The Wild Hunt - Mythillogical

this episode is sponsored by curiositystream more to come on that shortly [Music] so crofty it's been a bit of a wild week of research hasn't it wild is definitely one word for it i'd go with tiring yes tiring and a little anxiety inducing i've got to say folks uh we are here today to talk about a subject which is more controversial than we expected let's put it that way yeah we thought this was going to be an easy episode we were wrong yep thought it was going to be an easy short episode and we're off to the races instead it may be the longest standalone episode that we do there's no good way to split this one in half so uh let's just muddle through and hope for the best hello everybody my name is charles i'm here today with my uh pet demon sidekick crofty and we're here to talk to you about some myths welcome to mythological hello today's episode is a curious object um i ended up kind of revealing this a little bit over on my on the youtube community tab over on his channel um and i talked a bit about your twitter as well and it's been given us some difficulties in terms of research we had a lot of problems with sources for this one and we had a big body of myths to summarize so without any further ado crofty would you like to reveal today's topic yes today's topic is the wild hunt vildejacked or ah yagdar however it's supposed to be pronounced and that's our first mispronunciation of the day yes there's going to be plenty of them folks because there's a lot of german words going to be in this particular episode as it is primarily seen as a germanic myth or is it done yes that's going to be a little bit of the journey of this particular episode is how germanic is the wild hunt and we'll get into that and how mythological is the wild hunt exactly are we unfortunately just dealing with pure folklore we'll have to wait and see so crofty i'm going to start us out on the right track by saying what was your previous familiarity with the wild hunt well it's quite a common trope in fiction i'm sure quite a lot of people listening will have heard of it in various forms i in particular knew it from jim butcher's dresden files series where it was led by an elf with the title of earl king which comes from van gogh's poem the earl king i also knew of it from the warhammer universe where the wood elves army had the wild hunters of kurnuos and i knew what i thought i knew some of the mythology surrounding it and how some of the mythology developed and discovered in the past few weeks that i was a little bit wrong well for my uh for my two shakes my uh previous knowledge this was almost entirely limited to a just a generic knowledge of this myth that it is a myth out there when i'm going into this i thought that this was like a proto-indo-european myth that had shown up repeatedly throughout european history and i think unfortunately today we're going to be challenging that idea quite a bit in terms of my pop cultural knowledge of this i was probably most familiar with this motif from the aptly named the witcher free wild hunt which features the main villains as a procession of spiritual uh horsemen who do indeed ride through the night and in this case they are a group of elves but other than that i didn't have probably the same fictional basis as you crafty i'd actually forgotten about the wood elves example that you gave there but hopefully i have managed to adequately enlighten myself in order to discuss it today crofty do you want to start out for those at home who are not previously familiar with the wild hunt and its general form by giving us a little bit of a definition yes so the term as we interpret it was coined by jacob grimm in a section of his book the deutsche mythology which collected a variety of myths and folklore from germany dating back several centuries to give a bit of context to this jacob grimm while he's most well known perhaps for his collaboration with his brother on grimm's fairy tales he was also a respected folklorist a respected legal scholar and a scholar of linguistics um in which much of his work concerned finding ways of unifying the history of germany so finding the origins of the various germanic languages finding a unified origin for various forms of germanic folklore and also studying the history of the legal systems of various german states which culminated in a brief career in politics where he was part of the first attempt at a united german parliament the frankfurt parliament in 1848 as he was quite a strong supporter of a unified germany which will become quite relevant when charles goes into detail on him later on yeah so the way that he defined the wild hunt was that it was a host of other worldly riders generally heard before their scene and recognizable by the thunderous cacophony of hooves the barking of monstrous hounds the cries of hunting horns all of which were louder and much more terrifying than any mortal hunting party could create and this was mostly seen and heard throughout november and december associated with the winter solstice and also associated with the blurring of barriers between the mortal world and the other world and so in many traditions it was also seen as heralding a change of seasons the leader of the hunt jacob grimm specified that the leader was odin but did also suggest that other traditions had other leaders generally a god or a dead hero who were usually associated with the crossing over of the dead and the host itself can be made up of a combination of spirits of the dead spectral hounds elves fairies demons practitioners of magic who are using a form of spirit projection and mortals who've been swept up in the frenzy there are a few related terms that i'm going to briefly define as well that have been used by mythographers and folklorists in more recent times one particular one is the furious host which tends to refer to a host of dead knights or warriors which are often determined to engage in a battle the infernal hunt or infernal host which refers to christianized depictions which specify the host as being from hell or being from a form of purgatory we might also be using terms such as spirit procession which tends to be used when describing hosts that share a lot of aspects of the wild hunt of the furious host but will be passing peacefully and may even speak to onlookers and we'll also be mentioning a phenomenon called the witches sabbath in which the spiritual host is made up entirely of witches projecting a double of themselves while their body remains in their bed which is similar to what we would call astral projection and they would be roaming abroad at night led by usually a pagan goddess of magic i don't think i missed anything there charles unless you've got anything to add no what i really then have to add going off that was the question that hangs around a lot of grimm's construct there's coffee just defined it of the wild hunt and of the various umbrella traditions that it holds is how consistent was it with the idea of a single belief as jacob grimm himself argued so his argument was very much as you said before that the wildcat consisted of a single belief that like we stemmed from a pre-christian era the unfortunate reality in the course of doing our research is i think we came to disagree with this concept crafty we honestly from what i've seen in terms of evidence and interpretation i feel like jacob grimm's definition of the wild hunt is really the birth of the wild hunt in this kind of collated cohesive form and that the origins of its actual definition really rely on a selective reinterpretation of quite a wide variety of different traditions i'm inclined to agree with you there as the listeners will be finding out of the course of the episode okay crofty before we get into the problems surrounding the construct of the wild hunt as defined by jacob grimm i just want to take a moment to talk about this episode's sponsor so this episode is brought to you by curiositystream curiositystream is an affordable subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including its own exclusive original series i've recently been watching through their series the nile five thousand years of history which tracks the critical role they're ever played in the development of ancient egyptian society you'll learn about how denial shaped day-to-day life for ordinary egyptians throughout the last five millennia and influenced their understanding both with the wider world and the afterlife i'm currently exploring making a video myself on one of the lesser-known periods of egyptian history so this was the perfect thing to get myself in the mindset and if ancient egypt isn't your thing curiosity stream covers a wide range of other content on topics such as history science technology music and sports that can be easily streamed to a device of your choosing so go to curiositystream.com the histocrat or click on the link in the description below to get unlimited access to the world's top documentaries for under 20 dollars a year that's just 1.67 a month and with the promo code histocrat you can save another 25 of your purchase so try curiosity stream today so i think it would be valuable for us to briefly talk about where jacob grimm was coming from in the way he formulated his mythology so as crofty mentioned beforehand many of the claims and interpretations of myths and folklore that he collected and presented in deutsche mythology seem to be very much shaped by his own preoccupation with germany's national borders and there seems to be some evidence that he was attempting to create as you said very much a unified mythology for the germanic and scandinavian peoples of northern europe this worked very much in line with his kind of political concerns and his political sympathies with the leading question within germany of the day which were the question of lesser germany or greater germany being formed as a cohesive political unit so what this refers to is lesser germany in the form of the eventual german empire that was recreated in the 1870s which consisted of the then state of prussia combined with the other german states but not including austria which itself was a large multinational empire which included territory in places like hungary southern poland modern romania you know austria what is now the czech republic and ultimately as i said this question would be resolved in favor of leicester germany jacob grimm was very much in favor of greater germany as shown by his involvement with the frankfurt parliament as a result of these various sympathies he considered the job of much of his foe court as i said to establish a unified mythology for the germanic peoples there are also some problems of his methodology so for a start he tended to consider reported folklore as having an antiquity greater than that of available medieval and early modern texts and the reason for this was really was that he just didn't believe that the kind of common folk were capable of altering the practices that they inherited from in earlier periods and they very much continue to use these rituals without really comprehending their meaning and crofty the comparison i would give here which is a bit more of a lighthearted comparison is if you look at the development of fan fiction on the internet you will learn how very much untrue that idea is that a pre-existing belief or practice when given to a particular human community will stay frozen in time and used without much knowledge of its origins yeah i would also add to that that if he was correct on that a lot of our previous episodes will be much shorter yes particularly dragons yokai and i don't think we'd have a spring healed jack episode at all yeah i think king arthur falls under that as well as we saw with all the reinterpretations that happened over the centuries so he also his interpretation of what ancient religion looked like is very much out of step of our knowledge of what a lot of pre-christian religions actually looked like so in 19th century a lot of thought regarding pagan religions was that they were primarily concerned and based around fertility rights and rituals which if you look to any ancient religion is a passionately false statement like many ancient religions including those of ancient rome greece norse mythology etc those did have festivals and rights that were definitely associated with fertility but they did not form anywhere near the single thread of those particular belief systems and ways of looking at the world yeah i think a lot of uh rights surrounding death and ancestors would also be another major threat of those kind of older religions that grimm seems to ignore yeah so i think it's best for us to say that in summary grimm's work was highly influential and he should be lauded for bringing together a basic body of associated folklore but it should be seen in the light of the problems that we have raised and many of his more exact concerns and claims regarding the origins of certain legends are a lot more suspect and most scholars that talk about the wild hunt have thrown out a lot of his claims as a result however two major assumptions of the methodology that he used seemed to have remained fairly constant within the various pieces of literature that i looked at on their subject and there's a reason that unlike some previous episodes we haven't yet given our sources and it's probably because we discuss problems with some of these sources as they come up but don't worry we are we are getting to it so those two major assumptions that have kind of remained within the literature are that the various forms associate with his wild hunt construct were derived from a single untarnished pre-christian belief and that this belief then either diversified during the christian era or was actively demonized and then the second point was that folklore recorded in more recent times can be used to augment and interpret information from genuinely ancient and medieval sources even if there are no intervening sources that show any degree of continuity between these periods and i think you can for some of these sources you can also show you could also add geographical separation between the two as well without any evidence being shown of continuity between those locations yeah those issues will certainly come up when i get onto the british variations of the wild hunt later on so up until recently this interpretation of the wild hunt myth as being a pre-christian uh mythology has been the predominant one as discussed by folklorists such as catherine briggs carlo ginsberg and eva pox often this discussion took the form of a possible linkage between these pre-christian popular beliefs and early modern ideas associated with witchcraft that crofty kind of touched on when he was defining various terms and it quite frequently contains assertions that the wild hunt was one of those kind of indo-european-wide traditions that we have discussed in various forms in previous episodes particularly in the dragons episode where we talked about the idea of the recurring motive of a storm god or a hero of some type contending with a serpent within various indo-european cultures and this kind of uh tradition has continued right up until recently the most recent major articulation of the theory was in the form of uh claude lekker two how do i pronounce that i've been going with le coutas let's might be another possible one there uh the work is called phantom armies of the night the wild hunting the ghostly processions of the undead um