When the Hunt Rides Overhead

Ilinca Petran
Field Correspondent, The Old Continent

Fieldnotes — the Harz uplands, midwinter storm

The wind that comes up suddenly, out of nowhere, on a night when the sky has no business moving that fast, has a name in a dozen European tongues. In the German uplands it was Wotan's Heer, Woden's army. In Wales it rode as Cŵn Annwn, the hounds of the otherworld, their baying said to grow quieter the closer they came, so that a man who thought himself safe was in fact already overtaken. In parts of Scotland and Ireland it was the sluagh, the host of the restless dead, moving low over the fields at night. The names change at every border and sometimes within the same valley, but the shape of the story holds: a company of riders, sometimes masked or antlered, sometimes headless, sometimes led by a god demoted to a ghost, crosses the sky or the road on the wildest nights of the year and takes with it anyone foolish enough to be caught in the open.

I have sat with versions of this tale in three countries now and I have stopped expecting them to agree. In the Harz uplands, where I am writing this, the leader is Wotan, riding a grey horse with eight legs, the same beast that would later be pressed into service as Odin's Sleipnir further north. Cross into French folklore and the hunt becomes the Mesnie Hellequin, a rabble of the damned trailing chains, first written down by clerics who were clearly appalled and possibly a little thrilled. In the English west country it is sometimes Herne the Hunter, antlered and chained to Windsor Forest by a story that only fully appears in the sixteenth century, though the motif behind him is plainly older. Scholars argue, reasonably, about how much of this is a single inherited belief and how much is medieval and early modern writers reaching for a familiar shape to describe something stranger and more local. I do not think the question can be settled from an armchair, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims it can.

What stays constant, wherever I have gone looking, is the timing and the etiquette. The Hunt rides in the dark half of the year, most often around the solstice, the Twelve Days, or other threshold nights when the old calendars agreed the walls between worlds had worn thin. It comes with weather, always, a gale or a driving rain that seems to arrive with the riders rather than before them. And there are rules for the living: do not look up, do not answer if hailed, throw yourself face down in the ditch if the sound of hooves and horns comes too close, and above all do not join in, because the tales are full of men who fell in with the Hunt for a night's sport and were never quite right again, or were never seen again at all.

In the Alpine valleys this same midwinter unease survives in a gentler, louder form, in the Perchten processions, where whole villages still turn out in carved masks and antlers to walk the dark down, whether or not anyone now believes a god rides behind them. I stood at the edge of one such procession a few winters ago, watching the torches and the wooden faces pass, and understood, briefly and completely, why a farmer three centuries ago might have barred his door at the sound of dogs on the wind. Whatever the Hunt originally was, war-band memory, weather personified, the restless dead given a route to travel, it has kept its old instruction intact across every border it has crossed: stay inside, keep your head down, and let it pass.

Ilinca Petran is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Old Continent. Carpathian thresholds: doorways, graves, and the moments in the year when the two are said to be less distinct. She follows transhumance routes and the beliefs that travel with them, and is dry about the vampire question.