One of the most awesome and terrifying images in Germanic legend is the Wild Hunt. Known throughout Germany, England, Switzerland and in Scandinavia, where they were known as Oskoreia or Juleskreia, this troop of riders, galloping through the night sky, is traditionally led by Wodan or Woden (although some Hunts are led by ancient heroes and even by female entities such as Frau Hulda and Perchta). The Hunt is usually seen at the time of important festivals, most noticeably Yule, where the Hunt is conflated with the wild winter winds. I think that part of the enduring, and now legendary, power of the Wild Hunt lies in it originally being enacted at festivals like Yule by troops of masked young men riding through the country lanes to villages, where they would race down the streets. This is what has entered the folk memory but these all too material riders were nonetheless of great mythic meaning. This is something the visited as much as the visitors would have entered into; both would be participating in a mythic recreation outside of mundane time. Terry Gunnell, in his ‘The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia’ (D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1995) states: ‘Furthermore, certain scholars have recently argued that many legends concerning seasonal visiting spirits like the ‘Wild Ride’ or the … julebukk …might have been based originally on visits by people in such disguises… since for both children and more primitive people, the dividing line between the masked performer and the actual spirit seems very unclear.’
Yule is seen as the time when the dead return to visit the living. In Celtic countries, such a time is Samhain, the modern Hallow e’en, but in the ancient Germanic world, Yule was the time when the ancestors would be remembered. (Charles Dickens instinctively understood this, as is evidenced by his fondness for Christmas ghost stories.) In the Woden-led Wild Hunt, can be seen the einherjar, those fallen warriors who, in Norse myth, are chosen to die and join Othinn’s elite war band in Valholl. When I say “die”, I use it in a modern sense. To the Germanic soul, the opposite of life was not death, but being forgotten; where no one honoured your memory. If honoured and remembered, the dead did not fade away but became only stronger, more powerful. The Norse draugar are a mythic (and negative) parallelism to this idea of i. life after death; ii. greater strength and vigour after death – they had more life! If a warrior was consecrated to Othinn (in other words initiated as a warrior), he had already ‘died’ during his initiation to be reborn as an Odinic warrior. In a sense, his immortality began then; his ritual death was the only real death, his physical death was just a transition to even greater might and main.
We know that the berserkir and ulfhethnar were elite warriors and (at least in images such as those we find on the Torslunda bronze plate) were effectively masked. Terry Gunnell (1995) says of the Scandinavian Julebukk, ‘Indeed, it might be noted …in many cases, the costume seems to have borne a close resemblance to those of the monsters and ‘berserkr’ depicted on the Torslunda matrices.’ By the wearing of a mask, you become no longer yourself, but a mythic being; effectively you are of that band of elite warriors, not as any part of their personal, individual lives – a doting grandparent or a busy farmer – but as they were in their prime, young, vital, ecstatic and enraged, the pride of their people. Those who wore masks in rituals did not symbolise the dead, they were the dead, identified, at one, with those now even more potent warriors who stretched behind them – spear bearers in the Host of the Dead! The troops of the ancient Germanic world were infantry, light infantry, heavy infantry but infantry. (This is not to say they were not skilled horsemen, a skill the Romans took advantage of in placing many Germanic auxiliaries in cavalry units.) So why does the Wild Hunt ride horses? Because they are dead and the horse is very much associated with death and with travelling between worlds.
What is the reason for their visitations? They come to receive offerings of food and beer, to be honoured and remembered. They also come to dispense blessings on field, farm and village for the coming year. They come to preserve their traditions, their culture and their descendants, who are the living expression of these things.
Although we do not live in a society that has these cavalcades anymore, we should still honour the Wild Hunt in our hearts and hidges each Yule, inviting them into our homes to receive their blessing, in return for the offering of ale, with the words:
“Come on horses hoofed with thunder!
Come flying, leaping, laughing, shrieking,
To our rites and our mad feasting –
You shall have good cheer with us!”
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P.D. Brown, Aberdeenshire, SCT