which i would describe as a useful but highly disorganized catalogue of the various ghostly traditions of europe and this very much comes down on the side that i've mentioned beforehand that this wild hunt uh myth and construct that we really identify as coming from jacob grimm was a cohesive hole in earlier times in the second half of the 20th century however it seems like a small number of scholars really started to push back against this it first started in kind of a limited way amongst authors such as gustav heyingson wolfgang behringer and john claude schmidt um who largely noted that there was a policy of textual evidence that directly connected the full construct of the nocturnal procession back to ancient times however i think several of those authors either then went on to say however the antiquity of this myth is clear even if there is a positive evidence uh or i think one of them also recanted that position as well probably the most well-known refutation of this idea in the last 10 years has been that of the historian and folklorist ronald hurton who is probably known for his wide range of various writings since the 1990s on all aspects of pagan uh traditions of beliefs within europe i knew him best from his book on druids which i used to inform my video on the subject on his channel which was blood and mistletoe and i would describe ronald hudson as someone who is sympathetic towards many pagan beliefs and new uh neo-pagan beliefs out there currently but he is also a historian and he is willing to be critical and point out lack of evidence and in a 2014 article titled the wild hunt the witches sabbath and also in a section of his book in 2017 the witch he has argued that the modern understanding and idea of the wild hunt is largely just an amalgamation of a varied body of hunt related myths and that there is no clear textual evidence that shows a single myth with all these component parts prior to jacob grimm he further asserts that with the possible exception of some components of an element that we will get into which is uh a more female-based spirit procession that crofty hinted on his definitions there is little in the way of any direct evidence that any of the traditions within the umbrella of the wild hunt are truly pre-christian in origin in fact it may be plausible that development of many of the traditions that later would be amalgamated into the wild hunt may actually have come come about and been spread into popular consciousness by the church wishing to demonize some local traditions in fact many of these traditions that we have in terms of textual evidence are only really known of first from church denunciations sort of the original is it the streisand effect yes where you try and uh suppress something and instead make it much more widespread possibly um that in itself is something of a theory rather than a certainty but it fits the evidence that i've seen presented a little better than the claims of a single belief that was diversified in christian times so to before we go any further folks i really want to lay my cards on the table and say that i am not obviously a linguist i am not a folklorist by any means and many of the authors that we discussed before and have better knowledge of the actual first-hand sources i'm also handicapped by the fact that many of the sources are published in german and i do not speak german and some of them are just difficult to access at all however in my role and knowledge of history and as someone who kind of prides himself on inquiry and working from evidence i personally am more inclined to side with hutton's argument that the wild hunt is really a construct that was pulled together from a wide range of folkloric traditions by jacob grimm i'm also inclined to side with ronald hutton on this one so with our positions kind of put on the table there i want to say that what i'm really going to devoting my section to and i think crofty as well we're going to be simply discussing the various wide strands and categories of mythology and folklore throughout europe which can conceivably come under the umbrella term of wild hunt or wild hunt related just to give you folks a sense of the different focal orientations that we personally feel were probably amalgamated later on but there's definitely some worthwhile and useful folklore in there for my sections i just want to quickly say that i am going to be using as i mentioned before ronald hutton's article and his section of the book the witch i'm also going to be referring back to like a show's uh work phantom armies of the night because whilst i disagree with many of the conclusions he played he presents and the examinations that he includes in that book the first-hand sources of the folklore i think is really useful and genuinely interesting so i have used some sections on that particularly when i'm going to be discussing the wild hunts association with odin right crofty so i think it's fair to say that of the various traditions that later came under the umbrella term of the wild hunt there are kind of two major strands and one minor strand the major strands are the procession of the marching dead as a single tradition by itself and the separate female-led spirit procession that as you mentioned before is usually led by a goddess figure from a pre-christian religion or a mythological figure or even a biblical figure the minor strand that's kind of been added into this as well there are also quite a few different focal traditions around just the tradition of a single spectral huntsman so for example uh claude like a show kind of demonstrated that there was three major guises of this so one is as a wandering demon who is seeking out sinners one is as a human huntsman who is condemned for his sins to hunt without rest and then finally as a wild man who is instead chasing a human or a supernatural prey this final thread is quite disparate in nature there doesn't seem to be a obvious evolution and origin point as best we can tell for this so we're going to kind of treat that one on a case-by-case basis when we come to talking about individual regional figures and traditions associated with the wild hunt before then we're going to start by looking kind of at the historical development of the two major strands that we mentioned beforehand so the first of these is what is termed the processions of the marching dead so it has been known from at least roman and greek times that the night generally has been considered a time in which overworldly elements were more prevalent in addition to this we have things like scattered reports of ghostly armies seen on ancient battlefields or as importance of coming events however there is no clear evidence of any major accounts of wandering armies of the dead that seem to date from roman and greek times and that was a conclusion that was largely led to by the scholar calo ginsburg in fact there are even some quotes from early christian era roman authors for example the author tertullian that specifically condemned that this belief uh is relevant although i will point out that the fact that he's had to condemn it probably indicates that some people at the time did believe this so his quote is in relation to the works of homer and it comes from his work de anima to quote him it was believed that the unburied dead were not admitted into the infernal regions before they had received a proper supporter as in the case of homeless patroclus who earnestly asks for a burial of achilles in a dream on the ground that he could not enter hades through any other portal since the souls of the supported dead kept thrusting him away he then goes on to say they also say that those souls which are taken away by a premature death wander about hither and liver until they have completed the residue of the years which they have lived through had it not been for their untimely fate now either their days are pointed to old man severally and if so appointed i cannot suppose them capable of being shortened or if notwithstanding such an appointment they may be shortened by the will of god or some powerful influence then i say such shortening is of no validity and they still may be accomplished in some other way so similar to the lack of any clear evidence for possessions of the wandering dead coming from greek and roman accounts we simply lack any such beliefs from northern europe within this period with one minor exception that i'll get into a lot of this may stem from the fact that there is almost a complete lack of indigenous written accounts during this era and any future claims that have been claimed that there were particular belief structures acted during this time i will say are largely based on back projection from later accounts and folklore so the one exception we have which has occasionally been linked to the wild hunt is a second-hand report that comes to us from the roman author tacitus who is best known for being the son-in-law of the roman general agriculture who completed the conquest of britain and i believe also produced the works the histories and the animals this quote from him however comes from his work on tribes of germania and it concerns a germanic tribe known as the harry and i'll find my quote here so this is him discussing people who are native to the region of suebia and he says i need only give the names of the most powerful the harry the hell the cons the manimi the helici and the naharanavari and the nahan aravali wow that one's hard in the territory of the nahan oh you had to say again didn't he in the territory of the nahan ar valley there is shown to be a grove hallowed from ancient times presiding priest dresses like a woman but the gods in latin translation are caster and pollocks that expresses the power of the divine presence their actual name is alci there are no images no trace of foreign superstition they are certainly worshipped as young men and brothers as for the harry they are superior in strength to the other peoples i have just mentioned savages they are and they enhance their innate ferocity by trickery and timing they blacken their shields and stay in their bodies and choose pitch-black knights for their battles the shadowy horror of this ghostly army inspires a mortal panic for no enemy can stand so strange and devilish sight defeating battle always begins with the eyes so that particular quote has been interpreted by many later authors as associated with an early belief in the wild hunt i think it's important to point out however that that at no point involves a procession of the spectral dead it is simply a case of human warriors using a particular tactic to mimic spirits so that is essentially the closest textual evidence we have any sort of wild hunt uh being present in northern europe in roman times and i think we have to agree crafted that is pretty slim as evidence goes i'd say so as we move to the early medieval period we do have a small smashing of accounts of the wandering dead so uh probably the most notable i found is that of the sixth century byzantine historian procopius who reported secondhand again like tasters that there was a myth that comes from the north west coast of goal which i assume means brittany or the region below that invisible companies of the dead were shipped by the local peoples across the britain on route to the afterlife much like tacitus said procopius never ventured as far as gaul so we're uncertain as to how much this is actually a genuine traditional belief local to the region it may be something that was reported to him spuriously the one thing i'll point out as well that these are invisible companies of the dead to the best of my knowledge they're not associated with the night or any specific time of the year as the later wild hunt is as shown by in crafty's definition as we reach kind of the 11th and 12th century however this is where we begin to see a fully fledged tradition of wandering visible companies the dead that emerge throughout france and germany so briefly this includes accounts such as that of rodolphus glabber of cunning who claimed a living monk had met a frog of christians they had been martyred by muslims and that they were preparing to journey to heaven similarly we get an account from the book of visions by oslo of saint emiram who recorded how a vast troop was seen in the sky by two brothers after crossing themselves protection they asked the troop who they are one of the people they're talking to disclosed to them that he is in fact their father who has been actively punished for using someone else's property during his lifetime and that he will only be able to find redemption if his sons return the land to its rightful owners on a similar subject uh whippert who was the archdeacon of tol writes in his life of pope saint leo which i believe was penned approximately around 1066. yeah no that's not correct i just went to 1066 because it's the norman one which was penned approximately around 10.60 there's a company of white quad individuals were seen advancing towards the city of nami these individuals were seen marching in ranks from the morning until three in the afternoon at which point they settled down approached by the local inhabitants they informed them that quote we are souls who have not yet atoned for our sins because we are not pure enough to enter heaven we are visiting the holy sites as penitents i think the thing to point out there is these troops were all seen during the daytime again don't quite yet see this real association with the night but our next account very much brings in that association and it's going to be one that crofty i believe you've been doing a good amount of research into and this was to set it up an account by a norman monk by the name of or derek i believe might be oderick vitalis that's right yes oh derek vitalis from the saint everaldt abbott in lasalle in northern day exactly so he was 11th or 12th century anglo-norman benedictine monk who wrote to contemporary chronicle of norman england this account begins with the birth of christ and i believe continues until the defeat of king stephen england during the english history period known as the anarchy at the battle of lincoln in 1141 and a section of his work that seems to date from the 1130s he chronicles an encounter that was related to him by another norman priest named walter lin who claimed to have met a host on the 1st of january 1091 whilst he was called out to tend a sick man in an outlying area of his parish so crofty i believe you have a detailed description of this encounter for us yes i do so as you said the monk welchelin was returning from attending to a sikh parishioner who was living quite far out in the countryside and so walking down dark country roads he heard the sounds of an army on the march behind him not sure whether this army might be hostile to him he attempted to hide in a grove of medlar trees while they passed however a giant man wielding a club appeared before him barred his way and commanded him to stay where he was the figure then lowered his club and stood beside him as the house passed this host was a thousands strong procession which was separated into several groups so the first group in the procession was a crowd on foot many of whom welch lin knew as recently dead villagers and they were carrying what vitalis describes as the possessions that make up the plunder of a raiding army this is then followed by a group of poll bearers carrying 50 beers as well as two men carrying a tree trunk to which a man that washland