As an appropriate post for International Women's Day, fortuitously following on from my last post - are there any female leaders of the Wild Hunt? The answer is yes, which
shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever heard of a Valkyrie. Njal’s
Saga tells of a man in Caithness named Dorrud, who on Good Friday sees
‘twelve people riding together to a women’s room’ who disappear inside. Looking
in, he sees these twelve women working a loom. They are using severed heads for
the weights, and intestines for the thread. As they wind the finished cloth on
to the loom beam, the women chant a poem known as ‘The Song of the Spear’ which
includes these lines:
Valkyries
decide
who dies or
lives.
[…]
Let us ride
swiftly
on our
saddle-less horses
hence from
here
with swords in
hand.
Njal’s Saga, tr. Robert Cook (Penguin
Classics)
The women then pull down the
cloth and tear it to pieces; each keeping a torn piece in her hand,
they climb on their horses and ride away, six to the south and six to the
north.
In Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, Hilde Ellis Davidson cites an
Old English charm known as Wið færstice (‘Against
sudden pain’ – probably cramp or stitch), which visualises the pain as ‘caused
by the spears of certain supernatural women’:
Loud were
they, lo, loud, riding over the hill.
They were of
one mind, riding over the land,
Shield thyself
now, to escape from this ill.
Out, little
spear, if herein thou be.
Under shield
of light linden I took up my stand
When the
mighty women made ready their power
And sent out
their screaming spears…
Davidson thinks this may once
have been a battle-spell, though the charm addresses supernatural causes of
pain – elf-shot, witch-shot, gods’-shot – rather than human. (Cramps do seem to
come out of nowhere…) In another Old English
charm a swarm of bees is addressed as sigewif,
‘victory-women’. This implies that Anglo-Saxons correctly assumed worker bees
to be female, which was neither obvious nor scientifically proved until the
late 18th century. At any rate, the image conjured up is a flying
host of warrior women, armed of course with stings.
 |
| Gold plaques embossed with bee goddesses, 7th C Rhodes. British Museum |
In England, at least one Wild
Hunt still possesses a female leader. In Shropshire, the Lady Godda rides the
hills forever with her partner Wild Edric at the head of their troop. First found in the late 12th
century account of Walter Map, the tale tells
how the lord of the manor of Ledbury North, Edric Salvage (a real person
named in Domesday Book) snatches an unnamed fairy woman he has found dancing
with her sisters in a cottage in the woods. She marries him on condition he
must never reproach her with her fairy origin: when he breaks this prohibition
she vanishes and Edric dies. However, as Katharine Briggs remarks in ‘A
Dictionary of Fairies’, ‘Tradition restored him to his wife, and they rode
together over the Welsh borders for many centuries after his death.’ To see them was unlucky. Charlotte Burne in
‘Shropshire Folklore’ (1883) knew a servant girl who as a child had seen them
with her own eyes: by this time, the fairy lady had acquired a name:
It was in 1853
or 1854 or, just before the Crimean War broke out. She was with her father, a miner, at
Minsterley, and she heard the blast of a horn. Her father bade her cover her
face, all but her eyes, and on no account speak, lest she should go mad. Then
they all came by; Wild Edric himself on a white horse at the head of the band,
and the Lady Godda his wife, riding at full speed over the hills.
Hold that thought please, and
read this account from Jacob Grimm.
There was once
a rich lady of rank named frau Gauden;
so passionately she loved the chase, that she let fall the sinful word, ‘could
she but always hunt, she cared not to win heaven’. Four-and-twenty daughters
had dame Gauden, who all nursed the same desire. One day, as mother and daughters
in wild delight hunted over woods and fields and once more that wicked word
escaped their lips, that ‘hunting was better than heaven,’ lo, suddenly before
their mother’s eyes the daughters’ dresses turn into tufts of fur, their arms
into legs, and four-and-twenty bitches bark around their mother’s hunting car,
four doing duty as horses, the rest encircling the carriage; and away goes the
wild train into the the clouds, there betwixt heaven and earth to hunt
unceasingly as they had wished, from day to day, from year to year.
