Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

(man shouts faintly)

(lightening crackling)

(snake hisses softly)

(monsters growling)

- The tales have been told since man first gathered

around the fires of pre-history.

Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden

in the vast unknown shadows of the world.

Tales of creatures divine,

and beasts demonic,

of gods and kings,

of myths and monsters.

From dark forests to the lands of ice,

from desert wastes to the storm-thrashed seas,

every corner of the earth has its legends to tell.

Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter,

of the wilderness and the dangers within.

Stories of battles, of love, of order,

and of chaos.

(dog barking)

But what are the roots of these fantastic tales,

and why have they endured so long?

In this series, we'll explore

the history behind these legends

and reveal the hidden influences that shaped them.

(swords clanging) War and disease,

religious and social upheaval,

the untamable ferocity of the natural world.

(thunder rumbling)

And, above all,

the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

(birds twittering)

(waves crashing)

(bird cawing)

Today the significance of the wilderness

and a journey into it can be hard for us to appreciate.

As populations grow and travel and communication

become ever faster,

we can overlook how different

the world was in the past,

how vast it must have seemed and how wild.

(wind whistling)

For thousands of years,

most people lived and died

within a short distance of the place they were born.

Their existence was bounded

by the wilderness,

by the unyielding darkness

of ancient woods,

by the ice shod peaks

of impenetrable mountains,

and by the hostile deserts lonely wastes.

(camel grunting)

A journey to the next town

was a perilous undertaking.

It meant abandoning the safe and the familiar,

and entering a realm that was not their own.

(dramatic music)

(wolf howling distantly)

(epic theatrical music)

(waterfall rumbling)

(birds twittering)

- The wilderness is usually defined

as somewhere that is uncultivated,

uninhabited by humans,

and it's often a liminal space.

- Wildernesses are the places you don't know,

the places where you don't go,

the places where you have no business to be.

They are the spaces of darkness.

- What counts as wild and what counts as natural,

is very much a human construct.

We decide where the wilderness starts and where it ends,

so, that question makes it

a very fertile place for stories to happen

as human cultures work out where those limits are.

- You confront difference.

You confront a world that's not your own.

You confront the unknown.

- It's dangerous and it's disordered,

but it's natural and it's free, as well.

And this is, really, in many ways,

the perfect setting for what's going to happen

in a myth or a legend.

- [Diane] People will fill

the wilderness that surrounds them

with what they fear in themselves,

what they fear in their own society.

The wilderness is the place where we expel

all the stuff we don't like in ourselves,

in our culture, in our society.

- Such is the contradiction of the wilderness,

it is both of us and not of us.

Surrounding us,

yet at once, strange and far away.

For wilderness is as much an idea

as it is a physical place,

and a great deal can be learned about a people

from the way they saw it

and from the stories they told about it.

(tense music)

As much as people must have feared

what lay beyond their walls,

they also relied upon it.

Seas threatened the fisherman with drowning,

but they provided his livelihood too.

The forest hid all manner of danger,

but that was where the hunter had to roam.

(birds chirping) (dramatic music)

The trees can hide more

than deadly creatures and lawless men however.

As the ancient story of Actaeon tells us,

magic and madness can lie in wait

should we ever stray too far from the path.

(tense music)

"Actaeon had wandered far from home.

(wind blows)

"The young huntsman had long

"since passed the city gates

"and the fields where farmers,

"thumbing sweat from their brows,

"had stood to track his progress

"towards the darkness of the woods."

(dogs barking)

"Actaeon did not fear that wilderness.

"He scorned the superstitions of other men.

"The forest, he thought,

"was as much his realm as the city street.

(dog barking) (dramatic music)

(birds chirping)

"As Actaeon rested in a shady clearing,

"he suddenly heard an unfamiliar sound.

(eerie choral music)

"Drawn on by the strange music,

"Actaeon pushed deeper and deeper

"into the ever thickening forest.

"He parted the last branches

"and stared into the grove beyond."

(waterfall splashing) (eerie choral music)

(women giggling)

(air whooshing)

The story of Actaeon is a classical myth.

