Looks like Hellraiser (or vice versa); though I cannot imagine to move practical in that suit, to freely moving stab a bear - maybe a partner would take distance and come from behind to kill the bear eventually..
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
The dark clouds sped across the orange moon As smoke trails streak across a fire And to the far horizon woods were black. Silent we walked amid the dewy grass, Amid dense briars and the vaulting heather Until beneath some moorland conifers We saw great gashes, marks of gripping claws Made by the wandering wolves we tracked. We listened, holding back our breath, Stopped in mid-stride. Nor wood nor plain Loosed murmurs to the air, only The mourning wind-vane cried out to the sky For well above the ground the biting wind Only disturbed the solitary tower And the oaks within the shelter of the rocks On their gnarled elbows seemed to doze. No rustle then, but sudden, stooping low The most experienced hunter of our band Better to scrutinize the sand, Softly declared - and he was never wrong - That these fresh claw-marks showed without a doubt These were the very animals we sought, The two great wolves and their two stripling cubs. And then we all prepared our hunting knives, Hiding our guns and their fierce tell-tale gleam, We went on, step by step, parting the bushy screen. Three of us stopped, and, following their gaze, I noticed suddenly two eyes that blazed, And further off, two slender forms together, Dancing beneath the moon, amid the heather. And they were like the hounds that show their joy, Greeting their master with a wondrous noise. And they were like; like also was the dance Save that the cubs played all in silence, Knowing full well that near and sleeping slow, Secure inside his house was man their foe. The father wolf was up, further against a tree Remained his mate, a marble statue she, The same adored by Rome whose generous breast And suckling gave Remus and Romulus. The sire advanced with fore-legs braced to stand With cruel claws dug deeply in the sand. He was surprised and knew that he was lost For all the ways were seized, retreat cut off. Then, in his flaming maw, with one fell bound Seized the bare throat of our bravest hound. Like traps his steely jaws he would not leash, Despite our bullets searing through his flesh, And our keen knives like cruel and piercing nails, Clashing and plunging through his entrails. He held his grasp until the throttled hound, Dead long before, beneath his feet slumped down. The Wolf then let him drop and looked his fill At us. Our daggers thrust home to the hilt, Steeped in his blood impaled him to the ground, Our ring of rifles threaten and surround. He looked at us once more, while his blood spread Wide and far and his great life force ebbed Not deigning then to know how he had died Closed his great eyes, expired without a cry.
II
I couched my brow upon the smoking gun, And deep in thought, I tried to bend my mind To track the She-Wolf and her two young ones, They would most willingly have stayed behind. But for her cubs that fine and sombre mother Would not have left her mate there to endure, She had to save her children, nothing other, Teach them to suffer gladly pangs of hunger, Not sell their souls, enter that dishonourable Pact man forced upon those hapless beasts Who fawn and hunt for him, and do his will; The primal owners of the hills and forests.
III
Alas, I thought, despite the pride and name Of Man we are but feeble, fit for shame. The way to quit this life and all its ill You know the secret, sublime animal! See what of earthly life you can retain, Silence alone is noble - weakness remains. O traveler I understand you well, Your final gaze went to my very soul. Saying: “With all your being you must strive With strength and purpose and with all your thought To gain that high degree of stoic pride To which, although a beast I have aspired. Weeping or praying - all this is in vain. Shoulder your long and energetic task, The way that Destiny sees fit to ask, Then suffer and so die without complaint.
_________________ Life has a twisted sense of humour, doesn't it. . . .
* * *
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
If you think about it, nearly all epic literature has a hunting aspect to it. There is a long chase, a capturing or losing of prey and a feast afterwards. I can't think of any of Shakespeares works that don't follow the same trajectory either. Joseph Campbell, a noted Mythology researcher actually wrote a very interesting book called "The Hero's Journey" which has a fascinating breakdown of almost every book every written that has become popular among any culture it has been accepted in. There is almost always a journey of searching for something, and always a battle of some sort and a coming to oneself, either being the hunter or becoming the prey.
It's interesting too, that most books written by women and more recently modern "men" don't often follow Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, instead seeming to follow the 'Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' written by Ursula Le Guin. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Le Guin wrote:
I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.
Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.
_________________ When your arguments are guided by your conclusions, you aren't doing philosophy, you are merely demonstrating your bias.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
If you think about it, nearly all epic literature has a hunting aspect to it. There is a long chase, a capturing or losing of prey and a feast afterwards.
I have suggested this book on here before but Ted Hughes' 'Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being', and Draper's 'The Humours and Shakespeare's Characters' show how its almost as if the story were writing itself… "the ghost of the opera"…
This is beyond the 'manly' level of the Campbell pattern turning hero; Sh.'s plays are like an archetypal well where some other world, some kind of vortex opens up like a real presence and the tragedy and comedy of the humours.
"The night was then divided into seven parts: crepusculum, vesperum, conticinium, intempestiva, gallicinium, matutinum, and diluculum. Only the middle of the night (conticinium) was propitious for the magic journey. This was also the most favorable time for apparitions, because it was the time men no longer spoke and the roosters were not yet crowing. It is common knowledge that the crowing of the cock sends the spirits of the night fleeing. The first warning is given by a white rooster, the second by a red one. By the time the black cock crows, all spirits have vanished.
The belief that night attracted demons and the return of day drove them off was universally widespread. The Hebrews believed that the demons of the desert were particularly active from twilight to cockcrow, which signified the return of light and possessed an apotropaic virtue: it broke spells and sent spirits fleeing.
The Greeks believed that the revenants returned to Hades with the dawn, and Propertius (ca. 47–15 BCE), in Elegies (4, 7, 89), puts these words in their mouths: “By night we range in wandering flight; night frees the prisoned shades, and Cerberus himself strays at will, the bar that chains him cast aside. At dawn hell’s ordinance bids us return to the pools of Lethe.”
Certain nights play host to the passage of all kinds of nocturnal troops. These legions were sometimes composed of the living, led by Diana and Herodias, Satia, and Dame Abonde, or alleged witches whose Doubles had quit their sleeping bodies. Sometimes they gathered the dead, revenants, or damned souls who could find no rest (the Mesnie Hellequin, Oskoreia, Asgardsreia). Finally, demons or the devil in person or his minions could be seen walking or riding in the darkness. On every occasion these figures were associated with a specific kind of activity…
We encounter the first instance of the belief in the Ladies of the Night in a canon attributed to the Council of Ancyra, which met in 314. Yet this canon’s first known appearance was in 872, in the capitularies of Charles the Bald. It was picked up anew in 899, in a treatise by Regino, the abbot of Prüm:
“This also is not to be omitted, that certain wicked women, turned back to Satan, seduced by demonic illusions and phantasms, believe of themselves and profess to ride upon certain beasts in the nighttime hours with Diana, the goddess of the pagan, or Herodias, and an innumerable multitude of women, and to traverse great spaces of the earth in the silence of the dead of night, and to be subject to her laws as of a Lady, and on fixed nights be called to her service.”
This text, known as the Canon Episcopi, inserted around 1066 by Burchard of Worms in his Decretum, offers evidence that the church attacked an allegedly pagan belief that was still vigorous enough to be viewed as dangerous: “Have you believed what many women, turning back to Satan, believe and affirm to be true, as you imagine in the silence of the night when you have gone to bed and your husband lies in your bosom, that while you are in bodily form you can go out by closed doors and are able to cross the spaces of the world with others deceived by the like error and without visible weapons slay persons who have been baptized and redeemed by the blood of Christ.”
Burchard records here a belief that is the source of the witches’ Sabbath: certain women possess the ability to propel flesh and blood Doubles of themselves to roam for great distances, committing evil deeds, killing people, eating them—placing pieces of wood or straw in the place of their hearts, then reanimating them. These women who roamed the night fought the same battle as the sixteenth-century Benandanti, who performed a third-function ritual. Here the representatives of good and evil, the fertility and sterility of the land, confront each other. The wicked individuals of one of these bands stole the seeds; the others, working for good, tried to hold the wicked in check. The victory of the “good folk” over the wicked ones made it possible for the coming year to be fruitful.
The notion of a troop appears in these three extracts from the Decretum: the women involved gather together in the night, when they travel across the earth and through the air led by Holda, Diana, or Herodias. This Diana is certainly not the same as the Roman Diana whose cult, according to Margaret Murray, survived into the Middle Ages. According to Martin of Braga, she might be the sylvan and rural goddess worshipped by fifth- and sixth-century peasants. In fact, commingled here are Diana of antiquity and Di Ana, a Celtic goddess who is also called Anu. The existence of a god Dianum speaks to this hypothesis. This deity, who was perhaps the Asturian Dianu, no doubt came from Di Anu, who was taken to be a masculine figure.
In his De universo, the bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, indulges in a sharp critique of the pagan rites and beliefs that were widespread in his century, and, of course, he, too, speaks of nocturnal hosts.
"The same is true of the spirit that, under the guise of a woman who, in the company of others, visits homes and services at night. She is named Satia, from satiety, and also Dame Abonde, because of the abundance she bestows upon the dwelling places she visits. It is this very kind of spirit that the old women call the ladies and in regard to whom they maintain this error to which they alone give credence, even in delusional dreams. They say that these ladies consume the food and drink they find in homes without consuming them entirely, nor even reduce their quantity, especially if the dishes holding food are left uncovered and the containers holding drink are left uncorked when left out for the night. But if they find these containers covered or closed or corked, they will not touch either food or drink, and this is the reason why the ladies abandon these houses to woe and ill fortunes without bestowing either satiety or abundance upon them."
The feast of the Ladies of the Night is also vouched for on the eastern side of the Rhine, but the leader of the host here is named Percht or Perchta. Bertold of Regensburg (Ratisbonne) (ca. 1210–1272) violently condemns the beliefs of the Bavarians and commands his flock in a Latin sermon: “You should not believe at all in the people who wander at night [nahtwaren] and their fellows, no more than the Benevolent Ones [hulden] and the Malevolent Ones [unhulden], in fairies [pilwitzen], in nightmares [maren, truten] of both sexes, in the ladies of the night [nahtvrouwen], in nocturnal spirits, or those who travel by riding this or that: they are all demons. Nor should you prepare the table anymore for the blessed ladies [ felices dominae].”
Leaving containers open is clearly a pagan custom, according to the Bible: “And every open vessel, which hath no covering bound on it, is unclean.”
What can we deduce from all these different accounts? First, a troop of women travel through the night and stop at houses for restoration. Second, they are led by a domina who bears several names often connected to her duties (Abundia, Satia) or to the date on which she appears: Percht undoubtedly personifies the transfigured night (giberahta nacht), Epiphany. The most detailed texts all agree on the date this ritual occurs: between Christmas and Epiphany—that is, within the twelveday Christmas cycle, when it is said that spirits have free rein to leave the otherworld and wander about the earth, performing various tasks. The Wild Hunt appears most frequently during this time of the year.
The movement of this host of women was connected to a rite of the third function that falls into the category of omens. If the visitors were satisfied with the food offerings, they would bring prosperity and fertility to the household. Thus taking shape in the background was a calendar-based rite belonging to the mythology of beginnings: whatever happens on this date foreshadowed what would happen over the New Year. This rite accrues greater meaning for us once we know the Romans celebrated it. Setting a table during this time of year was a religious rite connected to ancestor worship, for the dead were considered the dispensers of the fertility of the soil and the fruitfulness of men and beasts. In Rome this table was known as the table of souls or the table of the deceased. A Munich manuscript from the Alderspach Monastery alludes to those who “garnish their table for Percht.”
The Matronae were quickly incorporated into the goddesses of Fate, into the Parcae, and, by means of etymology, into the dead. One of them was named Morta, according to Varro and Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights, III, 10, 16), and they were also quickly identified with midwives as well. It was believed that parcae shared the same root as parere: “to bring into the world.” Successors to the Parcae and the mother goddesses, medieval fairies, inherited their attributes and were in turn mother goddesses, deities of fate, and messengers of death. This feature is found in Melusine, for example, who is also a white lady, a banshee. Kin to the good women of the Abundia, Satia, and Percht, but with a much more pronounced ominous nature, the Dises (Dísir) of the ancient Scandinavians were believed to fly through the air in a group. They were often confused with the Norns, the Germanic Parcae, the Valkyries, and the Swan Women. In The Lay of Volund (Volundarkviđa, strophe 1)— Wayland the Smith—their number is not specified:
The maidens fly from the south Through the mirkwood, Young, all wise, For deciding destinies.
The Lay of the Lance, transmitted by The Saga of Burnt Njal (chapter 157), relates an event that takes place on the eve of the battle of Clontarf (1014). The Irish king Brian perishes: “A man named Dorrud walked outside and saw twelve people riding together to a women’s hut, and then they all disappeared inside. He went up to the hut and looked inside, through a window there, and he saw that there were women there, and that they had set up a loom. Men’s heads were used for weights, men’s intestines for the weft and warp, a sword for the sword beater, and an arrow for the pin beater.” These women spin death, and when they are done they tear the cloth into pieces, one for each of them. Holding their piece of cloth, they mount their horses and ride away, six to the south and six to the north.
The Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani (Helgakviđa Hundingsbana II, in the Poetic Edda), says that Högni’s daughter, “was a Valkyrie and rode through sea and air.” An interesting link is implicitly established between the riding of the Valkyries and the storm: “Helgi assembled a great fleet and went to Frekastein and braved, on peril of their very lives, a violent storm. Then lightning flashed from above and the bolts struck their ships. They saw nine Valkyries riding in the sky and recognized Sigrun among them. The storm then subsided, and they made their way to shore safe and sound.” We can therefore see that entities of all kinds with a direct connection to fate haunted the skies.
Examination of the texts provides evidence of the existence of a variety of nocturnal hosts, as testified by a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century German charm, which lists the demonic creatures who haunt the night: pixies (pilewizze), witches, Good Ladies, nightmares, elves, and the Furious Army whose members are criminals that have been broken on the wheel and hanged.
Thus roaming across the earth are phalanxes of demons, legions of damned dead, and the throng of Doubles of sleepers who gather under the guidance of a leader—Diana, Herodias, Percht—in order to perform tasks closely connected to the third function as defined by Georges Dumézil, which rules fertility and fecundity. Dealings with the dead also fall into this category. Though the troop formed by the Good Women allegedly brings prosperity with it as long as the rites are respected, the passing of phantom armies is a bad omen: it heralds either some catastrophe or war. Sometimes, people see even gods ride through the skies. In the saga that bears his name, Viga-Glúm dreams this:
The ring-giver saw them riding A snapping of swords must happen It’s come, the grey spears’ greeting As the gods ride [godreid] fast through the pasture Odin exults to see The Valkyries eager for battle Those goddesses dripping forth gore Drenching the lives of men.
As early as the eleventh century, it is counseled in the Ruodlieb never to form the bond of friendship with a redhead: Non tibit sit rufus umquam specialis amico. This phrase appears in the legend of Pope Gerbert—Rufus est, tunc perfidus—and this is still proverbial wisdom in the Tyrol (“A red beard rarely hides a good nature”—unter rotem Bart stecjt ke gute Art) and in the Upper Palatinate (“Red hair and firewood never grow in a good soil”—Rauds Huar und Jarhulz wachsn af koin gouden Buadn)." [Phantom Armies of the Night]
"The diabolical huntsman is a demon that sets off in pursuit of a person; he appears mounted on horseback and is most often accompanied by a pack of hounds. The wild huntsman is a being of folk mythology (a daimon) who primarily victimizes supernatural creatures. He owns no dogs except in traditions that appear after the Middle Ages. Indeed, he is a tracker. The cursed huntsman is a man on horseback who, with his pack of dogs, pursues a prey that eternally eludes him.
The principal elements of [the] stories of the Wunderer can be summed up in this way: The enemy of the maiden is an ogre who has exterminated her family or that of the queen. His dogs attack the victim, and the sound of his horn sparks terror in the heart of the maiden over whom he claims to have rights. The Wunderer claims that Frau Saelde has been promised to him and that he shall wed her. Behind this story that appears to be the avatar of a myth there is a hierogamy whose purpose is to guarantee the prosperity of a region.
In Denmark, Odin sets out in pursuit of a supernatural being. In a long article, Hans Ellekilde addresses the theme of the wild huntsman, called Odin here, and other related figures (Grøn Jette, Groen, Valdemar, Kong Volmer, Natjoegeren, etc.) in the traditions of the Isle of Møn and other Danish islands. The case file he assembles and analyzes emphasizes the importance of the horn and dog motifs, and the testimonies he cites show how the theme of the wild huntsman blends and intersects with that of the king sleeping in the mountain (Klintekongen), the priest’s mistress, and the cup stolen by the spirits or bestowed by them. We find, for example, the pursuit of a supernatural being, an ondine (havfrue) or an elf (ellefrue).
Philippe Walter has recently proposed a new interpretation of the facts based on his analysis of the forms of the Hennequin, one of the names for the leader of the Infernal Hunt. He suggests that the name can be read as cock dog (German Han, Henne + Norman quin). To lend weight to his hypothesis, he studied the possible role played by the rooster and the dog in ancient beliefs, and he unearthed an important fact provided by Thietmar of Mereseburg: “in January, every eight years, the inhabitants of the Lejre region—in other words, Roskilde, in Sjaelland (Denmark)—sacrifice dogs and cocks to the gods. This is no isolated testimony. We can find a Christianized version of it in the legend of St. Tropez: when his decapitated body came ashore, those who discovered it found a rooster near it.” These tales indicate that two animals were connected to a sacrificial and funereal rite that took place during the Christmas season—Thietmar mentions the day after the “theophany of the Lord.” Philippe Walter concludes from this that Hellequin/Hennequin is a roving spirit, a giant psychopomp that oversees the seasonal journey of souls, which offers a new and plausible explanation for the figure of the hunt leader.
The symbolism of the two animals seems relatively clear if we refer to archaeological findings. A group of three clay statues was found in a field of Gallo-Roman urns that depicted a Matrona with a child, a rooster, and a dog. On a symbolic level, the dog represents death and the cock stands for resurrection. We can recall the Swedish saying “the dead are put to flight by a red rooster.”* The Latvians slew a black cat, black dog, and black rooster when they believed they were threatened by Meris, the Plague Virgin. The blood of these three was used to coat a rope twisted backward, which was then used to gird the house. As a symbol of resurrection, a chicken (or goose) egg was placed in Celtic tombs and, more specifically, in ossuary vessels that contained the remnants of cremated bodies. We can also note that the body of a woman who was forty to sixty years of age was found in a Celtic tomb in the Valais canton, in a wooden coffin that also held, among other objects, a cup with five chicken eggs. In Geren, in the Upper Valais, a depiction of a woman showed that on the front of the lower half of her body was an anthropomorphic figure and a rooster. This is how Phillipe Walter decodes the myth of the death of the cock and dog: the name (The Union of the Cock and the Dog) reflects the coupling of the two holy animals charged with the duty of expressing the sacred cosmological act and the hierogamy that establishes universal order at the moment of renewal when the solstice takes place. The pursuit of a supernatural being by the wild huntsman “would be nothing less than the hunting of the Virgin Mother (Great Goddess) for the purpose of a divine hierogamy realized by the union of the cock and the dog.” This utterly new reading of the legend returns the wild huntsman to a mythological and religious context, which clearly reflects that of its origins.
