HOME | DD

Wild Huntsman — Description

If you read my buddy Jacob's favorite book series, Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files, you'll come away with the impression that leading the mythological Wild Hunt is a joint effort between an Odin who counts Santa Claus as one of his many names and a fae lord named Herne, two creative liberties which I… don't generally agree with. I've already gone on a few tirades about how I think Odin and Santa mix together like oil and water, so I won't bore y'all by droning on like your functioning alcoholic grandmother. What's my beef with Herne then? Well nothing personal, certainly, it's just that he seems to be an OC of Shakespeare, first appearing in his 1597 play The Merry Wives of Windsor. Nothing wrong with that in itself, I mean I've developed a much greater appreciation for the Bard's wit than I had in my high school years, but it becomes a problem when you try to take such an otherwise minor figure and cram him into some imagined pagan context. Which means… uuuuuuuuuugggggghhhhhhhh… it's finally time I take a crack at the Wild Hunt. Gods. Dammit. I don't wanna talk about the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt's a pain in my reconstructionist ass.
Alright look, here's the crux of the issue: Wild Hunt, totally awesome image. A procession of ghosts riding the howling winds abducting the souls of any mortal unfortunate enough to be out at night when they pass overhead? That's metal as hell! Is it, however, an expression of a once-unified chunk of Proto-Germanic folklore? Ehhhh probably not? Maybe? Every scholar (and Heathen, for that matter) you ask is going to have a different take on just how historically valid we can call the Wild Hunt, and I'm constantly changing my own mind about how this thing works. See, the Wild Hunt isn't so much a myth as it is a motif. That single sentence summary I gave at the top of the paragraph is actually quite nondescript when you stop and think about it. There's a lot of unrelated stories which people can and have lumped under the umbrella of “Wild Hunt”, which is part of why approaching this subject has been so intimidating for me. It's like trying to write a blurb about “sun gods”. Like yeah every culture has one but is that really useful to telling a coherent story about any one of them that's not literally all over the map?
If I want to crack this egg, we gotta focus on the guy who came up with this idea in the first place: Jacob Grimm, the father of both comparative mythology and its oldest misconceptions. In his 1835 study Deutsche Mythologie, Grimm coins the phrase Wild Hunt (“Wilde Jagd” in German) to single out a handful of tales whispered in hushed tones come wintertime all throughout the German Confederation. See, Grimm, in addition to writing all those fucked versions of bedtime stories, was also an early German nationalist who was actively trying to compress as many stories as he could collect into the smallest possible unified mythology in the hopes that'd unite the German people into living under one banner, because that's totally how that works. This is why for my own practice, I try to only use Grimm as supplementary material, a slightly more modern yet still fanciful take on otherwise obscure subjects in Heathenry. Bro tried really hard to condense as many cork boards as he could, and it often got away from him, claiming some things must've come from one source based on the slimmest evidence which modern literary and linguistic analysis can easily debunk. The Wild Hunt, it seems, sits in a gray area where no one can quite agree if Grimm was onto something or if he was pulling it out of his ass. I for one am a linguist by trade, and I generally live by the maxim of “if it's not a cognate, it's a coincidence”, so I tend to be on the skeptical side myself. I think we really, really underestimate the convergent evolution stories can go through just in between a single generation, let alone the 600 years between the authorship of the Eddas and Grimm's contemporary interviews. Literally anyone can tell any story, so unless we can see a direct reference or a legitimate vowel shift, superficial similarities are a really hard sell to me.
For the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to put that whole debate aside and just give you the rundown of myths which Grimm himself asserted were representatives of his Wild Hunt thought bubble. The first proper noun he places at the head of the Hunt is a guy from Westphalian folklore called Hans von Hackelberg or Hackelberend or a bunch of other minor spelling variations that make me glad this isn't an audio platform and I don't have to embarrass myself with my horrible pronunciation. Legend has it that this guy was the hound master to the Duke of Brunswick, and that he was so obsessed with hunting that he'd even go out riding on the sabbath. One day, he got a little too overzealous when hunting a boar and stabbed himself in the foot, as you do, causing an infection that killed him not long after. Man was so dedicated to his craft that when a priest tried to read him his last rights, he said nah, the whole heaven thing sounds lame, I just wanna hunt for eternity. So as punishment, when he died in either 1521 or 1581, his immortal soul was cursed to spend the Twelve Nights of Christmas hunting every year… for… eternity. I'm uh, I'm not sure he's going to see that as a punishment, guys. He was even given his troop of loyal hounds, a talking owl named Tutosel, and a flaming horse to spend his afterlife with. That's fuckin kickass! I'd watch that show.
