From the Wild Hunt to the Fairy Rade

Sir Joseph Noel Paton: 'The Fairy Rade: Carrying Off A Changeling - Midsummer's Eve'

This account from an unnamed 'old woman’ of Nithsdale tells of a Fairy Rade or cavalcade of the fairies which she had witnessed as a lass. It was recorded by Allan Cunningham and R.H. Cromek in Remains of Nithdale and Galloway Song (1810) and is repeated verbatim in Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828). It is strangely convincing, as folk accounts often are. (Translation below!)

 

“In the night afore Roodmass I had trysted with a neebor lass a Scots mile frae hame to talk anent buying braws i’ the fair.  We had nae sutten lang aneath the haw-buss till we heard the loud laugh of fowk riding, wi’ the jingling o’ bridles, and the clankin’ o’ hoofs. We banged up, thinking they wad ride owre us. We kent nae but it was drunken fowk ridin’ to the fair i’ the forenight.  We glow’red roun’ and roun’ and sune saw it was the Fairie-fowks Rade. We cowred down till they passed by. A beam o’ light was dancin’ owre them mair bonnie than moonshine: they were a wee wee fowk wi’ green scarfs on, but ane that rade foremost, and that ane was a good deal larger than the lave wi’ bonnie lang hair, bun about wi’ a strap whilk glinted like stars.  They rade on braw wee white naigs, wi’ unco lang swooping tails, an’ manes hung wi’ whustles that the win’ played on.  This an’ their tongue when they sang was like the soun’ of a far-away psalm. Marion and me was in a brade lea fiel’, where they came by us; a high hedge o’ haw-trees keepit them frae gaun through Johnnie Corrie’s corn, but they lap owre it like sparrows, and gallopt into a green know beyont it.  We gaed i’ the morning to look at the treddit corn; but the fient a hoofmark was there, nor a blade broken.”

 Here is my tamer English version:

 

In the night before Roodmas [the Feast of the Cross, May 3^rd] I had met up with a neighbour lass a Scots mile from home [a Scots mile was about 220 yards longer than an English mile], to talk about buying pretty things at the fair. We hadn’t been sitting long under the hawthorn bushes when we heard the loud laugh of folk riding, with jingling bridles and clattering hoofs. We jumped up, thinking they would ride over us. We assumed it was drunken folk riding to the fair in the early evening. We stared round and about and soon saw it was the Fairy-folk's Raid. We cowered down as they passed by. A beam of light was dancing over them, prettier than moonshine: they were tiny little folk with green scarves on, all but the one who rode in front, who was a good deal bigger than the rest, with lovely long hair bound about with a band that glinted like stars. They rode on fine little white horses, with uncommonly long sweeping tails, and manes hung with whistles which the wind played on. This, and their voices when they sang, was like the sound of a far-away psalm. Marion and I were in a broad pasture field, where they came by us; a high hedge of hawthorn trees barred them from going through Johnnie Corrie’s corn, but they leaped over it like sparrows and galloped into a green hill beyond it. We went next morning to look at the trodden-down corn, but devil a hoofmark [ie: not a single hoofmark] was to be seen, nor a blade broken. 

 

Charming as this seems, it’s quite clear that the young women’s experience was startling, even alarming. Hearing the loud, possibly drunken laughter, jingling bridles and thudding hoofs, they leap up in fear of being trampled – but when they see the fairy troop, they cower down.

             The Lowland Scots word ‘rade’ means ‘raid’. It’s derived from Old English rād (‘road’) used in the sense of a (usually military) expedition or incursion upon horseback, ‘a foray, an inroad’ as the OED states. So a fairy rade really is a ‘raid’: an implicitly threatening intrusion into the everyday world. No matter how beautiful fairies may be, they are always dangerous, and the Fairy Rade is related to the phenomenon of the Wild Hunt or familia Herlequini, the host of the dead. Related, yet no longer the same, for superstitions are in constant evolution. The Fairy Rade branched off, you might say, from the Wild Hunt, stories of which of course continued to exist in parallel. Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythology, connected the Germen wilde Jagt (wild hunt) or wütende heer (furious horde) with Wotan – Odin, the wild or mad god who goes ‘driving, riding, hunting … with valkyrs and einheriar in his train’, and versions of the Wild Hunt led by demi-gods and legendary characters both male and female have been recorded across Europe: it was always bad luck to see it – a harbinger of death. But how did the ancient and fearsome host of the dead evolve into the green-clad trooping fairies of early 19^th century Nithsdale?

