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Herne the Hunter

Herne the Hunter

Last updated on: September 8, 2026 at 3:00 am by John Beckett

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Herne the Hunter 2026-09-07T13:23:55-06:00 John Beckett

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Herne the Hunter – The Lord of the Forest

by Andrew Anderson
Published by Moon Books – August 2026
145 pages
Paperback: $15.95, Kindle: $7.99

When I was a beginning Pagan in the 1990s, I learned about the Horned God. He was the consort of the Mother Goddess, bringing masculine energy to balance her feminine energy. He had many names, chief among them Pan, Cernunnos, and Herne.

When I began practicing in depth in the 2000s, I found that my experiences of various deities were very different from my experiences of other deities. Perhaps all the Horned Gods weren’t just aspects of one Horned God? If my experiences of them were different, it made sense that I would understand them differently and relate to them as individuals.

Disambiguating Pan was easy. He was first known in Greece, he has the lower body and horns of a goat, and there are plenty of stories about him. Cernunnos has no ancient lore and his name is only recorded once. He was first known by the Celts, and he’s usually depicted as a man with antlers. And then I got to know him better, and many things happened.

But what of Herne?

Some say he’s a forest spirit. Some say he’s the ghost of a human gamekeeper. Others say that the name Herne is a corruption of Odin, and that he leads the Wild Hunt.

In his new Pagan Portals book Herne the Hunter – The Lord of the Forest, Andrew Anderson takes a historical approach to look for the origins of Herne and to trace how popular understanding of him has changed over the centuries. He begins somewhere I wasn’t expecting: with a guided meditation to meet Herne the Hunter and to record your impressions of him.

Because as with all deities and other spirit persons from ancient times, what is most important isn’t who they were, it’s who they are here and now.

Herne’s first appearance is in Shakespeare

The most important fact in the search for the origin of Herne is this: there are no references to Herne prior to Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, written around 1597. Shakespeare has one of his characters introduce Herne as “an old tale.” But if that tale ever existed, there is no evidence of it. Anderson points out that Shakespeare was a playwright, not a folklorist – making up stuff to tell a good story is what he did.

Anderson quotes five different Shakespeare scholars to support this claim, including Leo Salingar who wrote “the story of Herne the Hunter and his oak is not genuine folklore, but Shakespeare’s invention.”

But that doesn’t end the story – far from it. Anderson writes:

Just because Herne the Hunter does not have a line of evidenced worship stretching back to antiquity does not mean he is not a valid neo-Pagan God.

Herne’s Oak has a similar story. It first shows up on a map in 1742 and it’s labeled “Sir John Falstaff’s Oak” – Falstaff being one of the central characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But by 1760, all references to it were labeled “Herne’s Oak.” It was cut down on order of George III in 1796 and memorialized in a poem published in The Whitehall Evening Herald. And while the poem speaks of Herne, it makes it clear the oak’s importance comes from Shakespeare.

Anderson documents how time and again Herne is incorporated into fiction, a backstory is invented, and then later readers assume the fiction is actually folklore. Fiction and folklore are two very different things. The first is a work of imagination – the second is grounded in the experiences of our ancestors.

The impact of Robin of Sherwood

Much of Herne’s modern popularity comes from his appearance in the 1980s British television show Robin of Sherwood. I’ve never seen it – my friends who have tell me I really should (as I write this, it’s available to stream on Amazon Prime, Tubi, and The Roku Channel). Richard Carpenter – the show’s creator – described Herne as “a kind of semi-supernatural Merlin figure that I created as a sort of mentor, guide, speaker in riddles.”

By making the outlaws of Sherwood Forest contemporary and accessible for a Saturday evening television audience, and by positioning Herne as their guardian, Carpenter secured Herne’s position as a deity.

Herne: here and now

The conclusion of this book is titled “Our Herne” and it begins with this:

It would have been an enormous stroke of luck for Shakespeare to have found a horned spirit haunting a tree in Windsor when he needed a joke about horns for the final scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The chance of him finding a story which would fit exactly are incredibly remote.

It does seem, though, that he found something.

We know the origin of Serapis: he is a Greco-Egyptian syncretism of Osiris and Apis, introduced in the Ptolemaic era of Egypt for political purposes. He was actively worshipped for 700 years, and he has some worshippers among today’s modern Pagans. Divine syncretism and multiplicity are so complicated it is right to call them a mystery, but it’s happened so many times – in antiquity and today – it is undeniably real.

What did Shakespeare find? What – or who – whispered in his ear when he was writing The Merry Wives of Windsor? A local tree spirit? The spirit of a shaman from prehistoric times? The ghost of a hunter who met an untimely end? A deity unknown to humans who decided there was a need he could fill? I don’t know. We don’t know. All we know is that he’s here. Anderson says:

Herne’s position among the pantheon of neo-Pagan Gods is secure for one simple reason: he is the Lord of the Forest because that is what we need him to be.

Who should read this book?

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Herne or any of the other Horned Gods. You will learn the historical origin of the myths surrounding Herne – far more than I have space to share in this brief review. You’ll also learn something about how stories of Gods are transmitted and embellished… something to keep in mind when evaluating claims that some religious stories should be read literally (hint: none of them should be read literally, especially those some insist are historical when there’s no evidence they are historical, and plenty of reason to assume they aren’t).

Like all Pagan Portals books, Herne the Hunter is short and easy to read. If you want to follow up on any of the sources, the bibliography has 76 entries.

And at the end of the day, the historical record confirms what we should know as modern Pagans and polytheists: how humans first encountered a God is far less important than how we encounter them here and now.

For those who care about such things, Moon Books sent me a review copy of Herne the Hunter. As always, my only obligation in a review is to you, the reader. This is my honest opinion of the book.

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