The Wild Hunt

Legends & Folk Belief The Wild Hunt, Odin's ghost host in the night sky

When in deepest winter the storm howls, so people believed, a spectral host rides through the night: the Wild Hunt. At its head rides a one-eyed huntsman on a grey steed – Odin himself. It is one of the most enduring legends of all, alive from the far North down to the Eifel.

In the North the phenomenon is called Oskoreia („Asgardreia“, the ride of the Asgard host) or Julereia. In Germany it is known as the Wild Hunt or the Raging Host – led by Wotan (the continental Odin), and in later folk belief by figures such as Frau Holle or anonymous „wild huntsmen“. The time of the hunt is the Yuletide nights (Raunächte) between the Yule feast and Epiphany, when the boundary between the worlds is thin.

A Host of the Dead in the Storm

The hunt is a host of the dead: fallen warriors, restless souls, hounds and steeds that roar through the air with a great din. Whoever meets it does well to throw themselves flat on the road and keep silent. Some tales tell that anyone who answers cheekily or laughs along is swept up, or has a piece of carrion thrown to them that turns to gold by morning – or the other way round. At the same time the ride counted as a blessing: where the hunt passes over the fields, the coming year will be fruitful.

„Wôdan rides in the Twelve Nights –
hear the storm, then shut the door.“
— after German folk belief (rendered in sense, handed down in the public domain)

Evidence & sources. The Wild Hunt is attested above all from early-modern folk legend – collected among others by Jacob Grimm (Deutsche Mythologie, 1835), who linked it with Wotan. Older testimonies (such as the Peterborough Chronicle of 1127) describe nocturnal „huntsmen on black steeds“. How far the legend really reaches back into heathen times is disputed – Grimm's reading is influential, but partly reshaped by Romanticism. Standard reference: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology.

Myth & interpretation – and the arc to Odin. Odin bears many bynames that fit the hunt: „Lord of the Slain“, leader of the Einherjar. Scholars draw an (unproven) line from the ancient Germanic „host of the dead“ – Tacitus's Harii – by way of Odin's warrior bands to the medieval Wild Hunt. Whether this is a continuous tradition or a recurring image cannot be said with certainty. What is clear: in the Wild Hunt the heathen storm-god survived Christianity as the „wild huntsman“.

Regional: the hunt in the Rhineland and the Eifel. Here too the legend lived on: in the Eifel and the Rhineland people told of the „raging host“ and of the nocturnal huntsman who rides through woods and over heights; place- and field-lore around Wotan/„Woden“ reaches into our own region. The North was never as far away as it seems – one more reason why, out of Aachen, we engrave the old motifs.

Laser-engraved slate plaque with an Odin motif by Glanz & Gravur — Odin, the leader of the Wild Hunt – as a laser-engraved **slate plaque**. Odin motifs in the shop →

From Aachen, for the North. Yuletide nights, storm and night-huntsmen – the darkly beautiful side of the winter legends we engrave on slate, wood and glass; warm light, by contrast, as a lantern. More on feasts and the Yuletide nights in the Blót calendar. To the shop.

Sources & literature

Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (1835, public domain). Peterborough Chronicle (1127). Norwegian Oskoreia tradition. German public-domain Edda translation: Karl Simrock (1851). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; critical on the continuity question: Walter Pohl and others. Regional legends: Rhenish and Eifel legend collections of the 19th century.

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A Host of the Dead in the Storm

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