The Wild Hunt by Johann Corde

In a marvellous book, Elf Queens and Holy Friars (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Professor Richard Firth Green suggests that medieval clerical commentators put a deliberately dark spin on the Europe-wide concept of the Wild Hunt. I’m not entirely convinced by this, for I suspect the familia Herlequini had its frightening side well before Christianity. However, it could certainly be adapted to a Christian agenda, and Green contrasts two of the earliest accounts. The Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, writing of an event ‘witnessed’ in 1091, depicts a grim procession of dead knights, priests, ladies and commoners suffering dreadful torments for their sins. A half century or so later, Anglo-Norman courtier Walter Map tells in his book De Nugis Curialium the story of the British king Herla who, returning from attendance at a fairy king’s wedding, finds that centuries have elapsed and he and his company are now doomed to wander the hills forever. Green drily comments: ‘People could hardly be allowed to believe that Herla and his followers were living happily in fairyland.’ Reading this, I was struck by the memory of Aucassin’s famous defiance – ‘To Hell will I go!’ – in the 13^th century French romance Aucassin and Nicolette:

For to Hell go the fine scholars and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the good men-at-arms and all noble men. With them I will go: and there go the lovely courteous ladies who have two or three lovers as well as their lords, and there go the gold and silver and ermine and miniver, and there go the harpers and minstrels and kings of this world: I will go with them, so only that I have Nicolette my sweetest love beside me. 

 

Aucassin & Nicolette (artist unknown to me)

One might well imagine that Aucassin has Orderic’s gloomy vision of the trooping dead clearly in his mind, and is deliberately subverting, diverting it. This gaily-clad cavalcade will surely end up in fairyland – not hell – and Aucassin’s vehement, emotional rejection of the stark hell/heaven binary may express a more general sense that alternatives had to be available. Could true love such as Aucassin’s really be a sin? Where did the unbaptised babies go, and men who died in battle unshriven, and mothers who died in childbirth.

They were taken away into fairyland, according to the anonymous author of the late 13^th century romance Sir Orfeo, for when Orfeo is admitted to the fairy king’s subterranean crystal castle, he sees lying all about him in the courtyard: ‘folk that had been brought here, and were thought to be dead, but weren’t…’ And there follows a grim catalogue of the headless, maimed, wounded, mad, drowned and burned… ‘Wives lay there in child-bed … and wondrous many others lay there too: as they had fallen asleep at noon each was taken from this world and carried there by fairy magic.’ It’s got to be better than hell.

‘Queen of heaven ne am I naught,’ says the fairy queen to Thomas of Ercildoune, in the medieval Scots romance of that name: ‘For I took never so high degree,/But I am of another countree.’ 

 

Illustration: HM Brock

Her counterpart in the much later ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (first published in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802/3) points out to Thomas three ways that diverge ahead of them: the thorny path of righteousness, the easy road of wickedness, and lastly the ‘bonny road that winds about the ferny brae’ which will lead them to fair Elfland. It must have been tempting! And once you’ve imagined fairy land as a place, and a sumptuous, royal place at that, what remains but to wonder what the people of Elfland do? The answer was obvious: they danced, and they rode out. Not just because of the living tradition of the Wild Hunt, but because this was the way kings, queens and nobles always displayed themselves to the people. Like earthly kings, fairy kings and queens rode out in procession for three main purposes – ceremony, hunting or war – so that the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court are aspects of the same thing. 