They have long
wearied of the wild pursuit, and lament their impious wish, but they must bear
the fruits of their guilt till the hour of redemption comes. Come it will, but
who knows when? During the twölven* (for
at other times we sons of men cannot perceive her) frau Gauden directs her hunt
towards human habitations; best of all she loves on the night of Christmas eve
or New Year’s eve to drive through the village streets, and wherever she finds
a street door open, she sends a dog in. Next morning a little dog wags his tail
at the inmates, he does them no other harm but that he disturbs their night’s
rest by his whining. He is not to be pacified or driven away. Kill him, and he
turns into a stone by day, which, if thrown away, comes back to the house by
main force and is a dog again at night. So he whimpers and whines the whole
year round, brings sickness and death upon man and beast, and danger of fire to
the house; not till the twölven comes
round again does peace return to the house.
* twölven: the twelve nights of Yule or
Christmas
Frau Gauden and the Lady Godda
are both supernatural wild huntresses and the names are surely too similar to
be coincidence. But who was Frau
Gauden? Grimm continues with another story.
Better luck
befalls those who do dame Gauden a service. It happens at times that in the
darkness of night she misses her way and comes to a crossroad. Crossroads are
to the good lady a stone of stumbling: every time she strays into such, some
part of her carriage breaks, which she cannot herself rectify. In this dilemma
she was once when she came, dressed as a stately dame, to the bedside of a
labourer at Böck, awaked him and implored him to help her in her need. The man
was prevailed on, followed her to the crossroads, and found one of her carriage
wheels was off. He put the matter to rights, and by way of thanks for his
trouble she bade him gather up in his pockets sundry deposits left by her
canine attendants during their stay at the crossroads, whether as the effect of
great dread or of good digestion. The man was indignant at the proposal …
incredulous, yet curious, he took some with him. And lo, at daybreak, to his no
small amazement, his earnings glittered like gold, and in fact it was gold. He was sorry now that he had not brought it
all away.
Notable here (apart from the
enjoyable comic element) is that though like the Valkyries, Godda rides a
horse, Frau Gauden travels in a wagon, which seems a cumbersome thing to go
hunting in.
But here is a goddess or priestess
riding on a wagon. It’s made of bronze and was found in a cremation grave of
the 7th century BC, near Strettweg in Austria. The female figure in
the middle who supports an offering bowl towers above a crowd of smaller
figurines, male and female, some on horses. Facing outwards at both the front
and back is a stag flanked by figures of indeterminate sex who are holding its
antlers. There is of course no knowing for sure what all this may have meant,
or of connecting it in any direct way to the Wild Hunt or to the wagons of Frau
Gauden or Frau Holle. But deities in wagons are certainly known from prehistory.
The Norse gods called the Vanir presided over fertility and the domestic
arts: the two most powerful were brother and sister Freyr and Freyja – titles
which mean simply ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’, and from which the word ‘Frau’ is
derived.
If a sly story told in the 14th
century Icelandic Flateyjarbòk (the
‘Flat Island Book’) has any truth in it, an image of Freyr used to be taken
about the Swedish countryside in a wagon accompanied by a priestess: the wagon
gets stuck in a snowstorm and all the attendants desert it except the priestess
and a young man called Gunnar. The two keep each other warm in the
time-honoured way: a few months later when the priestess is discovered to be
with child, the worshippers are delighted at the fertility of their ‘god’. It’s
quite possible that Freyr’s sister Freyja also travelled in a wagon. A
beautifully carved ceremonial wagon was placed in the Oseberg ship, itself the
burial-place of two high-status women who may have been priestesses. Carefully
dismantled wagons have been found in Danish bogs, presumably cult offerings.
