Happy halloween, everybody!
Now, as you know, I generally do special spooky episodes in honor of the world's best holiday,
and more specifically I usually cover a classic work of great horror fiction.
Unfortunately, I… kinda ran out.
I mean, there's more out there, but once you've covered Dracula, Frankenstein, Lovecraft,
Poe and Jekyll and Hyde, the great seminal works of horror fiction start getting a little
thinner on the ground and a lot less interesting.
Now I was planning on breaking the formula anyway by covering a much more subtly creepy
classic - The Count Of Monte Cristo, a harrowing exploration of trust, betrayal and the transformative
poison of revenge.
But it's really long.
Like, really really long.
Like, basically as long as my copy of Journey To The West.
So unfortunately I couldn't finish it in time.
But it's probably fine to leave it on the shelf for a year or… fourteen.
I'm sure it won't get mad and swear tortuous vengeance about it!
Instead, let's dip into folklore and talk about something really in the spirit of the
season - spirits of the season!
Specifically, the folkloric wild hunt, a delightfully spooky staple concept in European folklore
with suspiciously ancient roots.
Now, the wild hunt is officially classified as a folklore motif in the Stith Thompson
Index of Folkloric Classification, a thing that I am desperately happy exists.
It sounds like a joke in an urban fantasy story.
("Code E-221!
E-221!
We got a dead wife haunting husband on his second marriage!")
Anyway, the Wild Hunt is officially motif code E501 - a ghostly hunter and phantom entourage
pursuing an eternal phantasmal chase through the night.
Frequently connected with the sound of howling wind and other such creepy nighttime noises,
the Wild Hunt invisibly storms through the sky, hunting an ever-elusive prey and often
doing very unpleasant things to anyone who doesn't get out of their way fast enough.
Nothing like a good ghost party to really get into the spirit of the season.
The Wild Hunt concept was first officially codified by Jacob Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm,
during his studies of German Folklore, when he noticed a super recurrent motif of a ghostly
hunt through the night.
Variously called the Wild Hunt, the Raging Host and the Wild Army, the names can change
but the concept stays the same - where some ghosts haunt individually, the Wild Hunt is
a veritable ghost tornado, a screaming storm of the unhallowed dead, forever barred from
their rest and cursed in death to ride eternal.
And though Grimm was specifically studying german folklore, the Wild Hunt is found all
over western europe and beyond, even contributing to the american folkloric concept of… the
ghost rider.
Yes, that one.
Now, Jacob Grimm, a comparative mythologist after my own heart, believed that a lot of
these fairy tale staples had ancient pagan origins.
And while that theory is often a bit… hokey, the fact that a lot of the fairy tales about
the wild hunt specifically credit Odin as its leader lends some pretty solid credence
to that theory.
See, back in the old norse days, Odin had a ghost posse of his own - the Einherjar,
ghostly warriors brought to Valhalla by the valkyries to eternally train for the final
battle of Ragnarok.
With Odin and his valkyrie cohort leading them, the Einherjar ride out to the field
of Vigridr for the battle that ends the world.
And even post-Christianization, Odin and his Einherjar were still a very popular concept.
Tenth-century Norwegian King Haakon the Good was super into christianity, and spent his
life trying to christianize Norway before being killed in battle by the forces of the
amazingly named Eric Bloodaxe.
When he died, his court poet composed a poem about his death wherein King Hakon is spirited
away by valkyries and welcomed into Valhalla by Odin; and while Hakon is worried Odin will
hate him for his Christian faith, he instead welcomes him, and the Einherjar honor his
warrior's courage.
Amusingly, when Eric Bloodaxe was later killed, his equally-awesomely-named wife Gunnhildr,
Mother Of Kings, supposedly had a similar poem composed where Odin prepares Valhalla
and the Einherjar for the arrival of her husband.
One can only imagine the awkward dinner conversations.
And, bonus fun fact, Odin's ghostly host might have been originally based on a real group
of warriors attested by Tacitus in his Germania way back in the aughts CE.
This group, the harii, painted their shields and bodies black and attacked on dark nights
as a shadowy phantom army to very effectively confound and terrorize in their enemies.
Eight centuries and a lot of mythologization later, the story of this ghostly shadow-army
could easily transform into a phantom host in service to Odin.
The fact that einherjar is etymologically connected to harii supports this theory - though
harii just means warrior, and einherjar just means those who fight alone, so… it maybe
doesn't support it THAT much.
Anyway, while Scandinavian kings at the turn of the milennium loved them some Valhalla,
Grimm thinks the general opinion might have soured a bit after a few centuries of Christianization.
In those early days, the Norse gods were still very familiar - they weren't quite being worshipped,
but they still had a very strong presence in the social landscape.