recognises as a murderer has been tied and he is being tortured the giant at that point joins the procession behind the pallbearers following this there are a group of women riding side saddle with all of their saddles covered in red hot nails that vitalis describes as being punished for their lettering welshman also recognized some empty horses and empty car carriages as belonging to people that he knew were still alive following these empty horses and empty carriages there is a group of clerics again some of you whom welsh lynn knew and all of whom begged that he pray for their souls finally a troop of knights described as with no colours except that of darkness and flickering flame past at this point welsh lynn realizes that this must be the retinue of heliquin whom we must assume is the giant figure with the club yeah i understand crofty as well there was some inter some claims interpretations are that this also referred like as a name to the whole group rather than one individual yes yes as time goes on it seems to become unclear where the name whether the name refers to individual or the host i believe in this case welshman does specify that he believes hallie quinn's be the giant who's leading them fair enough i could be mistaken in that i could have missed it still like my notes yeah a lot of authors uh when i was reading it seem to be unsure of the exact origin of the word and it suddenly seems to appear associated with with the particular giant figure and with the wider host as well and uh the exact source is is some debate over that exact name but i'm sure we'll get into that later yeah the way that it's written in the story basically is written as if the reader will know who heliquin is yeah it's probably already known as a concept by this point yeah just this seems to be the first written reference to the name so the monk intends to bring proof of what he's just seen back to the abbey and so he quite foolishly attempts to seize one of the riderless horses however as he attempts to get into the saddle his foot is burned by the stirrup and his heart is struck with an icely cold which is quite a common trope in various bits of folklore surrounding processions of the dead where touching the dead both causes the feeling of cold and a physical burn so following this attempt at stealing a horse four knights immediately turn back and accost welcoming three of them attempt to drag him off with them into their procession as punishment for trying to steal their horses when he had not been harmed by their passing however a fourth knight stops them and instead requests that welsh lim pass a message on to his family and asks them to return property that he had unlawfully held as collateral for alone and have that returned to its rightful owners however the priest refused to do that citing that if he found the man's son the man's son would never believe him never believe his story and would refuse to do so and so it's a pointless endeavor and so the knight seizes him by the neck and attempts to strangle him however the monk invokes the name of mary and another knight appears to rescue him and chases off the four this knight reveals himself as walshland's brother saying that he had recently died in england and says that he is atoning for his sins and will be released from his burden the following year he then implores welsh lynn to amend his own ways and the tone of his misdeeds of which there are many and to not tell anyone of this event for three days which is apparently also quite a common trope when seeing these kind these kinds of processions that there is a condition on when you can actually relate the story the following morning when marshland is returned he falls ill and remains ill and feverish for a week and stays bedridden once he begins to recover he then tells the bishop what occurred the point you just mentioned of the witness to this procession falling ill is something that also happened in that account i briefly mentioned by whitbert deacon of tool so when they spoke to the white cloud company of individuals uh who informed them that they were the restless dead next day many of the individuals met with them then fell ill for a period of time so that clearly is a wider trope at this point yeah yes and another wider trope that appears here vitalis claims that he has met welsh lin and claims that he has seen the burn marks on his face and neck from being attacked by the knight and this is also a common trope as proof that the story was real and so after declaring that he's seen this proof he then uses this story as a warning against sin warning that sinners will join this procession of the dead if they don't mend their ways so while there's no hunt involved in this narrative the idea of an army of ghostly knights that are doomed to roam the earth on winter nights under the leadership of this supernatural figure who is associated with the passing over the dead is quite consistent with one of the core ideas of the wild hunt that i mentioned in my initial definition yeah okay thank you for the explanation crofty i think um one big thing to take away as well from this legend that we were touched on before is the developed nature of the legend and the known association of the host with uh heliquin does seem to show the belief in the host was likely pervasive in the region at the time it's kind of also cited by some authors so ginsburg and liquor show both seem to regard this as the moment where the host the dead went from a purely pagan myth to being incorporated into a christian one but as i've previously noted we don't have any previous written accounts of this myth in association with other pagan beliefs and as we've seen many of the trappings of that story so for example the torment of the sinners the urge for wall shelling to repent by his brother and the invocation of mary's name they all seem to be distinctly christian elements in the supposedly pagan story you can't argue this is the point where those christian elements were inserted but we don't have an earlier story to compare it to fundamentally yeah so because it's used very much to say repent for your sins it's possible that it was an original story used as christian propaganda possibly it may have been intended to con yeah it may have been that it may have been used in allegorical sense we just don't know fundamentally so by the late 12th century this legend of harlequin's host also known under names of hurler herletjin our hellowin appears to become quite widely attested throughout england france and the rhineland some theory i saw from rosterton was that northern france is fought to be the epicenter due to its association with norman monks um but i could not find anything further to corroborate that point the supposedly clerical origin of these reports has also led some such as ronald hutton to suggest that this whole trope is as we said largely a result of christian reporting uh designed to discourage folks from believing in these traditions an additional point really to know is that whilst the it kind of contradicts our earlier point was that whilst this helicwin's host name was known to the subject of the story who was himself a monk at no point has ever stated that the common folks would know who this figure is it may be something that a christian monk might know but it doesn't necessarily mean a widespread belief in addition whilst there was an example that you gave within the story of a leader of the host in many of these future kind of reportings that we see throughout this period there is not that much sign of a common leader um a good exception to this is walter maps account uh published in the 1190s where uh the leader of this group is an ancient british king by the name of heller who was doomed to roam for centuries due to a curse but i imagine you're going to get into that a bit later yes i'll be telling that story in full at a later point but again it should be noted this legend is found to the best of my knowledge nowhere outside of england and does not feature directly a host of the dead by the 13th century these practices spread further into places such as spain and germany in germany the very distinctive title of das wutend here or the furious army comes to be associated with this group according to gene called schmidt this spread is also marked by an increasing level of suspicion and hostility by the clerical authors who report it and the reporting of ghostly parades just generally seems to to take on more demonic characteristics again possibly due to it becoming more widely known within popular culture and these clerics wishing to discourage its practice or belief in it when i say demonized i also somewhat mean that in a literal sense as later on in the heliquine we start to see greater presence of demons amongst its ranks so these tails continue on and appear in increasingly greater numbers but largely unaltered in substance during the later middle ages during this time the tradition of the mesney heliquin kind of appears and develops and is continued to be presented in some of a negative light largely by clerical authors as a group comprised of devils that will lead people astray from a christian life over time we also start to see the association of other mythical figures with this procession in different regions with the best examples i have being a former french king by the name of charles v and of course by king arthur who we have talked about plenty in this series um so i will leave my descriptions of those at that i think crofty you're going to revisit them a little bit later when you talk about specific traditions of these regions yeah yeah king arthur does briefly pop up um it should also be noted that during this time harlequin or harlequin increasingly starts to become a byword for scoundrel or rogue in france as we can see uh in some later versions of how this these figures were understood that crofty you'll be going into and in germany the term furious army was increasingly associated with noisiness and loutishness from the 16th century we also start to see some more detailed references that give some sense the common person's understanding of what these hosts would consist of so we can still during this time really see two different traditions of these hosts as either being a demonic entity or as a more penitent group of the dead so an example i have of this uh is that in 1508 johan gila von kaiserberg which is the best name enunciated the common people's view of the furious army as simply a band of regular people who had suffered violent deaths and were forced to wander the land until judgment throughout this period a more timed component also starts to appear to the host as crofty mentioned where they start to be associated with midwinter and the periods of november and december along with the four ember days which appear each year in the liturgical calendar of western christian churches there's also an account by protestant theologian johannes agricola who recorded how a priest near isil ben i told him the furious army was seen annually by his parishioners at the beginning of lent and that it was now said to include some people who were yet living for whom inclusion was said to be important and a prediction of the specific form of death that they would suffer so that is a very generic and heavily summarized over the view of how these traditions developed up until kind of the 16th century we're going to go into more specific details on some of these aspects later on i'm going to conclude however this section by saying that by the 16th century the various regional beliefs in these nighttime processions in places like england and france seem to be starting to fade and disappear or taking on different forms in england the associated term the hullaway slowly disappears and been reported over the course of the 15th century and actual reports of belief amongst common folk in the heliquin vanish from france during a similar period the exception to this really is that in germanic folklore these beliefs and traditions seem to remain strong into the early modern period and i will talk more about how these associations continued on towards the 19th century and jacob grimm's encounter and coalition of these myths in the course of me talking about the germanic god odin and his association with the wild hunt if i may add as you say about the beliefs in the heliquin disappearing towards the 15th century it has been suggested i think mainly by um lekito that that coincides with the rise of protestantism as the idea of the harlequin fits with some ideas in catholic tradition of purgatory whereas in protestantism purgatory was pretty much removed from the belief system and so the idea of an army undergoing so many years of penitence before being able to pass on very much fell out of favor in the religious community then yeah i mean i'm not particularly familiar with the development of protestant protestantism with france i'm much more familiar with its suppression later on so that certainly could be the case i don't really have any knowledge to say anything either way so that is a very rough overview of that particular school of uh traditions and beliefs associated with the later umbrella term of the wild hunt from their crafty i'm going to move on to give a similar description of the spirits procession okay so this usually consists in varying traditions of a retinue of a supernatural female who may take either as her retinue spirits or even humans predominantly living women but there are some traditions in which is both women and men the one thing i want to mention is i i think you'll probably go more into this crafty when you talk about your various figures that you've been examining uh along this line of the various traditions associated with the wild hunt is there is perhaps more evidence of this being a more ancient tradition than the wandering dead concept yeah it seemed seems to be that there was a tradition there that was very much co-opted by christian writers again as a sort of warning against sin by the looks of things so i have again summarized this tradition its development quite heavily um it seems in terms of the wild hunt that was later presented by jacob grimm it is somewhat less of a factor than the possession of the marching dead but it does contain a high degree of similarities and a number of figures who go on to be associated with wild hunts in future folklore so the earliest example of this residue i could find is given in the works of the canon episcopy which is a set of canon law by an unknown author that likely comes from the 9th or 10th century it's not 100 sure exactly where it derives from if i may yes it's like i go into that quite a bit of detail in my section and i have it sized as being written by by regino the abbot of proom in 899 fair enough and the main feature of this canon law is that it denounces the supposed belief by many women that on certain nights they would ride with a goddess figure known as diana across the world whilst they remained sleeping in their bed so crofty do you want to talk a little bit about that yes so the original quote that i have from the canon episcopal is thus certain wicked women turned back to satan seduced by demonic illusions and phantasms believe of themselves and profess to ride upon certain beasts in the nighttime hours with diana goddess of the pagan or herodias and an innumerable multitude of women and to traverse the great spaces of the earth in the silence of the dead of night and to