There is also a tradition making King Arthur the leader of the Furious Army (a German name for the Wild Hunt) or a cursed huntsman. We must note, however, that Étienne of Bourbon says nowhere that these are the dead. It is up to the reader or listener to deduce this by relying on other traditions. For his part, Gervase of Tilbury notes (Otia Imperiala II, 12): “The forest guard, whom the common folk call foresters—in other words, the guardians of the hunters’ nets, the game reserves, or the royal woods—recount how they often see on certain days, around the noon hour and during the first half of the night, when the full moon is shining, a company of knights hunting, accompanied by the din of hounds and horns. They answer those who question them that they are the retinue and house of Arthur.”
When speaking of the familia Arturia, Étienne of Bourbon forges a link to a tradition that maintains that this monarch did not lead an exemplary life, as The Prose Lancelot informs us. He is described here as caught flagrant delit, committing adultery, the reason why he was excommunicated. The Modena manuscript of The Legend of the Holy Grail has handed down another tradition in which we can see King Arthur after his disappearance to the Isle of Avalon:“ li Bretons . . . cuidaient tos que il revenist. Mais tant sachiés vos que li au quant l’ont puis ve es forès chacier, et ont oï ses chiens avec lui.” Folk traditions have preserved the memory of Arthur’s damnation: in the Maine region, the Chasse Artu designates the passing of demons carrying the body of a reprobate.
Undoubtedly influenced by popular legends about the diabolical huntsman and the cursed hunter, and through reliance on a particular acceptance of the verb jagen, “to move quickly”—in Norwegian the phrase å jage av sted means “a movement” often with no determined purpose—a new group of narratives began transforming into hunters men who had died in a state of sin. The explanation for this was surely the position taken by the medieval church on hunting, which it condemned and anathematized on many occasions. Here is a significant example of the infernal coloration that gradually began affecting the theme of the hunt:
Abel, second son of Count Waldemar of Denmark, slew his brother in 1250 then fell in 1252, when fighting the Frisons. He was buried in St. Peter’s Church in Schleswig, but numerous hauntings occurred. His body was removed from the religious building and submerged in a swamp in the Pöl Forest, near Gottorp, after the coffin had been pierced through with a stake. During this time, the area became haunted and those who passed near it heard the sound of a hunting horn and saw a man. Everywhere, it was said that the man was Abel and that his mouth and his body were black and that he rode a small horse of the same color and that he was accompanied by three dogs glowing like fire.
We can find this testimony by Brother Boissen, counselor to Duke Johann Adolph of Holstein-Gottorp (1575–1611), in the Schleswig Chronicle. It shows, moreover, that a proven precaution—piercing the coffin and body through with a stake—had no effect, doubtless because fratricide was too great a crime to prevent the deceased from leaving his final resting place: a swamp. Swamps were considered preeminent malefic spots, and the ancient Germans once tossed certain criminals in them.
The legends of the diabolical huntsman, the wild huntsman, and the cursed hunter form a complete set for which we can sketch an outline of specific time categories. Originally, we find a supernatural being, an ogre or giant, in pursuit of another fantasy creature, a lady of the woods, a fairy who has been promised to him. Because she refuses his suit, he wishes to kill and devour her. Philippe Walter has shown that the supernatural being was a composite mythical creature—a goddess of the dead or psychopomp?—connected to the rooster (or the chicken) and to the dog. This sets off the debate again about the name of the leader of the Wild Hunt and suggests that the Herla component is not original. Instead, it is likely a fabrication of Walter Map or his source, the invention of a mythical king of the ancient Bretons, introduced into the story to give it some historical heft. The leader of the Wild Hunt was undoubtedly the avatar of an ancient, ambivalent deity who presided over death and resurrection—exactly like the Celtic Dagda, who killed men with one end of his staff and resuscitated them with the other, and whose attributes included a rooster and a dog, which symbolically reflected his dual function. This deity likely provided the name Hennequin. The story of King Herla is, then, only an etiological legend intended to shed light on the origin of the Wild Hunt. Drawing from the same sources but merging them with other mythical traditions, the story by Walter Map does not share the same intention as that of Orderic Vitalis and those of clerical literature. It is political, whereas the others are edifying and fall into the context of redemptive propaganda and a pedagogy based on fear.
Predicated on the mythological canvas and adopting the image of the devil/hunter, the ancient deity was demonized and transformed into a demon pursuing a soul in punishment, that of a sinner. We should recall that the image of Satan as hunter was established in the fourth century, in opposition to the figure of the sinner, which smacks of Christian representations. Early on St. Augustine called the devil “the worst hunter in the entire universe.” Yet the devil does hunt in the conventional fashion, which would correspond to the civilization of the earliest testimonies describing him as a hunter. His weapons are instead ties and hooks (laquei) and, more rarely, nets (retia) or even stingers, picks, and arrows. This image of the hunter was partially transposed upon death, which was personified and depicted as a huntress carrying a horn that she blew devilishly while pursuing her prey. She can be seen wearing this guise in Hélinand of Froidmont’s Verses on Death. From the legendary narrative, we now move to the exemplum. The events were reinterpreted by Christianity and inscribed within a new reality. From this point, it was easy to make into sinners those individuals who were condemned to wander eternally, for these wanderers, as we have seen, were referred to with the verb jagen and the noun jagd, which facilitates their incorporation into hunters stricto sensu. At a given moment, the word hunter metonymically designated the sinner.
We can easily identify each group of this corpus centered on the notion of hunting, for each is characterized by one or more specific and recurring elements. In the case of the diabolical huntsman, this element was the active intervention of a living individual who attempted to save the hunted person, failed, and then saw the devil carrying off his prey, which he tossed across his saddle. In that of the wild huntsman, the nature of the protagonists, first and foremost, distinguishes this group of stories from the others. Another distinguishing element is the motif of a share in the hunt. In the case of the cursed hunter, the explanation provided by the dead person transforms the narrative into a pedagogical exemplum. We can note one constant: the appearance most often takes place in a forest. Some stories remain unclassifiable, because we do not know the nature of the hunter—as is, for example, the case with Herne, the name of a ghostly huntsman well known in the Berkshires, who appears in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (IV, 4, 28–38). There are a number of traditions that maintain that he was a forest warden who committed suicide.
There is an old tale that Herne the Hunter, Sometime a keeper in Windsor Forest, Doth all the wintertime, at still midnight, Walk around about an oak, with great ragged horns; And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle, And makes milch-kine* yield blood, and shakes a chain In a most hideous and dreadful manner: You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know The superstitious idle-headed eld Received and did deliver to our age This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth.
This tale, however, does not mesh with our typology." [Phantom Armies]
"Entering the cavern—the hollow mountain—is synonymous with death if we take at its word the Germanic literature. The best example of this literature is furnished by the legend of King Sveigdir, who follows a dwarf into a boulder and disappears never to be seen again. Further, “to enter the mountain” is used for “to pass away.” Numerous tales tell how a dead man invites a living man to follow him into a hollow mountain, a veritable purgatory in which the living man finds sinners gathered in expiation for their transgressions.
Herla’s disappearance in the mountain overlays another mythic theme: the sleeping sovereign who leaves his underground home when his country needs him. Folklorists have named this absconditio (Bergentrückung, bergtagning), and we can compare it to the dormition theme in Christian legends such as that of the seven sleepers of Ephesus. It has also been applied to Frederick Barbarossa, Charlemagne, Waldemar, and other kings who have left a positive remembrance in the popular memory, which explains the recuperation of the legend for political ends. Herla’s Mesnie no longer appears in a country where exists a strong central authority and the rule of order, as noted by Jean Claude Schmitt.
From where does this word Helquin come? You should know, my child, that the fifth Charles who was in France waged a great battle wherein he perished. After his death, there were several on the battlefield who saw what appeared to be a large assembly trotting to Charles, and it is said that it was King Charles who was dead and that he had returned to the field where he had died, both he and his men, and that is said Charlequin, which means the fifth Charles, for which one says Helquin.”
We can imagine another hypothesis by basing our conjectures on the notion of familia and mesnie. In Old English, cyn(n) is the exact semantic counterpart of these two terms, but also means “people,” “race,” or “folk,” like the High German künne, from which derives the word König, “king.” Familia Herlethingi is thus a pleonastic formation in which familia replaced the misunderstood cyn(n), which can be found in Hellequinus the Harlekinus. The origin of the Wild Hunt is therefore sought among a particular people, a tribe, a troop led by a certain Herla, or among a people whose name provided the basis for the word herla in medieval Latin. In this last case, this alleged people must have left a deep imprint in people’s memories, especially in the memories of clerics.
Walter Map’s name for the Furious Army (thirteenth century) is linked to the old French herler, “make a racket,” and herle, “tumult,” “noise.” We must note, however, that analysis of this Germanic name (Herla) has revealed that it means “war leader,” “head of the army.”
In 1175, Pierre de Blois uses milites/familia Herlechini to designate individuals with a strong attachment to the vanities of this world and to the court of King Henry II that constantly moved from one place to another. This metaphor primarily indicates that the name Hellequin was much older and that it fell into the public domain, so to speak. Under various spellings—Halegrin, Crenequin, Hennequin, Hanequin—it was applied to living people whose behavior the church desired to criticize.
It is undoubtedly these same courtiers that Chrétien de Troyes alludes to in his Philomena, concerning his heroine’s talents for embroidery: “She could have painted foliage patterns and arabesesques on cloth, and even the Mesnie Hellequin” (verses 191–93). Toward 1263, the Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne et Godefroi de Bouillon says that the King of the
Tafurs and his men were Hellequins: et le rois des Taffurs o lui si halegrin Qui plus aiment bataille qui li glous ne faits vins.
The tafurs were the uncouth rogues of Hainaut and Brabant who formed part of the Crusades army and were regularly depicted as quarrelsome, gluttonous, and scruffy with little to recommend them. We can find this definition frequently in works dating from the thirteenth century on. In the Actes des Apôtres by the Brothers Gréban, dating from around 1250 (verses 8734ff.), we can read this:
Desgoute, Rifflart et Briffault Tant plus y en a maint vault C’est le mesgnie Crenequin. This expression became a proverb and Gabriel Murier’s Recueil des sentences, published in Antwerp in 1568, notes it this way twice:
The Hennequines, more madmen than scoundrels. The Mesnie of the Hennequins, the more there are, the less their worth. In a sharp critique of lawyers, the thirteenth century text the Marriage des filles au diable (Marriage of the Devil’s Daughters) notes the Hellequins’s warlike nature by comparing them to mastiffs or guard dogs.
It is the Mesnie Hellequin, They are as unruly as mastiffs.
In the fourteenth century the Songe doré de la pucelle (The Maid’s Golden Dream) likens allegorical figures to the spoken names of the members of Hellequin’s troop. Jean Chartier, high chanter of St. Denis Abbey (d.1462) topped off the various meanings with that of “coward” in his Chronique de Charles VII, roi de France.
It is the Mesnie Hellequin For you who lack all heart: The more there are, the less their worth.
In France, therefore, during the Middle Ages, Hennequin had come to mean “rogue,” “madman,” “fighter,” “coward,” “cur,” “libertine,” “ragamuffin.” The name had come to mean people who banded together to form a troop that behaved in a reprehensible manner, which applies perfectly to the men who performed masquerades, as we can see in the deeds performed by the masked individuals in Fauvel. We can see that the historiography and the allegorical and entertainment literature no longer connects the Mesnie Hellequin to the dead, but the clerical literature remains captive to the old meaning, though it gives it devilish overtones. The Second Lucidaire, completed around 1312, explains it this way: “As I’ve told you, the Mesnie Hellequin is made up of devils who travel in the guise of folk on horseback who ride at a trot. This is what leap means when it says Ab incursu, etc. It is a manner of trotting.” We find this repeated almost verbatim in the Exposition of the Christian Doctrine (fourteenth century). These devilish overtones are fully expressed in the medieval theater, where the term Herlequin’s Cope means, as noted earlier, a curtain on which has been painted a hideous, grimacing head, which represents hell.
Herlewin/Hellequin followed the same evolution in Great Britain. In Beryn’s Tale, also known as The Merchant’s Second Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400) says that the mad, those who think only of joking and playing tricks, are devoid of wisdom and virtue and resemble the men of Hurlewayne (Hurlewaynes meyne). A poem attributed to William Lang-land ranks the comic oafs who were part of the retinue of King Richard II (Radeless) in the lineage of Hurlewayne (Hurlewaynes kinne).
In more modern times, we may recall that a petulant child is called a harlaque in Wallonia, a harlican in Dorsetshire, and a hannequin in Normandy, but in Champagne arlequin still meant “will o’ the wisp” in the nineteenth century. What connects the Mesnie Hellequin to the Charivari is a cluster of elements in which the notion of a noisy troop and a certain behavior regarded as mad and buffoonish occupy the main place. We could say that the name was secularized before going on to becoming a dual Carnival element. On the one hand are the processions of Charivari; on the other hand are those of the deviltries connected to the enactment of the Mystery of Saint John.
In Bresse is the Flying Hunt of King Herod, who was famous for slaying Jewish children, and in Normandy is the Cain Hunt—undoubtedly, Cain is a homophone of –quin.
In the Germanic regions, the Wild Hunt bears the names wilde Jagd; wildes Gloat; hellsche Jagd; wütendes Heer; Muetesheer; Muetesseil; würtige Fahrt (a company of black birds in a chariot); wilde Hejagd; Gutis-Ee (Muri in Aargau Canton), Temper (Bavaria, Tyrol), which refers to Quatember, the Ember Days; Wodesheer (Eifel); Odens jagt (Denmark); Dürsten jegg (Switzerland); and so forth. We can note that several traditions in one single region is a regular occurrence. The leader is dubbed Rodes or Herod, the infernal huntsman (hellscher jäger), Berndietrich, alias Dietrich von Bern4—in other words, Theodoric of Verona, whom the church condemned for his Arianism. Dietrich was carried off to hell by a black horse, according to Caesarius von Heisterbach, or, according to other legends, was abducted to the Rumenia Desert, where he must fight dragons for eternity, or it is told that he followed a dwarf one day, never to be seen again. We note that certain individuals who disappeared under strange circumstances had a tendency to enter the Wild Hunt or to become cursed hunters. The theme of the psychopomp animal or entity, which can be found as early as King Herla’s tale, seems to have been incorporated into this legend at a very early date, but it also continued a separate life, evidence of which we can find in this exemplum from the Gesta Romanorum (chapter 190):
A king coveted the lands of one of his vassals and commanded him, on pain of forfeiture of his estate, to procure and bring to him within eight days a black dog, a black horse, a black falcon, and a black horn. The vassal was in despair, but met an old man who gave him counsel, thanks to which he successfully passed this test. A short time later, the king heard barking and was told that his hounds flushed a stag in the forest but were unable to catch him. The king mounted his black steed, hung the black horn around his neck, and followed after his dogs. When he saw the stag, he sounded his horn and spurred on his horse. The stag immediately took the direct path to hell [cervus vero recto tramite ad infernum cucurrit]. The king followed him, and was never seen again [umquam amplius visus est].
Jacob Grimm’s hypothesis that Berchtholde (Berchtold), once vouched for as leader of the Wild Hunt, was the devil or Odin, is no longer considered valid. The name is the result of the combination of Bercht(a) and Holda, one of whom led a troop of children who died without being baptized. The other led a band of witches.
This is what we can establish in the German language traditions: we have apparently neutral names that seek only to give a handle to the phenomena without casting judgment. The core idea that emerges from all the various phrasings is that of a procession of the dead: Totenzug, Totenprozession, Totuchrizgang, and so forth. There also appears the Night Troop, Nachtschar, the latter part of which, -schar, refers to a military unit, which, as Jean Carles notes, clearly describes the aggressive nature of the apparition. The Night Troop describes crude, rough spirits who are dangerous. The People of the Night, Nachtvolk, are akin to the Good Folk, because of their openly benevolent character, as revealed by the harmonious music that accompanies this group’s passage. The two most common names, Wild Hunt (wilde Jagd) and Furious Army (wütendes Heer) emphasize several notions: danger, fury, the speed with which the troop moves, and its unruly and ungovernable nature, which can be found in the names forged with wild or wut/mut. We can easily imagine the hypothesis in which certain names for the Wild Hunt perform a normative function and eliminate other local names that could be quite old, some of which I have cited earlier. A giant, the Türst/ Dürst, possibly the final vestige of the psychopomp deity of the original myth, appears in these traditions. The culmination of the evolution of norms undoubtedly testifies to a reduction in their number as well as to their normalization, but we can see over the centuries the distinction between troops of peaceful or dangerous dead.
We should not confuse the Wild Hunts with those of the cursed huntsman—with St. Hubert’s Hunt (Normandy, Morvan); St. Eustache’s Hunt (Normandy); Macchabee’s Hunt (Orleans region); Herod’s Hunt (Bresse, Perigord); the Chasse Galery/Galerie (Vendée, Saintonge); Valory’s Hunt (Bas-Maine); Briquet’s Hunt (bords du Loire); the Chasse Malé/Mare/Malo (Maine); the Chasse Artu/Artui (Normandy, Gascony, Upper Brittany, Guyenne, the Fougères region, and the Foix Earldom); the Chasse à Rigaud/à Ribaut (Berry); ewiger Jäger (Eternal Huntsman), wilder Jäger, Hochjäger, Goï and De Jon Hunter (Westphalia); Waldemar, Wode, and Wohljäger (Schleswig-Holstein)—or with that of the wild huntsman that can be found in Ille-et-Vilains (the Human Hunt), in Alsace and Franche-Comté; Wor of Rügen Island; Fru Gode (Mecklenberg); Hackelberg/Hackelblock (Thuringia); Nimrod (Upper Hessia); and Roods/Röds (Hanover), another name for Herod. In addition, we must not confuse the night hunter (Nachtjäger), who is invisible or headless and rides a white horse that spits fire from its nostrils. In the old duchy of Berg, the sheet metal hunter (der blecherne Jäger) carries a staff and wears a metal hat.
Vincente Risco summarizes the Spanish phenomena and analyzes the various names for the Infernal Hunt. In the Iberian Peninsulan is Hoste (Hueste, Güestia), which was attested as early as 1469 in the form of Exercitus Antiquus, Huesta Antigua. This is an army of souls (ejercito de las almas). Estantiga/Estandiga is derived from the Latin hostis antiqua, which designates the devil. Other troops are more or less akin to the Wild Hunt, but they attest to a shift toward witchcraft, such as Hostilla, a cortege of witches; and Antaruxada, a troop that announces the death of an individual or a throng of witches or a host connected with Carnival. There has been some contamination from the Castilian antruejo. Estadea alludes to the candles in the procession of the dead, and to the “statue” (estadea) and the Santa Compaña. The testimonies collected in western Europe during the nineteenth century commingle everything and have helped obscure all the data.
The musical cacophony already announced by Adam de la Halle and Jacquemart Gielée has nothing in common with the sound of violins that accompany the Wild Hunt in Germany and Switzerland, and emphasizes the demonic aspect of the troop, whose only thought is to misbehave. This commotion forms the very substance of the Charivari, and it certainly testifies to society’s disapproval and punishment of a breakdown of normal or ideal matrimonial unions—a dangerous destruction of order—but the date on which it takes place is significant. It corresponds to the liturgical triduum—that is, the Thursday to Saturday that precedes Easter, when the bells, the “good music,” are prohibited from ringing and must remain mute. The din is a countermusic prompted by the “instruments of darkness.” It evokes the diabolical powers and natural disorder that accompanied the death of Christ. This countermusic makes itself heard during the twelve days of Christmas, Carnival, and St. John’s festivals.