The Roman historian Tacitus (AD
56-120) tells of a Danish goddess, Nerthus, who represented ‘Mother Earth’ and whose occasional dwelling was a sacred wagon
in a grove of trees on an island:
One priest,
and only one, may touch it. It is he who becomes aware when the goddess is
present in her holy seat; he harnesses a yoke of heifers to the car, and
follows in attendance with reverent mien. Then are the days of festival, and
all places which she honours with her presence keep holiday. Men lay aside
their arms and go not to war; all iron is locked away … until the priest
restores her to her temple, when she has had enough of her converse with
mortals. Then the car and the robes and (if we choose to believe them) the
goddess herself are washed in a mystic pool. Slaves are the ministers of this
office, and are forthwith drowned in the pool. Dark terror springs from this,
and a sacred mystery surrounds those rites which no man is permitted to look
upon.
Tacitus, Germania, 40, tr. RB Townshend,
1894
Wagons are associated with
another supernatural woman, Frau Holda. Grimm suggests she is originally a sky
deity associated with the weather – and therefore able to move through the air.
She appears in the Grimms fairytales as the kindly but powerful Mother Holle
(KHM 24) whose country the heroine arrives at by jumping down a well.
At last she
came to a little house, out of which an old woman peeped; but she had such
large teeth that the girl was frightened, and was about to run away. But the
old woman called out to her, ‘What are
you afraid of, dear child? Stay with me; if you will do all the work in the
house properly, you shall be the better for it. Only you must take care to make
my bed well, and to shake it thoroughly till the feathers fly – for then there
is snow on the earth. I am Mother Holle.’
'The Old Woman is plucking her geese' was the phrase my mother used when I was small... In a story very similar to the
one about Frau Gauden, Mother Holle needs the linchpin of her wagon mended, and
rewards the helpful peasant with the woodshavings left from his work: these too
turn to solid gold.
But Holda had her dark side. ‘At
other times,’Jacob Grimm continues, ‘Holda, like Wotan, can also ride on the
winds, clothed in terror, and she, like the god, belongs to the ‘wütende heer’
[furious army]. From this arose the fancy, that witches ride in Holle’s company
… in Upper Hesse and the Westerwald, Holle-riding,
to ride with Holle, is equivalent to the witches’ ride.’ The souls of
unbaptised infants were held to join Holle’s wild company.
The unnamed author of a 9th
century document called the Canon
Episcopi denounces the the wicked folly of those who believe in witches and
their power. ‘Have you shared in a superstition to which some wicked women have
given themselves?’ he demands. ‘Fooled by demonic phantasms, they believe
themselves in the hours of the night to ride with Diana the pagan goddess, with
Herodias and with innumerable other women, mounted on the backs of animals and
travelling great distances in the silence of the night.’
Diana or Artemis is an obvious Wild Huntress. Nor is it surprising that a cleric
should place Herodias in the witches' wild hunt, though it’s worth noting his main
point is that witches don’t exist,
not that they do. (It took a long time for the church to pass from this
relatively healthy scepticism to the crazed witchhunts of later centuries).
Herodias is the name given in the Middle Ages to the girl who danced before Herod and asked him for the head of John
the Baptist. Though known today as Salome, that name is not in the Gospels; some Greek versions read ‘Herod’s daughter Herodias’, while
in the Latin she is named only
‘the girl’ or ‘the daughter of Herodias’ - who was her mother. Jacob Grimm
suggests that Herodias ‘was dragged into the circle of night-women … because
she played and danced, and since her death goes booming through the air as the
“wind’s bride”.’ Medieval poets really
went to town on Salome/Herodias’ fate; Grimm quotes from a medieval Latin poem
which tells how
From midnight
to first cock-crow she sits on oaks and hazel-trees, the rest of her time she
floats through the empty air. She was inflamed by love for John which he did
not return: when his head is brought in on a charger she would fain have
covered it with tears and kisses, but it draws back and begins to blow at her;
she is whirled into empty space and there she hangs forever.