be subject to her laws as of a lady and on fixed nights be called into her service so it doesn't explicitly mention a hunt but the idea is very much implied when it states that the women are riding in service of diana who was the roman equivalent of the greek hunter goddess artemis this is later incorporated the same text into a text called the decretum by the bishop bouchard of worms which was written in 1066 in which bouchard further elaborates with the quote have you believed what many women turning back to satan believe and affirm to be true as you imagine in the silence of the night when you have gone to bed and your husband lies in your bosom that while you are in bodily form you can go out by closed doors and are able to cross the spaces of the world with others deceived by the like error and without visible weapons slay persons who have been baptized and redeemed by the blood of christ he also later goes on to mention that these same women whose spirits have left their bodies would fly into the clouds where you have waged battle on others and so these stories are again warning of the evils of witchcraft and paganism and do again contain several aspects of the wild hunt as mentioned earlier so a spiritual host riding abroad during the night led by a god associated with hunting death or the natural world engaging in hunting or killing and doing battle in the sky yeah i think birchard also pulls in another thread that will be useful to talk about in the evolution of the spiritual host which is an additional condemnation that he includes alongside that collection of decrees crofty i believe is of women who believe that certain times of the year they must spread a table with food drink and free knives so that if those three sisters come on quoting him directly here whom past generations of stupidity called parsai which is a roman word for the fates of roman mythology whom past generations of stupidity called parsai they can regal themselves and that these sisters were then expected to provide benefits to the household in return for this provision yes there do seem to be a few suggestions that belief that this initially came from a much more benevolent tradition so it was suggested by william of overn the bishop of paris in the early 13th century that there was a pagan belief of a host of ladies of the night who were led by a woman called either satya or dame abundia she was thought to be the golic variant of the roman goddess of prosperity abundancia which is where we get the word abundance from a goddess who was also associated with the cornucopia or the horn of plenty which came up last episode this version of the host of women would enter homes at night and they would consume any food that was found in uncovered dishes and drink anything that was found in uncorked bottles and then these vessels would all magically refill the 13th century text the thesaurus popperum which was attributed to the scholar peter of espana elaborates on this and claims that this visit would then bring prosperity and plenty to any household that had left open food offerings for demobundia so it would seem from other writings such as the abba to prom and bush out of worms and certain other christian figures that by associating these pagan beliefs with satan and then subverting the idea of bringing abundance and prosperity into the idea of gluttony christianity then attempted to subvert these beliefs and turn the benevolent witches into a kind of infernal host yes certainly and it also kind of ties together the two separate strands at that point that we just briefly mentioned beforehand of when you're talking about burchard of worms account you have these separate kind of spiritual procession then you have the three sisters who enter a residence and partake of food and provide benefits to household for it it's in the 13th century that we start to see those two strands kind of be pulled together into a common tradition yes and this same tradition also appears in the colty poem the roman de la rose and this case the figure that leads the host is known as lady a habbond who had an entourage known as the good ladies they're comprised of human women whose spirits flew out of their bodies whilst they slept and this is specifically said that as they were spirits this host had no problem entering houses through any crack so again considering on from birchard's theme there around the same time crofty in support of what you were saying about increasing demonization of these figures the sermons of berthold of regensburg warns against the belief of these nighttime spirits for whom food is left and he gives quite a range of names associated with them he calls them the benevolent the benevolent ones the malevolent ones the night women the blessed ladies or the ladies of the night so there's clearly still some variety in tradition here and you are still seeing variations whether the host is still called diana or it's called herodius or bensosia so crofty do you want to talk a little bit about those latter two figures yes because herodias is in fact an entirely christian creation herodias was actually the daughter of king herod and she was the woman who was blamed for the death of john the baptist herodias was a virgin who lusted after john the baptist and vowed to give herself to no other man when her father king herod discovered this he ordered john the baptist to be decapitated and ordered that the head he brought herodias on a platter in her grief she tried to embrace the head however john's head flew away from her and exhaled a strong wind which tore open the roof and carried herodias into the sky where she would be eternally tormented by saint john's anger in the form of this wind pursuing her so a 12th century text called issengrimus claimed that one-third of humanity which is interpreted to mean adult women with the other two-thirds being adult men and children serves her during the second half of the night specifically from the time that we would now call the witching hour john of salisbury also in the 12th century claims that the host of herodias would feast and riot and carry out other rights where some are punished and others rewarded for their merits moreover infants are set out and appear to be cut to pieces eaten and gluttonously stuffed into the witch's stomachs then through the mercy of the witch ruler they are returned so once again bringing this association to one of gluttony and taking that the next step to the sin of cannibalism and i believe i should come back to you after that one yep no problem so from this point crofty where we start to see these various diversifications uh of the leaders of this host and of the various types and forms it takes we also see going into the kind of them high middle ages these legends really spreading throughout much of western europe so it now comes to include the regions of kind of in england france italy and germany by the mid-14th century this particular procession and the figure that is led by it has recognized would become a figure known as perchter or burshtan who i'm not going to go into in great detail here let's just say she is a somewhat more forbidding figure than the leaders of the house have been presented to this point with the exception of the last couple that you mentioned there crofty i will talk a little bit about her when i talk about specific german myths and a good thing to keep in your mind here is more of a comparison to someone like baba yaga than the ideas that we've had of this figure up to this point in italy a nightmare possession was reported that consisted of both of living men and women known as the tragenda which is again led by either diana or herodias in the 15th century descriptions continue to multiply further i'm going kind of through a bit of a list here i must admit with names for the leader of this possession being those such as habundia finzen saksemper and sakriya so according to professor thomas von hasselbach of vienna in the 15th century it was reported that pershita was in fact an alias of habundia and this is where we kind of see an element of perch that i will go into and it's claimed that she and the possession are active at the feast of the epiphany that ends the christmas season so we do see a kind of a comparison you could make potentially there with the spirits of the dead restless dead where they are kind of active in mid-winter sort of period although i'm not sure if they're ever identified as specifically being active during the christmas season in germany there also seems to become further levels of equation between these figures um for example we start to see mention of figures such as figure known as unhold of frau birther or frau helt of frau holt who is also equated to the abunda or satya that you mentioned that was um given in the works of william of of vern and really these stories begin to kind of adopt something of a south german distribution in which the older tradition of the female figure who would reward offerings of general of food with generosity was preserved despite the efforts of the church to condemn these practices a good example of these condemnations comes from a contemporary account in england in the 1400s from the homily dives and pauper which condemns the practice of leaving out food and drink at new year to feed a figure known as all hold it was again uh quite easily acquainted with the figure of unhold i mentioned beforehand who would go on to kind of evolve into the figure of holder and really be incorporated into the figure of frau holt who we i believe discussed in the baba yaga episode to quite an extent yes i think it was actually a story that was in grimm's fairy tales of rauhal which brought quite a lot of resemblance to a specific baba yaga story and did cover these themes of her treating you well if you were generous to her and responding angrily if you're hostile towards her yeah very much so so crofty one thing to then add on is that by the time we reach the 14th century in addition to kind of these church chroniclers we really start to see occasional records of these figures actually appearing in trial records um usually in the form of testimony by people who claim to have been involved in these spiritual processions themselves so i believe you have a couple of early examples of trials in which these figures were raised yes a bit light on detail there was a french magician in paris i believe in 1319 and he specified that he gained his knowledge of magic by traveling in spirit form with and i quote good ladies and the souls of the dead so one of the earlier texts that does incorporate the idea of witches leaving their bodies and also spirits of the dead in the same host i then also have men brief mention of two magicians who are on trial in milan in 1370 who also claimed that they traveled as part of a spiritual host which was made up of both living and dead people and was led by an unnamed supernatural female figure to those i can also add a pair of celebrated trials that were held in milan in 1384 and 1390 in which two women stated that they had gone to the society or game of an individual by the name of lady oriente at which they paid homage to her and what's interesting to me is that the presiding inquisitor over this trial referred to this figure as diana or herodias so we see the continuation of those figures association was that inquisitor fra beltramino de kerner schooler it may well be yes because i have a bit of information on that where he refers to this as the game of diana he i don't have a specific date just that it's 14th century uh he forced a confession from a woman named petrina in which he claims that petrina traveled in the form of a spirit or an animal with the host which would kill animals and eat their flesh before placing the bones back into the skin where diana would then strike the animal's skin with her staff and resurrect the animals yep that very closely matches the description i have here so my scripture indicates that this host was indeed joined by every kind of animal except for the donkey and the fox and as you said it feasted on beasts that were then restored to life one factor i think to add that you don't seem to have their crafty is this host also visited homes to bless them and also includes detail that uh this orienty who's referred to as diana or herodias instructed her followers in the arts of both herb law and divination it seems we got information on the same trials from different sources yeah one minor thing to kind of note is we also as big as ronald hutton points out we see a little bit of this tradition mixing with the separate tradition of the marching dead at this point as this testimony i just mentioned i believe uh also includes a note that some members of the companies were in fact executed criminals who were shamed by their uh role in life one slight thing that i'd like to mention is that lecture suggests that the diana that is mentioned in these various accounts is not in fact the roman diana he references writings of saint martin of braga which is in the region of northern portugal that was formerly part of galicia in which he wrote in the 6th century claiming that the diana known in western europe was in fact a celtic goddess of the forests rather than the roman hunter goddess and that the name was a latinization of a goddess alternately named as dianam or dai anu in asturias in spain and he also thought has to be connected to the irish goddess danu this is quite a tenuous i think admittedly and only lacuto seems to make it but there are also others that try and make different links to celtic figures rather than germanic figures that i'll be discussing later on so i thought i should mention that at this stage yeah there is quite a lot of work people have done trying to connect uh various names uh to the wild hunt kind just on a basic linguistic similarities very little of it to me seems to be actually based in direct evidence or accounts it is very much reconstructive uh speculative work i'd agree there um just some of the figures then became quite prominent later on yeah and that does seem to be based on these kind of tenuous links so i thought i should introduce that at this stage if that was okay yeah i mean i'm gonna spoil a warning to everyone listening at home um the association with probably the biggest figure with the wild hunt hunt which is odin is equally tenuous so uh uh we're not really gonna judge these people because people have been making similar links for a long time so crofty these beliefs of a company have generally been evident female spirits continue to persist despite kind of discouragement from christian sources in a broad zone throughout much of southern germany the alps in italy well into the 16th and 17th centuries so i have an example here from 1586 of a figure known as the shaman of oberstorff which was a man by the name of conrad steklin who claimed to be a witch hunter himself he actually ended up being tried and executed for witchcraft and this particular detail that i have that's relevant to this spectral group comes from i believe his testimony of his trial in 1586 he was executed the next year so at his trial he claimed to have traveled long distances with a group known as the nakhtsar which was the night company and i thought this was interesting because according to him this company consisted of both men and women this sort of theme is also echoed in an early 17th century by a citizen of luzon in modern switzerland who wrote up a chronicle that recorded