Round the Herne

 My spin on a popular notion found in Slavic folklore about the wolf-herder (identified in Christianity with various saints, including Andrew and Nicholas - Romanian lore favours the former). In pagan tradition, the figure is often thought of as the god Dabog. The holy night of the saint is when the herder predicts what each wolf will eat in the coming year. The relevance of the pretzels is a mystery to me, but might make more sense to someone far more familiar with ancient Slavic religion than I am. The image of the herder of wolves is a very evocative one and is examined in a chapter in my forthcoming book "The Magic of Wolves" (which can be pre-ordered via Moon Books!). 

 This is my reading of W B Yeats' epic poem "The Wanderings of Oisin". I uploaded a prose storytelling version of this myth a while back. Yeats' poem is a dialogue between Patrick (not yet a saint) and the ancient Irish hero Oisin who has returned from centuries spent in Tir na nOg, an Otherworldly realm, with his beloved fairy-wife Niamh. The myth ends with the old man dying, bewildered by the changes in life and religion that he has seen in Ireland. I would have posted this yesterday, but minutes after I finished recording it, I heard the news about the death of the Queen - and it seemed a little inappropriate to put up a poem about a dying man and a lost era on the same day as the second Elizabethan Age came to an end.