Now Grimm reeeeeeeally wants Hackelberend to be a continuation of Odin, because Grimm reeeeeeeally wants everything to be Odin, because Odin to him is just this generic sky god that you could conveniently slot in place of that dusty old fuddy duddy Abrahamic God as if that's how that works. Boy, I sure do hope that no future Germans look at that logic and twist it into a horrifically antisemitic worldview. What could possibly go wrong? Grimm's problematic desperation is highlighted perfectly in his defense of Hackelberend as Odin. See, that “hackel” element is cognate with Old Norse “hekla” meaning “cloak”, and Odin… uhh… wears a… cloak? So… checkmate? It doesn't help that Grimm seems to be the oldest written account of this character's existence, at least so far as I can find, so there's no paper trail that we could feasibly extract any more conclusive connections prior to 1835, let alone all the way back to medieval Heathenry.
Now mind you, sometimes Odin is identified as the leader of a spiritual army. If you want the closest thing to the Wild Hunt in the Eddas, for example, look no further than his famous einharjar, the souls of the toughest and noblest warriors who fell in battle and were brought by the valkyries to Odin's glamorous hall Valhǫll (often rendered in English as Valhalla). There they drink, feast, fight, and regenerate day after day in preparation for the final (and vain) battle against Loki's children at Ragnarök. That's not exactly the earthly procession of wintertime ghosts we'd typically identify as the Wild Hunt, and as far as I can gather, the modern day’s equivalent word in the Scandinavian languages, “oskoreia” (literally “Asgard ride”) is not used in medieval sources, but we don't have to get ancient to find examples of Odin leading a hunt. After the Hackelberend thing, Grimm shifts to a tale about some poor drunken schmuck who gets stopped by Odin as he's trying to figure out where he put his house. The High One challenges this peasant to a game of tug-of-war to test his strength, and being too plastered to think this is anything but fuckin awesome, the peasant grabs one end. Odin shoots up into the sky like a lightning bolt, fully expecting to just yeet this dude into his service, but this crafty son of a bitch ties his end of the chain to a fuckin tree to keep it rooted, and by the time Odin's come back down to call bullshit, the peasant's already undone the knot and said nah see I've totally been holding it the whole time! After this happens a few times, Odin just gets this shiteating grin on his face and rewards this random nobody with a meal of divine stag and sends him on his way with leftovers that turn into solid gold the next morning. The wording of the story kinda implies that Odin was fooled by the rouse and rewarded this guy's “strength”, but knowing Odin, he totally knew he was being punked and was actually rewarding this mad bastard for having the steel balls to repeatedly fuck with a trickster god of Odin's caliber.
Not all leaders of the Hunt are so easily swept under the Odinic umbrella, however. Some of them are female. That obviously doesn't rule out the genderfluid Odin in itself, and to Grimm's credit, he does suppose this next subject originated as a female twist on Odin. The first huntress he brings up, rather abruptly mind you, is a lovely lady named Frau Gauden. Once a mortal noblewoman, she loved hunting so much that she uttered the phrase “hunting is better than heaven”, which cursed her to hunt forever in the clouds, her twenty-four daughters transformed into dogs to follow her into the night. The specific phrasing used by the translation I read was, “the daughters’ dresses turn into tufts of fur, their arms into legs, and four-and-twenty bitches bark around the mother's hunting-car,” their italics not mine. That had me laughing for about thirty minutes despite my sinuses being full of influenza. It’s not clear if these bitches are the same lil dogs Frau Gauden is said to generously gift to random villagers she passes by during the Twelve Days of Christmas. I mean, I think that's generous but apparently these are “cursed dogs” whatever that means, as unkillable as Deadpool and bringing bad luck until she comes back around the next year to collect them. I'm sorry, that doesn't compute. I don't understand this concept of a “bad dog”. These things shit gold, how can that be bad? No, for real, Grimm goes on to describe a story of how in exchange for fixing the shoddy wheel on her carriage, Frau Gauden rewards him by telling him to grab as much dog shit off the ground as his pockets can carry, and after somehow convincing him to do so, he wakes up the next morning to find his literal pile of shit has turned to solid gold. Fuck man, I might just have to welcome the Wild Hunt into my practice if this is the sort of thing I get in return!