a belief in the quote good army or blessed people who visited favored and deserving individuals and it was said that unlike the portion we saw beforehand of where individuals who were living who were seen to be in this army saw important of their death instead this army was said to include people who were still alive and their appearance there was considered instead an honor rather than important of their doom that's an interesting one um it is i unfortunately did not have a lot of time to go into it but i is one more interesting interpretation of it yeah this seems to be one of the few positive accounts that sort of come out of this after um christianization of the legend really well i have another example of that as well so one thing that's also going to do is the seventh the one thing that's also pointing to as evidence is believed considered to persist uh comes from sicily of all places which is quite far removed from germany there are various other traditions as well i'm summarizing quite heavily here for time in sicily in the 17th century this belief seems to persisted in the form of a group of figures known as the ladies from outside so this consists of small groups of beautiful fairy like women often strangely marked by the tension of having hands taken from animals what also interests me is that this group again seems to be led by a figure of various names often referred to as the queen of the fairies but what's kind of froze me is i don't see any direct links in the names chosen with previous versions of this myth so the names i had listed here were in guanata isabella and sibilia or sibila sybella c-y-b-e-l-e nope s-i-b-i-o-a ah because yeah my my first thought then was um cybele who was an equivalent of gaia pre-greek in fact but that would that would again be making a very massive linguistic leap with no real yeah isabella is the goddess of the fiery jeans as far as i'm aware in the anatolian peninsula which is a pre-greek mythology period of belief and that is that would be an incredibly tenuous link yeah i mean the furthest east i understand she spread was she made it as far as roads and crete um is my understanding but again your understanding is off because she was actually taken into the roman pantheon at one point but we're getting off topic here yes we're doing what we've just criticized of making tenuous linguistically yes exactly sam yeah we're not immune to it the last thing to add to this group is that sometimes this figure this female leader has a male consort or simply the group as a whole has a male attendant and very much in keeping with previous traditions these figures were known to visit and bless houses uh or simply to dance and feast within other houses as well these figures also do appear in trial records from this late 16th century from people who claimed that they had received such a visit and were promptly informed on to the inquisition for the offense of claiming to travel with the ladies which is listed in a sicilian penitential from the late 15th century i'm going by uh ronald hutton's claims here so i think the summary of all that crofty is that there is a widespread body of evidence that there was a belief in a host of supernatural or superhuman women often associated with traveling nocturnally sometimes with the christmas season that ran from the 9th century through to the end of the medieval period and into the early modern period and as i will discuss a little bit coming forward many of these beliefs then continued on into later folklore and appear to have had at least some influence over grimm's depiction of the wild hunt and of further depictions and associations of the wild hunt by more modern authors okay crafty so that is everything i have in terms of my chronological kind of review of those traditions what i think we're going to kind of do now is try and go into more depth on the individual regional traditions and major figures who were had their own body of legends or beliefs some of which associated them with the wild hunt so we we actually get into the fun folklore yes exactly okay so we've kind of divvied these up between us you you did take friends uh but we've kind of discussed some of those traditions already uh along with spain and that but i think you're primarily here going to focusing on beliefs associated with wild hunt in britain and wales specifically yes yes so would you like me to start and then you can move on to uh the germanic traditions to bring the episode to a close indeed let's uh let's go with that then yep so i will start with some nice folklore from my adopted country of wales is it dot adopted when you invade and take something over crofty don't say it like that they might kick me out so yes the place that i showed up in and said right i'm living here now if you really want to be pedantic charles i'm just the first citizen i swear yes nothing wrong with that so wales has quite an interesting figure that for the most part seems to occur pretty much in isolation i can only find a few small suggestions as a connection to any other figures outside of wales and this is the hero known as gwyn apnead who became associated with a supernatural hunt and leading a group of spectral hounds gwyn was originally part of the retinue of king arthur he featured prominently in the tale of collock and olwen which was an 11th century narrative appearing in the red book of her guest and in the mabinogian which i believe we discussed in our king arthur episode the middle part of gwyn's name app means son of so gwyn's father was named need and this name according to an essay in the 1930s by j.r tolkien is a distortion of the name of the celtic deity noduns who was worshipped as a god of healing god of the sea hunting and dogs by the ancient britons yeah he's he's one of those figures where it's a little difficult to tell because he again was kind of taken over and uh romanized to some extent it's a little difficult to tell how much of his actual celtic character was preserved there exactly so it's a potential connection to a wider mythology as the son of an of what may be a hunter god but we can't really confirm anything more than tolkien's linguistic connection there yeah but it means we get to mention tolkien yep any episode we mentioned tolkien is always good yeah we doesn't matter how tenuous the claim is we'll we'll always jump at that yeah another suggestion as to his origins comes from the welsh folklorist sir john reese writing in his book celtic mythology welsh and manx in which he suggested that gwyn was a god in his own right a god of winter god of death and the god of darkness in his form as a human he has two main exploits which feature like i say in the narrative of kulluk and olwen firstly he kidnaps a woman called cradladd who was the betrothed of another of king arthur's knights guither apgradal gwither gathers his host to take her back and assaults gwyn's stronghold but gwyn defeats them in this battle gwyn kills the knight nython and he forces his son sorry wales he forces his son claire dear to eat his father's heart which drives him mad king arthur upon hearing of this summons gwyn before him he frees all the nobles that gwyn had captured and he forcibly makes peace between gwyn and gwither to do so he makes them agree that craig lad would remain in her father's house and marry neither of them and that gwyn and gwithie would fight for her every first of may from that day until judgement day and whichever of them should be the final victor would have her the second main exploit he has is as part of arthur's hunting party when arthur assists colic by hunting for the turk troith which was a prince who had been cursed into the form of a wild boar which i think you told that story in full i believe charles yes i did yeah the main important aspect then for this is that the giant is baden tells colic that he can't hunt for the turk troth without the aid of gwyn apnead who contains the nature of the devils in annun which is the name for the welsh of the world so from these references we have gwyn as a demigod or as a full god who is bound to engage in battle every year for eternity and who is known as a hunter both potentially from his parentage but also from his deeds on earth all of which do cast him as a very fitting leader for the wild hunt following the tales in the mabinogian he appears in the black book of camardan which is a collection of 13th century manuscripts and he features in a poem the exchange between gwyn apnead and gudeno garan here in it gwyn is described as the lord of hosts and it says that he has traveled many battles many deaths with shields held aloft many heads pierced by spears he also specifies that he saw battle at cairfandu which is a place that is explicitly described as in the other world by the welsh poet tillerson and towards the end of the poem gwyn very explicitly identifies himself as one who escorts the dead to the other world with several verses in which he names fallen warriors that he's escorted and so i'll quote here i was there when gwendoline was slain kedio's son a pillar of poetry when ravens croaked on gore i was there when bran was slain he where did son of wide fame when battle ravens croaked i was there when liaka was slain arthur's son wondrous in woodcraft when ravens croaked on gore i was there when muric was slain carrion's son honored in praise when ravens croaked on flesh i was there when gwelog was slain from a line of princes grief of the saxons son of leonock i was there when the warriors of britain were slain from the east to the north i live on there in the grave i was there when the warriors of britain were slain from the east to the south i live on they are dead so that is quite explicitly suggesting that he is he is somehow involved in assisting the dead and aiding them dead and passing over to the other side particularly the battle dead yeah that sort of role as a psychopomp as a figure that aids in the transfer of the people from the living to the afterlife is a fairly common element that you do see with some of the figures who are associated with the wild hunt so that very much appears in odin's role as a psycho bomb for example so part of odin's role within north forge is that he takes half the warriors who are slain in battle and takes them to valhalla to form part of his own host but we will get into that i just just thought the parallel was interesting to bring up yeah yeah that's it that that's one of the reasons that later folklorists associate gwyn with the idea of the wild hunt because of that connection he does seem to be the only figure in the british isles that i can find who does have that role who's associated with the hunt which is strange particularly given that norse folklore um danish folklore didn't really have much effect on whales because the danes only really got a few small parts of the south welsh the south welsh coast around swansea and the welsh were very territorial and very much kept their own beliefs separate yeah unlike the english where there was much more mingling of yeah of cultures there so the poem um also then specifies them after describing gwyn as a psycho pump specifies that gwyn travels with a pack of hounds led by the greatest of hounds dor math and these hounds are taken to be the anun which were the welsh hellhounds of later folklore a later piece of outlaw has a man by the name of iolo apheu who played the traditional welsh fiddle the crew encountering gwyn amned on a misty halloween night he trades his crew for a bugle and becomes the huntsman-in-chief to gwyn and it was said that every halloween night they would hunt together with the anoon over keda idris in snowdonia and one final story of the hunt in wales which was published in the 19th century but was thought to be older as the leader of the kuna noon not explicitly named as gwyn but there's some debate over whether he is gwyn or whether he's the devil himself and the narrative goes as follows ages ago as a man who had been engaged on business not the most creditable in the world was returning in the depth of night across kevin craney and thinking in a downcast frame of mind over what he had been doing he heard in the distance a low and fear-inspiring bark then another bark and another and then half a dozen and more along he became aware that he was being pursued by dogs and that they were the anoon he beheld them coming he tried to flee but he felt quite powerless and could not escape nearer and nearer they came and he saw the shepherd with them his face was black and he had horns on his head they had come round him and stood in a semicircle ready to rush upon him when he had a remarkable deliverance he remembered that in he his pocket he had a small cross which he showed them they fled in greatest terror in all directions and this accounts for the proverb moynara kethral at igrowess any more than the devil to the cross so i'll apologize if i butchered that bit of welsh there but i tried i think there's a there's a 100 chance of that happening i think i'm getting slightly better yeah yeah well i mean you didn't even hesitate with some of those words yeah rate me out of 10 in the youtube comments half that'll do yeah so there's debate over whether that particular figure is gwen or whether at this point the folklore has become fully christianized and replaced the leader of the countenan with the devil himself but i would say that at that point it's entirely up to the reader's interpretation and if the figure were gwyn it's also quite interesting that this final version gives him horns because that would suggest that there is some english influence as we'll see later on that horns or antlers do become associated with the leader of the hunt towards the end so now i will head across the border into england and start with i think the first mention of anything that resembles the wild hunt in england which is in the peterborough chronicle a continuation of the anglo-saxon chronicle um which was composed by various monks in peterborough following the norman conquest it's a short description of a single sighting dated as sunday the 6th of february 11 27 which picks up shortly after the arrival of a new abbot at the monastery abbott henry um and i'll quote it in full as it's quite a short one again let everyone who hears this believe and let them regard this testimony as true for it soon became common knowledge throughout the country that as soon as he arrived there which was on the sunday when they sing ex-sergey cuare o'domine then immediately afterwards a great number of people saw and heard many hunters hunting the hunters were dark and huge and ugly and all their hounds dark and broad-eyed and ugly and they rode on dark horses and dark stags this was seen in the deerfold in the town of peterborough itself and all the woods that led from the same town to stamford the monks heard the sound of the horns that they blew in the night trustworthy men who were here on watch that night said that as far as they could judge there were about 20 or 30 hornblowers this was seen and heard from the time that abbott henry came there throughout lenten tied to easter the author then goes on to discuss that about henry left the abbot in disgrace about the same time that these hunters disappeared though i don't have the full details from that from what i can gather is that he wasted the funds that were intended for rebuilding the abbey so this hunt if we take it as the wild hunt can be interpreted as an omen of albert henry's less than pious