Wild Hunt
[1] Wild Hunts typically involve a chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters engaged in pursuit.
[12] It was also known in Germany as the Wildes Heer ('Wild Army'), its leader was given various identities, including Wodan (or "Woden"), Knecht Ruprecht (compare Krampus), Berchtold (or Berchta), and Holda (or "Holle").
[21] In the Netherlands and Flanders (in northern Belgium), the Wild Hunt is known as the Buckriders (Dutch: Bokkenrijders) and was used by gangs of highwaymen for their advantage in the 18th century.
[citation needed] In Welsh folklore, Gwyn ap Nudd was depicted as a wild huntsman riding a demon horse who hunts souls at night along with a pack of white-bodied and red-eared "dogs of hell".
"Another class of specters will prove more fruitful for our investigation: they, like the ignes fatui, include unchristened babes, but instead of straggling singly on the earth as fires, they sweep through forest and air in whole companies with a horrible din.
[31] Grimm's methodological approach was rooted in the idea, common in nineteenth-century Europe, that modern folklore represented a fossilized survival of the beliefs of the distant past.
In developing his idea of the Wild Hunt, he mixed together recent folkloric sources with textual evidence dating to the medieval and early modern periods.
[32] Grimm interpreted the Wild Hunt phenomenon as having pre-Christian origins, arguing that the male figure who appeared in it was a survival of folk beliefs about the god Wodan who had "lost his sociable character, his near familiar features, and assumed the aspect of a dark and dreadful power... a specter and a devil.
[33] In his words, "not only Wuotan and other gods, but heathen goddesses too, may head the furious host: the wild hunter passes into the wood-wife, Wôden into Frau Gaude.
"[36] He added that a number of figures that had been recorded as leading the hunt, such as "Wuotan, Huckelbernd, Berholt, bestriding their white war-horse, armed and spurred, appear still as supreme directors of the war for which they, so to speak, give license to mankind.
"[36] Grimm believed that in pre-Christian Europe, the hunt, led by a god and a goddess, either visited "the land at some holy tide, bringing welfare and blessing, accepting gifts and offerings of the people" or they alternately float "unseen through the air, perceptible in cloudy shapes, in the roar and howl of the winds, carrying on war, hunting or the game of ninepins, the chief employments of ancient heroes: an array which, less tied down to a definite time, explains more the natural phenomenon.
[37] A little earlier, in 1823, Felicia Hemans records this legend in her poem The Wild Huntsman, linking it here specifically to the castles of Rodenstein and Schnellerts and to the Odenwald.
In the influential book Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (1934), Otto Höfler argued that the German motifs of the "Wild Hunt" should be interpreted as the spectral troops led by the god Wuotan which had a ritualistic counterpart in the living bands of ecstatic warriors (Old Norse berserkir), allegedly in a cultic union with the dead warriors of the past.
"[39] Historian Ronald Hutton noted that there was "a powerful and well-established international scholarly tradition" which argued that the medieval Wild Hunt legends were an influence on the development of the early modern ideas of the Witches' Sabbath.
[41] In the 'Host' variants, principally found in southern Germany, a man went out in front, warning people to get out of the streets before the coming of the Host's armed men, who were sometimes depicted as doing battle with one another.
Gottfried August Bürger's ballad Der wilde Jäger describes the fate of a nobleman who dares to hunt on the Sabbath and finds both a curse and a pack of demons deep in the woods.
[3] One tradition maintains that Odin did not travel further up than an ox wears his yoke, so if Odin was hunting, it was safest to throw oneself onto the ground in order to avoid being hit, a pourquoi story that evolved as an explanation for the popular belief that persons lying at ground level are safer from lightning strikes than are persons who are standing.
1142), an English monk cloistered at St Evroul-en-Ouche, in Normandy, reported a similar cavalcade seen in January 1091, which he said were "Herlechin's troop" (familia Herlechini; cf.
[49] While these earlier reports of Wild Hunts were recorded by clerics and portrayed as diabolic, in late medieval romances, such as Sir Orfeo, the hunters are rather from a faery otherworld, where the Wild Hunt was the hosting of the fairies; its leaders also varied, but they included Gwydion, Gwynn ap Nudd, King Arthur, Nuada, King Herla, Woden, the Devil and Herne the Hunter.
[54] The Santa Compaña[55] (known also in Galician as: Rolda, As da nuite, Pantalla, Avisóns or Pantaruxada; in Asturian as Güestia, Güeste, Güestida or Güéstiga;[56] in Spanish as Estantigua[57]) is a mythical belief in Northwestern Spain and northern Portugal which consists in a procession of ghosts or souls.
[42] The anthropologist Susan Greenwood provided an account of one such Wild Hunt ritual performed by a modern Pagan group in Norfolk during the late 1990s, stating that they used this mythology "as a means of confronting the dark of nature as a process of initiation.
If completed successfully, it was held that the participant had gained the trust of the wood's spirits, and they would be permitted to cut timber from its trees with which to make a staff.
[75] The anthropologist Rachel Morgain reported a "ritual recreation" of the Wild Hunt among the Reclaiming tradition of Wicca in San Francisco.
[80] César Franck's orchestral tone poem Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman) is based on Gottfried August Bürger's ballad Der wilde Jäger.
[84] The Wild Hunt was adapted for the Grace Note portion of The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II anime adaptation with the 4th and 5th episodes where Lord El-Melloi II (voiced by Daisuke Namikawa) helps a fellow magus teacher by the name of Wills Pelham Codrington (voiced by Tomoaki Maeno) in a case involving his father's home where the leylines have become unstable.
With the help of his allies, Wills, and a fairy they encounter names Faye, Lord El-Melloi II manages to solve the case and avert the threat.
Episode 5 of the BBC series shown in 1958/9, Quatermass and the Pit, written by Nigel Neale, was entitled The Wild Hunt and made frequent mention of the myths described here.
Tolkien's The Hobbit, while traveling through Mirkwood, the dwarves and Bilbo encounter a deer running through the forest, which knocks Bombur into the enchanted river.
In The Deluge (1886) by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the motif of the Wild Hunt appears, as a hellish procession of Teutonic knights rushing through the night sky, heralding war and extraordinary disasters.
[95] In The Elder Scrolls series of role-playing video games, the Wild Hunt is a ritual performed by the Bosmer (wood elves) for war, vengeance, or other times of desperation.
