In 1127, after Peterborough received a disastrous new abbot, Henry d'Angely, its chronicle recorded something worse. Huntsmen who were black, huge and hideous rode through the town's deer park and the woods toward Stamford on black horses and black he-goats, followed by jet black hounds with eyes like saucers. Witnesses put the riders at twenty or thirty. At night the monks heard them winding their horns. The haunting lasted nine weeks and ended at Easter.
The Peterborough Chronicle entry is one of the oldest English reports of what is now called the Wild Hunt: a spectral troop of riders and dogs that sweeps through the night sky behind a leader who may be a god, a king or a damned man. It suits the first days of November, when the Western church keeps All Saints on November 1, a feast for all the saints, known and unknown. The legend has one awkward feature, though. Its famous name, and much of its tidy shape, are younger than they look.
A hundred names for one noise
Almost every corner of northern and central Europe had its own version. German speakers told of the Wilde Jagd, the wild chase, or the Wütendes Heer, the Raging Host. In England the troop was Herlaþing, Herla's assembly. Northern England heard Gabriel's Hounds, and Cornwall the Devil's Dandy Dogs. Scandinavians spoke of Odens jakt, Odin's hunt, and of the Oskoreia, a word usually read as the Asgard Ride.
In France the procession was the Maisnie Hellequin, the household of Hellequin, a name probably borrowed from the English Herla and possibly related to the stage clown Harlequin. The monk Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy, described "Herlechin's troop" passing by night in January 1091. Czechs had the divoký hon, Poles the Dziki Gon, Slovenes the Divja Jaga, although specialists in Slavic folklore regard the motif as a German import. In Spain the hueste antigua, the old army, is documented since at least the 13th century.
Odin or Wodan is the usual leader, but the troop has also followed Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the Welsh Gwyn ap Nudd, Herod, Cain and the Devil.
King Herla's dog
The best story belongs to Herla, told by Walter Map, who lived from about 1140 to 1210, in De Nugis Curialium. Herla, a king of the ancient Britons, agrees to attend the wedding of a dwarf king inside a cliff. After three days of feasting he rides home with a small bloodhound in his lap and a warning: no one may dismount until the dog jumps down first. Outside, a shepherd can barely understand his speech. The Saxons have held the land for two hundred years, and Herla's queen is a legend. Some retellings stretch the absence to three centuries.
Some of Herla's men leap from their horses and crumble to dust. The dog has never jumped down, Map notes, so the king rides on. Map also reported a less eternal ending: some said the band plunged into the River Wye in the first year of Henry II's reign, 1154.
Rules for meeting the riders
The folk record, much of it gathered by 19th-century collectors and assembled by the folklorist D. L. Ashliman, is full of practical advice. One Scandinavian tradition held that Odin rode no higher than the height at which an ox wears its yoke, so the safe thing was to throw yourself flat on the ground. In Bohemia a peasant who lay face down let the procession pass harmlessly, while a tradesman who looked up was said to have been insane from that hour.
Mockery was punished with grisly gifts. On Buller Mountain in the Stargardt region, a head forester who chased the noise on St. Bartholomew's Night and uttered a blasphemous curse had a human leg thrown into his carriage. Help, on the other hand, paid. In a tale from Hanover printed in 1854, a peasant beats Wod in a tug of war by looping the chain around an oak, receives a boot full of stag's blood, and finds it full of gold when he gets home.
Many of the riders were sinners rather than gods. In Cornwall the priest Dando, who hunted on the Sabbath, was carried off by a stranger into the River Lynher, and a carved chair in St. German's church was said to show him and his dogs. Gottfried August Bürger's ballad Der wilde Jäger gave the Sabbath-breaking nobleman a literary form.
Grimm builds a god
The reason all these local stories now share one name is Jacob Grimm, born in 1785. In Deutsche Mythologie, first published in 1835, he gathered medieval chronicles and modern peasant lore into a single picture. The leader, he argued, was the old god Wodan, who after Christianization had become "a specter and a devil." Before that, Grimm imagined, the procession had been a "solemn march of gods" that visited the land at holy seasons and brought blessings.
It was a brilliant synthesis built on an assumption common in his century, that modern folklore preserved fossilized pagan belief. Folklorists in the 20th century grew wary of that method. Lotte Motz observed in 1984 that the motif is found "above all in areas of Germanic speech," which fits Grimm's map but not necessarily his chronology.
The sharpest critique comes from the historian Ronald Hutton. In a 2014 article in the journal Folklore, he argued that the modern notion of the Hunt was created by Grimm, who conflated different medieval traditions with modern folklore, and that sorting the medieval processions by type leads to different conclusions. Sources disagree on whether Grimm coined the term or popularized it. Hutton's 2019 article treats it as his coinage. Either way, the label stuck. Peter Nicolai Arbo painted Åsgårdsreien in 1872, a canvas Dani Huvaere's 2018 study reads as a hunt for Norwegian national identity, and Hutton notes the Hunt became a major motif in British children's fiction in the late 20th century.
Weather, birds and winter
The popular picture puts the Hunt in deep winter, and some sources support that. Churchgoers in Småland carried bread and steel at Yule against the rider and his dogs, and in Somerset the idea survived into the 19th century that King Arthur and his hounds could be heard on wild winter nights near Cadbury Castle. But the record is less seasonal than the image. Peterborough's riders ran until Easter. Buller Mountain's huntsman came in late August. A Scandinavian sinner, King Jon, rode on clear summer evenings, and the Balkan horsemen called the Todorci rode in the first week of Lent.
The tellers often supplied their own explanations. Along the Rhine, sudden night storms were taken for the passing host. In Scandinavia, hearing Odin's hunt meant changing weather. And in 1907 a contributor to the journal Folk-Lore, recording a hunting ghost on the edge of Otmoor, noted that the moor had once teemed with wild fowl, whose night cries resemble a pack in full chase and are called Gabriel hounds in many places. The moor had since been drained. The birds were gone, and the hounds were no longer heard.