 

Les Tres Riches Heures, Musée de Condé, Chantilly, France by the Limbourg brothers

 

The medieval romances emphasise the courtly aspect of the fairies: in Walter Map’s 12^th century tale of King Herla, the unnamed pygmy fairy king is grotesque in appearance but his entourage is dressed in splendid livery and jewels. He eats and drinks from vessels and plates carved from single precious stones and his underground palace is lit by innumerable lamps as if it were the palace of the sun. The fairy king of Sir Orfeo comes by with a company of over two hundred knights and damsels dressed in white and riding on snow-white steeds: the king’s crown is made neither of gold or silver, but all of one precious stone that shines as bright as the sun. And in the late medieval French romance of Huon of Bordeaux the child-size fairy king Oberon (‘the dwarf of the fairy’) entertains Huon by magicking up a beautiful palace, ‘hung with rich cloth of silk beaten with gold, with tables set ready full of meat’, and he and his guests wash their hands in ‘basins of gold, garnished with precious stones’ and are seated on benches of gold and ivory.

 

Fairies in a Bird's Nest, by John Anster Fitzgerald

 

By the late 16^th century however, literary representations of the fairy rade had become far more rustic and a lot less serious. Writers like Shakespeare and Jonson (and in the 17^th century, Drayton and Herrick) popularised the notion of the fairies as amusing miniature creatures. In part of his Flyting (a poetic duel) against fellow-poet Patrick Hume of Polwart some time in the early 1580s, the Scots writer Alexander Montgomerie includes a fanciful account of the fairy rade:

            In the hinder end of haruest, on Alhallow even

            When our good nighbours do ryd, gif I read right,

            Some buckland on a bunwand, and some on a been,

            Ay trottand in trupes from the twilight;

            Some sadleand a shoe aip all graithed into green,

            Some hobland on ane hempstalke, hoveand to the hight.

            The King of Pharie, and his curt, with the Elfe Queen,

            With many elrich Incubus, was rydand that night…

In rough translation:

            At the back-end of harvest, on All Hallows eve,

            When our good neighbours [euphemism for the fairies] do ride, if I'm correct,

            Some buckling on a plant-stem and some a dry stalk [as weapons],

            Always trotting in troops from the [beginning of?] twilight;

            Some saddling a she-ape all harnessed in green,

            Some jogging on a hempstalk, hovering to the height.

            The King of Fairy and his court, with the Elf Queen

            With many eldritch Incubus, was riding that night…

This may seem whimsical or even cute to us, but the point for Montgomerie is to smear Polwart’s character and morals. For the Reformation has occurred: the fairies are now regarded as disreputable rather than dangerous, and he continues with a scurrilously imaginative account of Polwart’s supposedly monstrous origins:

            There ane elf, on ane aipe, an vnsell begat,

            Into ane pot, by Pomathorne;

            That bratchart in ane busse was borne;

            They fand ane monster, on the morne.

            War faced not a cat.

 That is:

            There an elf, on an ape, begot a wretch

            In a pit near Pomathorn [a place in Midlothian];

            That brat was born in a bush;

            They found a monster in the morning,

            Worse faced than a cat.

You cannot write this kind of thing if you really believe in fairies. Even though some of the fairy lore is genuine (flying on hemp-stalks, for example), you can tell that Montgomerie's attitude towards these country superstitions is part scepticism, part mockery. A few years later in 1599, King James VI of Scotland (soon to succeed Elizabeth as James I of England) writes with disbelief and disapproval in his Daemonology of the popular belief in spirits called ‘by the Gentiles…Diana, and her wandering court’ and ‘amongst us, the Phairie… or our good neighbours’:

How there was a King and Quene of Phairie, of such a iolly [jolly] court and train as they had, how they had a teynd [tithe], & dutie [tax], as it were, of all goods: how they naturallie rode and wente, eate and drank, and did all other actiones like naturall men and women…

He adds that this is ‘no[t] anie thing that ought to be beleeved by Christians’: in fact, the only possible explanation is that ‘the devil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeve that they saw and harde [heard] such thinges as were nothing so indeed.’