Many gods were explicitly connected with natural phenomena, like Thor's anger to the thunder,
or Odin's night rides with the howling night winds, serving as constant physical reminders
of these familiar old figures.
But as centuries passed in the new paradigm, the old gods became unfamiliar, even demonic.
Grimm thinks the christianization of Scandinavia never erased the old gods, but instead made
them unfamiliar and terrifying, personifications of the wild and the unknown.
Odin's nightly rides stopped being a glorious battle charge and a promise of a shining afterlife,
and instead became a terrifying army of ghosts.
And since christianity promises a peaceful afterlife for the hallowed dead, by extension,
that army of ghosts has to be really bad news.
Grimm puts this really beautifully, in a… distinctly creepy way: "as the christian god
has not made them his, they fall due to the old heathen one".
Basically, since good people get to join the christian god when they die, the unhallowed,
unbaptized or otherwise bad dead fall into the waiting arms of the old pagan gods and
join their host instead.
But despite this extremely creepy framing, the Wild Hunt is not always strictly an antagonistic
force.
One folktale describes a drunk peasant walking home through the woods - he hears the cry
of the wild hunt behind him and a voice telling him to get out of the way, and when he doesn't,
the hunt leader crashes down out of the sky in front of him.
The huntsman tosses a chain at the peasant and challenges him to a game of tug-of war,
but when he takes off into the sky, the peasant quickly ties the chain around a nearby oak.
Impressed by the peasant’s apparently prodigious strength, the huntsman tries and fails two
more times, and as a reward for the peasant's cunning, he butchers a stag and gives the
him meat, and the peasant, without any other way to transport it, is forced to carry it
in one of his boots.
As he walks home with it, the boot becomes heavier and heavier, but he eventually reaches
his house - whereupon he finds the boot is full of gold.
General consensus is this huntsman is Odin, or Wotan if you wanna be old high german about
it, and the bootful of gold is probably a remnant of a much older story, cuz it's a
little too weirdly specific otherwise.
This general format is pretty common in folktales - a mysterious and potentially malevolent
supernatural entity challenges the hero to an impossible task, and when they succeed,
the entity rewards them.
But the wild hunt specifically seems to have a habit of rewarding people with gifts of
gold, specifically gold that doesn’t initially look like gold.
There's a few other consistent themes about the Hunt.
It’s very commonly framed as a karmic punishment for the people caught up in it, usually as
a cautionary tale - the stock explanation for why the huntmaster is leading the hunt
in the first place is that they used to be some hunt-happy dumb-dumb who loudly declared
that the christian god can stuff it cuz hunting is where it's at and immediately found themself
bound eternally to the phantom wild hunt, cursed never to rest until judgment day or
something.
It's also generally agreed on that, if you hear the cry of the wild hunt, it's unwise
to mimic it.
It might go pretty well for you!
Sometimes the hunt appreciates your enthusiasm and leaves you some of what they hunted that
night, like a bit of moss or an entire human leg.
But sometimes you're just getting their attention, which is a good way to get swept up by the
storm and disappeared forever.
Or both things could happen, like the tale of the peasant who mimicked the call of the
Hunt and was instantly killed when they tossed an entire horse flank down his chimney.
It's also very common for the hunt leader to ride a white horse - which is interesting,
because Odin's steed, Sleipnir, was very specifically gray.
Hm!
Now, while the base concept of the Wild Hunt seems to have originally evolved from Odin
and his Einherjar, Odin is not always the huntsman leading it.
Although Grimm does believe a lot of the supposed hunt leaders are actually just corruptions
or bynames of Odin - for instance, several stories describe the hunt being led by a dead
nobleman named Hackelburg or Hackelbaran, which seems to be derived from the old norse
word hekla, meaning armored or cloaked one, which he thinks is just an epithet for Odin
corrupted and confused into being another figure entirely.
But not every hunt leader is Odin.
For instance, a lot of them are women.
One common theme says the hunt is led by one Frau Gauden, a noblewoman with 24 daughters
who loved hunting more than life itself, and once said that hunting was better than heaven.
In a bout of shockingly well-timed karmic retribution, Frau Gauden's daughters all immediately
transform into hunting dogs and they're whisked up into the sky, doomed to hunt eternally
through the night.
Oh no!
Exactly what we asked for!
This is the worst!
But Frau Gauden's wild hunt is a little aesthetically different from the Odin version.
For one thing, she doesn't ride a horse - she rides in a carriage.
And a common story when she's in charge is that her carriage gets damaged, usually when
she rides over a crossroad, and she politely asks a local craftsman to fix it.
When he does, she rewards him with a payment that initially appears worthless, like wood
shavings or literal dog poop - but when the sun rises, it transmutes into pure gold.