intentions shall we say and well the visual description fits an idea of the wild hunt and i think in fact the dark and huge and ugly description matches what you were saying about early germanic warriors as well charles yep um it does seem to be an entirely christian ghost story that was written as a warning with the evil host being an element of a person's misdeeds rather than a continuation of any previous wild hunt meth yeah i think um it does remind a little bit of all derrick uh vitalisa's account a little bit where um the appearance of the hunt is effectively uh almost like an omen to uh tell the priest walter in to change his sinful ways but that's that is stretching a little bit i must admit yeah the the timings do line up um you know being about what just over just over 35 years after welch lynn's story hmm although actually yeah you said vitalis published his in the 1130s didn't you yeah that is correct yeah so yeah the timings roughly line up so it is quite possible that this had become a widespread christian thing that was being used as a warning you know throughout england and france at this point yeah it is possible it's very speculative though yeah i think we'll leave it at that yeah in england probably the most fleshed out myth that's associated with the hunt is the story of king hurler which we mentioned briefly in the chronology which was first written in the late 12th century so i don't have an exact date in the book de nuges curialum which translates as trinkets for the court by an author called walter map he claims that this comes from earlier folklore but again there's not really much evidence to suggest that it came from anywhere apart from his own imagination but it's an interesting story in its own right so in this narrative king hurler was a king of the ancient britons when out riding one day he encountered a small figure that was no bigger than ape and depending on the translation described as either a dwarf or a pygmy with a long red beard a hairy belly and legs that became goat's feet by way of introduction the dwarf said that he was the king of many kings and chiefs and people numerous beyond count and after giving hurler many flattering compliments he requested the honor of being hell as wedding guest when the king of the french gives his daughter to her which at this point herland knew nothing about an agreement was made that he should attend heller's wedding and that hurler would attend his wedding one year later to the day while the dwarf then swiftly departed when hurler returned home he encountered messengers who were delivering the offer from the king of the french to marry his daughter and so a wedding was arranged before the first course of the wedding feast the dwarf entered with a great multitude of his fellows filling all of the tables that hurler had set out and then pitching his own pavilions in order to accommodate even more of his people the dwarf servants produced vessels and plates of crystal and gold all worked with precious stones but nothing of silver or wood and they provided an endless supply of food so everything that hurler had prepared was left untouched the dwarfs also provided wondrous entertainment weights on the guests hand and foot and gave hurler many gifts before departing the dwarf reminded herler of the agreement that hurler would attend the dwarf's wedding one year hence and so almost one year later the dwarf returned and on the day of his wedding guided hurler and his house to a cave in a large cliff they passed through this cave into a large open space that was lit by many lamps and was filled with dwarfs hurler gave rich gifts to dwarf his wedding and three days and three nights they all celebrated after this the dwarf escorted heller back to the cave entrance and as they were leaving the dwarf presented heller with even more gifts gifts of horses for all of his men gifts of dogs hawks bows and falconry gear the final gift the dwarf gave was a small bloodhound which hurley was told to carry in arms and the dwarf said that none of hurler's company was to dismount from their new horses until the dog should leap down from his bearer the dwarf then said farewell and return returned into the cave upon leaving the cave hurler accosted an old shepherd and asked him for news of his queen by her name the shepherd replied my lord i scarce understand you since i am a saxon and thou britain but i have never heard that name say that she was a queen of the ancient britons wife to king hurler who was reported to have disappeared into this very cliff the saxons having driven out the natives have possessed this kingdom for 200 years so in shock at hearing that some of the company dismounted ignoring the dwarfs warning and upon touching the ground they immediately turned to dust which is a theme that we've heard a few times in previous episodes so upon seeing this heller forbade anyone's dis dismount before the dog did so and walter matt says then that the dog has since never descended so for several hundred years following this walter map says that hurler has endlessly wandered throughout the country with his army and he has been seen far and wide until finally in the year of king henry ii's coronation many welshman saw his house sinking into the river y at hereford which is near the welsh border and from then on their wild march has ceased so some folklorists suggest that hurlers host which in other writings are referred to as the hello thing guy or hella thingus which literally means the family hurler so some other folklorists suggest that this name is an evolution of the harlequin however there's not really any intermediate to suggest how how the kind of host of the damned then became a host for king that had just entered the other world on an agreement with a dwarf yeah the actual textual difference differences are so vast because like you're not actually dealing with a host of the dead anymore as you say it's like a cautionary tale about making deals over anything else that seems a stretch to me yeah you got the basically you've got a mounted host and a leader there exactly and also it's it's only about 70 or so years after the actually no no it's it's actually before the last references to the helicoin as well yeah so uh very very very tenuous uh association yeah it's a bit tenuous um another folklorist um priscilla kershaw suggests that the name is actually a saxon name that has descended from the name herald koenig or cynic i'm a bit unsure of the pronunciation there yeah i think we discussed this briefly beforehand where i mentioned there's various germanic words associated with king uh of which cynic and uh konig are a couple i probably pronounce both of those wrong myself i apologize and that would make some sense in terms of the etymology of the name although it would probably be most sensible to assume that a saxon name was just given to an original character rather than descending from someone specific yeah there have also been suggestions that the name of hurler then went on to become the name of earl king in van gaal's poem the earl king but again that's just an interesting bit of speculation and one final potentially tenuous connection that was made to king hurler is that the narrative itself is quite similar to a welsh story called the predu annun or spoils of the underworld which also appears in the mabinogian i believe that's uh again one of the early main er we uh starring rules of arthur yeah but um i can't really comment on whether there's anything substantial there to connect the two so i'll just leave those as potential connections but i can't say which of them if any are accurate we have a few other local figures that are just interesting folklore and actually seem to just be local word of mouth tales that have eventually been written down the 20th century and i found on the internet just you know hobbyists collecting these stories by the sound of it yeah that wouldn't surprise me yeah so if i can go into them just briefly because that they're interesting and i but i can't really make any connections to anything else there so one of them collected by a website called folk horror revival talks of the story of wild edric which is localized to the county of shropshire which is near the welsh border wild edric was a disgraced saxon lord who initially fought alongside the welsh against william the conqueror before becoming outlaw after william's victory and in 1070 surrendered to william giving him failure in exchange for his freedom and a small manner with his shropshire holdings being given to norman lords the supposed folklore around this however says that prior to the arrival of william the conqueror edric had encountered a fairy princess named godda when he was lost in the forest he asked her to marry him and she agreed as long as she could visit her sisters in the forest as often as she liked and for as long as she liked in this version william the conqueror actually negotiated a piece with edric because he wished to see goddard's otherworldly beauty and after meeting her he said it would be shameful to rob her of her husband after several years of marriage edric then once rebuked godda for spending so long with her sisters in the forest she vanished and edric few years later died despair after searching for the rest of his life and for his sins of submitting to william and of rebuking his wife the fairies then locked him in the ancient lead mines at the town of snail beach and to remain there until all the normans had been expelled from the land and he is only released on the eve of battle where he musters the fey and long dead warriors for the hunt which he leads through the county of shropshire and this has supposedly been seen before the crimean war before the napoleonic wars before the boer wars and before world wars one and two another local legend found on on a website collecting ghosts and legends of the lower calder valley in the north of england and is also mentioned in a 1964 paper called ghost riders in the sky by one susan hillary houston is a legend known either as the gable ratchets or gabriel ratchet or the gabriel hounds it's quite similar to the kunan it's first recorded in 1664 by the reverend oliver heywood he'd recently moved to the calder valley and he wrote there's a strange noise in the air heard in many parts this winter called the gabriel ranchers by this country people the noise is as if a great number of whelps were barking and howling and has observed that if any season sees them persons that should see them die shortly after they are never heard but before a great death or death though i have never heard them and this appeared through the north of england as late as 1879. so finally for this section on england we come to possibly the most famous figure associated with the english wild hunt and that is hearn the hunter jacob grimm was the first one to describe him as the leader of the wild hunt and from this it's spread through popular consciousness and has endured even to modern depictions for example earlier on i referenced um the dresden files series where the wild hunt is led by a fairy with the title of earl king some of this earl king's vassals address him as lord hearn hearn also appears leading a supernatural hunt in the tv series robin of sherwood he leads the wild hunt in susan cooper's the dark is rising novels and appears as part of the wild hunt in the hellboy comics however prior to jacob grimm's book there are only two written records of hearn the first is a short passage in shakespeare's the merry wives of windsor act 4 scene 4 which says there is an old tale that goes hearn the hunter sometimes a keeper here in windsor forest doth all the winter time and still at midnight walk round an oak with great ragged horns and there he blasts the tree and takes the cattle and makes the milk kind yield blood and shakes a chain in a most hideous and dreadful manner you have heard of such a spirit and well you know the superstitious idol-headed eld received and delivered to our age this tale of hern the hunter for a truth that's all that shakespeare says on him and the first record we have of him anywhere the next written reference is a single sentence from 1792 by the writer and engraver samuel ireland which was in a caption to one of his picturesque views on the river thames and it simply states the story of this hearn who was keeper in the forest at the time of elizabeth runs thus that having committed some great offence which he feared to lose his situation and fall into disgrace he was induced to hang himself on this tree samuel island himself is very much not a reliable source as he was the man who announced discovery of a trove of lost shakespeare manuscripts that were later revealed to be forgeries made by his son william henry ireland and following grimm's publication of deutsche mythology the next reference is then an 1843 novel called windsor castle by william harrison ainsworth so pretty much entirely fictional accounts of of her and here nothing in terms of written folklore or any records of him it seems to be entirely jacob grimm's creation that he was the leader of the wild hunt in later academia the professor r lo thompson in the 1920s claims that the name of hearn is a derivative of kernanos the horned god of celtic mythology and that the antler depiction supports this but that is again a connection based entirely on the similarities of the name with current yeah kern part of kononos meaning horn the aspects of kononos as a god of the dead don't really line up with any particular aspects of hearn and there's also a thousand year gap with no intermediaries at all yeah not to be too dismissive of that theory but that's the uh i got a hunch level of uh evidence that we're talking about there yeah yeah sounds a bit similar yeah basically i knew of this theory prior to all of this and i i was under the impression that there was an actual there was an actual progression between kern and us and hearn and so i i actually wanted to be able to tell the story of how we have this this celtic horned god of the forests and how we then see it progress over about a thousand years to this english figure of folklore that was the episode that i really wanted to make and that was not what we got that was not what we got so yes that's the major british traditions associated with the hunt we get scattered mentions of other names the irish hero finn mccall is sometimes claimed to lead a hunt of irish she fairies there's other tales of ghostly hounds compiled by the 19th century author william henderson there's mentions of sir francis drake leading the hunt in dartmoor and even a mention of a 17th century cornish lawyer called jan treg eagle leading the hunt after he died but i have no sources to back up any of those claims and so with that i think it's time to hand over to you charles to discuss odin for the final segment of this episode okay thank you crafty i was gonna say your list was uh a lot more varied than mine and it may be whilst there are several other figures of mythology and focal that are associated with wild hunt in germany and scandinavia the real meat of the discussion there is dominated by one figure in particular so that may be why there are i have fewer examples to give here and i think most people know who i'm referring to we've referred to multiple times so far before i get to odin however i wanted to have a quick look through some of the other figures as we mentioned before uh in our little look through the chronology of how