To the Ancient Greeks,

the young huntsman was courting danger

the moment he stepped beyond his city walls,

the moment he entered the wild.

For the Greeks,

human life revolved around the city.

Athens, with its resplendent temples,

was the birthplace of democracy.

In its Golden Age,

it became a flourishing center of art and philosophy.

Socrates and Plato called the city home,

as did the great playwrights,

Euripides and Sophocles.

Their works helped shape Western literature and thought,

and they are still read, debated,

and performed to this day.

Athens was not only a cultural powerhouse,

it had military muscle, too,

with a Navy which dominated the Aegean Sea.

This supremacy was not unchallenged, however.

For Athens had a rival,

another great city of ancient Greece.

Renowned for its austere discipline

and the skill of its hoplite warriors,

Sparta was more than a match for Athens.

The long war between the two great cities

consumed the Ancient Greek world

and ultimately ended the Golden Age of Athens.

(dramatic music)

Cities such as Athens and Sparta were the human realm.

What lay beyond belonged to something else, however.

(eerie music) (birds chirping)

- The ancient Greeks

just didn't like the wilderness much,

so they were profoundly unenthusiastic

about anything that we would see as wilderness.

They simply saw it

as somewhere that you didn't want to be.

(ominous music)

- [Liz] The Greeks have this view

that if you're out in the wilderness,

there's always this risk of walking over the boundary,

of crossing into the divine.

- [Diane] The Greeks regarded the wilderness as so scary,

that the god they created to inhabit it, the god Pan,

is the god from whose name we get the English word panic.

- It's about the crossing in between the wild and the tame,

the controlled, the uncontrolled,

so, there's the possibility of crossing over that line

and going beyond where you should go.

- It's interesting that the gods

always seem much more comfortable

in the wilderness than human beings are.

It therefore follows that human beings,

who are usually out doing something like hunting,

something that's very much

about conquering the wilderness,

usually ends badly.

It's almost a way of saying know your place,

which is one of the great Greek sayings,

"Know that you're not a god.

"You're just a human being."

- There's a very real sense for the Greeks

that, that boundary between where humans are

and where the divine is, is very thin,

and if you're out in the wilderness,

if you're out in the wild,

you can just drop through it without meaning to.

(epic theatrical music)

(insects chirping)

- To the Greeks the wilderness

was a frightening place

where the laws of society held no sway.

It belonged instead to the divine,

to the monstrous, to the mad.

It was a place of taboos broken

and punishments terrible.

(monster roaring)

It was everything a city was not.

As such, it fulfilled an important role for the Greeks.

By exploring what lay beyond the boundaries of society,

people defined what lay within them as well.

By telling stories of the monsters outside,

they better understood those within.

(soft choral music)

"Actaeon stared into the grove.

(water splashing) (birds twittering)

"It was a wooded cave,

"wild and beautiful to behold.

"He was enraptured.

"He could not resist.

"He had to get closer.

"Actaeon crept forward,

"down to the water's edge,

"drawn on, ever on by the sight before him.

(water sloshes)

"His foot broke the stillness

of the crystal waters.

(water sloshing)

"The ripples spread.

(water sloshing)

"Suddenly, dark eyes turned on the intruder,

"for those were no mortal creatures.

"This was the goddess, Artemis, and her nymphs.

"Artemis of the wilds, of the hills, of the moon.

(tense music)

"The goddess stood cloaked in her wild fury.

"Actaeon ran."

(bushes rustling)

Actaeon's encounter with the goddess Artemis

would not have surprised the ancient Greeks.

For them the wilderness was no place for man.

(ominous music)

(birds chirping)

The Greeks were not alone in seeing the wilderness

as an otherworldly realm.

Centuries later the Celts of Northern Europe

would also sense in their great forests and rugged landscape

the presence of the supernatural.

(tense music)

The Celts were a pre-Christian people.

Their origins in central Europe

date back as far as the 9th Century B.C.

At its height, Celtic culture spread

as far south as the Iberian Peninsula

and as far east as modern Turkey.