Frau Gauden and Frau Holle both
have connections with crossroads. One of the many titles of the Greek goddess
Hecate was ‘She of the crossroads’, and she was represented as three bodied,
able to face in all directions. Dogs
were sacred to her, and she presided over thresholds and crossing-places,
including the threshold between life and death. The dog is of course the
guard-dog of the threshold into the underworld. According to Everyman’s Classical Dictionary Hecate
was probably ‘a pre-Hellenic chthonian deity’ and Hesiod represents her as
able, like the Norse Vanir, to gift mankind with wealth and all the blessings
of daily life. With her troop of ghosts
and hell-hounds she visited crossroads where offerings of meat, eggs and fish
were left for her. And in the 3rd century BC Argonautica, Medea tells Jason to sacrifice a ewe to Hecate, pour
honey over the offering and leave without looking back – even if he hears the sound of footsteps or the baying of hounds.
(Argonautica Book III lines 1020-1040)
Finally, what about the Breton
legend of the Ankou who drives about the countryside in a cart, picking up
souls? ‘At night,’ says Sabine Baring-Gould, ‘ a wain is heard coming along the
road with a creaking axle. It halts at the door, and that is the summons.’ The
Ankou is a male figure, but as Baring Gould points out:
The wagon of
the Ankou is like the death-coach that one hears of in Devon and Wales. It is
all black, with black horses drawing it, driven by a headless coachman. A black
hound runs before it, and within sits a lady – in the neighbourhood of
Okehampton and Tavistock she is supposed to be a certain Lady Howard, but she
is assuredly a personification of Death, for the coach stops to pick up the
spirits of the dying.
This seems to bring us back to
the valkyries again – the choosers of the slain.
It’s hardly possible or even
desirable to come up with a single explanation for stories of the Wild Hunt,
but it does seem to me that its female leaders are even more complex in origin
than the males. The leaders of most British Wild Hunts have assumed the names
and characters of local heroes such as Edric Salvage, Hereward, King Arthur,
Sir Francis Drake, a tendency which makes them somehow easier to grasp, more
comprehensible. But the only remaining
British Wild Huntress, Lady Godda, has a name similar to the German Frau
Gauden, stories of whom include items – wagons, dogs, crossroads – reminiscent
of ancient goddesses such as Nerthus and Hecate who held sway over domestic
affairs such as fertility and farming, which literally implies over life and
death. And since the Wild Hunt has
always been associated with death, its appearance in tales from Germany and
Scandinavia also suggest the weaving in of a separate strand of bloody
battle-spirits. Hilda Davidson thinks the valkyries may originally have been
believed to devour the dead of the
battlefield, rather than merely, as later, to escort them to Valhalla.
Herodias, whirling in the windy blast from the lips of John the Baptist’s
severed head – Frau Gauden with her carriage and her dogs and their golden poo
– Lady Godda riding on her white horse in her green gown like many a later
Queen of Elfland – the phantasmal spear-women galloping over the hill while
drops of blood shake from their horses’ manes – the lady in the black
death-coach – these are wonderfully various stories which deserve to be better
known.
Picture credits
Hilde, one of the valkyries, by Ludwig Pietsch, 1894
Frigga or Frau Gode hunting, by Ludwig Pietsch, 1894
Gold plaques
embossed with winged bee goddesses, perhaps the Thriai, found at Camiros
Rhodes, dated to 7th century BCE (British Museum)
Strettweg cult wagon, photo by Thilo Parg, Wikimedia Commons
Nerthus in her wagon, by Emile Doepler (1855-1922)
Goldmarie shaking Mother Holle's bedding, by Herman Vogel (1854-1921)
The Wild Hunt, by Peter Nicolai Arbo, 1831-1892
Salome dancing before Herod, by Gustave Moreau, Wikimedia Commons
Valkyries leading the slain to Valhalla, by Ludwig Pietsch, 1894
