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If you’re currently reading Susan Cooper’s The #DarkisRising (2nd book of the TDiR series, set around #Christmas 
) here’s a thread about the folkloric sources of one of its most memorable characters: Herne the Hunter /1
@FolkloreThurs #FolkloreThursday @UofGFantasy @TDiRReadathon
) here’s a thread about the folkloric sources of one of its most memorable characters: Herne the Hunter /1@FolkloreThurs #FolkloreThursday @UofGFantasy @TDiRReadathon
Cooper’s antlered Herne, leader of the Wild Hunt, is a composite character made out of 3 fairly shadowy folkloric personas:
1) Herne the Hunter (Shakespeare)
2) Gwyn ap Nudd (Welsh tradition)
3) Arawn (First Branch of the Mabinogi - Welsh)
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1) Herne the Hunter (Shakespeare)
2) Gwyn ap Nudd (Welsh tradition)
3) Arawn (First Branch of the Mabinogi - Welsh)
/2
1) Herne the Hunter first appeared in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the play Herne is the ghost of a keeper of Windsor forest, who appears “with great ragg’d horns” by a specific oak tree and plays pranks, scaring the passers-by. /3
With the Shakespeare revival of the 18th and 19th centuries and literary tourism a “back-story” developed, in which Herne became a suicide, thus explaining his ghostly presence. Herne’s horns would have been read in Shakespeare’s time as a sign of insult, contempt and ridicule /4
perhaps venting some anger against the hated figure of the forest keeper, who often exploited their power. But by the Romantic 19th century those same horns were being read as the vestiges of a pagan god, /5
mainly through the efforts of Harrison Ainsworth’s melodramatic novel Windsor Castle (1843), and the conflation of Herne with the “Wild Hunt” of Germanic folklore – an ominous ride of supernatural creatures throughthe night, foreshadowing calamity. /6
2) During the same period, a character fromthe Welsh tradition, Gwyn ap Nudd, was undergoing a similar transformation: from heroic warrior and lover in the 12-c “Culhwch and Olwen” and the 13th-c “Dialogue of Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir”
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to 19th-century interpretations of him as a “god of darkness” and a “psychopomp,” riding through the night with his hounds, hunting the souls of those destined to die. These later interpretations stem from Sir John Rhŷs’s mistranslations of certain words referring to /8
the medieval Gwyn. Rhŷs often wanted Welsh characters to match paradigms of classical mythology. Gwyn became a sort of Hades to whom Rhŷs attached Welsh folklore tales about the horned leader of the Cwn Annwn (the hounds of the Otherworld), usually understood as the devil. /9
3) From there it was not a great leap for Rhŷs to associate Gwyn with the hounds of a third character, Arawn, the King of Annwn. When Arawn appears in the First Branch of the Mabinogi he is accompanied by hounds that “were a gleaming shining white, and their ears were red.” /10
Arawn doesn’t appear in any other Welsh texts except the First + Fourth Branches of the Mabinogi, but following the same practice as Rhŷs (attempting to create a Greek-/Roman-type pantheon out of medieval Welsh texts) some have interpreted him as a “Celtic God of the Dead” /11
To make matters worse, in the early 20th century, RobertGraves went on to combine all three figures, identifying them as aspects of the same character. Not only that, he also added a few others for good measure: the classical god Hermes, the Egyptian god Anubis, the archangel /12
Gabriel from Christian tradition, King Arthur, and Bran from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi. Graves interpreted Bran too as a god of the underworld based on his idiosyncratic reading of a fragment of text in the Myvyrian Archaiology (don’t even get me started on this!) /13
By the time Graves was finished with him, Herne/Gwyn/Arthur/Bran was a highly complex persona, taking on myriad attributes supposedly originating from Britain’s ancient, pagan religion, but all of which should be viewed as an amalgam of wonderful fabrication. /14
Susan Cooper had certainly read Graves. She’s said:
“One of the things I tend to believe, largely as a result of reading Robert Graves whom, I’m sure, many scholars find outrageous, is that there is a blurring of identity between an awful lot of figures.” /15
“One of the things I tend to believe, largely as a result of reading Robert Graves whom, I’m sure, many scholars find outrageous, is that there is a blurring of identity between an awful lot of figures.” /15
Does it matter that Cooper’s Herne isn’t quite authentic in terms of myth/folklore? Not as far as enjoying the book is concerned! We can actually see her Herne as adding a layer to the modern composite figure. Here’s @RobinsonKH’s brilliant illustration of Will meeting him! /16 https://twitter.com/robinsonkh/status/1341321240238239746
This thread is a shorter version of bits of a chapter on Cooper’s series in my book (currently only £19.99 on the Palgrave site, down from £79.99, with code BEST20PAL! https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137552815)
Let me know if you want any bibliographic references! /17 ENDS
Let me know if you want any bibliographic references! /17 ENDS