(tense music)

Celtic religion was a polytheistic one.

The worship of its many gods was led by the druids,

mysterious figures of great social importance.

They made prophecies, dispensed justice,

and performed religious rites

that may even have included human sacrifice.

Celtic society and the age of the druids

was threatened, however,

by the growth of the Roman Empire.

- Most of our sources for the Celts are Roman sources,

unfortunately, rather than surviving Celtic sources.

The Celts didn't write stuff down and the Romans did,

so we have Julius Caesar's horrified account

of Celtic sacrifices in oak groves

and oak groves with bits of

sacrificed people hanging off them.

So that's the first encounter between the Romans

and the people they call the Celts,

and it's an encounter fraught with horror and dismay.

- Interestingly, the Romans never called the Celts "Celts."

They call them "Galli, Gauls, or Britanni."

Britons, basically.

So, they don't actually use the term Celt.

So, clearly they were aware

of this slightly disparate group,

which was nevertheless pressuring

on their desire to establish a huge empire.

- [Nicholas] The Roman authorities

suppressed the druids,

who disappeared from the written record

in the 2nd century.

Much of the Celts unique cultural heritage

was preserved only as an oral tradition,

and so, it was lost, along with the druids.

- The druids were a challenge for the Romans

because they were very, very secretive.

They didn't like even writing down

what their beliefs or their rituals were

and that was a problem.

- The Romans found it very hard to get to understand

what it was that they were facing.

Faced with all that secrecy and denial,

they decided that the easiest thing

would be to get rid of it completely.

- The Romans attitude to the druids

was the same as their attitude to any group

that they were going to take over.

If there was a locus of power in that group,

it had to be suppressed.

(dramatic music)

- By 500 AD,

the once widespread Celtic people

are to be found only in Northern Europe,

in parts of Britain, France, and in Ireland.

(eerie music)

There, some ancient traditions survived

to be recorded by later Christian writers

of the Medieval period.

Stories of the gods they worshiped,

of the kings they served,

and of the wilderness that surrounded them.

(waves crashing)

The Giant's Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland

is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Its 40,000 geometric rock columns

reach heights of over 10 meters,

and they stretch from the cliff edge

to the sea and beyond.

We now know them to be the result

of ancient volcanic activity,

but the Celts had another explanation.

To them, the Causeway was the work

of legendary giant, Finn MacCool.

He was challenged to a fight by a Scottish rival,

so built a great bridge of stone over the sea,

so the two could meet

without wetting their feet.

(ominous music)

Alongside that wilderness

of rocks and trees however,

there was another more magical realm

to be discovered in the lands of the Celts.

The Otherworld.

(foreboding music)

- The Celtic Otherworld was a supernatural realm,

a realm that existed alongside of our own

and parallel to our own.

(eerie music)

- It's a world that has its own laws,

inhabitants, power structures, and nature.

It's like something that's always there.

It doesn't go away.

So, it's very much located in the outside,

the beyond, the wild.

(eerie music)

- A glimpse might be seen in the clouds

or the fleeting mist,

in the half light,

or in the shadows.

It was at once both here and somewhere else.

(mystical music)

Stories of humans entering the elusive realm

are found throughout Celtic mythology.

Sometimes heroes were enticed in by a beautiful fairy maid,

or they stumbled across an entrance in a cave,

or under the water, or in a dream.

The Otherworld they found beyond was home

to the many pre-Christian gods of the Celts.

It was a land of eternal youth and beauty,

where it was always summer,

and there was no hunger and no despair.

The realities of life for most Celts

were sickness and starvation, war and want.

The Otherworld must have offered

an attractive mirror image of those struggles.

However, the price the Otherworld

extracted could be hefty too.

Just as in the tales of the ancient Greeks,

these human encounters with the supernatural,

did not always have a happy ending.

(dramatic music)

- [Diane] The Celts managed the wilderness by peopling it

with entities that are somewhat like themselves.

On the other hand, those entities are,

more often than not,

at least potentially very dangerous.

- The realm of the fairies is superficially attractive.

It seems quite glamorous.