The great novelty here is the cartwheel machine, a true noise-making machine, a new kind of rattle whose sound is comparable to thunder. Patrice Uhl perspicaciously compares it to the Wheel of Fortune: “This complex mechanism of wheels turning in solidarity undoubtedly serves to transpose the allegorical representation of the book into the ‘reality’ of the street. For the Wheel of Fortune is composed not of a single piece, either. We must refer to the second book of Fauvel to learn this. When Fauvel goes to Macrocosmos, city of high fantasy, where Fortune resides (whose hand he hopes to win), he finds her sitting in front of her wheel or wheels, rather.” Quoting Gaston Paris, Patrice Uhl adds: “Before Fortune are two large wheels that turn without cease, one quickly, the other slowly. Within each are contrived two smaller wheels that move in the opposite direction. The wheels on which all humanity is laid out is the game with which Fortune ceaselessly amuses herself.” It is important for us to recognize the close relationship that links Fortune and Hellequin. First, this linkage introduces us to a tradition whose first trace we can find in the work of Adam de la Halle. Next, Fortune is only one of the shapes adopted by the Good Woman called Abundia, Satia, Bensozia, or Percht. We therefore find in France the exact same shift of the legend: these hosts of women and the Mesnie Hellequin are brought together and made one.
In his study of the relationship among the dawn, fairies, and Fortune, J. H. Grisward has shown that Morgue, Arsile, and Maglore, who emerge in Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la feuillée, and Fortune function as the two faces of fate: the first three reserve their gifts for those they have chosen, and the latter has been, since birth, blind, deaf, and dumb (verses 771ff.). They are inclined to favor those who honor them, which implies a rite. This rite happens to take place on the spring or autumn equinox, dates on which the Wild Hunt also appeared. We can accept that the rapproachment we have noted did take place, because the apparition of the Mesnie Hellequin and that of fairies that visit homes falls into the jurisdiction of the same liturgy, is based on the same belief, and shares a temporal kinship: all the dates denote a turning point and refer back to the notion of beginning.
Fauvel’s Charivari is not the sole masquerade connected to the Infernal Hunt by one means or another. In the Padstow tradition in Cornwall, still attested in the beginning of the twentieth century and called Hobby Horse, a man wore a demon mask over his head and held a wooden frame covered by dark cloth with a small horse head at one end. This Hobby Horse gathered his companions on the night of May 1. The next morning, the troop paraded through the village, with each companion wearing some sort of disguise, playing a musical instrument, and making a hellish din. Preceding the Hobby Horse and leading this procession was a man who wore a gnome mask and who was armed with a club. In the duchy of Kent, the troop was called Hooden Horse, and it paraded on Christmas night. Its members wore disguises and blackened their faces and carried small bells. They roamed the village, frightening the inhabitants and demanding beer. Here is an interesting detail: the Hooden Horse is represented by a man covered by dark sackcloth from which pokes the head of a horse fixed to a cane used by the man to prop himself up as he limps forward. The horse costume therefore represents the three-legged horse of death. In Westphalia the parades of horses on New Year’s Day showed men wearing a horse costume and forming a horse with six or eight hooves. Richard Wolfram emphasizes its systematic connection to death—sometimes the processions ended in the cemetery— and to the Mesnie Hellequin. There is an undeniable kinship between these processions and the Charivari of the book of Fauvel. We can find in these traditions certain elements of the Wild Hunt: the bells and the leader armed with a club, for example. Even if it is hard precisely to identify the relationships between the Wild Hunt and these masquerades that use horse costumes, the parallel to Fauvel is worth noting." [Phantom Armies]
"It has long been known that, depending on the circumstances, masks customarily represented the dead or demons: the same word in many languages was used to designate both the dead and masks—for example, the Latin larva and the Lithuanian kaukas. In ancient times commemorative feasts for the dead were accompanied by masquerades, and, if we refer to the customs of a country that was converted to Christianity quite late, such as Lithuania, we can see that the dead (veles) made up the troop of Veliona, god of the dead, and were represented by masks during solstice and Carnival celebrations. We also know that the masquerades took place on precise dates connected to the solstices and equinoxes and at the beginning of the year, which, depending on the era and the civilization, fell at different times. Before the reform of the Julian Calendar, the year began on March 1. In the Gregorian Calendar, it started on January 1. Numbering 350 to 600 at the least, the New Year’s Day celebration in the Roman world was marked by the appearance of masked processions that noisily roamed through the towns and cities.
In his study of the January New Year’s Day, Michel Meslin emphasizes that these masquerades inaugurated a new time, and that each act and object had a functional reason that was magical in nature. Each was for expelling the evil forces of the past and giving strength and vigor to the new time that the ritual invited. Early on, W. Mannhardt (1858), then F. Liebrecht aired the opinion that concealed behind the Wild Hunt was a set of beliefs connected to rituals for expelling winter. In Switzerland, masquerades today still share a connection to the changing of the year. They are known as Chalandamarz in Engadine, and Colonda Mars, Calenda Mars, and Onda Marsa in the Grisons. We can recognize the old appelation Calends of March in these different names.
Additionally, we see the same in southern Germany and Austria, where the masquerades are connected to Percht. In Scandinavia, they are concentrated to the twelve days, the Christmas season, and the day of Santa Lucia. In Lombardy, Venice, and the Piedmont, people paraded to “burn the old one” (brusar la veccia), “one” meaning “year,” which can be likened to the ancient Roman festival of Anna Perenna that fell during the Ides of March. Though the Roman New Year’s Day celebration in January was also that of the Lares, in Germany it was that of the dead, but we should not overlook the fact that the Lares—domestic spirits—are the good dead who have gained tutelary status. The Kalendae Ianuariae is therefore also a form of worship of the dead—at this time, a table of souls was set for the dead, who were given food offerings, a ritual also celebrated by the ancient Scandinavians. In France and the Germanic countries this setting took the form of the fairy feast, the table set for Dame Abundia, Percht, or the Parcae. We find exactly this same table in Adam de la Halle’s book in which the fairies are announced by the messenger of the Mesnie Hellequin, which underscores their collusion with the dead. We should not allow the blending of traditions to obscure their meaning: the dead ruled over fertility and fecundity of humans, livestock, and the earth. The fairies and the fates shared the same function.
The aim of the rituals that fall on the dates mentioned is therefore the expulsion of the harmful dead, who were perceived as demons, and to propitiate the other departed souls so that they contribute to the well-being of all over the course of the year that is just beginning. The superimposition of the Roman feasts of the dead—Dies Parentales, Caristia et Cara cognation (February), the feasts of the mother goddesses (Matronalia; March)—transformed into fairies, and masquerades is therefore not illogical.
Fauvel’s Charivari is therefore also a rite of the third function: the noisy masked cortege calls on the new couple’s fecundity. It is therefore usual that it brings onto the stage the reigning powers. The dead are represented by the coffins and the fates and are symbolized by the machine of wheels that refers to Fortune and her hypostases. The various utensils—kettles, hook, grill, pestles, pots, tubs— carried by the masked figures are household instruments connected to cooking and to the food that should not be lacking in the new home. Marriage is not only a rite of passage; it is also a new beginning. The Charivari therefore takes place in the liturgy of beginnings.
The presence of the Hellequin can be explained this way: he represents the dead connected to rites of the third function, but at the same time, he has been subjected to transformation into a figure of Carnival, as testified by the Jeu de la feuillée and Fauvel. This is the same process that turned Hellequin into the Arlecchino of Italian theater. Transformed into a figure of folklore, he found a place in the devilish mischief that accompanies performances of the mysteries, as clearly demonstrated by Otto Driesen, who performed a meticulous comparison of the mysteries with the Charivari. This is why Arlecchino’s coat designated the curtain that masked the entrance to hell or represented it on the medieval stage: a devil’s head was painted on it.
There is also strong evidence for the assimilation of the Mesnie Hellequin by Carnival in the regions east of the Rhine. We can see this in the Carnival procession that appears in a farce by Christian August Vulpias: “Behind the dragon’s tale, the Furious Army ran riot. Its members were quite singular figures endowed with horns, beaks, tails, claws, humps, and long ears, and they made a large racket full of shouting, clapping, hissing, whistling, roaring, bleating, and growling. Behind them, riding on a wild black horse, was Dame Holda, the wild huntress, sounding her horn, cracking her whip, and shaking her unbound tresses.”
David Fechner (1594–1669) makes the troop led by the Loyal Eckhart a bacchanalia, and many texts retain an ambiguity intended to allow us to contine to confuse the Wild Hunt and the masquerade. To distinguish one from the other, we must rely on a detail of the texts: the site of its passage. We can see that when the action takes place in town, we are dealing with a masquerade, but when the Furious Army emerges in the forest or open country, it is the Wild Hunt." [Phantom Armies]
""Oskor,” a word that some have seen as a deformation of Ásgarðr, the realm of the gods. The northern countries, Norway in particular, offer a theme that seems to have come directly from the night hosts we have been examining. Here the Wild Hunt is known as Oskoreia, the Terrifying Ride. This host is a troop of masked men or spirits* that ride horses (ridende julevetter) between Christmas and Epiphany or Santa Lucia Day, hence another name for the Wild Hunt: Lussiferdi. In Scandinavia the twelve-day cycle can run from December 13 to Christmas or from Christmas to January 13.
We can note other names in evidence—Julereia, Trettenreia, Fossareia, and Imridn—all including the word rei or reid, meaning “to ride,” “to go by horse,” sometimes grafted on the determiners Jul/Jól (Christmas) or Imbre/Imbredagene. These terms designate the four days of Lent of the liturgical year (ieiunia quatuor) and Fosse (name of a spirit). There is also another name for this time of the year: Trettenreia or Trettandreia, “the troop of horsemen of the thirteenth day (of winter).” The host traveled through the air* or paraded over the ground and is characterized by two essential motifs: a connection to horses and an association with food and drink. The first motif brings to mind what we read in the accounts provided by thirteenth-century authors: during the cycle of the twelve days spirits slip into stables and abduct horses, returning them later covered with sweat, as if they had been galloping and ridden hard for a long time. It is said that the members of Oskoreia or Lucy have ridden these horses (at merri var Lussi-ridi). This is what happened to Nils Taraldson Berge’s (1769–1846) horse. The second motif is the theft of food—especially drink. The Oskoreians slipped into houses and cellars and stole the food and emptied the kegs of beer, which they refilled with water.
The most frequent date in Norway for the passage of the Wild Hunt, which is called Oskoreia, is the night of Santa Lucia (December 13), which means, according to some, twelve nights before Christmas or even “eleven nights before Christmas, while others maintained it was merely three.” Before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, Santa Lucia Day was considered to be the shortest day of the year and was viewed as the beginning of winter, a time marked by masquerades and other rites. In Sweden, the spirits that formed part of this retinue were called Lussegubber, Lussen, and Lussiner. We find the same rite in Switzerland at the beginning of the sixteenth century, three days before Christmas during what was called “noisy night” (bolster nächt) or “hunt of the sträggele.” The sträggele was the equivalent of the Howler (Schrat), a kind of dwarf that was sometimes combined with a nightmare (mar). Today this name is used to designate the masks used in Carnival processions. On St. Crispin’s Day (October 25) there emerges the Scälarageister, which can be translated as “souls of purgatory” insofar as the third site is called Scälaratobel in the Grisons,* and they ride horses whose nostrils spit fire. Another purgatory is located in the Lötschental. In Switzerland and Alsace, Hutata is on the move during the twelve days, and takes his name from the scream he unleashes.
In Lithuania, the autumn festivals (Ilges) that correspond almost exactly to All Saints’ Day, last for ten days, three of which were dedicated entirely to worship of the dead. At this time, the dead were invited to leave their graves to bathe and feast, and the Wild Hunt was abroad. There are a number of dates for other times of the year, among which we have: Easter, Pentecost, Walpurgis Night (April 30–May 1) St. John’s Day (June 24), St. Peter’s Day (June 29), and St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24). Some of this troop’s movements occur cyclically. It is said that the Wild Hunt appears during the meatless times of the Ember Days (first week of Lent, the week of Pentecost, third week of September, Advent), or that it returns every seven years. All these dates are heavy with significance in the folk calendar, and many rites occur on them. St. Martin’s Day marks the end of the old fiscal year and the beginning of the new one,
as well as the beginning of winter. St. Bartholomew’s Day performs the same offices for autumn, and St. John’s Day is the Christian reinterpretation of the Janus bifrons, which, in antiquity, marked a pivotal point in the year. It so happens that a full set of rites take place on dates considered to be the ending and beginning of the year: purifications; purgings; removal of demons; expulsion of evil; the extinguishing and relighting of fires; masked processions; a ceremonial reception of the dead, who are then led back outside of the village.
The Feast of the Chair of St. Peter (February 22) replaced the ancient ceremony of di parentes or dies parentales, an expression of ancestor worship. Furthermore, we have seen that one of the names of the Wild Hunt’s leader is Goï (Westphalia). As it happens, Goï was the name of the fifth month of winter for the ancient Scandinavians, and it fell at the end of what is now February or the beginning of March. When the new year was still celebrated on March 1, Goï was marked by rites to expel winter, purification rituals, and commemorations of the dead. This corresponded almost exactly to the Greek Anthesteria, during which the dead were given free rein and permission to invade this world, and to the Roman Lupercalia whose purpose was to purify the city and drive away the demons responsible for sickness, sterility, and poor harvests. In Sweden, the sacrifice of Goï was celebrated in the spring equinox. The Westphalian name for the Wild Hunt leader could quite conceivably be a recollection of the past. This would not be the first time that the name for an important festival was anthropomorphized—for example, the Befana is the personification of Epiphany and Perchta personifies Christmas.
The time is sometimes specified as being between eleven o’clock and midnight or between midnight and one in the morning. Nighttime hours predominate, with a strong concentration on midnight (Silesia), but we can also find in the Allgäu and Bavaria noon for the Hunt’s passing. Latvian folk songs (dainas) offer us some invaluable information in this regard. The dead make their way to the otherworld successfully by being buried before noon, the hour that marks the beginning of the setting of the sun and the transition to twilight.
Bury me before noon After noon do not bury me After noon the Children of God Have closed the gates of heaven. Another variant of this is: After noon, the Children of the Spirits Have Closed the Gates of the Spirits.
The day is rarely indicated, and when it is, it is Saturday—a day that conveys the idea of the Sabbath and attests to a connection between our theme and that of the flight of the witches.
If we look for a denominator common to all these dates, we see that they all indicate key times of the year that involve changes, ends, or beginnings—in short, they are all transitional periods. Easter, for example, provides a key to the entire medieval calendar. Its French name, Pâques, comes from the low Latin pascua and the Greek paskha, derived from the Hebrew pesah, “passage” or Passover. The English name Easter is derived from the Old English Eostre and the Old High German Ostara, who was a goddess of the dawn whose feasts were celebrated in April. The holiday was an equinoctal spring rite, a lunar festival connected to several seasonal myths. Even today it marks the transition from the death of winter to vernal life, and the Christian celebration integrated many pagan rites, such as the din intended to drive off the demons of winter. Mircea Eliade cites an eighth-century text: “the Alamans sought to expel winter during the month of February,” and points out more than one custom for expelling death. All the year’s transitional passages have the distinctive feature of permitting communication between the otherworld and our world, evidence for which is provided by the invasion of the undead and spirits during these times. We can find a faint echo of this in the festival of Halloween (October 31), which corresponds to the Celtic Samhain (November 1)—a veritable November Carnival and night of the devil, witchcraft, and the dead represented by masks and popularized in countless movies. In ancient Ireland this was the time when the Army of the Sidhe left the otherworld to roam the earth. This account is the sole piece of evidence reminiscent of the Germanic Wild Hunt: “In the Intoxication of the Ulstermen, several festivals were organized for Samhain. Following the feast arranged by Fintan, all the nobles, who were already fairly intoxicated, engaged in a wild race across Ireland, following Cuchulain, and at the passing of this furious troop, hills were flattened, trees were uprooted, and the fords and streams were emptied of their water.” We should also recall that there is a European corpus of ballads on Hallewijn, which E. Smedes connects to Halloween and to the religious conceptions of the ancient Celts (oud-Keltishe voorstellingen). Hallewijn, whose name is quite close to Herlewin (seen the work by Pierre de Blois) is sometimes regarded as the leader of the Wild Hunt.
Taking a position at the antipodes of the mythological interpretations and undoubtedly in reaction to them, Karl Meisen’s thesis is simple: the Infernal Hunt “is the expression of the Christian dogma of the punishment of the soul of the person who has committed reprehensible acts.” Within this punitive system, we can seek the origin of the Infernal Ghost Army, this troop of the damned led by the devil and his satellites. Meisen acknowledges that the roots of this belief originate in ancestor worship in classical antiquity, but he does not deal with this matter with any greater precision. All the researchers note that hiding behind the Helle of Hellequin is certainly the Herla of Herlethingus, Herlechinus, and Herlewinus, but the interpretations of thingus and quin have given rise to the wildest hypotheses—those evoking the word king and that are incompatible with philological laws, as clearly demonstrated by H. M. Flasdieck. People have tried to see in Hellekin the “king of hell” (hell king), the “child of Hell” (Höllenkind), and the “king of alders” (Erlkönig). Indeed, we can stumble upon this error in many French books. It has been claimed to derive from Erenquin, the name of an earl of Boulogne, and so on.
This theme became the object of a completely new and appealing interpretation in 1934. Picking up on an idea of Lily Weiser-Aall (1927), Otto Höfler, student of R. Much, a fine representative of the Vienna Mythological School, postulates “the priority of the ecstatic worship over the mythic legend.” For him, the Furious Army complex “is the reflection of secret German ecstatic cults,” the reflection of rites binding warriors within a brotherhood, placed beneath the aegis of Odin, whose recognition sign is the mask. It involved a warrior aristocracy that had social and religious duties closely connected to the dead, because its members were intiated by means of a mock death. These fraternities would have been mistaken for armies of the dead by the noninitiated who caught sight of them. This is what Höfler seeks to demonstrate, chiefly relying on a passage by Tacitus in which the Roman historian says that the Harii painted their bodies black in order to pass for an army of dead men (Germania 43). O. Höfler shows thirty points common to the Furious Army and to the masked processions that mark the winter equinox, some of which allowed the participants to go into a trance, leave their bodies, and transform into the entities whose masks they wore—in other words, the dead. According to Höfler, the myth of the Furious Army has its socio-religious counterpart in the “rite” of the warrior societies. Hence its root should be sought in their actions. Readers pressed for time can find a good summary of Höfler’s involved and deeply detailed investigation in the study that H. M. Flasdieck devotes to Harlekin.
Widely debated by many researchers, Höfler’s thesis has made its presence felt, inspiring as much rejection as it does approval. For example, H. P. Hasenfratz, in 1982, takes it up when he builds a case that relies on a corpus of Indo-European texts and emphasizes the close connection existing between masked fraternities and the dead, veritable tutelary spirits ( fravashay) of the living. The passage of the Furious Army falls into the context of Dumézil’s third function (fertility/fecundity), a point that has won a rather large consensus today. One aspect remains obscure, however: the relationship between warriors (second function) and fertility.
