Hellhound

The hellhound of Europe has two lineages that ended up fused into a single animal. The older one is Greek: Hecate, goddess of the crossroads, goes about accompanied by dogs, and the Orphic Hymns invoke her directly as a «lover of dogs». Her coming is announced by howling: when the village dogs start barking at nothing in the dead of night, the goddess is passing with her retinue. At the crossroads, ritual suppers were left for her at the month's end, and it was the dogs (hers and the neighbourhood's, which in practice came to the same thing) who finished them. The second lineage is the one Jacob Grimm gathered in his Teutonic Mythology: the Wild Hunt, the night ride of the dead that crosses the storm sky with its pack out in front. When Christianity reinterpreted these processions, the huntsman became the Devil and his dogs became hounds of Hell: beasts that come out on stormy or moonless nights to run the roads, and whose encounter is rarely told twice. Out of that fusion comes the hellhound as European folklore knows it: the black dog that no longer guards any gate, because its work is to come out of it.

The tales agree on the essentials: a dog far larger than any dog, with a coat black as a moonless night and eyes lit red or amber, like coals someone is blowing on. Smoke seems to rise off its fur, its breath throws sparks, and its howl cannot be mistaken for an animal's: it rolls like distant thunder and silences every real dog in the district. Many tales hang from its neck a broken chain that drags and rattles as it runs, the leash it tore itself from, a motif British folklore also repeats in its chained spectral dogs. It goes almost always alone, though on the nights of the Hunt it runs in a pack. And there is one detail the witnesses repeat: you do not hear it coming. First there is the cold, then the two burning coals at eye height, and only at the end the enormous body that carries them.

What defines the hellhound is not a place but a task. It does not guard Hell: it brings Hell its quarry. In the Christian tales of Europe it pursues the damned (the perjurer, the breaker of pacts, the one who died unconfessed) and its appearance beside a traveller is sentence before it is threat: he who is already claimed does not need to be bitten. It runs ahead of the Wild Hunt clearing the way for the procession of the dead, and it plants itself at the crossroads, which are its own twice over: through Hecate, who reigned there, and through the Devil, who in folklore seals his bargains there. It is also a sentinel of the boundary: where the safe road ends and the night begins is marked, exactly, by the spot where it is seen. From its double master comes its double reading: for the Greeks it was the retinue of a goddess who also protected; for Christianity, an executioner on a leash. In both cases it obeys, and there lies its oldest trait: the hellhound never hunts out of hunger. It hunts because it has been let loose.

Europe is full of supernatural dogs, and it pays not to confuse them, for each has its own entry and its own trade. Cerberus and Garmr are guardians with proper names: one ties his post to the gate of Hades and the other to the cave of Gnipahellir, and neither ever abandons it — which is exactly what the hellhound does every night. The black dogs of the British Isles (Black Shuck in East Anglia, the Barghest of Yorkshire, the Scottish Cù-Sìth, the Moddey Dhoo of the Isle of Man) are omens: their trade is to appear and be seen, because seeing them announces a death, and they rarely touch anyone. The hellhound is something else: the anonymous hunter of the continent, with no gate to guard and no one else's death to announce, carrying its own as its only message. Where the English black dog is a bell, the hellhound is the chase. That is why folklore tells them apart without hesitation even while painting them almost alike: one is survived and talked about; of the other, it is said that one is not.