But often when the hero's in there,

they discover another side to it.

Initially, the character who stumbles into the Otherworld

finds it a sort of glorious and happy place.

But, generally, the longer

the character stays in that Otherworld,

they realize that it's more sinister.

That it's got darker dimensions.

(tense music)

- Let's take the beautiful fairy lady,

who's perhaps the most typical issuer

of an invitation to the Celtic Otherworld.

In Irish mythology,

she's usually well-intentioned

and usually won't do any harm in and of herself.

But there's still a problem

because if you spend three days with her,

it'll be three years where you came from.

If you spend three years with her,

it'll be 300 years.

So, when you go back home,

everybody you know will be dead.

(dramatic music) (birds chirping)

- The principle of life is change,

and we often regard that as a frightening thing

because we don't want to grow old.

We don't want to die.

But, yet, the idea of the fairy realm suggests

that the opposite is also quite horrific.

That if we didn't grow old, if we stayed static,

then there would be no growth.

There'd be no life.

(epic theatrical music)

- For the heroes of Celtic myth,

entering this fairy land

meant abandoning home and family.

By their return, though, the world had changed,

and there was no place left for them in human society.

The stories seem to recognize

that shared suffering and ultimately shared mortality

are necessary for a society to function.

But where there is suffering,

there is also kindness,

and where there is death,

there is a need for new life.

"Actaeon heeded not the rocks underfoot,

"nor the branches clawing at his tunic,

"slashing at his face.

"But he could not escape the goddess' rage.

"Actaeon had intruded as no mortal should,

"upon the realm of the divine.

"He would have to be punished.

"As he ran,

"the bones of his face began to split and reform."

(wind blowing)

"Actaeon stumbled.

"His whole body taut with pain.

"Antlers burst through his skull.

"He tried to scream,

"but a stag's harsh cry had displaced his human tongue."

"The dogs he had left behind stirred from their rest.

(dogs panting)

"That familiar scent.

(dog barking)

"It quickened in the mouth of every hound.

"Excitement quivered through the pack.

"A stag.

"The hunt had begun."

Actaeon is transformed from man into stag.

His dogs changed from loyal companions

into fanged predators.

The transformation of these dogs

strikes at a very human anxiety.

Our communities are ordered.

Laws govern our behavior.

Crimes are punished.

But in the natural world,

it can seem that chaos reigns.

Like Actaeon and his hounds,

our grip over the wild is only ever a tenuous one.

Some things are beyond our control.

We are at all times exposed

to the random ferocity of nature.

(dramatic music)

(waves crashing)

Oceans cover over 70% of the Earth's surface.

Almost every civilization in history

has exploited them for food, trade, or transport.

But if the waters brought opportunities,

they also represented danger.

- You were at the mercy of wind and the storms.

Leaving view of shore was a very dangerous undertaking

that only very experienced sailors took.

- It was normal for sailors to be scared of the sea.

It's not the case that people who crossed the sea

are comfortable with it or at home with it.

It's actually normal the more time you spend with it

to distrust it.

Even experienced sailors,

even experienced mariners

will be caught by surprise by the behavior of waves,

by currents, by weather.

(waves crashing) (wind blowing)

(wood creaking)

- [Nicholas] It was not just the wind

and waves that sailors feared.

(thunder crashing) (suspenseful music)

Throughout history there had been tales of strange creatures

living in the cold blackness of the deep.

The serpents of the mid-Atlantic

would stalk ships of the Royal Navy.

The vast Devil Whales

seen by early Irish explorers,

and, of course,

the famous monster of Loch Ness in Scotland.

(thunder rumbling) None, however,

is more terrifying than the creature said to dwell

off the frozen coasts of Norway and Greenland.

(suspenseful music)

"The King's Mirror",

an old Norwegian manuscript from the 13th Century,

spoke of a creature that had never been caught.

A beast so large sailors mistook it for land.

An enormous being which devoured fish, men,

and even ships whole.

They called it the hafgufa.

(creature groans)

- The hafgufa is a sea monster

that appears in the saga of "Arrow-Odd".