But if poets and playwrights and kings no longer believed in fairies, many ordinary country people and other common folk undoubtedly still did - and they were interested in them, which is why some of the now unfashionable medieval romances ended up as tales in chapbooks or sung as ballads. The 13^th century Sir Orfeo became the Shetland ballad King Orfeo: it was collected there in 1865 and was still being sung up till the mid 20^th century, when two different tunes were recorded for it. And Thomas of Ercildoune morphed into the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (collected by Walter Scott), when a fairy queen as richly attired as any of her predecessors comes riding down past the Eildon tree on her milk-white steed –though without followers:

Her shirt was o’ the grass-green silk

Her mantle  o’ the velvet fine:

At ilka tett o’ her horse’s mane

Hung fifty siller bells and nine.

 

The ballad of Tam Lin includes a famous account of a fairy rade, and one that adds a twist to King James’s dour comment about the fairy king or queen claiming a ‘teynde’ or tithe on earthly goods. For on Hallowe’en, young Tam Lin will pay the seven-year ‘tiend’ the fairies owe to hell – unless his lover Janet can save him.

 

        Just at the mirk and midnight hour

        The fairy folk will ride;

        And they that would their true love win,

        At Milescross they maun bide.

…

About the middle of the night

She heard the bridles ring;

This lady was as glad of that

As any earthly thing.

 

First she let the black pass by,

And syne she let the brown

But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed

And pu’ed the rider down…

This is as serious a treatment as it could be, far removed from the satire and whimsy of Mongomerie, and untouched by the notion that trooping fairies were diminutive. The oral tradition preserved the gravity of the fairy kingdom. But writers couldn’t take fairies seriously and expect to be taken seriously themselves: they had to guy it up. It’s not that you can’t find any fairy lore in the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), it’s just that he’s at such pains to make it all light, decorative, amusing. In his poem The Beggar to Mab, the Fairy Queen, the beggar pleads with Mab to feed him:

            Give me then an ant to eat,

            Or the cleft ear of a mouse…

            Or, sweet lady, reach to me

            The abdomen of a bee…

 

The Fairy Queen's Messenger, by Richard Doyle

Contrast such elegant flippancy with the genuine shiver we get at the end of the ballad of Tam Lin when the fairy queen, furious that she’s lost her knight, swears that if she had known ‘what now this night I see,/I wad hae ta’en out thy twa grey een,/And put in twa een o’ tree.’

Andrew Lang, in The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, tells of a man called Donald Ban who fought at the battle of Culloden and was afterwards troubled by a bocan (boggart) which made great difficulties for him. The bocan was thought to be the spirit of a man who had died at the battle, and it once led Donald to dig up some plough-irons which had been hidden while he was alive: as Donald lifted them, ‘the two eyes of the bocan were causing him greater fear than anything else he ever heard or saw.’ This is very like the incident in the medieval Icelandic Grettir’s Saga, where Grettir slays the corpse-ghost Glam and is never able to shed the terror of seeing Glam’s eyes roll horribly in the moonlight... Donald Ban saw other fairy sights too: for out hunting one day ‘in the year of the great snow, at nightfall he saw a man mounted on the back of a deer ascending a great rock. He heard the man saying, “Home, Donald Ban,” and fortunately he took the advice, for that very night there fell eleven feet of snow in the very spot where he had intended to stay.

Country people – small-holders, crofters, farmers – took the world of spirits and fairies seriously because they had to: they lived liminal lives themselves, dependent on weather, on crops doing well, on animals thriving. Anything that might tip the balance, anything that might help or hinder their own survival, was worth paying attention to. So they kept a belief in their ‘good neighbours’ the fairies, whom it really wasn’t worth offending, and they kept telling the old tales and finding new ones. That is why the story of the fairy rade of Nithsdale with which I opened this post is so compelling. The fairies those young lassies witnessed may have been ‘tiny little folk in green scarves’, bedecked with stars, and shining with a light ‘prettier than moonshine’ – but they were really scary. 

And that’s why the two girls cowered down, afraid of being seen. 

 

Baccanal: Richard Dadd

Women who lead the Wild Hunt

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 18^th 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 12^th 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 7^th 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 14^th 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 9^th 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 3^rd 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