Hackelberg, the wild huntsman, is buried in more than one place

Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof wrote that, if he remembered right, in 1558 he lost his way riding from Einbeck to Uslar and stumbled on Hackelberg’s grave.⁸ A Brunswick newspaper of 1756 reports a gravestone with the words “Anno Domini 1581. die 3 marcii”, twenty-three years after the year of Kirchhof’s ride.³ The two graves were not in one place: Kirchhof’s lay in the Solling wilderness, the stone was in a churchyard by an inn.⁸³

The tale as the Brothers Grimm printed it, with a boar and a death in a hospital, is not in Kirchhof.⁹¹⁰ The first place we found it is a book of 1800.²

A grave in the reeds

Kirchhof tells the story in Book IV of his Wendunmuth as no. 283, “Hakelberg jagt am Sölling”.¹⁰ It starts with a rumour: a master of the hunt in the Brunswick country, called Hakelberg, is said to have lived “vorzeiten”, once upon a time.¹ On his deathbed he begged God, in place of his share of heaven, to let him hunt in the Solling until Judgment Day and ordered himself to be buried in that wilderness.¹ His wish is granted: horns and hounds are heard at night, and when such a night hunt has been noticed, one of the men who hunt the next day is said to break a leg, an arm or his neck.¹

Then Kirchhof puts himself in the story.⁸ He rode from Einbeck over the Solling to Uslar, “ist mir recht, anno 1558”, got lost, and came on the grave by accident.⁸ It was a clearing like a meadow, rough with reeds, more than one Acker, a field measure, with no trees on it.⁸ At the lower end lay a raised red stone, about eight or nine feet long and five wide, which he took to be a boulder.⁸ It lay north to south, not east to west like another gravestone.⁸

He had been told nobody could find the grave on purpose, and that grisly black hounds lie beside it when someone stumbles on it.¹² He saw none:

What the entry leaves out is most of what later tellings rest on.¹⁰ It gives the hunter a surname and nothing else: no first name, no family, no year or place of death, no boar and no hospital.¹⁰ Nor does it mention Wülperode or an inscription.¹⁰

Oesterley, who edited the Wendunmuth, says Books 2 to 5 appeared in 1602 and that he had only a single print of the continuation.¹³ So Kirchhof’s 1558 reaches us in a book printed 44 years later, and 21 years after the date on the stone.¹³⁸³ Oesterley’s own note calls the entry a “Sage” and dates the sighting “c. 1558”.¹⁴ The Brothers Grimm reprinted the passage in 1816 as Deutsche Sagen no. 171, in modern spelling.¹⁵

On our reading, if the stone’s date marks a death, the grave Kirchhof found was not that man’s.⁸³

One stone, many addresses

The next document we could read is a reader’s query in the Braunschweigische Anzeigen, November 1756.³ It asks about an old helmet that people at the Adlerkrug inn by Wiedela ascribe to a Herr von Hackelnberg, and about a gravestone in the churchyard beside it.³ The stone shows a rider on a horse with two dogs running alongside, and carries the inscription.³

The writer asks who the man was and whether anything else is known of him.³ Heise and Mischke, whose 2020 book on the legend we could read only in a publisher’s excerpt, quote a reply of 1757.¹⁶ The anonymous answerer noticed that descriptions of the stone differ, for instance in the number of dogs, advised sending an exact drawing to the Brunswick address office, and joked that Hackelnberg had not lived in older times, when such men were set among the stars.¹⁶ The one reading of the inscription we saw is the 1756 query’s.³

Other writers put the stone elsewhere and draw something else on it. Where each puts it, in order of date:

The Mulms-Krug query adds that the innkeeper said the man had been dead almost 200 years, and that the grave, once fallen in, had been filled with earth and raised again.⁴ Nachtigal asks in a footnote whether the mule is only the sculptor’s clumsiness.⁵ Whether these are one stone under four descriptions, we cannot say from what we read.

The relics move too.¹⁸ The earliest notice has a rusty helmet at the inn; by 1764 there is also an iron breastplate; by 1812 a hunting cap, armour, a hunting knife, a sword and a plate for the mule’s forehead; by 1819 only the cap and the plate.¹⁸ Nachtigal, in 1800, says only the helmet is left and the armour is in Deersheim.⁵ Heise and Mischke wonder whether the innkeepers grew more inventive or the writers embellished.¹⁸

The man behind the stone

Nachtigal, writing as “Otmar” in 1800, makes the huntsman a person: Hans von Hakelberg, last known hunter of a noble family of that name, who died in the sixteenth century in a hospital by the road near Wülperode.⁵ He dates the death only to the sixteenth century and names no source.⁵²

Grimm, in 1835, writes that the Lower Saxon legend has him born in 1521 and dead in 1581, with “soll”, “is supposed to”.⁶ The Niedersächsische Bibliographie’s person record carries the same two years and the title Oberjägermeister, with Wülperode as the place of death marked with a question mark, and states that the identity is “nicht gesichert”.¹⁹ It adds that some regional researchers see in him the embodiment of the saga’s figure, and traces the folk legend to 1558, which is Kirchhof’s date.¹⁹⁸

We found no ducal court list, fief record or register entry for a Hans von Hackelberg. A Brunswick or Halberstadt archive would have to be searched. Heise and Mischke title a chapter of their 2020 book “Hans Hackelberg, eine fiktive Person” and say on the back cover that objects at Wülperode let people take him for real; we could not read the chapter.²⁰

Other places also claim he died there: Abbenrode am Harz and Molverswende.²¹ Printed notices that put the grave at Wülperode run back to 1735, according to Heise and Mischke, who quote Caspar Abel’s geography: in the Fallstein “or, as others will have it, at Wilperode”.²²

The boar comes late

Kirchhof’s hunter dies in bed, with a wish.¹ The boar, the dream at Harzburg and the death in a hospital near Wülperode first appear, in what we read, in Nachtigal’s book of 1800, where the story is printed as a “Volks-Sage” with no source.² Grimm printed it in 1816 and named Otmar, pages 249 and 250, as his source.⁹

By 1855 local collectors had more. Schambach and Müller list versions in which Hackelberg kills the boar at Nienhagen, is wounded by it at the hip at Hardegsen, and, before dying, wishes to hunt as long as the world stands or to float before heaven until the last day.²³ In the Harz sagas, they add, the owl that flies ahead of the wild huntsman was a nun in her lifetime.²³

Wodan’s cloak

Grimm did not take the stones for proof of a man.⁷ In 1835 he wrote that the sheer variety of places, “den grabsteinen im Harz und Solling zum trotz”, shows a mythical being is meant.⁷ He proposed that the Westphalian name Hackelberend, from hakol (cloak or armour) and berand (bearer), was an old by-name of Wodan in his broad hat and dark cloak, worn down over time into Hackelberg.⁷

Schambach and Müller, twenty years later, made a narrower point:

So who lies under the stone and where the legend comes from are separate questions.²⁴ The sources we read settle neither: Grimm’s Wodan reading is a proposal, and the library record says the identity is not secured.⁷¹⁹