The Wild Hunt – a procession of otherworldly beings that travels at night and is often observed by a solitary individual – is an incredibly popular folklore motif in Western Europe, and fits into a global tradition of supernatural processions (see, for example, the Japanese Hyakki Yagyō/百鬼夜行). With a varied composition, different leaders, and diverse attendant phenomena, it is nonetheless an instantly recognisable motif in folktales, literary fiction, and popular media. But what does this have to do with StoryMachine?
I joined Project StoryMachine at the start of February 2026, after a PhD on depictions of the Horned God in fantasy fiction and a postdoc on Lincolnshire folklore (didn’t know Lincolnshire had any folklore? You’re not alone. Check out the project website for a host of stories: Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project).
Over the years, the Wild Hunt and its often-antlered leaders have become a comfort trope for me: if I’m at a loss where to take my research, I look whether I can link it to the Wild Hunt. As you’ll be hearing from me regularly on this blog and on the project’s various social media platforms, I’m sure the topic will come up more than once.
And there is a lot to say about the Hunt. So much, in fact, that it is assigned its own classification number by folklorist Stith Thompson – E501, described in 1946 as
the apparition of a hunter with a crowd of huntsmen, horses, and dogs, crossing the sky at night. Stories of this king go back to classical antiquity, and they appear nearly all over Europe. The huntsman himself, and sometimes his companions, are identified with historic characters, sometimes even with one of the gods.
Thompson’s definition is accurate, but only for a section of Wild Hunt stories. For example, in Britain, packs of supernatural hounds like the Wisht Hounds or the Gabriel Ratchets are much more prevalent than spectral hunting parties. Sometimes the cry of these ghostly packs is accompanied by a solitary hunter’s horn. There is also a tradition of single huntsmen on foot. Or cases where the Wild Hunt, despite its name, doesn’t actually hunt anything.
The Hunt’s leaders also vary from region to region, and from tale to tale. Despite Jonathan Durant and Michael D. Bailey writing in 2003 that ‘the hunt was usually led by a divine or semi-divine figure, either female . . . or male, often called Herne the Hunter’, Herne leads the Hunt in a minority of cases. The earliest mention of Herne the Hunter survives to us in William Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), and currently there is no decisive evidence on whether he was a folk character before that. Shakespeare casts him as a vengeful ghost, complete with a sinner’s chain and stag’s antlers.
Herne’s role as the leader of the Wild Hunt is cemented by William Harrison Ainsworth, who describes him as such in his 1842 novel Windsor Castle. From there, Herne makes a leap into folklore and fantasy fiction as the supernatural leader of a mounted party of hunters that disturb the peace in Windsor Great Park. Sightings of him are recorded through the 20th century by folklorists, including Katharine Briggs, Ruth Tongue, and Christina Hole.
His fictional appearances feature such childhood favourites as Susan Coopers The Dark is Rising (1973) and Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown (2015). But despite his enduring popularity in fiction and popular culture, Herne is still only one example among other leaders of the Wild Hunt. Other named male leaders include Odin/Woden, Wild Edric, and King Arthur, while some of the female leaders are Perchta, Frau Gauden, and even the Greek goddess Hecate.
With such variety, no one story can be said to contain a definitive version of the Wild Hunt. This prompts other questions: How do Wild Hunt stories relate to one another? What other tales do their various leaders appear in? Where does one particular tale sit in the wider body of Wild Hunt folklore?
StoryMachine is a tool for answering these kinds of questions. Using spatial hypertext recommender systems, it offers recommendations for a motif, prompting the user to discover more but also to consider original angles of enquiry. Spatial hypertext represents strengths of relations through bonds between entities (bits of information), giving users an intuitive understanding of how the motif’s different element relate to one another and how strong those relations are.
Project co-leads Christopher Ohge and Sam Brooker, and their co-authors explain:
It is commonplace in the literature on hypertext to approach it in broadly three different ways: as compositional tool, as navigational logic, and as distribution infrastructure.
These three approaches tend to centre hypertext technocentrically—primarily as a tool to be studied, rather than an approach to be applied. It is with the latter that we are concerned.
We are reorienting the locus of inquiry from the initial process of composition to the end process where we examine the chosen works, from hypertext as a compositional tool to hypertext as an analytical one.
(Alessio Antonini, Francesca Benatti, Sam Brooker, and Christopher Ohge, ‘Hypertext as Method in Book History and Beyond’, DH+BH: An interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History, 2025)
In other words, hypertext is both a non-linear way of representing information and a theoretical method for modelling associative of thought and analysing how your information holds together.
While StoryMachine is in development, I will document the process through these blogs and offer you a glimpse of modern folklore research and practice, and what kind of questions StoryMachine can help them answer.
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