King Abel was interred after his death in St. Peter’s Church in Sleswig, but the fratricide could find no peace in his grave. His ghost walked about in the night and disturbed the monks in their devotions. The body was finally removed from the church, and sunk in a foul bog near Gottorp. To keep him down effectively, a pointed stake was drove through his body. The spot is still called Königsgrabe. Notwithstanding this, he appears seated on a coal-black charger, followed by a pack of black hounds with eyes and tongues of fire. The gates are heard slamming and opening, and the shrieks and yells are such that they appal the stoutest hearts.
At the ancient capital of Fuen, Odense, said to have been built by Odin, the myth has been reduced to a spectral Christmas-night equipage, which issues from St. Canute’s Church and passes to the ancient manor-house of Glorup. It is a splendid carriage, drawn by six black horses with fiery tongues, and in it are seated the Lords of Glorup, famous for their cruelty to peasants, and now not able to rest in the church where they were interred. It is of evil omen to witness the spectacle: a man who watched for it was struck blind.
In France Le Grand Veneur bears various names; he is King Arthur, Saint Hubert, Hugo. His alleged appearances within historic times have been so strongly attested that various attempts have been made to give them rational explanations. Thus Charles VI. of France, when going to war in Bretagne, is said to have been met by such a spectre in the Forest of Mans, and became insane; he believed himself to have been the victim of sorcery, as did many of his subjects. It has been said that the King was met by a disguised emissary of the Duc de Bretagne. More particular accounts are given of the apparition of the Wild Huntsman to Henry IV. when he was hunting with the Comte de Soissons in the Forest of Fontainebleau, an event commemorated by ‘La Croix du Grand Veneur.’ According to Matthieu,[2] both the King and the Count heard the cries of the hunt, and when the Count went to discover their origin, the terrible dark figure stood forth and cried, ‘You wish to see me, then behold!’ This incident has been explained variously, as a project of assassination, or as the jest of two fellows who, in 1596, were amusing Paris by their skill in imitating all the sounds of a hunt. But such phantoms had too long hunted through the imagination of the French peasantry for any explanation to be required. Robert le Diable, wandering in Normandy till judgment-day, and King Arthur, at an early date domesticated in France as a spectral huntsman (the figure most popularly identified at the time with the phantom seen by Henry IV.), are sufficient explanations. The ruins of Arthur’s Castle near Huelgoat, Finistère, were long believed to hide enormous treasures, guarded by demons, who appear sometimes as fiery lights (ignes fatuui), owls, buzzards, and ravens—one of the latter being the form in which Arthur comes from his happy Vale of Avallon, when he would vary its repose with a hunt.[3]
A sufficiently curious interchange of such superstitions is represented in the following extract from Surtees:—‘Sir Anthon Bek, busshop of Dureme in the tyme of King Eduarde, the son of King Henry, was the maist prowd and masterfull busshop in all England, and it was com’only said that he was the prowdest lord of Christienty. It chaunced that emong other lewd persons, this sir Anthon entertained at his court one Hugh de Pountchardon, that for his evill deeds and manifold robberies had been driven out of the Inglische courte, and had come from the southe to seek a little bread, and to live by staylinge. And to this Hughe, whom also he imployed to good purpose in the warr of Scotland, the busshop gave the land of Thikley, since of him called Thikley-Puntchardon, and also made him his chiefe huntsman. And after, this blake Hughe died afore the busshop; and efter that the busshop chasid the wild hart in Galtres forest, and sodainly ther met with him Hugh de Pontchardon, that was afore deid, on a wythe horse; and the said Hughe loked earnestly on the busshop, and the busshop said unto him, ‘Hughe, what makethe thee here?’ and he spake never word, but lifte up his cloke, and then he showed sir Anton his ribbes set with bones, and nothing more; and none other of the varlets saw him but the busshop only; and ye said Hughe went his way, and sir Anton toke corage, and cheered the dogges; and shortly efter he was made Patriarque of Hierusalem, and he same nothing no moe; and this Hugh is him that the silly people in Galtres doe call le Gros Veneur, and he was seen twice efter that by simple folk, afore yat the forest was felled in the tyme of Henry, father of King Henry yat now ys.’
