Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

The tales have been told

since man first gathered around the fires of prehistory.

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 forest to the lands of ice.

From desert wastes to the storm-thrashed seas,

every corner of the earth has it 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. (dramatic music)

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.

War and disease.

Religious and social upheaval.

The untamable ferocity of the natural world.

And above all,

the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)

(birds chirping)

(suspenseful music)

(waves whooshing)

(suspenseful music)

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've seemed

and how wild.

(suspenseful music)

For thousands of years,

most people lived and died within a short distance

of the place they were born.

Their existence would 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.

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.

(suspenseful music) (wolf howls)

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music)

As much as people must've 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.

(suspenseful 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.

(dramatic music)

Actaeon had wandered far from home.

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.

(dog barking) (suspenseful music)

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.

(dogs barking) (suspenseful music)

As Actaeon rested in a shady clearing,

he suddenly heard an unfamiliar sound.

(peaceful music) (birds chirping)

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.

(peaceful music) (water 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, (suspenseful music)

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're still read, debated, and performed to this day.

(suspenseful music)

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.

A long war between the two great cities

consumed the ancient Greek world

and ultimately ended the golden age of Athens.

(suspenseful music)

Cities such as Athens and Sparta were the human realm.

What lay beyond belonged to something else, however.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

The Greeks regarded the wildernesses 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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

It was everything a city was not.

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

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music)

(fire crackling)

(peaceful music)

Actaeon stared into the grove.

(water whooshing) (peaceful music)

It was a wooded cave, wild and beautiful to behold.

He was enraptured.

He could not resist.

He had to get closer.

Actaeon crept forwards down to the water's edge,

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

His foot broke the stillness of the crystal waters.

(peaceful music)

The ripples spread.

Suddenly, dark eyes turned on the intruder.

For were those no mortal creatures.

This was the goddess Artemis and her nymphs.

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

(suspenseful music) (water whooshing)

The goddess stood, cloaked in her wild fury.

Actaeon ran.

Actaeon's encounter the the goddess Artemis

would not have surprised the ancient Greeks.

For them, the wilderness was no place for man.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

The Celts were a pre-Christian people.

Their origins in Central Europe date back

as far as the 9th century BC.

At its height,

Celtic culture spread as far south

as the Iberian Peninsula

and as far east as modern Turkey.

(suspenseful 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.

(suspenseful music)

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 their 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

that they came to call the Celts.

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

(suspenseful music)

Interestingly, the Romans never called the Celts Celts.

They call them Gauli, Gauls,

or Britani, Britons, basically.

So they don't actually use the term Celts.

So clearly they were aware of this slightly disparate group,

which was nevertheless pressuring

on their desire to establish a huge empire.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

By 500 AD, the once widespread Celtic people

were to be found only in Northern Europe,

in parts of Britain, France, and in Ireland.

(suspenseful 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 whooshing) (suspenseful music)

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 McCool.

He was challenged to a fight by Scottish rival.

So built a great bridge of stone over the sea

so the two could meet without wetting their feet.

(suspenseful 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.

(eerie 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.

(eerie 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 the land of eternal youth and beauty,

where it was always summer

and there was no hunger and no despair.

(eerie music)

The realities of life for most Celts

were sickness and starvation.

War and want.

The Otherworld must've 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.

(suspenseful music)

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 discovered there's 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.

(eerie 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.

(eerie music)

The principle of life has changed.

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.

(dramatic music)

For the heroes of Celtic myth,

entering this fairyland 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 society to function.

But where there is suffering,

there is also kindness.

And where there is death, there is a need for new life.

(dramatic music)

Actaeon heeded not the rocks under foot,

nor the branches clawing at his tunic,

slashing at his face,

but he could not escape the goddess's rage.

Actaeon had intruded, as no mortal should,

upon the realm of the divine.

(suspenseful music)

He would have to be punished.

As he ran, the bones of his face began to split and reform.

(suspenseful music)

Actaeon stumbled.

His whole body taut with paint.

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.

That familiar scent, (dogs barking)

It quickened in the mouth of every hound.

Excitement quivered through the pack.

A stag.

The hunt had begun. (dramatic music)

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 hands,

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

Some things are beyond our control.

We are all times exposed to the random ferocity of nature.

(dramatic music)

(water whooshing) (suspenseful music)

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's quite normal for sailors to be scared of the sea.

It's not the case

that people who cross 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.

(suspenseful music) (rain whooshing)

It was not just the wind and waves that sailors feared.

(dramatic music)

Throughout history, there've been tales

of strange creatures living in the cold blackness

of the deep.

The serpents of the mid Atlantic

which stalked 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.

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.

The Hafgufa is a sea monster

that appears in the saga of Örvar-Odds.

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 seagoing going nightmare

that illustrates the way that the ocean's depths

are the ultimate wilderness,

the ultimate unknown space.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(dramatic music)

In the 18th century,

new scientific disciplines emerged.

Many natural philosophers dismissed the kraken

as a fisherman's tale.

And others were not so sure. (suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

I mean, 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.

(suspenseful music)

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 oceangoing ships of the past.

The sailor's 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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

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?

(dramatic 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.

(dramatic music)

(fire crackling)

(suspenseful music)

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) (suspenseful music)

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.

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.

(suspenseful music)

Among the most famous stories of the forest

are the fairytales collected

by two German academics in the 19th century,

the Brothers Grimm.

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.

(melancholy music)

This traumatic upheaval affected the young brothers deeply.

Relying on each other for support,

the two became inseparable.

Both excelled at school

and went on to 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 folktales of their own land.

They spoke to German peasants and aristocrats,

farmers and city dwellers,

and documented the stories they heard.

(suspenseful music)

The Grimm tales were collected from people

who lived in Hesse,

which, though it was quite industrialized

by the Grimm's time,

had a lot of woods in it.

About 10 or 11% of 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.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

They were adapting the tales, of course,

for an educated literate public,

a middle class, an 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 "Grimms' Fairy Tales."

(bright music)

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 rewrote

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.

(suspenseful 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 therefore 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.

(suspenseful music)

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 recast 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.

And they represent this sort of savage interior

that has to be carefully contained, controlled,

and muzzled by civilization.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music)

Hurtling through bush and trees,

Actaeon's hounds streamed after him as never before.

The transformed huntsman urged his unfamiliar limbs on.

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.

Actaeon crashed on through the woods,

but the trees closed tight around him.

There was nowhere left to run.

On every side, (dogs growling)

the ravenous dogs surrounded their dear master.

(dog barking) (dramatic music)

Teeth sank into flesh, tearing and slicing,

ripping and biting.

So they ended the life of Actaeon

and slate the goddess's rage.

(suspenseful music)

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

deep in the wilderness that was the untamed forest.

(suspenseful music)

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.

For 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. (suspenseful music)

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 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.

(dramatic music)

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 sort of becoming too artificial

and too false?

It might 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.

(dramatic 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 mountain side.

But it is with us always.

Our maps may grow ever more detailed,

but the wild unknown will always lurk at the edges.

(awe-inspiring music)