The sea monster is enormous

and spends most of its time

below the surface level of the sea,

so, all you ever see of it

is its nostrils and its fangs,

and when it comes to the surface

it looks like two big craggy rocks

sticking up out of the sea.

Its name is made up of two elements.

The old Norse words for sea, "haf,"

and "gufa," which is steam or vapor.

So, perhaps it's something about

this monster's breath as it comes to the surface

looking like sea mist.

- It's a sort of sea-going nightmare

that illustrates the way that the ocean's depths

are the ultimate wilderness,

the ultimate unknown space.

(waves crashing)

- The stories circulated among fishermen

and traders of the north for decades.

Some likened the creature to a giant crab.

Others said it was more like a squid

with enormous tentacles that ensnared

boats and sailors alike.

All agreed, though,

that not even the greatest ships of war

could resist its attack.

Over time, a new name emerged and stuck.

The beast was dubbed the Kraken.

(suspenseful music) (waves crashing)

(monster groans)

In the 18th century,

new scientific disciplines emerged.

Many natural philosophers dismissed the Kraken

as a fisherman's tale,

but others were not so sure.

Swedish zoologist, Carl Linnaeus,

described it as a singular monster

of the Norwegian seas.

Danish bishop, Erik Pontoppidan,

believed the stories, too,

but claimed the true danger lay not in the creature

but in the deadly whirlpools left in its wake.

Modern science gives more credence

to the stories than you might think.

The legend of the Kraken may be a result

of sailors encountering a giant squid.

These unearthly-looking creatures

rarely come to the surface,

but can grow to enormous lengths of 13 meters and more,

and it is thought even larger squid,

as yet unknown to science,

lurk in the inky depths.

- If you see a giant squid,

and you're in a very small boat,

that's a terrifying experience.

They are unnatural-looking.

They have the largest eyes

in proportion to any other animal,

so, they look incredibly powerful.

Also, they can do magical things

like squirting ink out of their bodies.

So, there's a lot of discomfort

associated with that kind of creature,

and they therefore figure

very often in horror stories.

There's one in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

There's one in Victor Hugo's book, "Workers In the Sea".

They often figure as man's opponents,

a kind of personification

of the ocean itself in its unpredictability,

its enormity, and its power.

(gentle music)

- [Nicholas] Terror and confusion at seeing such a creature

may have been intensified by the condition

of the sailors themselves.

Hunger and malnutrition were commonplace

on ocean-going ships of the past.

The sailors' work was hard,

and they were confined to the same small space

with the same people for week after week.

The combined effect all this could have

on their physical and mental health was devastating.

- I think if you spend hours on a ship looking out at sea,

as a lookout for land or for any other vessels approaching,

you're going to start seeing things in the light

and the water and their interaction.

- It's natural to give a reason

for the odd behavior of the ocean.

It's in a way easier to deal with it,

with a bunch of superstitious

and mythological interpretations

than it is just to throw up your hands and say,

we don't really know why it works the way it does,

but I'm going out sailing again next weekend.

It's much better to think in terms of sea monsters

that will make a good story.

- Whatever the roots of the Kraken,

the tales proved enduring,

and we've not lost the taste for such stories.

The ocean retains its power to frighten and to enthrall.

In 1975, director Steven Spielberg

scored box-office success

with his killer shark movie "Jaws",

and the formula remains a popular one.

For taking to the seas to sail or to swim

is still to enter the unknown.

For who can say what might be sharing the waters with us?

What might be lurking beyond the boat's hull

or beneath our kicking feet?

(tense music)

Though today ships cross our oceans

with satellite precision,

the fears provoked by open waters

and the unseen depths below have not entirely disappeared.

The wilderness of the sea remains a dangerous place.

And in modern tales of killer sharks

and the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle,

we can still hear the echo of the Kraken's roar.

(suspenseful music)

(waves splashing)

(gentle music)

(birds twittering)

For thousands of years,

Europe was cloaked in forests.

Even the largest of its settlements and cities

were mere pinpricks of light

among a vast wooded darkness.