some of these beliefs um changed over time i wanted to have a look at some of these figures and see if there's anything interesting there one of the figures which is most commonly associated with the wild hunt is frau hall or holder uh who i'm not going to go into in great detail at all here for the simple reason that we discussed her in our baba yaga episode if you want to have a listen to that and go back and see her major characteristics there's not a huge amount in there that really links her to the wild hunt it's more this spiritual possession and then she takes on further attributes over time as well and i have a little bit of a theory as to why that might be coming up in a minute the one figure i do want to talk a little bit about though is frau perched her and for the simple reason that crofty i think she's an interesting figure we didn't really get onto her in our baba yaga discussion and given that we've already done the episode and we've now mostly done this episode i don't think we're going to have many other opportunities to ever really talk about her again so i thought i'd just give her a little bit of a starring role here yeah that's where i'd like to hear this frau percher is frequently seen as kind of the southern variant of frau hull some of her kind of distinguishing features from for our whole that i thought would be interesting to go into here though that she basically appears to be a figure who is very much associated with the feast of the epiphany and with the 12th night of christmas as a result of this she is also considered large equivalent to a folkloric figure in italy known as la pefana most of my information regarding her comes from the work of john b smith's 2004 article just perched her the belly slitter and her kin a view of some traditional threatening figures threats and punishments and uh that title there gives away one of her major characteristics so i'll quickly just wrap up the figure of la pefana in italy she is mostly known for being a figure who you know very similar to santa claus and his associated miss visits children not on christmas but on the final night of the 12 days of christmas the night between the 5th and the 6th of january if the children have been good she rewards them with candy and if not she gives the stereotypical lump of coal and much like wabafana perchter is said to be at large during the 12th night of christmas her most distinguishing feature is a feature that she holds in common with frau hall and with babiago as we discussed which is her long or even iron nose she additionally rides in a carriage and in later traditions rides on a plow which is somewhat similar to the reappropriation of a mundane item in the form for example baba yaga's pestle and mortar alongside these characteristics she is also known to be accompanied by a host of unbaptized children which to some extent seems to be a cautionary tale aimed towards people who do not have their children baptized and she also is known as i mentioned before by the nickname of the belly slitter and this is due to her habit of slitting up people who break various societal taboos and then filling their stomachs with rubbish so these offenses kind of fall into a few different categories the main categories are if you fail to eat the correct foods or the correct amount of foods on a on the feast of epiphany then you will be the victim of her wrath in fact one of the legends i saw mentioned this article was that the whole point of filling your stomach at the epiphany was that if your stomach was full her knife would bounce off it so one of these strange situations where a feast and kind of gluttony and indulgence is seen in a positive light and it may be a kind of a celebration of plenty and seen as an appropriate appreciation of uh this request that is given to you she's also known to enforce a number of taboos associated with spinning wheels on certain rest days including the uh the tradition of the ember days of christianity there are a couple of tales from the article that did include elements of spinning so let me put my example i have here okay so this story comes from 1867 and it concerns a manifestation of pector known as frauberta or frauberta and it says the following in raunchy in the southern tyrol there once came a knock on the door of a house where 12 women were spinning there stood for alberta whom the woman addressed as follows greetings to you for alberta with a long nose fraberta answered behind me is one with a still longer nose in the end there were 12 froubertas each of her nose longer than her predecessors and they sat down on the chairs that the women had meanwhile vacated when the fraubertes demanded buckets to fetch water in the women knew they were in danger of being boiled alive instead of bringing buckets they were therefore brought to baskets in which the frau bertas would be unable to carry water from the river the women then quickly went home and got into bed with their husbands whereupon no harm could overtake them and then in addition to this i also have a story i think it comes from 1927 it basically is a cautionary tale that women should refrain from spinning and later tasks during the ember days in december so it says the following in fiesta it's a woman who was preparing to boil and scout her schemes i assume skins was visited by another woman a stranger who offered to help on going to a neighbors to borrow a sieving tub the first woman was warned not to return home since it was ember friday and her strange visitor might be the qualtenberger sure enough the stranger then appeared at the window of the neighbor's house saying lucky for you you didn't come back home with the tub had you forgotten that today is ember friday after boiling the skeins i would have boiled you so that boiling motif is quite similar to babi yaga's intentions of how she is going to consume her victims and many of the stories we discussed in that relevant episode yeah the thing of not being able to carry the water in certain vessels i think that did come up in baba yaga there's one of the ways of tracking her my memory's a bit rusty yeah it's been a while unfortunately there are however um examples of her being a far more generous force and she's more presented really as an enforcer of societal taboos rather than an evil entity and she will often reward those who observe her correctly and show her generosity so a good example of this is a story that i also took from that article called perched and the farmhand and it says that perched was on a journey with her company of children who had died unbaptized the way was uneven and her carriage lost a wheel arriving on the scene a farmhand was asked for help and he saw that a linchpin had been broken he puts the wheel back and secured it with a new linchpin which he carved from a piece of wood perch commanded him to keep the shavings as reward and afraid to refuse he put a few in his pocket and they turned into gold so yeah an example then of again someone sababa yaga is having a more generous side to her and i just wanted to say that um jacob grimm and scholar since him have indeed equated her origins to various pagan goddesses either a purely germanic one or the scandinavian goddess frigg who is known for being odin's wife jacob grimm however admits there is no clear evidence of her existence prior to the 14th century as we documented in the chronological section and according to the same article i mentioned by john b smith an argument that better syncs up with her known appearances is that she and related figures such as frau fast and frau holt may originate more as personifications of certain christian feast days that then over time may have acquired associations of earlier traditions such as the good ladies and the spirits host and her more general motifs and characteristics are more similar to things like baba yaga and again we're uncertain of babiaga's exact origins beyond kind of the 17th 18th centuries but that's kind of the limit of really her association with the wild hunt is her appearing with this host of children traveling in a carriage and there doesn't seem to be that much more really to link her to the uh the construct so in addition to perchter there are another other common figures associated with the wild hunt within germany i just want to quickly go through and uh in scandinavia so these include a couple of historical figures which are king vladimir iv of denmark who is also known as vladimir atadak who through the very brief references i found for him he appears to have been associated with this literature in the 19th century uh mostly in association with um various uh developments in danish nationalism uh associated with its contentions with germany in various wars over the uh region of what was it called holstein slash wig something like that so i haven't gone much more further into that but he is the other example of the historical figure such as charles v who has then been co-opted into the myth uh chancellor of france in addition to this another figure who is occasionally said to be associated with a wild hunt is the ostrogothic king theodoric the great who is best known as king of the ostrogoths who migrated into italy in the late 5th century and he proceeded to take over the italian peninsula from his previous ruler who was a chieftain by the name of odossa or odo assa i believe who had previously deposed the last western roman emperor so fiodrick is largely connected to the wild hunt not in his historical personage but through his mythological derivative which was the figure known as dietrich von burn so dietrich is a later myth that i think appears from the 9th century onwards that basically is presented as a king who rules from verona in bern who is essentially deposed by his evil uncle ermendrick and also the huns under a figure known as ezil uh which i believe is no name for a tilde hun if i'm correct however dietrich von burn is a very complex and highly developed figure with his own mythology he appears alongside many of the same legends as figures such as siegfried appearing he appears in the nebo london uh how's it said again the nebo london lead and various forms medieval german literature and i honestly feel like he may be a figure that we want to reserve to do a full episode and again because he has an incredibly long-standing body of oral tradition and effectively his own group of mythological deeds so he is in some folkloric discussions of the wild hunt associated as one of its potential leaders but we're gonna leave that there for today that's definitely one to cover in future it is i think what we might do is we may combine discussion of him alongside discussion of heroes such as siegfried also known as sigurd of germanic heroic myth okay so with those kind of out of the way i'm coming to our last figure associated wild hunt and by far the largest of these figures and this is waden under either his nordic name as i've just mentioned or his germanic name of wotan or wodan which is also associated with early anglo-saxons as well again we're probably going to do an episode either specifically on norse mythology we may even end up doing a whole episode of some form on odin himself for all we know and that association isn't really what i want to focus on here because a lot of the evidence for the association odin with the wild hunt is not linked to the initial north sagas and germanic myth that he appears in but for anyone here who is not particularly familiar with him i wanted to give you guys a quick primer on him and some elements of him that could be seen to contain silence of the wild hunt if given a very generous degree of interpretation so in the norse sagas uh in sources such as the prose and the verse edda odin is the king of the aesir which is one of two major tribes of the gods he is the husband of the goddess frigg and he's the father of many gods including most famously the gods four and boulder in iconographic tradition he is frequently depicted as a long bearded man often with one eye and leading on a spear known as gungner avani is accompanied by two ravens hugin or fort and munin memory or mind and these two ravens bring him information from all over midgard in addition to this he is accompanied by two wolves named gary and frecky and he rides the eight-legged steed of slip here across the sky and the underworld i mispronounced that last one horribly there slept near i is the closest i think i'm going to get i think we should just retitle this podcast myth pronunciation yeah myth pronunciation yes yes carry on and it should probably be noted that in the north sagas he usually is presented in the form of a lone wanderer who often appears in disguise wearing a long cloak and a broad hat in terms of the actual nordic myth probably the closest similarity between odin and these sources and jacob grimm's later constructed the wild hunt is his association with the ein hajar which is a group of 800 warriors slain in battle who have been brought by the valkyries to valhalla so this group remains in valhalla until ragnarok where they feast daily on the meat of the great boar serum near who is cooked and eaten each day they're made whole again in the evening they also suck mead that comes from the goat hadron who is able to produce mead by eating from the magnificent tree lerad for entertainment this host dons its battle gear each day and goes out into the courtyard of valhalla where they battle each other for sport and probably the most significant role that these figures kind of play within wider norse mythology is they are destined to follow odin to the battle of ragnarok in his contention and eventual consumption by the monstrous wolf fenrir child of loki this death however will be avenged by his son whose name i cannot pronounce uh vidma vida who it is said will tear apart the beast's jaws and kill it by stabbing it in the heart with a spear over the last century there has been a fairly serious argument amongst many folklorists that odin's association with the wild hunt was actually due to the survival of a cultic group of warriors throughout medieval times and that the folkloric manifestation of the hunt was rooted in rights that were performed by this group so another strain that's often pointed to as evidence for this is tacitus's mentions of the hari that we discussed before and also there have been some claims of connections with the more historical group of the norse berserkers who themselves held a reverence for odin the problem with these myths is there doesn't actually seem to be any such evidence of a cult that continues on amongst the peoples of germany and scandinavia until the earliest appearance of folklore that goes on to connect odin in his guise of wotan or woden to the wild hunt and also the earliest folklore is very different in terms of how it associates odin with this tradition it does not initially refer to any source of host this idea has also lost some credibility because it's associated with a folklorist and academic by the name of otto hoffler who is a german scholar who has kind of been largely discredited due to his uh and i've been cagey here for youtube uh monetization reason reasons who was discredited due to his close involvement with let's just call them a certain german political movement that ruled germany between 1933 and 1945 and as a result his works have been viewed in varying lights there are people who defend his actual academic works and will claim that he uh these are free of his uh association with