In 1980 a disciple of Höfler, Christine N. F. Eike, published an extensive study on the Oskoreia, the name for the Mesnie Hellequin in Norwegian folk traditions that picked up on the trance theory, noting that the manifestions of the winter-nights troop seem to reflect phenomena, such as forming Doubles, well known in shamanic traditions. This finally explains why it is logical for Odin to have been made the leader of the troop: he was considered the “god of ecstasy” (ekstasegud). She does not say explicitly just when this took place, so a major question is left hanging: Did Odin form part of this complex since its origins? Depending on the traditions they use for reference—Indo-European tradition, nineteenth-century folk legends, medieval texts—the researchers are not all of the same opinion.
Following in the footsteps of others before him, Friedrich Ranke delivered a concise critique of Höfler’s theories. Supporting his case by citing the folk traditions reflecting the legends (Sagen), he refutes these theories point by point. In fact, the major point of Höfler’s argument is that we do not know whether or not such fraternities existed and if the rite predates the myth or legend. It is hardly possible to answer these questions, because the myth explains the rite and vice versa, but our texts allow us to state that the belief in the return of the dead on certain dates must have given concrete form to a ritual monopolized by a group. In France, the name Mesnie Hellequin gradually came to mean people who assembled to commit acts contrary to good character and morality—but this could be a clerical interpretation of a rite that had a whiff of paganism.
The theories of German scholars can be summed up in a few key words: beliefs connected to the soul and ancestor worship, to the elements, and to dreams are the source of what initially appeared as a myth, then as a legend (Sage). They were crystallized in the form of rites of which processions of masked men would be one form. Two essential elements emerge from all this: the importance of the dead for the wellbeing of human societies, and the role of ecstatic practices that carry with them vestiges of shamanism.
One of the principal arguments made by scholars in favor of Odin as leader of the Wild Hunt is the motif of the storm. It opens the door to the Indo-European world. In the majority of post-medieval traditions, the passage of the Wild Hunt was connected to atmospheric conditions. This was also true of stories about ghosts or abnormal deaths,1 which would be normal, for an extremely ancient notion linked the soul to the pneuma, the breath. Therefore, when souls moved on, the wind rose. This immediately caused a problem. The same was said of the passages of the cursed huntsman, the wild huntsman, animal ghosts, unbelievable packs of all kinds, the phantom coach (Nachtgutsche, in Switzerland), and the flights of witches. We must, therefore, treat the motif with caution, for we are unable to know in what sense the borrowings have been carried out or even if the motif is original. Furthermore, researchers have long felt that the Wild Hunt undoubtedly had an Indo-European origin, because in ancient India a we find a troop that was apparently akin to it.
From the sixteenth century on, the terms regularly used to describe the nightly hosts were gedöss or “din”; brausen, “to howl, rumble, roar,” “to breathe violently”; and sûsen, “howls,” “makes a terrible din when passing by.”
When exploring the relationships between folk beliefs and paganism, W. Schwartz observes that the theme of the cursed hunter existed among other Indo-European peoples and suggested we view natural phenomena—such as tempests and storms—as the root of the portrayal. On the basis of this study, some researchers have compared the Wild Hunt to the god Indra’s companions, the troop of the Maruts, as Jan Gonda describes: “Large and powerfully strong and dreadful in appearance, they cleave the air over mountain and hill, armed with their glittering spears. Admirable and irresistible, they travel in their sparkling golden chariots pulled by red-roan horses or gazelles. All tremble before them, even the earth and the mountains. They cleave the rock and cause solid ground to tremble. Coming from heaven, they give birth to wind, lightning, and rain. The urine of their steeds is like the rain.”
We can note that in the Lay of Helgi Hjörðvarðsson, the Valkyrie Hrimgerd says this about horses and her companions:
Three times nine maidens, but one led them all White-skinned beneath her helmet When the horses lifted their heads, the dew fell from their manes Into the deep valleys; Hail in the high forests Whence prosperity comes to men.
Georges Dumézil again takes up the work of Stig Wikander and suggests that the Maruts be interpreted as “the atmospheric projection, with reference to the storm as a battle, of bands of young warriors, the márya, who were both dreadful and necessary, useful and excessive.”
The leader of the Maruts was Rudra, the patron of hunters and master of thieves and brigands. A wrathful archer, this dark, wild, and alarming figure dwelled in the mountains of the north. From there he came to sow terror and violence. In short, it is a virtual certainty that this troop represented the Indo-European version of the Wild Hunt and that its chief was one of the archetypes for the leader of the Infernal Hunt. It is not thinkable, however, that an ancient Indian tradition could have maintained itself this way for millennia and suffered no modification when it traveled through other lands. It is probable that the Mesnie Hellequin was the medieval Western form of a historical religious reality of Vedic India that was more or less transformed into myth. Up to now, the connections that have been discovered are typological in nature rather than genetic. We must therefore revisit the medieval case files.
There are some flaws in this theory that the Maruts are the ancestors of the Wild Hunt. Odin, the somber, binding magician god, did not correspond to Indra—counterpart of the god Tyr—but instead to Varuna, and the Romans identified him with Mercury. His connection to agrarian considerations is relatively recent, as clearly demonstrated by Jan de Vries. In addition, thunder and lightning were attributes of the god Thor and his hammer, Mjöllnir. In the eleventh century Adam of Bremen writes:
“He rules in the air, commanding lightning and thunder, and the wind and the rain, and sunshine and fruits. . . . When epidemics and famines threaten, sacrifices are made to the idol Thor.” In northern Sweden, the peasants called Thor “the good farmer; the good fellow of wheat and the fields” (gobonden; åkerbonden; korngubben). Thor appears here as a god of the third function (fertility). In fact, in Vedic India, Vayu resembles the leader of the Wild Hunt most closely. He is the god of wind and storms, and leads a troop of the dead.
Even taking into account all the slips and deviations, the substitutions of duties, the confusion of different gods, and the phenomena that mythologies give more than one god the same attribute, we still run headlong into a major obstacle: weather is connected to Thor and not to Odin. Nevertheless, Odin is a complex god who rebuts all simplistic definitions. He has appropriated to himself the attributes of the agrarian gods, the gods ruling fertility, and the gods of the dead, hence we can detect many overlaps. It is possible he belongs to the Wild Hunt, but it is impossible to say whether this has been the case since the beginning or if he entered this legend much later. In view of the texts and the most current research, we may be inclined to accept this second hypothesis.
Perhaps we can extricate ourselves from this impasse by recalling that there was not one but there were many nocturnal hosts—often confused for each other, as we have seen, and some with a pronounced martial character and some without. As mythic thought connects storms and combat, tempests and battles, the slippages that we detect are quite logical. To spell out precisely how something for which we have only the culmination is extremely delicate, but all will sense the inner structure of this complex.
The most solid argument in Odin’s favor is undoubtedly the fact that the Infernal Throng sometimes consists of warriors and horsemen. As the god of war and the owner of the horse Sleìpnir, Odin is at home in this context. He also finds a place as master of Jöl (Jölnir), through his knowledge of necromancy and other magical practices that make him the god-shaman who has mastered the trance journey, and by his Einherjar, the dead warriors that make up the army with whom he will confront the powers of chaos during Ragnarök.
When exploring the relationships between folk beliefs and paganism, W. Schwartz observes that the theme of the cursed hunter existed among other Indo-European peoples and suggested we view natural phenomena—such as tempests and storms—as the root of the portrayal. On the basis of this study, some researchers have compared the Wild Hunt to the god Indra’s companions, the troop of the Maruts, as Jan Gonda describes: “Large and powerfully strong and dreadful in appearance, they cleave the air over mountain and hill, armed with their glittering spears. Admirable and irresistible, they travel in their sparkling golden chariots pulled by red-roan horses or gazelles. All tremble before them, even the earth and the mountains. They cleave the rock and cause solid ground to tremble. Coming from heaven, they give birth to wind, lightning, and rain. The urine of their steeds is like the rain.”
We can note that in the Lay of Helgi Hjörðvarðsson, the Valkyrie Hrimgerd says this about horses and her companions:
Three times nine maidens, but one led them all White-skinned beneath her helmet When the horses lifted their heads, the dew fell from their manes Into the deep valleys; Hail in the high forests Whence prosperity comes to men.
Georges Dumézil again takes up the work of Stig Wikander and suggests that the Maruts be interpreted as “the atmospheric projection, with reference to the storm as a battle, of bands of young warriors, the márya, who were both dreadful and necessary, useful and excessive.” The leader of the Maruts was Rudra, the patron of hunters and master of thieves and brigands. A wrathful archer, this dark, wild, and alarming figure dwelled in the mountains of the north. From there he came to sow terror and violence. In short, it is a virtual certainty that this troop represented the Indo-European version of the Wild Hunt and that its chief was one of the archetypes for the leader of the Infernal Hunt. It is not thinkable, however, that an ancient Indian tradition could have maintained itself this way for millennia and suffered no modification when it traveled through other lands. It is probable that the Mesnie Hellequin was the medieval Western form of a historical religious reality of Vedic India that was more or less transformed into myth. Up to now, the connections that have been discovered are typological in nature rather than genetic. We must therefore revisit the medieval case files.
There are some flaws in this theory that the Maruts are the ancestors of the Wild Hunt. Odin, the somber, binding magician god, did not correspond to Indra—counterpart of the god Tyr—but instead to Varuna, and the Romans identified him with Mercury. His connection to agrarian considerations is relatively recent, as clearly demonstrated by Jan de Vries. In addition, thunder and lightning were attributes of the god Thor and his hammer, Mjöllnir. In the eleventh century Adam of Bremen writes:
“He rules in the air, commanding lightning and thunder, and the wind and the rain, and sunshine and fruits. . . . When epidemics and famines threaten, sacrifices are made to the idol Thor.” In northern Sweden, the peasants called Thor “the good farmer; the good fellow of wheat and the fields” (gobonden; åkerbonden; korngubben). Thor appears here as a god of the third function (fertility). In fact, in Vedic India, Vayu resembles the leader of the Wild Hunt most closely. He is the god of wind and storms, and leads a troop of the dead.
Even taking into account all the slips and deviations, the substitutions of duties, the confusion of different gods, and the phenomena that mythologies give more than one god the same attribute, we still run headlong into a major obstacle: weather is connected to Thor and not to Odin. Nevertheless, Odin is a complex god who rebuts all simplistic definitions. He has appropriated to himself the attributes of the agrarian gods, the gods ruling fertility, and the gods of the dead, hence we can detect many overlaps. It is possible he belongs to the Wild Hunt, but it is impossible to say whether this has been the case since the beginning or if he entered this legend much later. In view of the texts and the most current research, we may be inclined to accept this second hypothesis.
Perhaps we can extricate ourselves from this impasse by recalling that there was not one but there were many nocturnal hosts—often confused for each other, as we have seen, and some with a pronounced martial character and some without. As mythic thought connects storms and combat, tempests and battles, the slippages that we detect are quite logical. To spell out precisely how something for which we have only the culmination is extremely delicate, but all will sense the inner structure of this complex.
The most solid argument in Odin’s favor is undoubtedly the fact that the Infernal Throng sometimes consists of warriors and horsemen. As the god of war and the owner of the horse Sleìpnir, Odin is at home in this context. He also finds a place as master of Jöl (Jölnir), through his knowledge of necromancy and other magical practices that make him the god-shaman who has mastered the trance journey, and by his Einherjar, the dead warriors that make up the army with whom he will confront the powers of chaos during Ragnarök.
In Norway, the first mention of Odin as the leader of a troop of the damned—which is not called anything close to the Furious Army or the Wild Hunt—appears in the Dream Song (Draumkvoeðe), the narrative by the visionary Olaf Astesom (or Akneson, the name appearing most often), which we read earlier (page 148). Odin has a nickname in this text: Grutte Greybeard (Grutte Gráskeggi), which corresponds to one of this god’s names—of which there are more than one hundred seventy!— Hárbarðr (Gray Beard) in the Eddas. In the collection compiled by Jørgen Moe around 1847, Grutte Gráskeggi wears a black hat (strophe 17), which corresponds to the god’s other nicknames, “Hat” (Höttr) and “Long Hat” (Síðhött), which allude to Odin’s habit of concealing his face beneath a hat or hood. The problem is that this is a later text, even if its origin quite likely goes back to the thirteenth century. This leader could well be a later interpretation that had simply replaced a devil. It is common knowledge that Odin was regarded as a devil by clerics.
We can find the first instance of Odin’s name in connection to the Wild Hunt in Nicolaus Gryse’s (1543–1614) Mirror of the Anti-Christian Papacy and Lutheran Christianity, printed in Rostock in 1593—quite a bit later. Gryse criticizes ancient pagan rites that were intended to petition the “false god Odin” (den Wodendüel) for a good harvest in the coming year. Gryse adds: “This idolatry persisted under the papacy . . . among many peasants in the form of superstitious customs and invocations of Odin (solcker auergelöuischer gebruk in der anropinge des Woden) at harvest time, for the pagans believed that this same diabolical huntsman (dersülue hellsche Jeger) made his presence known in the fields at the time of the harvest.”
The attribution of the Wild Hunt rests only on bringing together Wotan/Odin and the hellsche Jäger. The third-function rite described by Gryse has nothing to do with our phalanx of the condemned. We should note that after the oat harvest in the northern German town of Rodenberg, a staff was implanted in the ground to which was attached a straw figure with the help of a horse shoe. This effigy was called Waut or Waul.
We owe Johannes Locenius (1597–1625), professor of history and jurisprudence at Uppsala University in Sweden for the second mention of Odin. In his Suebo-Gotland Antiquities (1654), he tells how the Norse made Odin the god of war and that a persistent old superstition widespread among the common folk said that “if any specter shows itself at evening or in the night on horseback or armed and accompanied by a loud din [cum magno strepitu], people say that it is Odin passing through [Oden istac transire dicant].” We find repeated here the theme of the phantom army, and the basis for its comparison to the Wild Hunt rests on the terms specter and din. What Locenius says is recycled by the philologist and archaeologist Johannes Scheffes, who was born in Strasborg in 1621 and died in Uppsala, where he taught. The sole difference in the narratives by Locenius and Scheffes is that Scheffes adds more emphasis to the text (strepitus nocturnes spectrum larvarumque) and lists the phrases in which Odin appears: “Far till Odens,” “Go to the devil, and live with Orcus;” “Oden eiga dig,” “May Odin carry you off!”*
As an enthusiastic philologist, Scheffes points out that Odin means “tumult” or “din” (quis iste Odini strepitusve significet) and that the Germans today call this fracas the Furious Army, which amounts to Wodan/Odin and his minions. In fact, Wodan/Odin does not mean “tumult” or “din” but “fury.” Yet the attribution of the Wild Hunt to Odin/Wotan stems from this error. The identification of this god with the leader of the phalanx of the night rests on erroneous philological deductions—the work of scholars reinterpreting certain pagan customs.
Locenius and Scheffes give impetus to a movement that keeps growing and a scholarly tradition, which, over the course of time, merges back into oral tradition. Christoph Arnold (1627–1685), deacon of St. Mary’s Church in Nuremberg, represents an important milestone in this scholarly tradition. Attacking the idols of the ancient Saxons and Germans, he pens a lengthy examination of Odin, pointing out that his name shared the same root as the German wüten (inspires rage) and the English wood, as well as the Danish and runic vode, meaning “destruction,” “danger,” “threat of war,” and mentioning that the Icelanders called the devil Odin and used the expressions Oden eige dig (May Odin take hold of you), far du til Odens (Go to the devil), and huada Odens latum (What is this deviltry?). He cites Locenius, then describes Lapp rites that took place during Christmas, when spirits called Juhlavolker (People of Jöl) traveled through the air. Small statues, similar to those erected for the spirits of the dead, were raised to them. A book by Johann Peter Schmitt appeared in 1742 in the Baltic port of Rostock and established a bridge between the traditions of northern Germany.
It is said in particular that this younger Odin [dieser jüngere Othin] was an archmagician and had no peer in the arts of making war. This is why some people have sought to see his name Woden as a derivitave of “to rage” (wüten). Further, no one is unaware of the senseless belief held by countless folk, especially some hunters, that the time around Christmas and on the eve of Carnaval (Fastel-Abend) is when the one called Woor or the Goor or the wild huntsman passes. They say that the devil organizes a hunt with a troop of rapping spirits (mit einem hauffen Polter-Geister). If we get to the bottom of this superstition, we see that it emerged from the story of this younger Odin, and that the common man thinks that Odin/ Wotan passes. This is why a company of ghosts like this is called the Furious Army, Wotan’s/Odin’s Army, Gooden’s Army, or the Army of Odin.
Schmitt therefore hunts in folk beliefs for what he needs to support his investigation of the vestiges of paganism, and he makes some bold comparisons by using the various spellings of the name Odin in the Germanic countries: Òðinn, Oden, Goden, Woden, Wodan, Wotan. He is not even aware that he includes a woman in these comparisons: Goor, a name that in fact is very likely a deformation of Woor.
In Denmark, Odin was incorporated into the wild huntsman around the eighteenth century and appeared for the first time in the writings of the priest Frederik Monrad (1702–1758).
It is common knowledge that the dead have a connection to the third function (fertility/fecundity). Mircea Eliade has written on this matter with great depth.
Agriculture as a profane skill and as a cult touches the world of the dead on two quite different levels. The first is solidarity with the earth; the dead are buried like seeds and enter a dimension of the earth accessible to them alone. Then, too, agriculture is preeminently a handling of fertility, of life reproducing itself by growth. The dead are especially drawn to this mystery of rebirth, to the cycle of creation, and to inexhaustible fertility. Like seeds buried in the womb of the earth, the dead wait for their return to life in their new form. That is why they draw close to the living, particularly at those times when the vital tension of the whole community is at its height—that is, during the fertility festival, when the generative powers of nature and of mankind are evoked, unleashed, and stirred to frenzy by rites and orgies. . . . As long as seeds remain buried, they also fall under the jurisdiction of the dead. The Earth Mother, or Great Goddess of Fertility governs the fate of seeds and that of the dead in the same way. But the dead are sometimes closer to man, and it is to them that the husbandman turns to bless and sustain his work.
Among other things, fertility depends upon precipitation from the sky, hence the link among the Wild Hunt, storms, and the third function (F III). The dead have power over the elements—the Scandinavian case file we study in my book Return of the Dead leaves no doubt on that score. The passage of the Wild Hunt as a sign of fertility is rarely mentioned explicitly.
When Nicolas Gryse (1543–1614) cites a Mecklenburg custom intended to appease Odin, he relays
the words of a peasant song. Wode, take now fodder for your horse ’Tis now thistles and brambles, Next year it shall be most excellent grain.
When Martin Crusius (1526–1607) discusses “these peasants who believed they had gone into Venus Mountain,” he informs us that they went there to speak certain words to forestall storms from striking the fruit (non percuto grandine fruges). Because Venus Mountain is the home of the Wild Hunt, it is easy to guess to whom these words were addressed. Speaking of the Christmastime perambulations of Dame Holle (Holla, Holda), Johannes Prætorius (1630–1680) writes: “People also say that Dame Holle begins to move about during the Christmas period. This is why serving women replenish their spindles or roll large amounts of yarn or fabric around them, and leave them there over night. They say if Dame Holla sees this she will say, ‘For every thread there will be a good year.’”
