the dead [and king of Fairyland], who rode with the Cŵn Annwn [red-eared hounds] on storm clouds to collect the souls of the newly dead, to take them to the afterlife.  . . . Gazing on the riders was dangerous, but those who put a sprig of protective rowan over their doors could watch the procession in safety.”

       Gwynn is closely associated with Herne the Hunter who “appears in various legends as a horned spirit, suggesting he may have originated as a woodland deity like Cernunnos.”  This Cernunnos was worshipped widely “as far back as the fourth century BCE.”  Like Herne, he wears the horns of a stag “suggesting a connection with the powers of the wildwood.”

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       Several sources link the British stag-horned god Herne to the Celtic Cernunnos. 
       According to Janet & Stewart Farrar, widespread evidence of Herne/Cernunnos is found “in many Celtic artefacts” including rock carvings, chalk hill-cut figures, and the famous Gundestrup Cauldron.
​       “He is usually portrayed with horns and accompanied by animals.  He usually either wears or has looped on his horns the torc (circular necklet) of Celtic nobility.”

       The name Herne may be an imitation of a deer’s challenge:  “The call of a hind to her stag sounds like a deep-throaty ‘HH-ERRRN’.”
       In Britain, Herne the Hunter “leads his Wild Hunt of red-eared hounds at a furious pace across the sky.  In Wales, the leader of the Wild Hunt is called Gwyn.”

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       The Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology notes that the name “Gwyn” [or Gwynn] means “white, fair, holy.” 
​       Gwyn ap Nudd is the mythological king of the Otherworld, “a realm beyond the senses,” with a pack of otherworldly dogs or hell-hounds, “snow-white, red-eared spectral hounds.  . . .  They hunt the souls of the living through the air” and are also known as fairy dogs, corpse dogs, or sky dogs.

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Authors have recreated the Wild Hunt in fiction.  These are my three favorites:

       In The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, the Wild Hunt chases the powers of the Dark away at the Midwinter solstice. 
       The book has one of my favorite portrayals of winter’s bite (a desperate scene illustrating the Dark's ascendant power with the lengthening nights preceding the winter solstice):
       “The air was like a current of chill water, coming at them from all sides.  The fire in the great hearth gave out no warmth now, no warmth that was not sucked in by  . . .  the deep cold, the cold of the void, of black space  . . .  And the cold grew more and more intense, cutting through the body to the mind.”  
      Our hero, Will Stanton, meets Herne, leader of the Wild Hunt, in the climax:

       “The figure of the Hunter towered over him.  The moonlight now glimmered clear on his head, and Will found himself gazing up into strange tawny eyes, yellow-gold, unfathomable, like the eyes of some huge bird.  . . .  The golden eyes blinked, feather-fringed and round, with the deliberate blink of an owl’s strong eyelids; the man’s face in which they were set was turned full on Will, and the firm-carved mouth above the soft beard parted in a quick smile.  [His smile told of] cruelty, and a pitiless impulse to revenge.  Indeed, he was half-beast.  The dark branches of Herne’s antlers curved up over Will, the moonlight glinting off their velvety sheen, and the Hunter laughed softly.”

       Will meets Herne’s hounds:
       “. . .  behind every shadow or tree and out of every cloud, leaping round the ground and through the air, came an endless pack of hounds, sounding, belling as hunting dogs do when they are starting after a scent.  They were huge white animals, ghostly in the half-light, loping and jostling and bounding together . . . 
​       Their ears were red [like flames], their eyes were red; they were ugly creatures.”

       The Hunt rides:  “Round Herne and the white mare they bayed and belled, a heaving sea of red-flecked foam; then all at once the antlered man stiffened, his great horns pointing as a hunting dog points and he called the hounds together . . .  A bedlam of yelping urgency rose from the milling white dogs, filling the sky, and at that same moment the full strength of the thunderstorm erupted.  Clouds split roaring into bright, jagged lightning as Herne and the white horse leapt exultingly into the arena of the sky, with the red-eyed hounds pouring up into the stormy air after them in a great white flood.”