Upon this uncanny fellow fell the spectral mantle of Hugo Capet; elsewhere as is probable, worn by nocturnal protestant assemblies—Huguenots.
The legend of the Wild Huntsman tinges many old English stories. Herne, the Hunter, may be identified with him, and the demons, with ghostly and headless wish-hounds, who still hunt evil-doers over Dartmoor on stormy nights, are his relations. The withered look of horses grazing on Penzance Common was once explained by their being ridden by demons, and the fire-breathing horse has found its way by many weird routes to the service of the Exciseman in the ‘Ingoldsby Legends,’ or that of Earl Garrett, who rides round the Curragh of Kildare on a steed whose inch-thick silver shoes must wear as thin as a cat’s ear, ere he fights the English and reigns over Ireland. The Teutonic myth appears very plainly in the story of Tregeagle. This man, traced to an old Cornish family, is said to have been one of the wickedest men that ever lived; but though he had disposed of his soul to the Devil, the evil one was baulked by the potency of St. Petroc. This, however, was on condition of Tregeagle’s labouring at the impossible task of clearing the sand from Porthcurnow Cove, at which work he may still be heard groaning when wind and wave are high. Whenever he tries to snatch a moment’s rest, the demon is at liberty to pursue him, and they may be heard on stormy nights in hot pursuit of the poor creature, whose bull-like roar passed into the Cornish proverb, ‘to roar like Tregeagle.’
On a pleasant Sunday evening in July 1868, I witnessed ‘Der Freischütz’ in the newly-opened opera-house at Leipzig. Never elsewhere have I seen such completeness and splendour in the weird effects of the infernal scene in the Wolf’s Glen. The ‘White Lady’ started forth at every step of Rodolph’s descent to the glen, warning him back. Zamiel, instead of the fiery garb he once wore as Samaël, was arrayed in raiment black as night; and when the magic bullet was moulded, the stage swarmed with huge reptiles, fiery serpents crawled on the ground, a dragon-drawn chariot, with wheels of fire, driven by a skeleton, passed through the air; and the wild huntsman’s chase, composed of animals real to the eye and uttering their distinguishable cries, hurried past. The animals represented were the horse, hound, boar, stag, chamois, raven, bat, owl, and they rushed amid the wild blast of horns.
I could but marvel at the yet more strange and weird history of the human imagination through which had flitted, from the varied regions of a primitive world, the shapes combined in this apotheosis of diablerie. Probably if Elijah in his fire-chariot, preached about in the neighbouring church that morning, and this wild huntsman careering in the opera, had looked closely at each other and at their own history, they might have found a common ancestor in the mythical Mahan Bali of India, the king whose austerities raised in power till he excited the jealousy of the gods, until Vishnu crushed him with his heel into the infernal regions, where he still exercises sovereignty, and is permitted to issue forth for an annual career (at the Onam festival), as described in Southey’s ‘Curse of Kehama.’ And they might probably both claim mythological relationship with Yami, lord of death, who, as Jami, began in Persia the career of all warriors that never died, but sometimes sleep till a magic horn shall awaken them, sometimes dwell, like Jami himself and King Arthur, in happy isles, and in other cases issue forth at certain periods for the chase or for war—like Odin and Waldemar—with an infernal train.
But how did these mighty princes and warriors become demon huntsmen?
In the Persian ‘Desatir’ it is related that the animals contested the superiority of man, the two orders of beings being represented by their respective sages, and the last animal to speak opposed the claim of his opponent that man attained elevation to the nature of angels, with the remark, ‘In his putting to death of animals and similar acts man resembleth the beasts of prey, and not angels.’