In fact, the reference to fertility is implicit most of the time as if its connection to the nightly hosts is obvious. Otto Höfler explains it by the fertilizing magic of the cultic course of demons roaming over the fields, a course imitated by processions of masked men on certain dates, but he goes too far, perhaps, when he starts talking about sexual orgies, which are entirely absent from the texts we have examined here. Like the dead, demons govern storms, but their action is generally pernicious and devastating, because they seek only to harm human beings. Because they are frequently confused with the dangerous dead, those who came to a bad end or who are unhappy with their fate and desire to get revenge on the living, it is quite difficult to distinguish them, particularly as they designated by the words devil and demon. We can be sure of this: in the mentalities of our ancient ancestors, the third function was inseparable from the dead, however they appeared—whether alone or in a band. The importance of fertility and abundance springs from two other themes formerly associated with the Wild Hunt: that of the night feast, about which we have already talked a great deal, and that of the resuscitated bull. During the cultic meals of these spirits, a bull was killed and eaten, then his hide was placed back over its correctly arranged bones, and the troop leader struck it with her wand, restoring the animal to life. Shamanic in origin, this rite is greatly attested in alpine legends outside those concerning the Wild Hunt. Another recurring motif reflects a third function context: that concerning the neat and tidy house and prohibitions on working. Here, the dead appear in the guise of the guarantors of a certain kind of order over which they keep watch. They never hesitate to reward or punish.
The relationship between the nocturnal hordes and the third function is very old, and this is what forms the connection among beliefs, rites—masquerades and ritual feasts—and legends. The dead are never impotent or powerless. They continue to meddle in human affairs and they remain a force with which to be reckoned. They customarily appear on certain dates when communication is established between this world and the next, when they have a decisive value in our lives. H.-P. Hasenfratz notes that the Festival of the Dead and Carnival were common to all Indo-European peoples before Christianization and that the ancient Iranians regarded the dead as tutelary spirits (fravashay) of the living. E. Mudrak reminds us of their kinship to the Valkyrie. He also shows how the role of masquerades in which the dead are represented is a rite of the third function, which explains the family resemblance between the Mesnie Hellequin and the Charivari in Fauvel." [Phantom Armies]
"We can note that the animals who are part of the Wild Hunt are mutilated: they do not possess a normal number of feet—generally, the horses, dogs, and hares have only three—or else they are missing their heads, which is a sign of their Chthonian nature. This detail has been compared to Sleipnir’s eight hooves, but in the case of Odin’s steed, the speed of his movement is evoked as well as his supernatural nature. Otto Höfler points to the existence of a two-legged horse and another with eight legs and compares them to the people disguised as horses in masked processions, but he neglects to mention that these people never disguised themselves as badgers, foxes, sheep, and so forth. Kurt Ranke notes that these animals smack primarily of popular belief and should be ranked alongside the lame or headless animals and men that haunt folklore and that we can find in stories concerning the diabolical huntsman, the cursed huntsman, and the wild huntsman. Hans Peter Hasenfratz reminds us, however, that the fraternities of ancient Iran were described as demon denigrators, as wolves, and even as two-legged wolves, and they were said to visit cemeteries at night, where they dug up cadavers, certain parts of which they cooked and ate. These individuals were either naked or clad in dark-colored garments topped by a pointed cap or hood, which recalls a phrase quoted by Étienne of Bourbon and Adam de la Halle: “Does this cap fit me well?” We can thus ask ourselves if this image may have been contaminated by exterior motifs intended to strengthen the fantastic nature of the nightly hosts. This is quite likely the case, for this motif does not appear before the sixteenth century (Cysat), and it is the distinguishing feature of several legends concerning revenants.
Among the animals cited as having a connection to the Wild Hunt, it is quite startling to find the pig, Freyr’s sacred animal (F III), but also a beast that plays a role in Celtic funerary gifts during the Hallstatt (1000–500 BCE) and the La Tene (500–300 BCE) eras. The pig is one of the most often cited ghost animals, and it appears most often around Christmas and during Advent, which is hardly surprising, for we know that the restless dead—sinners, suicides, the sacrilegious, the greedy, and the usurious—often appear in this form and that women who slew their children emerged in the shape of a sow accompanied by her piglets. This shows that Gloso, the incandescent pig of Swedish tradition, is not the only example. Near Pfeiffikon in Switzerland, a sow and her young accompany the Türscht, which appears from the east with the bad weather. In Adelboden, in the Bernese Alps, the Rochelmore travels through the air, and she sounds like a snuffling sow (Färlimore). In Grindelwald, the sow is a herald of bad weather. In Oberiberg, the priest’s concubine crosses the Münsterbach Ravine in the company of a sow and her piglets. Switzerland has other phantom creatures, such as the Tuutier, the Grägi, and the Fährlisau. We can see how difficult it is to attribute to a specific god the phenomena connected to the passage of a nightly host. We have in fact too many putative patrons:
Odin, Thor, Freyr! We should note that a detail from the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder titled Melancholy (1532) depicts a fantastic aerial ride in which appear a wild boar ridden by an emaciated naked woman who bears a spear, a ram mounted by a Landsknecht, and a cow that carries a naked man and woman. In addition, we can note P. N. Arbo, who painted a Wild Hunt (Asgaardsreien, 1872) led by a bearded king who brandishes a hammer, in other words the god Thor. The animal that seems to be the oldest member of this complex is the horse, whose role as a psychopomp clearly emerges in several accounts—namely, that concerning King Herla and the episode in the story recounted by Orderic Vitalis, when Walchelin seized the riderless steed and “felt a heat as hot as fire and an intense cold.” When demons carry off the soul of a sinner, they arrive on horseback, and the Infernal Hunt often includes a mount for their intended victim. Theodoric the Great is carried into hell by a demonic horse. We should also recall that archaeology has unearthed evidence of men and horses buried together. In addition is the case involving Heremod, one of Odin’s sons, who rode Sleìpnir into hell when he sought to rescue his brother Baldur.
In Gotland, the tombstones from the Germanic sepulchres of Ardre, Hablingbo, and Tjangvide confirm the horse’s psychopomp role. There is abundant testimony from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries telling us that the dead make their way to the otherworld bound to a horse. In Denmark and in the regions east of the Rhine, a horse buried alive in the church would appear before the house on whose door the dead man would knock, and it had only three legs. It was said that a horse was buried in all new cemeteries before the first deceased human being was buried there. The dictionary still reflects the horse’s role in accompanying the dead: the litter, or mortuary stretcher, was called St. Michael’s horse. When someone died suddenly, it was said that “the white horse had struck him with its shoe.” In Denmark, someone recovering from a serious illness said, “I gave Death a bushel of oats” ( jeg gav Döden en skäppe havre). In folk beliefs and popular legends the dead often appeared looking like horses, a motif Henrik Ibsen borrowed for Rosmersholm (1886).
L. Malten notes that in ancient times the dead individual was first transformed into a horse, then was reconceived and depicted next to a horse. We can note another detail: the Hörselberg, the mountain where the Wild Hunt resides, is clearly implied by its name, Horse Mountain, for two variations for horse in Germanic, hros and hors, establish a clear parallel. In addition to its bond with the departed, the horse also is connected to fertility. We see that several blades of wheat were left for Odin’s horse to insure a good harvest the following year. We can also note that throughout the entire Germanic area, men offered sacrifices or offerings to horses. Alfred Eskeröd provides an excellent glimpse of this." [Phantom Armies]
"Otto Höfler believed that the Wild Hunt was possibly the image of brotherhoods that consisted of masked warriors. The mask permitted them to be identified with the dead. The festivals of this fraternity coincided with those on which commemoration of the dead was celebrated—in short, with ancestor worship. Perhaps we can hypothesize, cum grano salis, that an evolution occurred that was comparable to the one Vincente Risco illustrates in the traditions of the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain we move from the Procession of Souls to the Società do Oso, formed by living people. Risco writes: “This gathering of souls into a group, often the dead of a parish, ancestors, and relatives, transformed into a secret society made up of living individuals, a society whose functions appear to be similar to that of any other pious fraternity or brotherhood. . . . All the members of this society possess the ability to foresee the death of individuals and announce them with certainty. This death premonition seems to be the privilege of those who are members of the Società do Oso.” These people also enjoyed the ability temporarily to leave their bodies—that is, they created a Double. When they marched in procession, they could cross through physical objects effortlessly, as an astral body would. The Procession of Souls was akin to the Chasse Annequin that came in search of those on death’s doorway.
Its members formed two rows and were dressed in white, they walked barefoot and carried candles that give off a bluish light. These dead people were guided by two living individuals who carried a cross and a holy water stoup. We can note another important detail: in this Procession were the souls of those slated to die soon. The passage of this troop was the herald of an imminent death. German folk traditions include two similar corteges, which speaks in favor of the great antiquity of the belief.
1. A troop of dead souls that encounter a living individual who was destined to die in the near future. The troop traveled through the streets of the village where this person lived, accompanied by a vague rumbling that caught the attention of this individual. Several variations on this theme come into play here. The living individual did not recognize the dead person at once, but soon, thanks to a detail in clothing, he discovered that this ded person was none other than himself.
2. A procession of living people whose members were those destined to die over the coming year. The oldest testimony of the troop can be found in the Zimmern Chronicle (sixteenth century):
“Near Gernsbach (near Baden-Baden) there lived a chef named Marcel. One night, while the moon shone, he awoke and looked out his window in the direction of Quail Fountain toward Gernsbach. He caught sight of many people, both men and women, holding hands and forming a circle. They danced forward along the path leading from the fountain to the castle. When they reached the castle, he recognized many of the people among this company, and, most especially, he saw himself in his regular attire, which caused him quite a shock. He watched them dance around the castle before disappearing he knew not where. That same year, all those taking part in this dance died, including the chef.”
Sometimes, the living members that appear in these corteges are not the future dead.The possible confusion of corteges of masked men with the Wild Hunt emerges not only from The Romance of Fauvel but also from the testimony of Étienne of Bourbon in which one of the Hunt’s members asks his neighbor, “Does my cap fit me well?” and that of Adam de la Halle, “Does my hurepiaus suit me well?” As Phillipe Ménard notes, “the question posed on the subject of the cap should be attributed not to misplaced coquettishness. It means that the cap is not the normal headgear of this troop.” For us, it means that this headgear is donned in a specific circumstance: during the celebration of a rite.
This confusion also stands out in the narrative by Renward Cysat on the passage of a “truly strange and terrifying procession, whose members were horrible and hideous” (see page 246); in that of Jakob Trausch (page 162); in that of Johannes Agricola, who shows us the inhabitants of Eisleben waiting for the passage of the Furious Army on Lent Thursday (pages 145–46); and in that of Christian Vulpius, who teaches us that the Furious Army is represented in the Carnival procession (pages 181–82). In the Norwegian traditions, on Oskoreia, the confusion between the dead and masked men was permanent, a point that Christine Eike has illuminated fully.
If we attempt a hypothetical timeline of the facts, we end up with this:
1. According to an ancestral belief, the dead roamed the earth on certain dates and played an important role in the happiness of the living, because they governed fertility and prosperity.
2. To honor them, propitiate them, or protect ourselves from them, we formed societies (brotherhoods, fraternities, and so forth) that depicted them or mimed them by means of masks and disguises. This action derived from ancestor worship and held an important social function.
3. Distinct entities—originally, these two troops, one of the departed, the other of disguised living men—became confused with each other, and people no longer drew any distinction between them, instead regarding each as the other and vice versa. See Cysat’s testimony.
4. The fraternity of the living was thus cultish in nature, and its members, as much as we can deduce from the traditions examined, were a kind of elect who possessed the gift of being able to divide into Doubles, which allowed them, among other things, to foresee death and to move quite quickly, like the wind.
5. This company, more or less Christianized over the course of its historical evolution, lost its ties to Dumézil’s third function and became purely funerary in nature. It took responsibility for burying the dead it sought. Here, elements are far from clear, because, according to Vincente Risco’s investigation, the burial seemed virtual. The brotherhood did not abduct the true corpse, but instead it took its Double.
Let us revisit the fourth point: how members are selected for this society. It is likely that this changed over the years and bowed to the laws of ecotypes. The texts cited by Vincente Risco show that the living who accompanied the Societá do Oso were predestined by a gift, but the texts also reveal that their duties were transferable. In “La Procesión de las animas en pena,” the bearer of the cross and the bearer of the holy water stoup can become freed of their obligation. They need only meet a living human being on their path. The bearer of the cross then hands over his burden, and the other is obliged to take it. The bearer of the font does the same, saying Tócache a ti. All things considered, this transfer of power was strangely reminiscent of that of the Latvian werewolves, the name of a secret fraternity of men who could cast Doubles who would fight the wizards who had stolen the seeds. Here, we can take a short digression to refer to my study of the Double in which we can find the translation of the minutes of the trial of one such werewolf. We can note that these particular werewolves were active on Santa Lucia’s Day, St. John’s Day, and Pentecost—dates that witnessed the passage of the Wild Hunt. Otto Höfler has used this testimony to demonstrate the existence of secret societies in Latvia. There is no involvement of the dead, which makes the scope of the comparison relative.
It is possible that membership in these societies was reserved for a particular social group that acted as a kind of mediater between the living and the dead, but it might also have involved men capable of releasing their Doubles: shamans, experts on relations between this world and the otherworld. Höfler regards the members of these brotherhoods as soldiers, and we can find confirmation from our medieval narratives, which often depict armed men. Ronald Grambo believes that we have here the vestiges of an elitist cult of dead warriors. The different theories for which I have provided a glimpse disentangle the skein of beliefs and traditions. It is more than a certainty that ecstatic phenomena hid behind this legend complex, and it is more than sure that at its center were worship of the dead and fertility concerns. The church, it seems, adulterated the facts but simultaneously did some very creative work. It is possible that fraternities were involved with the worship of the dead and that masquerades and other Charivaris recuperated all or part of their activity.
The narratives we have read here allow us to see two large vectors. First is the ancestor worship that encourages the merger of the theme and the table of souls, the fairy repast. Next is the cult rituals that culminate in masquerades and Carnival-like processions. Grafted upon this trunk are motifs taken from the legend of the wild huntsman and, when the clerics had taken possession of the Wild Hunt and adopted it in accordance with Christian dogma and other elements of medieval creation, the legend of a cursed hunter, which is nothing but a miniature version of the Infernal Hunt that has been reduced to its simplest expression. In turn, this edifying legend evolved over the course of the ages to produce that of the wandering Jew and the ghost ship. This permeability of traditions rests on a common reserve, a common vision of the universe, and the intellectual approach that permitted this glimpse is an attempt at explanation and mastery of the world in which lived our ancestors.
In the Middle Ages the Infernal Hunt was a Christian legend that borrowed ancient traditions. It was directly inspired by a mythic phenomenon, the passage of the Wild Hunt, whose origin is Indo-European if we accept that the troop of Maruts led by Rudra clearly represents the archetype. It is undeniable that Orderic Vitalis was the initiator of a movement: by creating a Christian legend out of preexisting elements and then diffusing them, he inspired other clerics to do likewise, ad majorem gloriam Dei, and these clerics reutilized the traditions with which they were familiar, hence the numerous variations we have encountered. We could say that Orderic served as a kind of catalyst that gave an impressive narrative shape to elements that were in the air of his time. He was likely the first to grasp the benefits the church could wrest from beliefs concerning the dead and their return. By transposing events from the context of a vision into that of an actual encounter, he reconnected with popular beliefs and anchored his narrative in everyday reality. The sole distortion he made to earlier traditions was to transform this host of revenants into sinners and to have them describe their fate—in short, to transform a belief into an edifying exemplum. Simultaneously, the recycling of the theme of the Wild Hunt by the clerics allowed pre-Christian traditions to survive and evolve parallel to those spread by the church. Meisen is correct on the importance of Christianity’s role in the development of the legend. The leader of the Wild Hunt was certainly a psychopomp deity before he was recast as a demon. The last traces of his former identity are his gigantic size and club (Orderic). It is not obligatory for this deity to be a composite figure, for we can understand the cock and the dog as attributes rather than as a reference to his morphology. It is worth being cautious on this point, however, for the cock and the dog may well have been separated from this morphology in an anthropomorphic transformation of the deity.
The cyclical return of the dead to the earth retains a good part of its mystery. Exactly what is its reason for existing? Its explanation by the generative function of the departed is undoubtedly only part of the answer, and we must continue to look into it more deeply. Perhaps we must reassert the importance of ancestors and an unconscious refusal of their definitive confinement to the otherworld, the reiteration of a mental refusing of the finality of death and an understanding of life and death as to places on a cycle marked by an eternal return.
Roaming by day or night; visible or invisible; formed by horsemen, people on foot, or both; consisting of members who bear their normal appearance or that of their final hour; accompanied by animals or not; accompanied by a cart or chariot—the Wild Hunt has remained over the centuries one of the most singular legends of the Middle Ages, a model for the interaction of clerical traditions and popular mythology. It opens to us the doors to an imaginal realm that never rests, that works through associations. It represents a veritable quest for the knowledge of the universe taken in its totality, where this world and the next constantly interact, where we are thus never alone and we escape existential anguish only because we know that we are bound to the past and to the future. We know where we are going and what we will become, whom we will meet again when we quit this sublunary world, and what we will be doing in the world to come. The Wild Hunt thus also smacks of religion, whether pagan or Christian, and invites us to meditate upon a message that has survived centuries upon centuries." [Phantom Armies]
"Every Scylding in Heorot liked mead a lot, But Grendel the beast, roaring outside did not.
Grendel hated Scyldings, the whole Danish clan. Can I say why? I don’t think I can.
He spied on the Scyldings, he fumed and he wailed. He watched as in Heorot they drank mead and drank ale.
“How can I hurt them, the king and his thanes?” Alone in his barrow, it drove him insane.
Then he got an idea! An awful idea! Grendel got a horrible, awful idea!
That fiendish old monster was up to no good. He decided to kill them and gorge on their blood.
Outside the mead-hall, Cain-spawn raged and he roared, And with his great strength he broke down the door.
The Scyldings lined up, their swords in a row. “You warriors,” cried Grendel, “are the first ones to go.”
He slaughtered the Danes, ripped many apart. He crunched on their bones and then ate their hearts.
He did the same thing the very next night, And for twelve years more he continued to fight.
Every night he appeared, that hellbeast, that troll, He’d kill some more Scyldings and retreat to his hole.
Of Hrothgar’s dilemma the news would soon spread, And Beowulf in Geatland heard tales of the dead.
When word of the monster reached the valiant Swede’s ears, He promised to save them and calm all their fears.
So he loaded his ship – fourteen brave men Sailed to Daneland to serve Hrothgar the king.
Beowulf’s welcomed, though Unfurth’s suspicious, “You’re young and you’re strong, but this creature is vicious.”
The warrior responded, “I see that you’re shaken, But last time I went swimming, I dispatched nine kraken.”
“I’m here for the glory. If God’s will be granted, I’ll kill off this fiend and I’ll do it bare-handed.”
That very night, Grendel stormed in from the moor, The mead-hall’s entrance was destroyed with a roar.
He snatched up a Scylding and started to eat him, When Beowulf bounded right up to meet him.
The two joined in battle, throwing benches and chairs. Amidst all the chaos — the fiend was caught unawares.
The monster was fierce but suffered great harm, When Beowulf grabbed him and ripped off his arm.
The pain tore though Grendel, it hurt like none other, So he turned tail and ran back home to his mother.
The Danes gave a cheer, the ale started to flow, “Hail Beowulf, a most righteous bro.”
The king gave a speech and handed out treasure, Armbands, halberds, and gold without measure.
