The Wild Hunt or chasse sauvage is a pack of spectres and demons, usually as hunters on horses, sometimes accompanied by hounds which used to crawl in the sky at night to gather the departed souls. A tumultuous racket of pounding hooves, howling dogs and raging winds usually announce them and for those who had no time to hide, seing the Wild Hunt was considered a very bad omen, usually foretelling a time of strife or death. This strange and awesome folk belief with many variants was endemic in Britain and Northern Europe, especially France and Germany during the early Middle Age.
The Wild Hunt originates in the old pagan beliefs but has been demonized, associated and confused with the Sabbath after he XII century. The form of the Wild Hunt, the name of the Hunter as well as the quarry of this spectral horde varied across each of the geographical locations in which the tradition was found.
Description
Descriptions of the Wild Hunt are broadly the same: the Hunt is preceded by a great noise of baying, barking and shouting. Then a tall rider on a black, white, or gray horse, storm through the air with his hounds followed by a host of strange spirits. The rider is often black, sometimes headless and the spirits bear the battle-wounds that would have caused his mortal demise. Fire spurts from the mouths and noses of the phantom horses and hounds which are often only two or three legged. Often the recently dead are seen in the infernal train. There are numerous local adaptations like in the Okehampton district (UK) where the spirit of death rode in a carriage made of human bones, preceded by a one-eyed black dog.
Names
The Herlathing in England
The Yeth or Wish Hounds in Durham
The Yule Host, Wutan's or Wuet's Army, the Raging or Furious Host in Germany
La Chasse Maccabée, la Chasse Artus , and the Mesnée d'Hellequin in France
The Oskorei in Norway
The Nuada also known as The Fairy Cavalcade in Ireland
Gabriel Hounds or Gabbel Ratchets or Retchets in North Yorkshire
Odensjakt in Denmark and Sweden
The chasse-galerie or witched canoe in Quebec
The Santa Compaña in Galicia
Time
Across Europe, the Wild Hunt appears at various times of the year, being frequently seen in spring and fall, but most commonly over the Yule season. This is not surprising as Yule was regarded as the season in which supernatural visitations were most common. In particular, the spirits of the dead were allowed to return. The hauntings in Eyrbyggja saga take place at Yule, as does the death of Glam in Grettis saga. Folk tales of all the Scandinavian countries have trolls or elves making their appearance at Yule.
"These times are intercalendary periods in Celtic and Teutonic year-reckoning, the paradoxical 'time between the times' when the crack appears and the paths between the worlds are laid open. They are periods of 'ritual reversal' when the dead enter the world of the living and the living enter the world of the dead."
Testimonies
The first full description of a procession of ghosts was written in Paris about a night in January of 1092 (Ordericus Vitalis). The priest Wachlin, coming back from visiting a sick person, saw a swarm led by an enormous warrior swinging a mighty club in his hand. The shapes that followed wept and moaned over their sins; then came a horde of corpse-bearers with coffins on their shoulders -- the priest counted some 50 coffins. Then women on horseback, seated on saddles with glowing nails stuck into them; then a host of ecclesiasticals on horseback. The priest knew many of these people who had died recently. He concluded at last that he had seen the "familia Herlechini," of whom many had told him, but in whom he had never believed: Now he had truly seen the dead.
In the Peterborough Chronicle, the chronicler attests the Wild Hunt's appearance at the appointment of a disastrous abbot for the monastery. Around the year 1132, the anonymous monk wrote:
Tha huntes waeron swarte and micele and lardlice, and here hondes ealle swarte and bradegede and lardlice, and hi ridone on swarte hors and on swarte bucces....
("Then the hunters were black and large and terrifying, and their hounds were all black and broad-eyed and terrifying, and they rode on black horses and black goats....")
While these Wild Hunts are recorded by clergymen, and portrayed as diabolic, late medieval English romance like Sir Orfeo, the hunters are rather from a faery otherworld, as in Celtic countries, where the Wild Hunt was the hosting of the Sidhe, the fairies; its leaders also varied, but they included Gwydion, Nuada, and Herne the Hunter. Thereafter, the description of a ghostly hunt does not appear until the folklore collections of the nineteenth century. By that time, however, it seems to have been thoroughly established.
The Hunt through cultures and ages
The Wild Hunt appears to have been incorporated into several different myths; in some areas it seems to have been part of a fertility cult with the Huntsman/woman being wild spirits (selvaggi, salvatici or homines selvatici) , which may explain their connection with animals, notably the stag.
In other places the Hunter was not a God, but the leader of the fairies, such as Gwyn ap Nudd who was seen as the leader of the Welsh fairies (the Tylwyth Teg) and who led the Hunt in Wales and the West of England.