       Later:  “out of the west, with the speed of dropping stones, came Herne and the Wild Hunt.  At the peak of their power now, in full cry, they came roaring out of the great dark thundercloud, through streaking lightning and grey-purple clouds, riding on the storm. The yellow-eyed antlered man rode laughing dreadfully, crying out the avaunt that rallies hounds on the full chase, and his brilliant, white-gold horse flung forward with main and tail flying.  And around them and endlessly behind them like a broad white river poured the Yell Hounds, the Yelpers, the Hounds of Doom, their red eyes burning with a thousand warning flames.  The sky was white with them; they filled the western horizon; and still they came, unending.”

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The prolific author Jane Yolen wrote a dark novella entitled the Wild Hunt that presents the Hunt as a battle between Winter and Summer, with Herne the Huntsman personifying Winter. 
       “Lord Herne is the dark, the night, the cold.  He is chaos and anger and war.”   The White Lady who opposes him is “light and day and summer . . .  reason and calm and peace."

       Two boys, a talking white cat, and a slobbery dog carry two-thirds of the story in alternating chapters; the terrifying winter Huntsman stalks every third chapter of the book.  

       The Huntsman arrives:  “an enormous man, his black armor both polished and covered with a patina that spoke of centuries of wear.  One hand rested on his hip; the other held aloft a long black whip.  His horned help was up, but if he had eyes, they were only red coals burning in the darkness that was his face.”
       He rides with nine riders on “mine-black” horses and a “pack of slavering hounds” with bright red muzzles.  “They growled over their memories of the last hunt; they could taste time.”

       One of the boys is imprisoned by the Huntsman:  “[He] considered shinnying up the stone bars.  But when he put his mittened hands on them, he felt the cold go straight through the wool, straight through the skin, all the way down to the bone.  The bars were so cold they burned.”

       The contest between Winter and Summer is, as might be expected, a stalemate:
       “A draw then, my lady wife?”
       “A draw then, my husband.  Summer will again be but six months long.”
       “And winter the rest.”  Behind the helm the red-coal eyes seemed to smile.

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       Song of the Huntress by Lucy Holland may be the most original fictional version of the Wild Hunt.  Herla, a warrior of the Iceni queen Boudica, makes a bargain with Gwynn ap Nudd:  “The day I met him, the King of Annwn [the Fairy Otherworld] had eyes like cold stars.  He was both huge and humble: a giant one moment, a man the next.  . . .  he turned his face toward me, it was ancient and sad [and] wild; a stag startled to madness by the harvest moon.”
        Herla wants to help her queen defeat the Romans.  Gwynn gives her a horse, a sword, and a hound that “was all white save for two unsettling blood-red ears.”  The sword he provides curses Herla and her warrior companions to sleep under a tor-mound for hundreds of years. 

       “Every month, when the moon grew old, Gwynn’s blade woke us from our damned slumber beneath the tor to slay any who crossed our path.  [The sword] drew blood from the wind: it sheared soul from flesh.  . . .  The Britons called us the Wild Hunt and learned to dread the aging crescent of the moon.”

       Herla’s experience of the Hunt:  “Herla can feel it growing: an iron tang in her mouth, a widening of her nostrils. The bloodlust stirs the roots of her hair, fills her limbs with a storm, until the binding suddenly loosens and the full weight of the curse falls upon her.”
       When the Wild Hunt encounters land magic, loosed by a dying king, the curse begins unraveling.  This initiates Herla’s struggle to recover her humanity after many centuries leading the Hunt. 

       Here is Herla’s first bite of bread after so long out of time:  “Salt.  Yeast.  The warm mustiness of wheat.  She swallows, presses a hand against her mouth.  She can feel the morsel inside her like an anchor, like a burning coal, like a—the sensation fades and she wants to laugh.  Rocked by a scrap of bread.  What a stranger to life I have become.”

       Despite the weakening of the curse, the Hunt remains compelled to ride at each new moon, endangering Herla’s newfound love and threatening her fragile grip on life. 
       At the novel's climax she confronts Gwyn ap Nudd:
       “Your duty is not ours, Gwyn ap Nudd,” she hisses.  “It was given to you and only you can perform it.”  She holds out the sword.  “Take it back and free us.”

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       Tuck a sprig of rowan over your door (if you have access to mountain-loving rowan trees); call in your pets and lock any livestock in the barn before the sun fades—for on Midwinter night, the Wild Hunt rides.

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Read about related nature-based mythology:
Animism,  The Green Man,  The Spring Maiden,  Sky Goddesses,  Water Gods
Read more about Celtic deities:  Warrior Goddesses,  Celtic Fire Goddess Brigid

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