After a night of carousing, all were fêted and fed, The queen blessed them all, “Now safely to bed.”
But out in the moor a dark phantom howled, To revenge her dead son, Grendel’s mom prowled.
That fey creature too, stormed the king’s hall, That uncanny wight grabbed a Scylding to maul.
In the darkness she vanished with carrion prey, And the Danes set to mourning at the break of the day.
“Beowulf, help us,” the stricken king cried, “A new monster plagues us. So many have died.”
So the Geat girded his armor and took Hrunting, his sword, And followed the blood trail down to a fjord.
Beneath the dark waters the she-devil had fled, And the horrified court shivered with dread.
“Send my gold to my father if I do not return,” And Beowulf dove into waters that churned.
To an undersea lair the creature retreated, And Beowulf followed, his quest uncompleted.
For nine solid days, a fierce battle raged, The warrior determined, the monster enraged.
Beowulf slew her, and claimed as his prize, The head of fierce Grendel, whose dead body lies
In the cave where he fled, now pale like his mother, Beowulf’s lucky there’s no sister or brother.
Back on the land, Hrothgar’s men start to grieve, Thinking Beowulf dead, and they’re ready to leave,
When suddenly, splashing his way to the shore The warrior appears, covered in gore.
Spotting the fighter, the knights give a cheer, “Our soldier, our valiant, a man without peer.”
Finally with victory, Daneland’s at peace, The living can party, all battles have ceased.
Upon Beowulf’s shoulders more treasures are placed, Our hero’s reward for the dangers he’s faced.
The queen gives him thanks, hurrahs fill the streets, Beowulf returns to the land of the Geats.
He’s met with acclaim and amidst all the cheers, The Swedes make him their king, he reigns fifty years.
(At the end of his life, one more adventure there’d be, He died fighting a dragon and was buried at sea.)"
Quote :
"We need to know more about the resonances of “Heorot” and what associations are evoked when Hrothgar selects this name in particular for this imposing hall. Beside musings on the hall’s gables, studies have approached this problem through the “pagan stag cult,” seeing a link between the pagan Danes and worship of the Celto-Germanic fertility god Cernunnos/Herne; but their best results tend to serve exegetical readings that reduce the symbolism to what a “conventional Christian” poet would denounce.
On the other hand, Beowulf does call forth the emotional experience of wilderness, the reading of bloody tracks, the stag that would sooner be torn by hounds than dare flee into the Grendel-mere, and, of course, the spectacle of the dragon-kill. Such features enrich the heroic atmosphere by showing how the violence linking man and nature since immemorial times still answered to the life-or-death concerns of free men, or gave expression to the emotional life of the warrior. Of themselves, however, these features do not add up to a poem as overtly involved in hunting as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
On the level of the poem’s action, Hrothgar’s naming the hall can be read as investing it with a symbolic embodiment of the ancient spirit of his warrior-band culture, the life-sustaining spirit of the hunt.
Thus to Hrothgar was granted such prosperity and glory in war that his followers eagerly obeyed him, while the younger generation grew to the strength of allies. He conceived the idea of commanding men to build a hall, a great mead-hall whereof the sons of men should hear forever, in which he would distribute to young and old whatever God had given him, save folkland and the lives of men. Then, as I heard, the task was broadly commanded to many peoples throughout this middle earth: their attendance should adorn the folk-hall. Construction went apace by the work of many till it was fully built, greatest of hall-works. He whose word everywhere held sway gave it the name “Hart.” He kept his word, dealing out rings and treasure at the feasting. The hall towered high, stately gabled, awaiting the war-welling and loathsome flames, for the time had not yet come when the lacerating hate of the father- and son-in-law should awaken in its gory wrath.
In the building of the hall, symbolic capital derived from military honor is revalued for peace. Hrothgar erects a “representational space,” named the Hart, in which the fruits of his military conquests are ostentatiously distributed to those who cooperated in enlarging Scylding honor. Here, the hall’s salient features consist in its unprecedented size and prestige (healærna mæst), its function to house the nexus of wealth exchange in public tributary assembly (gifting and feasting), its emblematic character (the hart), and perhaps also its poetic capacity at once to project renown and presage doom. That the hart was a symbol somehow relevant to Anglo-Saxon kingship seems a fair conclusion to draw from the great whetstone with its stag emblem found in the treasure of Sutton Hoo.
In his rich analysis of Beowulfian culture, John M. Hill remarks on features of house ornament, kin organization, and the hall’s function to give focus to acts of marriage, inheritance, and adoption. He argues that the mead-hall is analo- gous to structures sheltering what Claude Lévi-Strauss defined as “house societies,” buildings epitomizing power in kin, property, and the cult of dynasty.
In Heorot’s case, the building of the hall is communal, involving many people from far and wide; it is Hrothgar’s effort to confirm and per- petuate the fame and wide dominion of a noble and powerful family of agnates; presumably it contains dynastic treasures and is the stage for a theistic hymn of creation. Thus, as the centre of kinship, amity, and cosmology, it may reflect sacral and magical functions as well as the deeply serious, drink-confirmed reciprocities of the lord to retainer relationship.
Although these observations certainly enlarge our impression of Hrothgar’s hall, Hill recognizes a genuine desideratum when he notes that the vocabulary of kinship in Beowulf does not overlap with words for house or hall. Likewise, the hall’s name, which surely we may presume to be of importance, suggests no connotations of kinship. Friedrich Klaeber accepts “Heorot’s” architectural derivation from the hall’s horn-like gable ends, although he also allows possible symbolism relevant to royalty and the archaic hart-deity.
Given the emphasis the text places on the moment at which Hrothgar institutes a peace-time continuance of warlike prowess, however, we might expect more profound symbol- ism than we get from the gables. The poet underscores the conjunction between Hrothgar’s power and his naming of the gifting-hall as if the king would endow this building with a soul (“scop him Heort naman/se þe his wordes geweald wide hæfde”). He evokes the concept of “mystical embodiment,” the principle underwriting proprietary rights invested in things and spaces. If the“Hart” is to signify as a rich and animating dynastic embodiment, as indeed we would expect a king to hope for when he bestows a name, the metaphor must be per- tinent more to the vital social and symbolic aspects described by Hill above.
Old English heorot denoted the male red deer, Cervus elaphus. Fully grown, the wild hart stood as the largest horned cervine in Europe short of the north- ern elk (called “moose” in North America). Growing in Britain to 400 lbs at his largest, he carried his weight upon lithe lean legs, leapt and swam with power, and he could run with almost inimitable fortitude. Hounds often could not overtake him. He was also delicate of nose, quick of hearing, and cunning beyond the skill of most pursuers. His reddish-brown summer coat grew round his neck into a shaggy mane, so that with his slender, austere head and ramified bone antlers swinging back to perhaps one-third his total length, his whole bearing could suggest grandeur—graceful yet endowed with an air of authority, he was by nature crowned. To those who knew how to read them (human and beast alike) his antlers were eloquent of his virility. Deformed antlers indi- cated castration or other injury to his sexual organs; strongly beamed antlers bespoke his thriving, for this was the weaponry he used against his rivals. Then as now, the wild hart sought a secretive life in remote woods, moors, and highlands till the season of rut, when he would strive for dominance over a herd of hinds. Surely it is in this independent and bellicose virility that we can see why Cernunnos was a fertility deity, or why the hart appealed to royalty charmed by a cult of dynastic regeneration. None of these notions, however, relates the hart to the chief social function of the mead-hall: a site for redistributing wealth. Only the old venison-economy of Germanic hunting bands offers such a connection.
How might “Heorot” be the perfect name for a dynastic mead-hall? An ancient game animal, the“Hart” tropes the obligating reciprocities expressed in gifting and feasting as reflexes of sharing venison among members of the hunt- ing band. As in distributing spoils of war, cutting up and sharing venison was a ritual act that had bound the community of arms-bearing men and rewarded their cooperation with a sense of purpose. The Old English textual corpus gives no example to approach the keen regard that later medieval French, German, and English treatises (and several romances) had for showing the butchering of game and the sharing out of “fee,” i.e., cuts of venison, to participants of the hunt. In fact, the jargon and ritual butchering we find in later literature may not have predated the forestry and hunting guilds that formed to support the royal forestae. However, we should beware against simplifying the early-medieval scenario, for, as is known from extant hunting societies, the customs for shar- ing out meat can attain political and religious significance. The stakes involved in who gets what, which specific cuts and how much, are always a question of competition and negotiation.
We identified the peoples of medieval Scandinavia and England not as hunter-gatherers of the archaic immediate-return type, but (as the principle of free-capture showed) agri-pastoralists whose hunting gained a strong symbolic character, all the more so as chief game species drew back to remote regions or were hunted to extinction. Beowulf, of course, does not dramatize animal and crop husbandry; nonetheless, salient features of the Scylding cultural order conform to ethnographic descriptions of delayed-return hunting societies.
Socially, the differences between immediate- and delayed-return organization are centred on the development of corporate households, of clans, lineages and other extra-domestic forms of social grouping, and, above all, of a range of varied, committed, binding social relationships of kin- ship or of contract in which the participants have formal obligations to each other and are, in some sense, dependent on each other. The devel- opment of such groupings and such relationships is connected with the control and allocation of assets, usually in the form of delayed yields on labour.
In delayed-return orders, social hierarchy assumes the form of structured kin-groups dominated by elder men who, backed by ideology and ritual, brace their authority by subsuming the autonomy of, and alienating the labor-produce of, women and younger men. In Beowulf we have such manifestations ready to hand; for instance, we can note the agnatic hall society and the fictional affinity of its tributaries, ring-giving, Hrothgar’s co-opting of the young thanes (geogoþ) for his comitatus, and peace-weaving bride exchanges (friðusibb).
The relevance of the delayed-return concept to Beowulf is obviously not to be found in any representation of farming but becomes elaborated in the cultural effects of agro-economics, just as such effects are evident in, and equally relevant to, chivalric romance. Hrothgar’s gesture to have his dominion embodied by the hart therefore bespeaks warlike, traditional, even antique cultural values of the freeborn hunting fraternity—but it does not hearken back to the archaic hunting order of enforced sharing, zero class differentiation, and autonomous women.
Linking the abundance of the hart with the civilizing transformation of war, Hrothgar’s naming of the hall constitutes a founding moment in the Scyldings’ assertion of their hegemony. When the Scylding dynasts institute their house- order under the aegis of the hart, they create a representational space that seeks ideally to justify dominion through a ceremonial and lavish circulation of wealth. The hart establishes the hall as a gendered space in which the masculine principle is dominant, encompassing the feminine within its ceremonial regime. Women of rank are not denied individual agency in the public sphere, but the hart-order agrees with strategies of epic representation that remove private space and action from view (unless their problematic nature is the- matically engaged) and integrate women within the male regime in prescribed public capacities.
Hrothgar’s naming of the hall occurs at a juncture when he can count on the eager obedience of his followers (“him his winemagas / georne hyrdon”) and his subjected chieftains to gather within the gabled folkstead, where divinely sanctioned gifting and feasting (“swylc him God sealde”) will ratify, but also dignify, these peoples’ compliance.
Heorot’s symbolism in Beowulf dramatizes the war-band’s troping itself as its precursor, the hunting band, to present itself viably for prosperous rule. For, the hunting-band idea strengthens the (fictional) affinity of the war-band, because the hunting band was surely composed of kindred, while the war-band, whose recruitment was based on merit, sought ways to compensate for its weakening of kinship ties. Furthermore, as war can be like a hunt on men, so also the symbolism of a ruling hunting-band can trope a striving for power in such a way that hegemony seems providing and protective rather than oppressive.
There remains the problem of Grendel’s motivation and how it relates to his Cainite lineage. The answer, I shall argue, must be sought in the effect of the Hart-trope on those remote “outsiders to humanity” who defy its semantic of honorable subjection.
First, heroic society in Germanic saga rises and falls through a vital, complex dialectic between honor and shame. Alliances and rivalries determine political life in which central authority is characteristically weak, and patterns of mate- rial and symbolic reciprocity adjust the measure of political bonds between individuals, kin-groups, and peoples. Among the chief means of defining reciprocal relationships we observe gifting (exchange of goods, hospitality, marriageable daughters, or hostages) and feud (raiding, legal action, or killing), both of which lend themselves to strategic manipulation. In its classic tribal or pre-feudal form (migration-age Europe, landnáma-age Iceland), political centralization appears infrequently due to general economic dearth: material scarcity keeps competition for subsistence and prestige resources acute, infrastructure remains undeveloped (territorial roots may still be relatively shallow), and the difficulty of amassing wealth generally holds powers in check.
Second, crucial to heroic society is its warrior ethos. This ethos is shaped by all the socio-economic factors just mentioned. It extols the cult of honor as a summum bonum tantamount in its own way to the metaphysics of redemption and damnation. Since the age of Homer, factors such as a willing risk of life and a passion for autonomy form the center of a heroic “self ” that is publicly confirmed through tribute and renown. Without willing risk and autonomy there is no “freedom,” a word stemming from an adjectival root expressing “dear, costly, beloved” as this was conceived as a social estate (free from bondage) and a moral condition (possessed of free-will). Old English freogan, “to set free; love,” reflects old verbal formations with a semantic of love in Gothic. From this idea the West Germanic gerundium that in English appears as freond, “friend,” seems to ground the notion of free society in an idealized concept of “amity” (as mentioned by Hill, above), enabling cohesion and strength within a given kin-group. “Freedom” as a condition between kin-groups, however, is much more volatile. A constant tension makes itself felt between egalitarian social balances and any unilateral gains in wealth or symbolic status. This imbalance threatens to lead to overlordship and durably hierarchical relationships, and endangers heroic notions of honorable freedom. This does not mean ultimately, however, that aggregations of material and symbolic capital are not negotiable.
Grendel seems at home in this heroic world if we consider how he represents an extreme (i.e.“monstrous”) example of its dominant traits. He enters the narrative described as an ellengæst (86a), literally a “valor”- or “power-spirit.”
The only time thus far the first element of this compound appeared was in the exhortation to hear of “deeds of glory” (“hu þa æþelingas ellen fremedon,” 3).
Ellen classically is the zeal belonging to valor (Latin glosses align it with robur, “oaken strength,” as well as virtus and fortitudo); it enables monumental acts that are (ideally speaking) productive and everlasting manifestations of an heroic ethos. Furthermore, it seems that Grendel has a belligerent attitude toward, or is intimidated by, others’ prosperity. An outcast from humanity, he responds with agony and rage to the mirth (dream) that Heorot shelters, suffering from its inhabitants’ poetic celebration.
Swa ða drihtguman dreamum lifdon, eadiglice, oððæt an ongan fyrene fremman, feond on helle. (99a–0b)
Thus the hall-warriors lived in mirth, richly prospering, until a certain one began his wicked deeds, an enemy from hell.
Obviously, Grendel has more than a philistine’s scorn for poetry. There is some- thing twisted about his nature, an outgrowth of “Caines cynne” (07a), but the adverb eadiglice ,“thrivingly,” is a key term here for what really irks him. English ead means “riches, property,” and from this, therefore, “bliss.” A Gothic reflex audags could be analyzed as “endowed by fate, beatus.” Hence eadiglice should prompt us to seek Grendel’s present motivation (the “why here and now?” of his attack) in a response to the material and emotional bounty sheltered by Heorot.
The poem’s view of heroic antiquity sees a collateral exchange between these two signs of prestige, for it sequences the facts of cultural superiority very clearly: first, victory in war (heresped, 64b) coalesces power in a future following (oðð þæt seo geogoð geweox, 66b), whose actions are focused in the building of a worship hall that magnetizes tributary compliance through the appeal of its moral order. Such hegemony could not be maintained if honor were not in circulation. Indeed, it is well to keep in mind the crucial public dimension of honor as a species of symbolic capital. True, the interior reality of honor was key to any awareness of self-worth and personal respectability, but its core dynamic arose from tensions caused by continual public trial and assessment. It was fruitless to be born to a certain rank or condition if one did not also incorporate the social habitus particular to that rank.
Grendel, a humanoid monster who bears the curse of the dehumanizing atrocity of Cain, disputes the Danes’ very principle of high civilization. Motivated by enmity and envy (heteniðas, 52b; niðgrim, 93a) of the Danes’ “prosperous” mirth, Grendel seeks to level them and, in that they represent human achieve- ment, all humankind by means of carnivorous depredations.
Thus the foe of humankind, the horrid exile, repeatedly committed many a crime and inflicted hard humiliation.
Old English hynðu, “injury,” is literally a “lowering” (cf. Old English hienan, “to degrade, humiliate” and Gothic hauns “low”). Grendel’s motivation, however much it may be driven by Cain’s original envy of Abel, accords with a primitively “heroic” reaction to the Danes’ great buildup of power, perhaps as well to the Scyldings’ pacifying strategies of honor-imparting subordination.
As God chose the Scyldings for glory in northern Germania, He also (for the time being at least) authorized their strategies of dispensing favor. Thus the notoriously enigmatic lines,
Heorot eardode, sincfage sel sweartum nihtum;
no he þone gifstol gretan moste, maþðum for Metode, ne his myne wisse (66b–69b)
[Grendel] beset richly adorned Heorot in the black of night; he could not approach the treasured gifting-chair because of God, nor know His love may be understood to taboo or sanctify the locus of power from which inequitable distribution is backed by divine will. Grendel thus visits his forebear’s ancient rage on the Scyldings at the peak of their political and cultural hegemony, a moment of power and honor patently authorized by God (72b).
The poet’s sympathies prove early “feudal” on the assumption that a disciplined social hierarchy can best ensure a peaceful circulation of worldly honor. As the curse of Cain is ancient, so Grendel’s actions appear regressive because he cannot stomach dynastic appropriation—an intolerance that is perfectly compatible with the most hard-bitten frontier egalitarianism of the migration and viking ages.
Grendel’s monstrosity refracts the iconic power of hunting culture upheld by the Scyldings to honor their preeminence. Given the hall’s function, the Hart with its symbolic order actuates the complex metonymies that correlate discrete parts to a whole social formation: the social body of the Hart figures as a composite of subordinated, mutually obligated parts (affine and tributary) that affirm their coherence by circulating wealth. Its organization extols the idea of agnatic supremacy—the example of venerable Scyld Scefing’s wrecking of mead-benches. Grendel, however, scorns the Scyldings’ seizure, or transformation, of what he might hold to be the authentic symbolic order of the hunt. He contests the dynastic-sacral mead-hall as though it were literally the body of a deer, tearing the social body limb from limb, even bringing a sack to carry off his killings (2085b–86).
If Grendel’s resistance to early-feudal subordination is regressive, so too is his “hunting.” In light of our overview of hunting ideologies, Grendel’s bear- ing toward Heorot adopts the posture of an immediate-return hunter angered by the Danes’ appropriation of an egalitarian symbol. He disdains Hrothgar’s gifting prerogative and, as it were, forces the parting out of pieces of the body of the Hart—literally, Scylding warriors in the flesh. This is the crucial difference that modern ethnology has observed to distinguish orders of hunter-gatherers: a (delayed-return) toleration of a distinguished group’s strategic, proprietary gifting versus a rigorous (immediate-return) prohibition of distinction that is enacted by a promptly enforced, and far less discriminate, sharing out of surplus. The two positions may be schematized as in the following table.