Toward the end of the middle ages, however, the Wild Hunt became more and more associated with witchcraft. Instead of saying that the Hunt was led by a spirit of God and featured many other spirits, it began to be said that witches participated in the Hunt and that their leader was either Satan himself or a demonic spirit. This belief also seems to have become muddled up with the idea that Witches rode in procession to Sabbats upon animals, or flew in the sky, and this idea became one of the major charges used in European witch hunts.
As the old name was corrupted and its meaning lost, leadership of the Hunt was transferred to real or imaginary leaders of the past. In Denmark its leader was the celebrated King Waldemar, hero of many tales or else King Christian II.
In nineteenth-century England the demonic huntsman might be any one of a number of local heroes or villains, usually of the landowning class - often a hunting squire such as Dando and his Dogs, condemned to. hunt for evermore for hunting on a Sunday, or someone who had otherwise achieved fame or notoriety, for example Sir Francis Drake and 'Wild Darrell', the Marcherlands it was Edric the Wild, and in the southeast it was associated with Herne the Hunter.
Though the ancient Herlething was forgotten under that name, beliefs connected with it long survived not only in traditions such as these concerning spectral huntsmen and their hounds, but probably also that of the sinister 'hell waine' listed by Reginald Scot in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1384) among common apparitions.
Belief in the hell wain as the wagon in which were borne the souls of the dead sturvived luntil recently in Wales and the West Country, and seems to underlie the many reports of phantom coaches with headless horses from East Anglia and elsewhere.
More recently the myth of the Wild Hunt has been separated from its connection to demonolatry, and has become gradually incorporated in modern culture as a fantasy prop. Modern Pagans have made Herne the Hunter on of their God and a powerful myth for men in particular. Listen to Bjork’s song : “The Hunter”. Because of this masculine attributes as well as the wildness of nature he represents, Herne is often confused with the Green Man or the Lord of Misrule that belong to different myths.
The Role of the hunt
Mortals who saw the Hunt were in grave danger: it was thought to presage some catastrophe such as war or plague, or at best the death of the one who witnessed it. Mortals getting in the path of or following the Hunt could be kidnapped by the spectral rampage and dropped many miles from home or brought to the land of the dead.
Not only humans but also animals were in grave danger; In England when Herne drove the Hunt across the skies people would hide away in their houses and lock away their animal, as any animal found out-of-doors during the Hunt would be chased and perhaps killed.
The Norwegian oskorei stops either at places where someone has been or shall be murdered, in a manner to the Baltic werewolves described by Olaus Magnus in Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555), who, like the oskorei, come uninvited, drink up the ale and mead in the cellars, and whose Yule visit also portends a death in the approaching year. In England, the Wild Hunt comes to fetch the souls of the evil; in Jutland, the Hunt's strong riding foretells war and its passing through a house in West Jutland is a sign of great bad luck to come (Olrik, "Odinsjageren i Jyland", Dania VIII, p. 146). Landstad reports how the Telemarker Tor saw the "Aasgaardsreiden" with his brother Gredgard riding in the host. He hurried at once to his brother, only to find him sitting "dead as a stock or a stone" (Norvegs Folkslagsminne 13, p. 17).
Certainly the hounds are everywhere supposed to be portents of death and disaster, and a belated traveler hearing them would fling himself face downward on the ground to avoid seeing them (cf. the precautions taken by the miner and his daughter, in Clun Forest, seeing Edric the Wild and the Hunt prior to the Crimean War - Edric is said to appear whenever England is threatened with invasion and leads the Hunt towards the foe). Henderson (Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, 1879) tells us:
"Sometimes they appear to hang over a house, and then death or calamity are sure to visit it. A Yorkshire friend informs me that when a child was burned to death in Sheffield, a few years ago, the neighbours immediately called to mind how the Gabriel hounds had passed above the house not long before."
In the Zimmerische Chronik, one man bandages a ghost and becomes ill, another man answers the hunt with the same result. In Pomerania and Westfalia, the Hunt chases travellers to death. M. Landstad cites a Telemark story of the "Aasgaardsreid" leaving a dead man hanging where they had drunken the Yule ale. "He was dressed as a Nummedaler and had silver buttons on his best. The Aasgaardsreid had taken him in Nummedal and carried him along, and they had presumably ridden so bard that he had burst" (Norsk folkeminnelags skrifter 13, p. 20).
The motif of the living person who is picked up by the horde and carried somewhere else is particularly common in Germany and in Norway. A curious form of this theme which is unique to Norway has people undergoing a sort of involuntary separation from their bodies, which lie as if dead while their souls are faring with the oskorei, as Landstad describes: "She fell backwards and lay the whole night as if she were dead. It was of no profit to shake her, for the Asgardsreid had made off with her." The woman then awakes to tell how she had ridden with the host "so that fire spurted under horse-hooves" (p. 15). In Pomerania, doors are closed against the Hunter to keep children from being carried off; in Bohuslän, it was said that "Oden fares from up in the air and takes creatures and children with him."