(birds chirping) (wind blowing)

It should be little surprise, then,

that the forest is a common setting

in the continent's myths and legends.

It was both mysterious and familiar.

Dangerous, but within touching distance of home.

It was a place of magic and adventure.

A wilderness that lurked all too accessible

at the bottom of the field

or beyond the city gates.

- The wood is one of those wilderness spaces

in which scary things that you've never met before

and can only imagine might lurk.

- Forests do tend to have a particular value

in the profile of that particular culture.

- [Diane] Forests are the places where the people

who haven't succeeded in the arable lands end up.

They end up there because

they can afford to live there.

Because nobody owns the forest,

you can't stop them from living there.

They're therefore associated

with the fear of not making it,

with the fear of failing your family, your children,

failing to provide.

(melancholy cello music)

- Among the most famous stories of the forest

are the fairytales collected

by two German academics in the 19th century,

the Brothers Grimm.

(solemn music)

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in Hanau

in central Germany in the late 18th Century.

Their childhood was one of comfortable affluence

until the death of their father in 1796

plunged the family into poverty.

This traumatic upheaval

affected the young brothers deeply.

Relying on each other for support,

the two became inseparable.

Both excelled at school,

and went onto attend the University of Marburg.

It was here that their interest in folklore began.

It was an interest that would become an obsession,

one that would dominate both their lives.

Building on the work of French academics

such as Charles Perrault and Baroness d'Aulnoy,

the brothers began a patriotic project

to collect the folk tales of their own land.

They spoke to German peasants and aristocrats,

farmers and city dwellers,

and documented the stories they heard.

(eerie music)

- [Diane] The Grimm tales were collected

from people who lived in Hesse,

which, though was quite industrialized

by the Grimms time,

had a lot of woods in it.

- About 10 or 11% of the United Kingdom

is covered by what we would call woodland.

In Germany, even today,

it's something like 35%,

so forests are everywhere.

Now there's a particular reason for that,

which is that the Germans place

a high esteem on unspoiled nature.

That's simply a cultural given,

and that means that in some ways

Germans value a radical encounter

with otherness represented by the forest

in their renditions of fairytales.

- They're stories handed down

by families who lived among those woods

and who often lived very difficult

and impoverished lives.

- The Grimms collected stories

from a whole range of sources.

In the main from middle-class bourgeois friends,

and neighbors and people in their own social circle.

They'd often take several

different versions of the same story,

take the bits they liked,

cannibalize them in effect,

and combine them into a new story.

(gentle music)

- [Saul] They were adapting the tales, of course,

for an educated, literate public,

a middle-class and aristocratic public,

and they were adapting the content of those tales,

of course, to the expectations of that public.

- In 1812, the Grimms published the first volume of their

"Children's and Household Tales".

Three years later,

the brothers added a second volume,

forming what we now know as "Grimm's Fairy Tales".

(mystical music) (birds chirping)

After its initial publication,

the brothers spent the next four decades

revising and expanding their collection.

The seventh and final edition of 1857

contained more than 200 stories.

Many of those tales are now familiar to us all.

"Little Red Riding Hood",

"Sleeping Beauty",

"Hansel and Gretel", and many more.

The Grimms enterprise was not simply

an act of scholarly record, however.

Over the years, the brothers re-wrote

many of the stories themselves.

They minimized sexual elements

and softened other darker themes.

In earlier versions,

Little Red Riding Hood

was eaten by the Big Bad Wolf.

Sleeping Beauty was raped, not kissed,

and Hansel and Gretel were neglected,

not by their evil stepmother,

but by their own parents.

(ominous music)

- I suspect that that violent

and abusive culture directed towards children

may unfortunately have reflected not a social reality

but a social fear.

We tend to credit other people with abusive

and violent tendencies towards children

rather than regarding ourselves

as having those tendencies.

We're getting with the parents

in "Hansel and Gretel" who are hungry,

and therefor abandon their children in the woods

because they can't work hard enough

to provide for them properly.

The reason we need to tell ourselves these stories

is because we need to be sure

that we're not those people.