Okay but wait, what is the Wild Hunt even supposed to be… you know… hunting? While I'm sure there's all sorts of mythical beasts and spirit animals out there on the menu, according to Grimm, the people of Thuringia believe the Hunt’s prey to be “moosleute” (“moss-folk”) and “holzweibel” (“wood-wives”), dwarvish sorts of wood-sprites who often offer to do people's chores in exchange for being magically warded in the safety of their homes to avoid getting pegged by the Wild Hunt. The Hunt evidently is equally willing to barter, as when a peasant of Arntschgerente mimicked the barking of the Hunt's dogs, they acknowledged him as one of their own and strung a big cut of moss-folk meat up in his stables for his “share”. This seems to be the “good ending”, because while I'm assuming moss people taste like moss, another guy tried mimicking the sounds of the Hunt and they disapproved so much of his botched impression that they chucked a fucking horse leg through his window saying hey asshole, you wanna hunt, there's your hunt. Huh, so that's what happens when you pick trick over treat. I would've just egged the guy's house but a horse hock works too.
Grimm then goes on to list a bunch of other regional variants: in Meissen, the leader of their Wild Hunt is a headless horseman named Hans Jagentaufel and another huntsman named Mansberg, in Swabia they have Elbendrötsch leading the “Wütendes Heer” (“Furious Host”, that first word is cognate with Odin's name), and in Baden it's just a guy called Marten, which I find fucking hilarious. Like oooooo beware travelers! Tonight the ghostly demons ride and you shall all tremble if caught in the path of voracious Marten! Grimm then circles awkwardly back to the more feminine side of the Hunt, specifically comparing Frau Gauden to the figure of Perchta (or “Holle” the further north you go). I've already discussed Perchta in my blurb “Huldra the Belly-Slitter” and my blurb on Krampus, so I won't rehash much here. While ugly and unforgiving, she is equal parts beautiful and benevolent, valuing good souls who abide by the law and help others, and earning the epithet “belly-slitter” with those who break her rules. Most relevant to the discussion today is her compassion for the innocent, as she is said to take the souls of unbaptised children who died young and welcome them into her host. As Grimm puts it, “as the Christian God has not made them his, they fall due to the old Heathen one”, which as a former Christian turned Heathen, is just such a beautifully affirming sentiment. The elvish procession that Perchta creates from these adopted babes is still replicated in the Perchtenlauf festival to this day, albeit looking more Halloween than its Christmastime spot on the calendar would have you expect. It's also interesting to note that Latin chroniclers often substituted Perchta's name with the more Hellenistic “Diana”, goddess of the hunt, when they wanted to chastise those dirty peasants for believing in fairy tales.
Grimm then takes another detour to gather some somewhat substance-less anecdotes getting historical and historical-adjacent heroes in on the “I want to believe” crowd like Charles V, Dietrich von Bern, King Arthur, Perchta's sidekick Eckhart, etc, before he finally gets around to one of the names you're probably actually familiar with when it comes to popular media depicting the Wild Hunt: King Herla. This name is first dropped by 12th century Norman monk Orderic Vitalis in his chronicle Historia Ecclesiastica. There he describes an incident that was witnessed by his homie Walchelin on New Year's Day in 1091, a marching army of the recently deceased dubbed the “familia Herlequin” after their giant club-wielding leader Herlequin. That funky suffix comes from the Old English “Herla Cyning”, literally just “King Herla”, direct cognate. We don't really get a backstory to this King Herla until about a century later in the Welsh author Walter Map's De nugis curialium, and it's actually refreshingly straightforward. Herla was said to be a king of the Britons who got invited by his buddy, the dwarf king, to attend a wedding in his kickass subterranean palace. Herla accepts, takes his retinue into the caves, they party for three days straight, and then the dwarf king sends his bro on his way with the gift of a lil bloodhound buddy, but warns that none of the humans can dismount their horses before the puppy leaps down first. Probably too shitfaced on dwarven ale to remember that bit, Herla and his entourage emerge back into the surface world, where he calls a shepherd over and asks if there's any tea to spill on what his queen has been up to while he's away. The shepherd can barely understand his Welsh, which to be fair neither can I, but the shepherd further explains that the queen he's talking about died 200 years ago, and the Britons have long since been overtaken by the Saxons. Some of Herla's horsemen are waaay to fucked up to process this mindfuck, and attempt to dismount, but the dog is still in Herla's arms, and so 200 years worth of time dilation collapses them into dust as soon as their feet touch the ground. Herla just kinda gives an “oh… shiiiiiiiit” and ever since he has refused to leave his saddle, forced to wander the Earth with his fae-cursed brothers for the rest of eternity, or until they put the dog down I guess, but why would you? He's such a cute lil bubba yes he is yes he is!