A number of the tales of the Wild Hunt describe the punishment of someone who mocks at the hunt, as in Neuvorpommern, where "A miller's boy stood before the mill, when the Wild Hunt went over him. 'Take me with!' the youth cried. 'Half part!' Wode said, and as he came back, cast a human leg before the mill, crying, 'Häst du wullt jagen / Kannst ok mit gnagen!' -- If you wanted to hunt, you can also eat. The boy tried to get rid of the leg in all possible ways, but nothing worked" (Jahn, Volkssagen aus Pommern und Rugen, pp. 7-8). Variants of this story are repeated a number of times in Northern Germany.
Those who help the Hunter or members of his train, however, are often rewarded with gifts. In the Strassburger Chronicle's example of the Freiburg woman who bandaged her dead husband, the woman was given "a great golden head, from which she should drink ... the woman held the head in her hand, and nothing happened to her. It was found afterwards, that the golden head was good, and had been no betrayal.
While it takes a foolhardy person to interfere with the Hunt, only the courageous survive when the Hunt accosts them.
Interpretation
As Kris Kershaw has exhaustively documented (Kershaw 2001), the ritual reenactment of the Wild Hunt was a cultural phenomenon documented among many Gaulish and Germanic peoples. In its Germanic manifestations the Harii painted themselves black to attack their enemies in the darkness. The Heruli, nomadic, ecstatic wolf-warriors, dedicated themselves to Wodan. Later the berserkers, brutal warriors that believed to be transformed into animals by rage, are most commonly associated with the cult of Odin from ninth century Norway onward.
Odin's name is derived from the Old Norse Odhr which means "Fury, ecstasy, inspiration", Woden is similarly derived from the related Indo-European word - the Saxon Wod. Apart from thus showing why the Hunt is "Wild", and supporting ideas of ecstatic trance and spirit flight, this clue may lead us to a possible origin of the Wild Hunt. By donning animal skins or believing themselves transformed into animals by their rage, Berserkers can easily be seen as the hounds of Odin's Wild Hunt.
Attempts have also been made to interpret the legends as based on natural phenomena. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Wild Hunt was often compared to the storm winds of winter. A more plausible explanation was offered by the Danish scholar H. F. Feilberg: in "Hvorledes Opstar Sagn i Vore Dage" (Dania II, 198294, p. 121) he describes how, one evening near Odense, he heard a great rustling and hound-barking in the air over his head, and how he thought at once of the Odinsjaeger, but "Next day I asked the teacher of natural history at Latin school which migratory birds it was that I had heard." Hylten-Cavallius (Wärend och Wirdarne vol. I, p. 216) cites the Wärend expressions, "that is Oden's hunt, those are Oden's hounds that can be heard in the air" for the passing of the wild geese, and in eastern Hinterpommern, the Wild Hunt comes in the spring and fall, when the migratory birds come and go. It cannot be denied that the eerie barking voices and rustling of a flock of geese passing overhead is very likely to have contributed to the longevity of the belief in the Wild Hunt; however, it does not explain the legend. Wild geese, after all, do not visit the northern countries around Yuletime, when the Wild Hunt most often rides.
Otto Höfler, in his Verwandlungskulte, Volkssagen, und Mythen, has strongly put forth the idea that many of the medieval records of the Wild Hunt were actually descriptions of a ritual folk-procession. The fact that the host appears by both day and night, coming into the city streets as well as terrifying lonely travellers in the dark wood, may support this theory, as does Vulpius' 16th-century description of the Nürnberg Fastnacht train as "the wild host, very strange figures, horned, beaked, tailed ... roaring and shouting ... behind, on a black, wild steed, Frau Holda, the Wild Huntress, blowing into the hunting horn, swinging the cracking whip, her head-hair shaking about wildly like a true wonder-outrage." Vulpius also calls this procession "das wuthende Heer" (Meissen, p. 124).
Overall, the legends of the "Furious Host" or "Wild Hunt" seem to have maintained a remarkable degree of consistency through their wide range of time and space a consistency which can, perhaps, be best explained by the essential reality of the underlying belief to those who held it, from the heathen period through the time of our own grandparents. So when you go out into the night this wintertime, listen carefully for the barking of dogs and the cry "Midden in dem Weg!" Do not mock at the horde that sweeps past, but be ready to carry home whatever Woden or Holda should give you, for the lowliest of gifts from the Hunt's leader may be found to turn to true gold like the very folk-stories themselves, whose quaint dialects and humble words cloak the gold of our forebears' souls.
End of part 1
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