Frau Gauden is also said to be most powerful around the new year, and sometimes leaves
phantom dogs in the houses of people who don't lock up properly - and while yes, a free magic
pupper would be amazing, these lil guys are actually bad omens that bring misfortune on
the household until Frau Gauden collects them the next year.
Some pretty standard winter-is-spooky-lock-your-doors morals on that one.
There's another huntmistress found in Alpine folklore known as Berchta, who's quite different
from Gauden - her name either means hidden or the bright one, and either translation
makes sense, since she's described as being completely swathed in bright white robes.
Berchta, like Gauden, also appears around the twelve days of christmas, but that's where
the similarities end.
Gauden is a stately noblewoman, while Berchta is at best horrifically old and wizened, while
some stories paint her as physically monstrous, with mismatched limbs and animalistic features.
But Berchta isn't just another pretty face - she also cares for the souls of unbaptized
children, which ties in well with Grimm's theory that the old gods take the dead that
the new god won't touch.
Berchta also serves the important role of enforcing taboos, like a ban on spinning during
the winter holidays or eating anything but fish and gruel on her feast day, and in bavarian
and austrian folklore she supposedly rewarded well-behaved children and servants with silver
coins.
This kind of ties into the same theme as Odin with the bootful of gold - an intimidating
figure punishing transgressions but richly rewarding good behavior.
Now Grimm theorizes that Gauden and Berchta are both offshoots of a very ancient pre-christian
goddess, along with a third folkloric figure, Frau Holle, who Grimm believes most closely
resembles the theoretical original figure.
Frau Holle or Holda, sometimes also called Old Mother Frost, is a generally benevolent
folkloric figure who sometimes leads a cohort of phantom women and occasionally rewards
people with gold.
In one popular story, a young girl who lives with her cruel stepmother and stepsister accidentally
drops her spindle down a well and jumps in after it - only to find herself transported
to an unfamiliar meadow.
She finds an oven with bread baking, and the bread asks to be taken out before it burns.
She obliges, then finds an apple tree that asks her to harvest the apples, which she
does.
Finally, she comes to a small house with a friendly old woman who calls herself Frau
Holle and says she can stay if she does her housework.
Ever-obliging, the girl agrees.
Frau Holle warns her to be extra-diligent shaking out the featherbed, because that's
what causes snow back in the real world, and the girl dutifully does her job.
Eventually she gets a bit homesick and Frau Holle sends her home with the spindle she'd
dropped - along with another gift.
Every time she talks, a bit of gold drops out of her mouth.
Sounds a bit uncomfortable, honestly, but it's better than what her stepsister gets
- when she jumps down the well and tries to earn the same reward without actually helping
any of the inanimate objects or doing any of Frau Holle's work, she starts spitting
out toads.
So Frau Holle is a bit of a dual figure - she fits the general folkloric role of rewarding
good stuff and punishing bad stuff.
She's also connected with spinning and weaving, is sometimes said to be the caretaker of dead
children and leads a host of phantom spirits.
She has a festival in midwinter, and the other connections to the season are pretty obvious
- she literally makes it snow.
It's her job.
Many folklorists believe she's a relic from a pre-christian and potentially even pre-norse
divinity, theoretically predating even Odin and company.
So according to Grimm's theory, these assorted huntmistresses - Gauden, Berchta, Holle, etc
- are all offshoots of this ancient winter goddess.
Which would be dope as hell.
Obviously this is a little hard to confirm, but the three figures do share a lot of similarities.
Gold, midwinter, spinning and weaving, punishing taboos, and - of course - leading a phantom
host of the unhallowed dead.
#JustGirlyThings!
But, like I said earlier, the Wild Hunt is not just a german thing.
In Scandinavia it's called Odin's Hunt, which is… pretty self-explanatory and follows
from the Einherjar origins we already covered, but in Old English it was called the Herlathing,
meaning Herla's Assembly.
Well, who's Herla?
Herla?
I barely know 'a! okay anyway Well, aside from being secretly Odin - which
at this point is kind of a given - Herla is a legendary king of the britons, the pre-saxon
Celtic inhabitants of England.
According to 12th century english/welsh author Walter Map, King Herla, modernized from his
old english title Herla Cyning, strikes a deal with a dwarf.
The dwarf will attend his wedding, and then one year later, he'll attend the dwarf's wedding.
The dwarf brings wedding gifts and provisions and is an absolute model guest, and then a
year later, Herla travels underground to the Dwarf king's realm and spends three days at
the wedding party.
When he leaves, the king gives him a small bloodhound and warns him not to get off his
horse until the dog does.
Free dogs?
Best wedding ever!