You might expect the title “Erlking” assigned to Herne by Jim Butcher in his books to be a descendant of this Herla Cyning, but etymologically, that doesn't pan out. Grimm himself explained how “Erlking” instead descends from Danish “ellekonge” which means and is cognate with the English phrase “elf king”. Even if it wasn't, the word as is doesn't appear until the 18th century, first mistyped in Johann Gottfried Herder's 1778 ballad Erlkönigs Tochter and popularized by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1782 poem Erlkönig. Erlkönig, in fairness, is a very Wild-Hunt-y sort of story. It's a really dark prose about a small boy terrified by the spirits in the fog threatening to take him away from the safe embrace of his father, only to die right there in his father's arms from a single touch from the Erlking. Jaysus. The much more light-hearted modern descendant of Herla Cyning is instead the medieval stock stage play character called the Harlequin, a tricksy sort of jester guy whose name is not spelled “Harley Quinn” despite what my autocorrect wants you to believe. Dammit spellcheck, get your A-eyes out of my incognito search history.
Then there's this Herne guy. He's one of the last examples of a Wild Huntsman that Grimm lists, and the entire mention goes as such: “Shakespeare (M. Wives of W. iv, 4. v, 5) tells how ‘Herne the hunter doth all the winter time at still midnight walk round about an oak.’” That's it. He doesn't even try to analyze it or connect it to anything, and to be fair I don't think there's anything to connect it to. Even in the play itself, Herne isn't actually a character, he's a randomly brought up local ghost story the protagonists get their pursuer Falstaff to cosplay as in order to fulfill a prank. But oh boy, people have tried really damn hard to connect Herne to any other horned woodland people from across mythology. The most common attempt you'll see online is R. Lower Thompson's 1929 claim that Herne is somehow an extremely late survival of the Celtic god Cernunnos, literally “the horned one”. Sure, “Herne” does come from the same Proto-Indo-European root “ḱerh₂-” (meaning “horn”) that Cernunnos derives his name from, but that's probably because, you know, both characters have horns as their defining visual feature. Naming them both essentially “Horny” requires neither a lot of creativity or a PhD in linguistics to come up with, and if you thought Herne had next to no primary source material to analyze, you should try digging into Cernunnos… like I'm probably going to have to some day (fuck me). See, as popular as Cernunnos is in neopagan circles today, there's no surviving literature or mythology about him from ancient sources whatsoever, so we have no clue what kind of character he was or how that might be compared to what little we have of Herne. There's also the teensy problem that Cernunnos was an entirely continental deity from the glory days of Rome, with no conclusive evidence of his cult ever having reached Britain, at least in a form we'd recognize archaeologically. If Herne is Cernunnos, then how the fuck did he time travel 1500 years and teleport to some randomly specific oak isolated in Windsor? Where you been bro? In Shakespeare's head, probably, where I think Herne actually came from. Take a minute, also, to consider just how far we're stretching to label things under the umbrella of “Wild Hunt” here. Herne isn't the leader of anything, he's just a ghost who just so happened to be a huntsman. He doesn't ride through the sky, he doesn't abduct weary travelers into his host, and if I meet Cernunnos in my travels through the Jurisdictions some day and it turns out he really was heading the procession of the Wild Hunt under the name Herne this whole time, I'll choke down an entire slab of moss people and chuck a horse leg through a window.
Aaaaand breathe. I've finally conquered my fears, covered the Wild Hunt, and come out of it just as conflicted as I was at the start. Gods, why did I become a history buff? There is one more thing I'd like to look into just to appease my own curiosity, though, because there's a particularly kickass pop culture character I often seen cited as deriving from the Wild Hunt: Nicholas Cage. Er- I mean… Marvel Comics’ Ghost Rider. You know, the flaming skeleton who rides a fuckin motorcycle and fries people's souls just by looking at them. Again, talking about Ghost Rider here, not Nicholas Cage, an easy mistake, I know. That character has got to be the most testicle-exploding, testosterone-throttling, angsty-teen-appealing design ever slapped onto a piece of pulp, and I wanna know just how true the claimed connection is because I fucking love that shit. The first incarnation of the Spirit of Vengeance, a stuntman named Johnny Blaze who sold his soul to the demon Mephisto in exchange for saving his father's life from a terminal illness, made his debut in Marvel Spotlight #5, released in August 1972. He was not, however, the first Marvel hero to sport the name “Ghost Rider”. That was instead Carter Slade, since renamed to “Phantom Rider”, a masked cowboy who did more generic cowboy things, infinitely lamer than a flaming skeleton on a motorcycle. Slade's design, debuting in 1967's Ghost Rider #1 was ripped straight from a character also called Ghost Rider from Magazine Enterprises's 1949 Tim Holt comic, by which I mean the same artist who came up with it, Dick Ayers, was brought over to Marvel to reimagine the character once the old trademark had expired. Ah, the pre-Disney days, when copyright could expire over the course of a couple decades and we'd be free to create such national treasures as Ghost Rider. What a world.