Extreme polarities of barbarianism had always been conceivable, if not also observable. In the features of barbarian hunting culture it evokes, Beowulf poetically conjures forth the monstrous aspect of half-animal troglodytes and pits them against civilized monotheists at Heorot. Callously independent, even pathologically so, Gren- del acts the hunter who, as a response to an encroachment, lays homicidal claim to another’s kill. True to her archaic indistinction, his mother steps in to do her share of the feud-killing as well.To the poet, sympathetic to the Scylding world order, Grendel is as much a hunter-wolf as he is a criminal, even cannibalistic and godforsaken maverick of the pagan outer darkness. God’s blessings are with that aristocratic order that has sublimated the violence of the primitive hunting band into new cultural economies, and demoted women to the rôle of bystanders.
Viewed from the perspective of the Grendel-kin, the order of Heorot seems a kind of “post-heroic” society, dedicated to mirth, and arrogant in its appro- priations and hierarchy. We may recognize in this order a transitional ethos of Heldenepos whose conditions emerge somewhere between a “heroic” (hunt- ing and raiding) egalitarianism on the one hand, and a “feudal” (land-based) or “chivalric” (service and eros) hierarchization on the other. Were the order of the Grendel-kin to thrive, it would foster the very conditions that retarded the coalescence of kingdoms which arose to stabilize the demographic convul- sions of the migration age. Beowulf’s formal theme is“þeodcyninga þrym”—the might and glory of the kings of peoples, precisely those military overkings who forged the great tribal confederations, be it Hrothgar and Beowulf, or The- odoric, Clovis, or Canute. Shrewdly, however, the poet vivifies passions of barbarian experience in the antitheses reshaping the ancient hunting and war- rior bands, associating a resistance to dynastic supremacy with archaic and sub- human violence.
I have not argued here that Beowulf is “about” hunting, as no one would claim that Beowulf is “about” the pagan stag cult. I have tried to show there is a story about Grendel’s hatred for the Scyldings’ Heorot that is richer in cultural and psychological detail than might be suggested by a fable about evil or a primal curse. If vestiges of hunting culture become intelligible in that story, it should surprise no one.
The history of the European royal forests—the king’s monopoly on hunting in the common chase of free-capture—begins with the Merovingians and fully flourishes with the Carolingians. The earliest charter evidence for a royal hunting preserve dates from 648, but Gregory of Tours (who gives an historical confirmation of Hygelac’s fatal encounter with the Franks) relates that already in 590 the Merovingian king Guntram came across the carcass of an aurochs that had been “poached” in the Vosges, evidently a space the king considered to be his personal hunting grounds. His forester accused the chamberlain Chundo, and the event led to an ordeal that killed the forester and Chundo’s champion, and ended with Chundo’s execution.
The history of such hunting preserves in England is marked by bitter controversy, at times almost anarchy, replete with earls and bishops poaching defiantly by broad daylight, because the royal hunting monopoly lay at the heart of debate about the rightful extent of crown prerogative and the bounds of tyranny. While the royal forests were not to come to England till the Normans imported them, they were anticipated before the Conquest in the laws of the Scandinavians, and especially in Canute. Beowulf, especially in its latest incarnation around the manuscript date of 1000 c.e., exploits the legend of Heorot to refract anxieties about royal power. In the next century this angst shall flare far and wide to defy the hegemony of the overlord of the hunt." [William Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature]
"In the Viking age the most spectacular way of cursing an enemy was by the Niding Pole (the Nithstong or Scorn-Post). They were poles about nine feet (2.75 meters) long upon which insults and curses were carved in runes. Ceremonies were performed to activate the destructive magic of the pole. A horse's skull was fixed to the top of the pole, and it was stuck into the ground with the skull facing towards the house of the accursed person. The pole channeled the destructive forces of Hela, goddess of death. These forces were carried up the pole and projected through the horse skull. The runes carved on the pole defined the character and target of the destructive forces. Among others, triple Thorn [Thurisaz] runes and triple Is [Isa] runes, were used to smite the enemy. When used maliciously, these had the effect of disempowering the accursed's will and delivering him or her to the forces of destruction. Here, the Thorn rune invokes the power of Thurs, the demonic earth-giant sometimes called Moldthurs. An example of this comes from Skírnismál, where the spell used by Skirnir against Freyr's reluctant lover, Gerdhr invokes harm using the Thorn rune. This provides the power for three other runestaves: 'I shall inscribe Thurs for you, and three runestaves: lewdness, and rage and impotence.
Magically, the Niding Pole was intended to disrupt and anger the earth sprites (Landvaettir, Land-Wights or earth spirits) inhabiting the ground where the accursed's house was. These sprites would then vent their anger upon the person, whose livelihood and life would be destroyed. Niding Poles were also used to desecrate areas of ground. This technique is called álfreka, literally the 'driving away of the elves', by which the earth sprites of a place were banished, leaving the ground spiritually dead...
On the Niding Pole, the horse skull invokes the horse rune Ehwaz, using the linking and transmissive power of the rune for the magical working. The horse is sacred to Odin, god of runes and magic..." [Rune Magic: The History and Practice of Ancient Runic Traditions]
"In historical Germanic society, nīþ (Old Norse: níð Old English: nīþ, nīð; Old Dutch: nīth); was a term for a social stigma implying the loss of honour and the status of a villain. A person affected with the stigma is a nīðing (Old Norse: níðingr, Old English: nīðing, nīðgæst, or Old High German: nidding), one lower (cf. modern English beneath, modern Dutch beneed/beneden, modern German nieder[citation needed] and modern Danish nedre) than those around him. Middle English retained a cognate nithe, meaning "envy" (cf. modern Dutch nijd and modern German neid/neidvoll), "hate", or "malice."
A related term is ergi, carrying the connotation of "unmanliness".
Níðings had to be scolded, i. e. they had to be shouted in their faces what they were in most derogatory terms, as scolding (Anglo-Saxon scald, Norse skald, Icelandic skalda, OHG scelta, Modern German Schelte; compare scoff, Modern Dutch schelden, Anglo-Saxon scop, and flyting) was supposed to break the concealing seiðr spell and would thus force the fiend to give away its true nature.
The actual meaning of the adjective argr or ragr [Anglo-Saxon earg] was the nature or appearance of effeminacy, especially by obscene acts. Argr was the worst, most derogatory swearword of all known to the Norse language. According to Icelandic law, the accused was expected to kill the accuser at once.
If the accused did not retort by violent attack, either right on the spot or by demanding holmgang, yielding either the challenging accuser to take his words back or the accuser's death, he was hence proven to be a weak and cowardly níðingr by not retorting accordingly.
Beside by words, scolding could also be performed by pejorative visual portrayals, especially by so-called níðstangs or nīþing poles. These were usually single poles with a carved man's head, on which a horse or a horse's head was impaled. In two attested instances (Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa ch. 17, Gísla saga Súrssonar), two níðstangs were arranged so as to suggest homosexual intercourse.
[...] a nithing was not only degenerated in a general [moral] sense [...] This [moral] degeneration was often innate, especially apparent by physical ailments."
"It was the French-speaking lords of the Norse raiders settled in Neustria, now dukes of Normandy, who, by bringing their hunting law to England, brought their hunt within the compass of tyranny. The Norman kings built a strategic network of motte-and-bailey castles, then of stone keeps, while at the same time they established hunting preserves over vast tracts of the English countryside. Both enterprises, fortification and hunting, were to reflect cherished interests of a foreign military élite seeking to assert control of the land.
The early afforestations show that the Normans tended to establish their private hunting grounds in sparsely populated wilderness territories linked together in belts of forestae running through the uncultivated or infertile wastelands separating arable regions.
Many of these forests were in the royal demesne, adjacent to royal manors; many, however, were not, as for example the whole county of Essex lay under the forest ban. The constitutional storm over the royal forests, which finally came to a head in the thirteenth century, was driven by the basic circumstance that, more often than not, the king’s hunting grounds overlay the demesne land of his subjects.
Afforestation weighed heavily upon the people with its ironies and burdens. A strong incentive for domestic and foreign colonization lay in the recovery of land through wilderness clearing, cutting back ancient woodlands to reveal the arable acreage beneath them. Such clearing would have been agriculturally unprofitable where woodlands blanketed gravel or acid soils or limestone, but royal forests stretched not only over wasteland. They covered populated and arable areas as well. And wherever the royal forests extended, they burdened exploitation. In England they seem rather to have brought a regressive dimension to processes of expansion.
Before the Conquest viking colonization had long undertaken to resettle Danish peasants in England; however, Norman colonization followed different patterns, directing its energies upon the replacement of English administrative and ecclesiastical authorities. In the case of the royal forests, the extension of a Continental institution could countervail methods used to facilitate the exploitation of conquered territory, curtailing the rights of new feudatories. The Normans acted upon this contradiction by granting hunting preserves to privileged subjects, using the example of royal forests and warrens to apportion favor, at a price. Yet the overwhelming impression made by monastic chroniclers was that the king imposed his hunting passion forcefully upon the liberties of all.
Themes of gross injustice, misrule, and divine vengeance coincide in monastic accounts of the death of William Rufus, who was killed (possibly assassinated) while hunting in the New Forest. William of Malmesbury recounts commonly reported visions of horror portending regicide with a motif of Rufus devouring a human body. On the day of the hunt an anonymous foreign monk relates a dream that he saw the king enter a church, and then, “violently seizing the crucifix, he gnawed the arms, and almost tore away the legs” until the image kicked him back prostrate.6 In his De nugis curialium, Walter Map amplifies this consuming appetite of the king. Rufus dreams of premoni- tions, telling Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, that
"In a beautiful forest, after long chasing of beasts, I went into a very fine chapel, and saw therein a naked man lying on the altar whose face and all whose flesh was so delectable to look upon that it might suffice for food and drink to the whole world for ever. And so I ate up the middle finger of his right hand, the which he suffered with the greatest patience and with a calm countenance: and from him I went back forthwith to the beasts. ..."
Gundulf weeps and glosses the dream to say that Rufus has devoured whom he should have safeguarded, the church and innocents of his realm. Map’s redaction of the Rufus legend is noteworthy for the way it uses the foresta, specifically a forest chapel with an altar as both bed and table, to connect homophobic anxieties with an image of the king as the tyrannical eater of his people. Twelfth-century chronicles repeatedly question the authority of the Norman foresta by defining it as a site of divine judgment where God took his vengeance upon the Norman king as He had upon Saul.
On the other, the dispossessions it enforced and subsequent rumors it incited augmented the stern, even ruthless, self-image that Norman lords typically sought to project. For, as Bartlett explains it, wherever in Europe and abroad Norman arms had triumphed, this was attended by demonstrations of severe rigor.
Part of the change was towards a new cruelty, brutality and bloodthirstiness, for savagery was as important a part of the image as vigour and valour. The “ferocious Normans,” as William of Apulia called them, had a reputation. To the local Lombard princes they seemed “a savage, barbarous and horrible race of inhuman disposition.” It was an image that was carefully cultivated. In England massive dispossessions linked with the terrors of corporal and capital punishment for poaching imbued the royal forests with this quintessentially Norman aura.
Gitsung, cupidinous desire, and grædinæss, greed, are moral rubrics under which the Peterborough Chronicle commits obituary verses to the memory of William the Conqueror.
"He was fallen in avarice and enraptured by greed. He established a great preserve for wild animals and laid down laws for it, that whosoever slew hart or hind was to be blinded. He tabooed the harts as well as the boar. He loved the high game as mightily as though he were its father. Also he ordained that the hares run free. His rich men bemoaned it, and the poor men complained. But so unmoved was he that he recked naught of the enmity of them all."
In the eleventh century it seemed arrogance itself to impinge on the consuetude of free-capture, and an outrage to extirpate men’s eyes for their hunting of wild animals. In the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I, poaching evidently incurred capital punishment, while blinding and emasculation were allowed to mitigate a capital sentence. Such severe penalties that ranked poaching with homicide, rape, and treason, obviously shot far off any economic scale for compensating the value of a deer carcass. The chronicler of the Gesta Stephani laments that Henry I, the Lion of Justice, saw “little or no distinction between the public punishment of those who slew men, and those who slew the deer,” for both classes of criminals were hanged.
The Normans and Angevins—William I, William Rufus, Henry I, Henry II—with whom we associate the combination of hunting passion and juridical force, became the hallmark of the royal forest in its most menacing phase. In his study on the history of forests in Western culture, for example, Robert Pogue Harrison traces their life in the mind as a sinister Other, a “shadow of civilization” against which human culture has striven to validate itself. In the Middle Ages this othering was not merely symbolic or psychological, it was literal.
"A “forest,” then, was originally a juridical term referring to land that had been placed off limits by a royal decree. Once a region had been “afforested,” or declared a forest, it could not be cultivated, exploited, or encroached upon. It lay outside the public domain, reserved for the king’s pleasure and recreation. In England it also lay outside the common juridical sphere."
It is worth noting that Fitz Nigel does not say that the forestae are “outside” other jurisdictions, but “separate” (secernitur).
"The whole organization of the forests, the punishment, pecuniary or corporal, of forest offences, is separate from the jurisdiction of the other courts, and solely dependent on the decision of the King, or of some officer specially appointed by him. The forest has its own laws, based, it is said, not on the Common Law of the realm, but on the arbitrary legis- lation of the King; so that what is done in accordance with forest law is not called “just” without qualification, but “just, according to forest law."
This otherness divides English law into at least two ideologies overlapping in the same realm, the one informed by cus- tom and consent, the other by the arbitrary will of the king.
The manifest object of the forest law was to reserve the hunting upon specific animals ferae naturae. These “beasts of the forest” were the red deer, the fallow deer, wild boar, and roedeer. No other fauna was protected by forest law, and roedeer were later demoted to the status of beasts of warren through a judicial ordinance of 338 ( Edward III). Laws of warren (which sometimes existed as a subset within or in other places separately outside the foresta) protected the hunt upon pheasant, partridge, hare, rabbits, and foxes. Because the thriving of the beasts of the forest depended on the quality of their habitat, their natural coverts also fell under the protection of forest law. Thus arose the two chief concerns around which turned all the cogs of forest justice: the preservation of the venison and the vert.
The grievances over the principles of the foresta stemmed from rural folk’s belief in the absurdity of anyone’s claiming to own wild animals. This view rested upon a sound basis of European customary law.
The principle of free-capture comprised the foundation of hunting law in Roman and Germanic antiquity. Free-capture posited that beasts ferae naturae were distinct from domestic animals in that they were res nullius, the prop- erty of no one. Domestic animals were the property of their dominus. By contrast, wild animals became a person’s property only through the act of capture, termed occupatio, which was variously defined in Germania as either wounding an animal or actually killing it. The classic articulation of free-capture as a formal legal principle appears in the Institutes of Justinian. In principle, a dominus could, as Canute had done in England, try to reserve the hunting for himself on his own lands, but he dared not prevent others from hunting on their own lands. The explosive potential of the Norman foresta, however, lay in its propensity to sprawl over the fiefs of the kings’ subjects; it imposed a prohibition against subjects hunting on their own lands.
Furthermore, the Institutes’ wording on free-capture made it clear that, although the dominus can legally resist encroachment, this does not imply that wild animals on his estate can be equated with his own property. The remedies available to the dominus to hinder intrusion do not change the legal status of wild animals. Beasts of the forest remain in principle res nullius.
In strict legal terms, the king could not own the beasts of the forest. Forest law may seem to have treated beasts of the forest as royal property, but nowhere in the forest pleas is the value of lost venison quantified. The black market did assess the value of a deer carcass, but forest courts adjusted punitive amercements to the substance of the trespassers. The popular notion of “deer-stealing” is a misnomer, for what is nobody’s property cannot be stolen. The forest pleas idiomatically refer to poachers as malefactores de foresta, trespassers not thieves.
This judicial mechanism, through which the king enforced compliance with forest law upon the bodies of his subjects and officers alike, remained an integral feature of the royal hunting grounds.
Gradually, then, we witness a new symbolic order of the hunt. At the heart of the foresta lurks a living paradox in the form of “the venison,” an elusive idea both transcendent and immanent that gives meaning to the passion and punishment expressed through ritual of the hunt and forest law. Its preservation is the express object of forest law; its death and dismemberment the object of venery. Yet the institution dedicated to the venison on the hoof also denies it a proprietary reality: something that of itself could be valued in economic worth, quantified as capital, become heritable, be stolen or compensated. Such profane factors do not apprehend the nature of the venison as a signified in the semiotic of hunting law. The venison is res nullius, most definitely not the king’s and yet so obviously the king’s, for who but the king could mobilize the vast array of forest officers (not to mention an unrivaled establishment of professional hunters, falconers, grooms, hounds and horses) to suspend others’ rights in the venison they capture on their own land and save it for his personal pleasure?
This was the signal departure from ancient custom. To follow its logic, we conclude that what the law reserved was not the bodies of wild game as such, but the liberties of the hunt. In other words, the radical difference entailed by forest law was not a newly asserted ownership of wild animals, but a privatization of the hunt itself. If the forest was “outside” or “other to” anything, it was outside the territory of common hunting rights, outside free-capture. And in an age when chivalry with its tournaments, heraldry, and ethics rose in the ascendancy, the legally segregated space of the hunt brought new subjective relevance to the performance of its ritual.
Roland Bechmann, writing a cultural history of the forests of France, singles out a notion relevant to poachers’ counter-hegemonic practice in England as well.
The peasants, who little by little lost the more extensive hunting rights that they used to have, couldn’t even efficiently protect their cultivated fields. Their only solution was poaching, braconnage in French—called bricolage in Normandy—which was severely punished.
The sportive bricolage of the Rockingham poachers differed from that of the Norman peasants in that it was motivated not by a defense of their base subsistence, but by an expression of free social status, of exercising the customary rights of their forebears in the face of the king’s tyranny.
Bricolage, it is worth remembering, is the word Claude Lévi-Strauss used to term the mythmaker’s art of improvisation.
In its old sense the verb “bricoler” applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting and riding. It was however always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle. And in our own time the “bricoleur” is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a het- erogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual “bricolage”—which explains the relation which can be per- ceived between the two.
The “devious” hands-on bricolage against official craft is illuminating. To make use of whatever it had to hand, metaphoric play at Harleruding wrought its spectacle violating “the venison” of the foresta. That the foresters read the poachers’ gesture unequivocally as “in magnum contemptum domini regis et forestariorum suorum” speaks for the efficacy of their malediction.
There is a literary example for cursing on this order to be found far afield, it is true, but the parallel is striking. The viking-poet Egil Skallagrimson, who with his brother Thorolf fought under Æthelstan at the battle of Brunanburh, sought vengeance upon Erik Bloodaxe, king of Norway, for the king’s having sabotaged Egil’s attempt to win a judgment in a legal dispute. Having killed his chief rival together with a son of the king’s, Egil erected the dire niðstong, or “enmity-stave,” against the king and queen.
Then he took a horse head, set it up on a pole and spoke these formal words: “Here I set up a pole of insult [niðstong ]against King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild”—then, turning the horse head towards the mainland—“and I direct this insult against the guardian spirits of this land, so that every one of them shall go astray, neither to figure nor find their dwelling places until they have driven King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild from this country.”
This use of an animal cadaver to signify contempt—setting its head on a pole, turning it in a particular direction, invoking its powers to confound the land’s guardians, seeking to oust the authority of an intolerable lord—suggests a cultural reflex on the level of homology. There can be no direct connection between Norse magic and poaching subculture in England, unless a maledictive symbolism survived in a latent Norse-Norman continuity. Even so, it is not essential to highlighting the degree to which the poachers’ bricolage constituted a desecration of the king’s hunting sanctuary by shaming the guardian-foresters and slaughtering the venison loved by the king “as if he were its father.”