Herla and his band leave the dwarf king's realm, but the hound stays on the horse - when
Herla asks a nearby shepherd how his queen is doing, he's shocked to find that the shepherd
is a saxon, not a briton, and that the saxons have ruled the land for over two hundred years.
Apparently three days in the dwarf king's realm equalled three hundred years out here.
Some of the men leap off their horses in shock - and immediately age three hundred years
and crumble to dust.
Stuck in his saddle and displaced in time, all Herla can do is ride eternally, trapped
in an endless unlife thanks to the world's worst case of supernatural jetlag.
But Herla's story doesn't end there!
This concept of an undead or demonic eternal wanderer was quite popular, and in the 11th
century French monk and chronicler Orderic Vitalis used the phrase "familia herlequin"
to describe a demonic host pursuing a hapless monk, led by a terrifying masked giant.
This was the first official attestation of the french version of the Wild Hunt, which
was a bit spicier than the Germanic version - the Hellequin leading the hunt was an emissary
of the devil himself, and his host of demons hunted down the souls of the damned, rather
than being those wayward souls themselves.
This demonic figure later evolved into a stock character in french passion plays, and then
evolved further with the advent of the sixteenth century commedia dell'arte and the introduction
of the masked motley figure of the harlequin, still a bit of a devilish trickster but a
lot less overtly malevolent than the wild hunt he used to lead.
All roads lead to Odin, apparently.
Well - that's not strictly true.
While the germanic wild hunt seems directly derived from Odin and the einherjar, the concept
of a nighttime host of ghosts or demons is actually… pretty widespread.
The Welsh variant of the Wild Hunt is sometimes led by Arawn, the king of the Otherworld we
talked about way back when we covered Pwyll.
Since we already knew he liked hunting, that part isn't really a surprise, and it's even
explicitly part of his job description - he and his hounds hunt lost souls and drive them
to Annwn, making this a surprisingly benevolent form of the wild hunt - it's basically supernatural
cleanup duty rather than an inherently malevolent ghost tornado.
In some versions Arawn's hunting activity even peaks around the twelve days of christmas,
like Gauden and Berchta.
But he's also not always alone.
Sometimes the hunt is also led by Mallt y Nos, a crone who drives the hounds onward
with her constant wailing.
Similar to the germanic version, sometimes she's retconned as a dead noblewoman who got
herself karmically permbanned from heaven for saying it probably sucks up there if there's
no hunting allowed.
Irish and Scottish folklore has the sluagh, a word that just means throng or army but
describes a host of very nasty spirits of the restless dead - considered really bad
news, much worse than the generally-benevolent-but-still-dangerous Seelie fae or even the actively malicious
Unseelie fae.
The Sluagh were chaotic, unpredictable, and known for spiriting people away in the night
- the kind of thing you hide under the covers about.
Another version where the main way to stay safe is to stay indoors, close your windows
and hope they don't notice you.
But the concept of nightly ghost armies isn't just a European thing.
For instance, Hawaii has the nightmarchers, a procession of ghostly warriors beating drums
and blowing conch shells like they're marching to war.
While this sounds a lot more regal and orderly than most similarly spooky ghost armies, the
suggested response is the same - get inside, lock the doors, hope they don't take an interest
in you, and do NOT attract their attention.
Not showing the appropriate levels of respect is generally considered a good way to get
vaporized by bolts of divine retribution.
On a similar note, Japan has the Hyakki Yagyō, the night parade of a hundred demons, a folklore
motif describing a massive horde of demons, spirits, phantoms, yokai, and every other
spooky specter in the area.
Sometimes it's a little more orderly, sometimes it's full-on pandemonium, but it's always
bad news, and like most other ghost tornadoes, best avoided to prevent death or ghost-kidnapping.
Now, perhaps the most obvious question at this point is - why do we have so many dang
ghost tornadoes??
This is bizarrely widespread, and while a concept as simple as "ghost" makes sense worldwide,
a cacophanic horde of the restless unhallowed dead trapped in an eternal hunt across the
endless sky is a biiiit more specific than "dead but hasn't got the memo".
Well, the most likely answer is kinda mundane.
Most wild hunt myths specifically describe the hunt as invisible but very, very loud.
Odin's hunt is specifically equated with the howling wind that plays through the forest,
which does often sound like howling or screaming, and over in Wales, Arawn's dogs barking in
the night sky is apparently - no joke - based on the eerie sound of migratory geese which'd
fly through the area in the winter months.
When the night is dark and full of really loud, weird noises that shake your roof and
blow your windows open, it's not much of a logical leap to assume you just got blasted
by a host of very inconsiderate spirits or ghosts.
In the same way that thunder and lighting were pretty much universally assigned gods
worldwide, creepy howling nighttime winds were also a universal experience - and a good
reason to stay indoors on wild nights.