The 1949 Ghost Rider was in turn inspired by that famous Stan Jones song, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, released in 1948. You've probably heard it, it was covered by the incredibly-named band Spiderbait for the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, but just to recap: a lone cowboy witnesses a stampede of demonic cattle raging across the night sky being wrangled by the souls of the damned, who warn the cowboy that if he doesn't shape up, he'll be doomed to this same Sisyphian job for the rest of his afterlife too. According to Jones’ widow, he pumped the song out in about ten minutes while chilling on duty as a park ranger in Arizona's Death Valley. Where he got the inspiration for the song from, however… well the internet has a lot of different anecdotes and not a lot of primary citations to go with them. The only version I was able to track down beyond Reddit and Wikipedia copy-pasting one another was from Jones’ biographer Michael K. Ward, who says Jones got the ghost rider myth from his elderly neighbor Cap Watts. When Jones was 12 and the two cowpokes were working on a windmill, Watts pointed to the approaching thunderstorm and told the boy a story about how those angry clouds were the Devil's herd, and that the ghosts of cowboys since passed are now bound to come wrangle them back into submission.
Okay, so where did Watts get his version of the story from? That's even harder to say, but a lot of blogs I've come across suggest (without much in the way of a paper trail, mind you), that it must've been an Arizonan twist on the legend of Stampede Mesa in Texas's Blanco Canyon. Spinning this yarn takes us back to 1889 and follows the strife of a cowherd named Sawyer trying to drive his cattle all the way to Kansas. Before he can get too far, Sawyer catches a nester (a derogatory term for farmers who squat on ranches) breaking off some steers from the back of the herd, and Sawyer’s understandably a little pissed. The nester insists that he's just collecting a few of his own cattle that got confused and joined up with Sawyer’s lot, but Sawyer’s like “oh yeah bitch? Say that again but with this six-shooter in ur face”. The nester backs down and pisses off, but then that night, Sawyer is resting his herd on the eponymous mesa during a thunderstorm, when suddenly the animals erupt into a stampede and hurl themselves over the ledge. Sawyer suspects the nester is responsible for spooking the cattle, so he gathers his posse, they wrangle and hogtie the nester, blindfold him, sit him on his horse at the top of the mesa, and give it a good slap on the ass to send it hurdling over the ledge where all those cattle lemming-ed themselves. According to legend, dark skies continue to plague that area to this day, sightings of Sawyer's ghost posse still haunt the thunderclouds trying to catch their lost stock, and cowboys know to avoid the mesa because it always causes their animals to mysteriously lose their shit every time they draw near. It's exactly the kind of fun little ghost story you'd expect to hear around a campfire in Red Dead Redemption, but does it really have any connection to the Wild Hunt? I'll be damned if that mysterious nester doesn't give off some serious Odin vibes, but vibes aren't exactly an academic method. I'm not even entirely convinced this legend is as old as 1889. The furthest back I could find this version of the tale was as recorded by folklorist John R. Craddock in 1964's Legends of Texas. Craddock in turn claims he first heard the myth a few years prior to publication from some guy named Roy Ainsworth, whose existence I can't seem to verify beyond this single reference. Internet blogs often gloss Jones's inspiration as coming from Apache mythology, but I can find no reference to such a motif in Apache beliefs outside of discussions of the song. I think trying to trace these ghost riders back to Grimm's Wild Hunt is sadly just another symptom of pointing to “generic sky ghosts” and going “see there it is again!” regardless of actual evidence of direct continuation. To go back to the top of this blurb when I compared it to sun gods, we're staring into the stars here, and it's kinda blinding us.
Design notes, I probably could've stretched this blurb out into a faction sheet if I really wanted to, but my original intention was to draw the singular leader of the Wild Hunt, which after writing this blurb… I'm no longer convinced there was such a thing. I was already too deep into this drawing, however, so I just followed through and pushed that concern onto future Ava. There's not too much to cite, as this was another freestyle, though I did do my best to merge elements from historical Harlequin costumes and depictions of Herne the Hunter, the two most famous incarnations of the Hunt's leader. Antlers are a pain in the ass to draw. Regardless, I'm actually really happy with how this came out. I think I got kinda hung up on how he doesn't look as “vikingy” as most popular cultures would have him, but the more convinced I became that the Wild Hunt isn't a Viking Era concept, the less concerned I became with this gripe. He looks super spooky, which I think is the most important element in the end.