We need to differentiate ourselves from those people

and make out that we are much more loving

and careful as parents.

(dramatic music)

- [Nicholas] Some have interpreted

these stories as cautionary tales.

"Little Red Riding Hood"

tells us to obey our elders, beware the woods,

and be cautious of strangers from beyond our homes.

Others have taken a more psychoanalytic approach.

Employing the concepts of Sigmund Freud,

these interpretations re-cast the story

as one of sexual awakening.

The dark woods are a symbol of the unconscious mind.

Obedient and innocent,

she is the archetypal female.

The wolf, on the other hand,

hungry and aggressive, is the male.

When they meet later at the grandmother's house,

Little Red Riding Hood recognizes the wolf

in his disguise but does not flee.

Instead, she climbs into bed with him.

The scene is a seduction,

and Little Red Riding Hood is a willing participant.

- Fairytales, like all stories,

have an element of content

which is not explicit on the surface.

Psychoanalysts have also argued that fairytales

communicate to us at the level of the unconscious.

In particular, they communicate to children

at the unconscious level.

- In real life, wolves very rarely attack human beings.

They're actually quite sensible animals,

so it follows therefore that wolves must be symbolic

rather than representing an actual threat.

What they seem to represent,

it's the fear that human beings who live in woods

might become wild and wood-like.

They represent this sort of savage interior

that has to be carefully contained, controlled,

and muzzled by civilization.

- If the wolf is a symbol

of the wildness lurking within us all,

then its frequent presence in these stories

is a reminder that however grandly we build our monuments,

however elegantly we draft our laws,

civilization is ultimately a fiction,

a veneer far thinner than we would like to admit.

The smallest of slips can see it crack

and set loose that savage interior,

that wolf in terrifying fashion.

(dramatic music)

"Hurtling through bush and trees,

"Actaeon's hounds streamed after him as never before.

"The transformed huntsman

"urged his unfamiliar limbs on.

(dogs barking)

"Close behind was Blackfoot Melampus,

"swift as the wind.

"Beside him, Snatcher, fiercest of all,

"and Shepherd, his favorite,

"who knew not his master's call.

(dogs barking) (dogs snarling)

"Actaeon crashed on through the woods,

"but the trees closed tight around him.

"There was nowhere left to run."

(dogs growling) "On every side,

"the ravenous dogs surrounded their deer master."

(dogs snarling)

(dog growling) (dramatic music)

"Teeth sank into flesh,

"tearing and slicing,

"ripping and biting.

"So, they ended the life of Actaeon

"and slate the goddess rage."

(gentle music)

Actaeon's grisly death comes a long way from home,

deep in the wilderness that was the untamed forest.

His story is one of the most famous

and enduring in all Greek mythology.

It has inspired writers, sculptors,

and artists in generation after generation.

But though the age of the Ancient Greeks is long past,

our fascination with the wild unknown remains undimmed.

Throughout history societies have used the wilderness

to explore what frightens us about the world

and about ourselves.

To help us understand what it means

to be part of a family, part of a community,

and what it means to lose those things.

(dramatic theatrical music)

- The wilderness, is in some respects,

the opposite of civilization,

but also there's a sense in which

we carry a bit of wildness in ourselves as well.

- The wilderness also becomes a place

for exploring what happens

when humans get too civilized.

What does it mean when we go too far?

Where we start becoming too artificial and too false?

- [Diane] It might be the mountains.

It might be the heath.

It's the place where,

because you haven't got a big rational take on it,

you can fill it with the irrational,

the parts of yourself that you normally repress or crush.

- It continually calls to us as being untamed,

and we are drawn by the lure of taming it.

But it will never actually give into our control.

(gentle music)

- Today, perhaps we like to think

we've pushed the wilderness back,

but though our cities may now stretch to the horizon,

we can never banish the wilderness entirely.

We can sense it in the silence of a deserted wood,

or in the roar of the storm

breaking over a distant mountainside,

but it is with us always.

Our maps may grow ever more detailed,

but the wild unknown will always lurk at the edges.

(dramatic theatrical music)