that certain group there are heart on the flip side however authors and scholars such as jan hirschbeigel uh wolfgang behringer and klaus fonsi who argue that his work was way less about academic knowledge and more about finding an ideological foundation for that particular group and state that he was associated with and also a certain organization which he was a member of at one point which is referred to often with two s's and yeah there's a lot of problems with that particular theory the reasoning a lot of this argument relies on is pretty actually pretty well summed up by cl uh claude uh lekito himself i know we've criticized uh his presentation of the myth uh in his book that we mentioned before but when it comes to this one in particular he has a very good take on it and i have to give him credit he says quote although many german researchers have long shown that the incorporation of the leader of the wild hunted to odin rests on flimsy foundations these reasonable voices have gone unheard because they contradict a general tendency to discover mythological survivals in folk traditions cost what it may so yes um jacob grimm's belief really that the mesner harlequin or the furious army that their leader was really a denatured form of odin that had basically been stripped of any of his positive attributes by christianity that idea has largely been abandoned by scholars but there are some interesting elements of folklore through which his name appears to have then later on being connected with a wild hunt and as we said has very little to do with the old norse sagas or germanic tradition and it appears to originate in the 16th century so the first known direct linkage of odin's name with the wild hunt comes from the 16th century in the form of nicholas grisso's mirror of anti-christian papacy and lutheran christianity which print was printed in 1593 so in this work he criticizes local rights that were intended to petition quote the false god odin for a good harvest this year to quote again this idolatry persisted under the papacy among many peasants in the form of superstitious customs and invocations of odin at the harvest time for the pagans believe that this same diabolical huntsman made his presence known in the fields at the time of the harvest so it should be noted that this initial tradition only really points to odin as a singular huntsman as we've mentioned various other examples of in the course of this episode he's also mentioned here under the name of waden but odin in norse mythology and here has many different very many different names in fact he is known for having over a hundred names so that's not particularly surprising so in the 17th century we see more associations of odin with wild hunt in 1654 johannes locenius tells us in his volume on suebo gotland antiquities that the norse made odin the god of war that there is a widespread superstition that whenever a specter is seen either evening or night or armed and accompanied by a loud din people say that it is odin passing through this account is noticeable that it associates odin with the word spectre and din which as i've mentioned a little way back these terms during this period in germany were increasingly associated with the furious army and as we continue on from 17th century these connections between odin and this group continue much of these initial connections seem to have been done on a kind of theological basis like a linguistic basis and rely on drawing links between odin's name and the name of the furious army so the philologist johannes scheffers recycles much of lesenius's work and expands on it and specifically he uses to point the idea that odin means the word chimolt or din and these are also terms that are associated with the furious army and it's really based on these terms that he then goes on to equate the army simply to odin and his minions it should be noted however that this link um which seems to actually form the main basis of which odin and the wild hunter associated is not correct so based on proto-germanic reconstructions it seems that odin means something more akin to possessed or fury i think i think one intervention saw was of the possessed and this comes from the association with the proto-germanic word of wotas so this is really the major link between him and the wild hunt and it seems to be based on a misconception future authors kind of take this link and run with it the tradition also becomes more demonized over time by christian authors in the in a continuing example that we've seen throughout this episode and it's really through their um protestations that it really then begins to merge back into popular folklore so in the 17th century the deacon of saint mary's church christoph arnold penned an attack on the idols of quote the ancient saxons and germans in which he singles out odin and he points out more correctly the connections between his name and the word wooten meaning inspires rage along with the danish and runic vode meaning destruction and he specifically points to reports that the icelanders named him as a devil in their expressions he does describe wilsenius's report and he adds to this also descriptions of rights amongst the semi people largely distributed to areas such as finland uh that take place at christmas so again got linking with odin with christmas as some of their elements the wild hunt have been and he also adds in these regions spirits known as the julac volcker traveled through the air and that small statues were erected in their honor in the mid 18th century johann peter schmidt who is professor at the university of rostock at northern germany wrote the following in a 1742 book whose name i'm not going to include here because i did go away and look it up i'm working from a lot of um lekitos summary for this i did go away and look up the exact name and i found out the book's name is literally like a paragraph long so i apologize my laziness in not reading out the whole thing is it made up of all those german words where it's just a lot of smaller words just clumped together um possibly i the phrase the thing it reminds me a little bit is i think what was the famous statement of frederick ii who i think he criticized german by saying one of his major complaints was that you have to get all the way to the end of a sentence before you know what its subject is and uh that's probably not relevant here but it just put me in that mind i of course love german even though i don't speak it it's a beautiful language the exact quote i have here in that book is quote it is said in particular that this younger odin was an arch magician and had no peer in the arts of making war this is why some people have sought to see his name woden as a derivative of to rage or wooton further no one is unaware of the census belief held by countless folk especially some hunters the time around christmas in the eve of carnival baster bend is when the one called were or the gore or the wild huntsman passers they say that the devil organizes a hunt with a troop of rapping spirits if we get to the bottom of this superstition we see it emerged from the story of this younger odin that the common man thinks that odin or wotan passes this is why a company of ghosts like this is sometimes called the furious army wotan or odin's army guden's army or the army of odin quite similar to jacob grimm schmidt then goes on to make some rather bold comparisons of different folklore beliefs throughout germanic countries to support the idea that these are really messages of paganism how accurate his reports there are is up to some interpretation so he cites the presence of names such as odin oden golden wooden wodan and wotan he doesn't seem to be aware however that one of the names in the form of gore he included is probably a woman's name so yeah now i have one very quick sentence from uh like a two which says that in denmark odin was incorporated into the wild huntsman body of myths around the 18th century and appeared for the first time in the writings of the priest frederick monrad unfortunately was not able to verify this so the transmission then of these kind of scholarly concerns back into popular consciousness was according to like a toe very much aided by the emerging nationwide press of the 18th and 19th century so he gives a couple of examples of this in may of 1832 a professor from the center of rostock in northern germany by the name of flork writes the following in the fremi mufijaes abend blatt or the evening paper and here is what he says when i speak about these apparitions and phenomena that are entirely based on the natural order which are attributed to supernatural causes i immediately think of the wild hunt also called the furious army and the wall in mecklenburg about which i heard so many terrifying things in my youth and later our agrarian labourers who seek to profit from the cool of the evening air to buy in the rye were so terrified by the wild hunt they would barely dare go into the fields shivering all the while first they heard the baying of hounds which then mingled with the fairly harsh voices of men and others that were fairly sweet they saw fires that passed rapidly through the air then if they did not flee an entire army paraded before them in a terrifying din made of a barking instruments that sounded like hunting horns and panting in my childhood it was self-evident that these were ancient brigand knights who found no rest in the grave and who to amuse themselves went hunting with their dogs in the world above as they were accustomed to doing so while alive a pious preacher since told me this is nothing other than the devil himself accompanied by several fallen angels who took pleasure in frightening people the devil he said took the form of wotan the old pagan igle in which guys he had been worshipped in earlier times the name wall comes from him and it is a defamation of wotan and lekker2 asserts that this last claim has no physiological basis whatsoever and then in addition in october of 1832 the same paper reports a similar event by fgc pogue who is an inhabitant of zf's dorf a village of mecklenburg where he states that farm workers who had already loaded several carts of rye when they suddenly heard quote here comes the war all the binders dropped their tools and hid inside haystacks but several old laborers did not budge grabbing hold of his courage with both hands pog remained with them and here is his story the noise was still far away and resembled that maid by being pack on the hunt in the forest a fair distance the phenomenon gradually grew closer and we could clearly hear the galloping and commotion quite similar to that made by an impetuous charge of many dogs perhaps more than a hundred with voices that were both rough and sweet the company slowly passed by high in the air making a racket just a short distance from where we were although the moon was shining with sharp clarity we could see nothing yet we could distinctly make out the different voices of the dogs that were moving past as it seemed in the upper layers of the air little by little the binders and the children came out of the haystacks some of them held their hands over their ears and pressed their faces into the straw and the sauron heard nothing others claimed they had seen fiery blocks in the sky and according to the testimony of some old people things like were seen during such manifestations this time however was simply an illusion for none of those who followed the phone on from beginning to end had seen anything other than what i saw the troop traveled from east to west and the folks stated it was the devil of the east with his hunt that really takes us up to the period where jacob grimm himself was compiling his legends and it's likely that legends symbol to this associating odin with a wild hunt really lie behind the genesis of his later modern construct of the wild hunt okay crofty so that's everything i have so i think then that about brings the episode to a close indeed it does i'm slightly surprised because i thought we'd be here for over three hours for once but when we cut out all the dead air and us being generally rubbish at talking uh which is probably more than we actually cut out but anyway it's probably gonna be about two and a half hours i reckon yeah we've managed to summarize everything in a shorter time than i thought given just how massively scattered every bit of mythology we could find was there was difficult to find any rhyme or reason to a lot of this yes folks we apologize if uh we were jumping out about quite a lot as a result from uh topic to topic and various different belief structures that all kind of fall within this later kind of umbrella structure of the wild hunt but that's really is the state of the stories as far as we can tell on the folklore it is a very disparate body that seems to have been pushed down into a more defined mold in the 19th century the thought that struck me while working on my research for this was that the myth that we were actually going to tell is the idea that the wild hunt was a myth in itself well you can't say it better than that for an ending so we discovered a myth just not the one we were expecting yep all right folks thank you very much for giving this a listen if you stuck with it for two and a half whole hours well done get yourself a drink exactly i'm definitely gonna get myself a drink so folks before we leave you today we would just like to say if you would like to support the channel a little bit further and the show so we can keep churning out these uh absolute disaster pieces of uh two and a half hour podcasts on a regular basis you can always head over to patreon.com thehistocrat where i'm taking any funds and kind donations people give and funding them back into the channel itself and allow us to fund various pieces of artwork associated with the channel and just generally acquire our reading materials that we're going to be using for composing these episodes in addition to this um you can also follow me over on twitter because i don't know that seems important to me for some reason over at twitter.com the underscore histocrat i do occasionally give updates as to what's happening in terms of planning next episodes and uh just generally like some more information around the various mythologies associated with these episodes so crafty before we leave today do we want to give a bit of a hint as to where we're heading over for our next episode uh yes if you'd like we're going to be heading into england we're going to actually be sticking with a single figure again so hopefully a bit more coherent yes story this time what else could i say i don't want to give too much away that's my little hint there for anyone recognizes where that came from all right folks thank you for listening we'll see you hopefully sooner than last time any last words crofty just thank you and good night thank you folks and goodbye

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 66,414

Rating: 4.8884873 out of 5

Keywords: the wild hunt, the witcher 3 wild hunt, the wild hunt podcast, germanic mythology podcast, Odin wild hunt podcast, mythillogical podcast, mythology podcast, world mythology podcast, brothers grimm, brothers grimm podcast, theodric the great, anglo saxon myth, charles v of france, harlequin podcast, pagan mythology podcast, Dietrich von Bern, herne the hunter, shakespeare podcast

Id: hi4VFbf8LI0

Length: 140min 59sec (8459 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021