But the woods are more than just a place to visit. They’re home to challenges, risks, and even dangers. Wild animals, difficult terrain, and the dark side of all that peace and quiet–the lack of human assistance–can all conspire to turn a pleasant afternoon into an unexpected tragedy. And it’s been that way for as long as humans have been around. But if the tales are true, the forest might also be home to something else, something that we mere mortals are woefully unprepared to deal with: dangers from another realm.
In Episode 152 of the Lore podcast, host Aaron Mahnke leads listeners deep into the woods. The dark forest, lying beyond civilization, is a locus classicus of American Gothic narrative, but Mahnke adopts a much more global approach here. He delves into the folklore of the Wild Hunt, tracing the origins of such mythic tales in Germany and their subsequent spread to other countries such as Great Britain, where “the tales changed to incorporate local legends and key historical figures.” Mahnke takes the time to ponder the significance of the Wild Hunt, which was popularly held as an omen of impending demise for hapless witnesses. Some fascinating details related to the Wild Hunt are shared along the way, such as the British positing of King Arthur as the doomed leader of the procession, and the historical instances of accusing people–by those wont to cry witch–as willing participants in the unworldly endeavor.
A critique I seem to rehearse on almost a biweekly basis is that Lore podcast fails to connect its subject matter to the realm of literature. Happily, that is not the case here, as Mahnke (when discussing the ghostly figure of Herne the Hunter) invokes William Shakespeare, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Jacob Grimm. And imagine my complete and utter delight when the narrative devotes several minutes to linking the Wild Hunt to one of the most famous stories in all of American Literature: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Mahnke remains on native soil in the episode’s concluding segment, which concerns a piece of lore involving an uncanny horse-drawn carriage in antebellum East Texas.
“Follow the Leader” need not assume a subordinate position to any precursor. In my estimation, it ranks as the preeminent episode that Mahnke has recorded in the five-year-plus history of the podcast.