Within the zone created to enable the recreation of princely delight and pleasure, the poachers reasserted the ethos of the common chase. Their curse in effect restaked their ancient hunting grounds in defiance of the afforesting will of the crown." [Hunting law and ritual in medieval english literature]
"Artes venandi appeared first at the courts of kings whose hunts asserted the right-of-way before the hunting of their subjects, and they flourished where hunting was monopolized by law. Consequently, popular interest in knowledge of hunting ceremony meaningfully paralleled an increase in the number and availability of private parks and free warrens. The treatises’ consistent concern with issues of “fee,” that is, who gets what piece of the quarry, together with the shared antiquity of French and German terminology for it, reaches beyond the Normans to a Frankish origin for courtly ceremony. It was there that forest law, the development of hunting as a professional craft, and bloodsport used for political spectacle, first came together in the medieval West. From this nexus, and from the fact that medieval bloodsport remained above all a socially driven event, arose the enduring preoccupation with technical jargon, horn blowing, and meat sharing that lay at the heart of English artes venandi. Equally enduring, and hitherto unexamined in detail, is the extent to which these artes factored into attempts to differentiate English “national” character.
Mention of artes venandi in pre-Conquest writing refers chiefly to the education or hunting of kings and great lords. What these arts consist of is not specified with much useful detail, yet it appears to be expected of kings that they not merely hunt, but practice the art of hunting. There is certainly more to it than just a monk’s rhetorical amplification of a king’s public style.
The biographers of King Alfred the Great and Charlemagne set the king’s hunting in contexts that served greater designs in their works. These echo the example set by Alexander the Great and Hadrian, in whose funerary and triumphal works the big-game hunt on lion, bear, and boar reflected proof of kingly virtue.
There is Alfred’s preface to the translation of Pope Gregory’s Cura pastoralis.
Her mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð, ac we him ne cunnon æfter spy- rigean. For ðæm we habbað nu æger forlæten ge ðone welan ge ðone wisdom, for ðæm ðe we noldon to ðæm spore mid ure mode onluton.
Here one may yet see [our wise elders’] trail, but we cannot track after them. For we have lost our wealth and knowledge both, because we did not care to bend heart and mind to the spoor.
This imagined lament of monks bemoaning their incapacity to use their libraries furnishes Lerer with a trail into the Old English translation of Boethius’ Consolatio philosophiae, where swæð, spor, and æfter spyrigean figure in Wisdom’s troping of philosophical inquiry. Lerer’s reading analogizes Alfred to the imprisoned seeker-after-truth who must liberate himself from the tutelage of external authority, asserting himself as a reader independent of his teachers (Waerferth, Plegmund, as well as Asser), and this liberation takes the form of a hunt for truth in which Wisdom offers himself as the quarry. Even if Alfred did not write the Old English Consolatio himself, or not all of it, this trope may still speak to an Alfredian influence over it.
Frankish authors writing on Charlemagne dwelt upon the emperor’s hunting chiefly so as to emphasize his boundless vitality, but their readings of it are considerably varied nonetheless. Einhard, a monk of Cloister Fulda, celebrates the Franks as a nation of coherent and sovereign identity, qualified by their high civilization, virile virtue, and political unity to be inheritors of the Roman empire. As cultural uniformity contributed to the political unity forged by Charlemagne, or at least as it was instrumental to the rhetoric of empire, Einhard ranges over features of horsemanship, dress, custom, and warrior fellowship to indicate the solid constancy of the Frankish character. The king’s hunting also does its part.
[The king] exercised himself continually in riding and hunting, for such was the custom of his people; only with difficulty could you find another nation on earth who can measure with the Franks in this art.
Robust, tradition-bound, and superior: this is the king who most firmly established the royal forestae of central Europe and built animal parks of Roman style in which to “exercise himself continually” as well as to stage official hunts in the protocols of the imperial assemblies.
The reader is told the hunter is audax in contrast to the angler and others.
That the king’s hunting-thane ranks socially higher than the other laborers is evident in a passage evidently not available to the Old English glossator.
Uel cuius honoris es inter tuos socios? Primum locum teneo in sua aula. Uestitum autem et uictum satis mihi tribuit, et aliquando uero anulum mihi aureum reddit. ...
[Q] Indeed what distinction have you among your fellows?
[A] I hold the first seat in his hall. He bestows upon me clothing and nourishment enough, and sometimes in fact he gives me a golden finger-ring. ...
While the self-image of chivalry still endorsed rigor and risk, a career through woods and fields with hounds remained the hunt of choice. Richard I left a great example of such a hunt five years before his death. As John Manwood records it,
"In anno domini 1194, King Richard the first, being a hunting in the forest of Sherwood, did chase a Hart out of ye forest of Sherwood into Barnes- dale in Yorkshire, and because hee could not there recover him, hee made proclamation at Tickill in Yorkeshire, and at divers other places there, that no person should kill, hurt, or chase, the said Hart, but that he might safely returne into the forest againe, which Hart was afterwards called a Hart royall proclaimed."
In other words, this deer received the privilege symbolically to wear the collar declaring “ ‘Noli me tangere,’ for Caesar’s I am,” the while he still wandered outside the royal forest.
“King Method,” whose practical teaching on questing and jargon contrasts with the learned moralizations of “Queen Reason,” advises also on weaponry (the bow and crossbow) and how to stalk big game with it.
There are many points in The Master of Game and elsewhere upon which to light for closer commentary either on English difference in technical diction, or praxis, or “ritual,” or in the way all these intersect to reflect a conscious shaping of cultural or “national” identity. A central locus for study is the body of the quarry itself, or, more precisely, its gralloching for the rites of the curée and division of fee. Almost two centuries later, George Gascoigne saw fit in The Noble Arte of Venerie to single out this moment with a separate chapter devoted to English difference.
The “breaking” lent itself to the exploitation of such pos- sibilities for two main reasons: first, because happening after the climax of the kill, it was stationary and focused on a specific locus and therefore watched by all. Second, the blood and slaughter energized the spectacle in memory. Technically speaking, the curée, rewarding the hounds on the stag’s hide, was almost always conducted in the field so as to whet their hunger for the chase to its keenest edge. Expecting to be fed at the kill, they would keep to the chase till the end. Once the stag was flayed, opened, and disjointed, his head was held forth to the hounds to bark and howl at, till their baying reached a fervor that pleased the hunters to let them fall to the feast laid out for them, the cut- up organs and flesh of their quarry, sometimes augmented by pieces of bread mixed in with blood.
For John Cummins, “There is an implied criticism of Phoebus here: what the Duke of York is thinking, but doesn’t say, is that there is no need of any of that Frenchified nonsense to butcher a carcass efficiently.” This observation of English skepticism is made again by Richard Almond:
"Did the English gentleman consider that breaking-up a beast was below his dignity? Was it perhaps that he disliked getting his hands dirty, or worse, covered in blood? There is probably some truth in both these notions, but I think that there is another very English reason, for which I have no evidence whatsoever from the hunting books. Englishmen have never placed much worth on unnecessary ceremony, especially that imported from the continent, and a gentleman-hunter perhaps considered that once the hart was hunted and slain, then his part of the job was completed."
From this it would be hard to know why the English treatises preserved the cries to the hounds in Anglo-French long after English became accepted everywhere. But Almond continues, referring to the élitism by which nobles sought to instill popular acceptance of their exclusivity and superiority.
"[T]hese ritualistic bases for class division are not particularly special when examined in relation to their practicality. ... The procedural way of breaking a carcass is simply the best way of tackling a not too difficult problem, the requirements being a good sharp, strong knife, patience and a minimum of training. In fact, confronted with such a task, by the nature of the anatomy of the animal, an intelligent person would almost inevitably follow the main logical steps as detailed in the hunting manuals."
Obviously, gentle authors introduced the particular obligatory sequence, like dealing first with the fore-quarters and then the hind- quarters, and so on, plus the odd item of superstition such as the “raven’s portion,” in order to add mystery and exclusive veracity to the whole ritual.
“In relation to their practicality”: viewed from a critically invested standpoint, French (and English) courtly ritual can certainly be read as a class pretension whose art glorified its practitioners arbitrarily and disguised practical necessities as creative works—a standpoint available already in the middle ages, as the desecrating symbols of the Rockingham poachers may show. There is nothing magical about getting a deer gutted out and disjointed, though the unskilled can make a nasty mess of it."
But there is more than one way to skin a cat. In the English version of Hugh of Rutland’s Ipomedon, breaking up the venison draws careful attention for more than practical reasons.
There squyers undyd hyr dere, Iche man on his owne manere. Ipomydon a dere yede [went] unto, Full konnyngly gan he it undo, So feyre that veneson he gan to dight [dress], That bothe hym byheld squyere and knyght.
“So feyre that veneson he gan to dight” suggests the insistence with which practicalities must yield to self-expression, as each man does it “on his owne manere.” In the sacral sphere there may be power in pure form and mystification, but in the secular world,“ritual” may impress all the more when it can also prove practical, thus also defensible. This may be especially true of hunting, where the nobles retire from the view of court and indulge themselves in the gritty reality of life and death.
Ritual then is a species of practice; it is processual and space-oriented, acting out some kind of elusive reality while it also affects our perception of that reality’s meaning.
In the case of courtly deer-breaking, practicality is a factor in its importance, but when invoking ritual it cannot be reduced to that factor alone. To study its meanings it is at least equally necessary to determine the forms, distinguishing manner, and purposes of ritualizing slaughter. Factors bearing on the distinc- tions created by such ritualization may include actions informed by a height- ened sense of formalism, rules of special operation, performative emphases, even an aura of (pseudo-)sacrality.
Gascoigne offers the closest thing to anecdote on the topic.
"There is a litle gristle which is vpon the spoone of the brysket, which we cal the Rauens bone, bycause it is cast vp to the Crowes or Rauens which attende hunters. And I haue seene in some places, a Rauen so wont and accustomed to it, that she would neuer fayle to croake and crye for it, all the while you were in breaking vp of the Deare, and would not depart vntill she had it."
This simple gesture differs from other ritual elements in that it seems to have limited social import, and so probably descends from an antiquity older than the craft itself. The native intelligence of these birds lends credence to Gascoigne’s sense that they wittingly haunt the place of slaughter to claim their fee. The impression left by their unbidden presence has affected the human imagination in other ways, for the analogy to the Anglo-Saxon poetic topos of the “beasts of battle,” who hover round the killing grounds so they may feed upon the slain, lies ready to hand. But the rite must owe its longevity to a combination of atavism and lasting psychic impulse. As Bronislav Malinowski put it,
"Magic flourishes wherever man cannot control hazard by means of science. It flourishes in hunting and fishing, in times of war and in seasons of love, in the control of wind, rain and sun, in regulating all dangerous enterprises, above all, in disease and in the shadow of death."
As a kind of hunting occult, the corbin’s bone reflects the hunter’s subliminal consciousness of dependency on the natural world, if not also the unease of setting hands to the “mortal coil,” and so dramatizes an economy of give and take with that world by rendering to the overseers their “right.” As such it may function as a talisman for success in the next hunt. Ironically, while it stands as a point of good custom, in the end it is an acknowledgement of the limits of ars venandi, a “science” that “cannot control hazard.”
To dress the deer’s head for rewarding the hounds, Edward says “þere nedeth nomore but caboch his hede, all þe ouerjawes still þeron, and the labels forseide.”
The lord or master of game may delegate this task—again, an action requiring a sure hand. In Gascoigne’s day, if not also used in Edward’s, it was an honorific task. Once more, Gascoigne is the most articulate.
"[The assay] being done, we vse to cut off the Deares heades. And that is commonly done also by the chiefe personage. For they take delight to cut off his heade with their woodknyues, skaynes, or swordes, to trye their edge, and the goodnesse or strength of their arme. If it be cut off to rewarde the houndes withall, then the whole necke (or very neare) is cut off with it: otherwise it is cut off neare to the head. And then the heade is cabaged (which is to say) it is cut close by the hornes through the braine pan, vntill you come vnderneath the eyes, and ther it is cut off. The piece which is cut from the hornes (together with the braines) are to rewarde the houndes. That other piece is to nayle up the hornes by, for a memoriall, if he were a great Deare of heade."
Before the deer was caboched, however, the English took the assay. This is a distinctly English variation on a presentation rite, which does not appear in The Master of Game but in The Boke of Huntyng (Boke of St. Albans) and the poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Parlement of the Thre Ages. Gascoigne names it first among the differences of the “Englishe manner.”
"First where [the Frenchman] appoynteth the Deares foote to be cutte off, and to bee presented to the Prince or chiefe, oure order is that the Prince or chiefe (if so please them) doe alight and take assaye of the Deare with a sharpe knyfe, the whiche is done in this maner. The deare being layd vpon his backe, the Prince, chiefe, or such as they shall appoint, commes to it: And the chiefe huntsman (kneeling, if it be to a Prince) doth holde the Deare by the forefoote, whiles the Prince or chief, cut a slyt drawn alongst the brysket of the deare, somewhat lower than the brysket towards the belly. This is done to see the goodnesse of the flesh, and howe thicke it is."
This is traditionally done to show not so much how thick the deer’s “flesh” is, but how much fat he has. The usual terminology would say you cut into the breast to assay (put to proof ) the “grease” he bears, two fingers thick being good. As is shown by its careful staging, with the “chiefe huntsman” serving his lord, this act carries prominent social importance. But what meaning could it have as a variation on the French rite of presenting a cut-off forefoot? Or what practical importance does it show? Deer grow fat by a combination of good pasturage and peace-and-quiet. The stags are fattest from high summer till just before the rut. Two factors in testing the fat at the assay are to have a measure for comparison between deer in addition to appraising their antlers, and to let that finding reflect how it will on the skill and luck of the hunters. This is useful enough for the assay perhaps to have been used in the common chase, and for a very long time, but without the presentation aspect which so overtly hierarchized relationships. The act of presentation in fact modifies the assay’s meaning considerably, for there is another factor bearing on the deer having grown to worthy girth in the first place, and that is the game-management function of foresters. The laws of the forest, while generating a huge take of revenue for violations, were ostensibly promulgated to defend and preserve the habitat of the ferae naturae so that the king could have good hunting. In a hard winter the deer would diminish and had to be fed. They had to have good cover to rumi- nate and sleep, and the less they were disturbed the better. Travel in the royal forests was discouraged or harassed, and forbidden altogether in the (de-)fence months when the deer were calving. Hunting seasons had to be observed, and poaching suppressed. Healthy deer therefore reflected on the condition of the forestry where there were foresters or parkers in service, especially as park deer could be expected to thrive mightily. This would appear a notable circumstance in the change that made the assay a presentable act in exchange for, or parallel to, the French custom of presenting a cut-off forefoot. Whereas the French present a trophy-fetish, the English offer a knife by which the lord may put to proof not only the deer but the handiwork of those who sustain their habitat.
The deer and all the ground game are lain out in regular rows and marked off as a kind of sanctum into which only the king and master of game may enter. There the king claims his own (and that of “þe quene, or my lorde þe prince”) and otherwise dispenses the kill, some to his friends or those he wishes to honor. Then the master of game goes row by row, tithing some to the church, sending others to the sergeant of the larder, to local gentlemen on the advice of the foresters, and to the officers and ranking hunters. Of the rest who shot or coursed deer, they are to mark their kill so as to claim it at the division of fee, where some must assert such claim by blowing certain motes (< French mot) on the horn.
As with other privileges of the “chiefe personage,” such as the assay and caboche, hunting ritual in reserved space thus tends to visualize and affirm patterns of authority and social subordination, or elevation. The king’s privilege to go within the quirré calls to mind the trope of the penetralia regum, the royal inner sanctum, that had been invoked by Richard Fitz Nigel to justify the arbitrary nature of the forest law. The “gentillmen of þe contre” who receive venison may well be local knights whose landholdings lie within the royal forest, and who, if this is so, cannot hunt the deer on their own land. Power is on display, and that power is socially troped through the hunt and the concentration of force and power that is made possible by the legal environment.
From the standpoint of its proponents, authority and bloodsport folded together in déduit conceived as “recreation”; that is, to read it literally, the re-creation of self brought about by an almost mythical belief in the power of destruction to create new forms of becoming—a belief that is psychologically natural to an honor-driven society in which arms-bearing and governance are restricted to a warrior nobility. What is striking is the consistency with which the treatises foreground self-expression, first by exemplifying and explaining the jargon of venery, then by singling out what is individual to English custom, or (as in the French works) by dramatizing dialogues. What can be learned of the ethos of artes venandi depends heavily on the manner of representation they are clothed in, as for example pre-conquest citation of the arts relates not to their content and method but to their function as attributes of kingly character and power. In the English works of William Twiti and Edward of Norwich, and invoked as well in Chaucer and the Gawain-poet, the ethos of English ars venandi is borne chiefly by “woodcraft,” a formalized, highly traditional knowledge that includes insights into both “vert” and “venison” within a single competency. As pointed out above, Edward even goes so far as to tie woodcraft to English identity. However, I think its evocative power derives from the fact that its meaning as a tradition cannot be bound by the culture fostered by hunting law, but is part of the ancient culture of the common chase. Hunters and foresters can have taken woodcraft only to new levels of commitment and training, but not actually changed its basic lore or character, which derived from the immemorial antiquity of tracking game through the woodlands. Woodcraft at its core, therefore, relates only tentatively to laws of the forest and their attendant culture of authority, or perhaps not at all, because woodcraft is about freedom. It is the lore of the fathers from back in the day when men hunted without constraint. It could be refined by teaching and practice to the point where it could be judged an art, and taught to nobles. A king should know woodcraft, therefore, but it is also what sustained Robin Hood." [Hunting law and ritual in medieval english literature]
"What Gottfried idealizes is Tristan’s tangible embodiment of a techne that uses animal anatomy to reify an order of knowledge which can transform the raw material of death.
This experience is not about the mort itself, the actual moment of which Gottfried elides; rather, we find only the hart’s passive body offered as a site to localize Tristan’s contestation of the foreign hunters’ method and to exhibit the ritual sequencing in five acts: to wit, the excoriation and dismemberment (which Gottfried idiosyncratically calls the bast); the honor portion (furkîe < French fourchée); the reward of the hounds (curîe < Fr. curée); the perquisites of venison apportioned to the hunters (rëhte); and the presentation of the venison at court (prîsant). Further, these five acts can be correlated to three discrete objects of focus: the body frame, the vital interior, and the ceremony that connects these to the social world.
Bast, as far as the record shows, was never a technical term in German venery, but a calque from the French escorche,“tree bark” (escorchier,“strip, peel”), that Gottfried coined by authority of poetic license. Furthermore, the excoriation diverges from logic and practice because, as Gottfried represents it, its method artificially segments or confuses the process of freeing the viscera.
With the animal on its back, Tristan strips the hide off the body like a garment and spreads it out to both sides. The limbs and joints are cut away progressively toward the interior, from higher to lower, and all the elements are arranged so as to produce the effect of removing layer upon layer of integument until all that remains is the central web of viscera, which we are to imagine as kept whole on the chine and the hide. Only at that point are the organs and fillets distinguished and prepared for ceremonial purposes: the honor portion of the fork-branch for the lord of the hunt (i.e. liver, kidneys, testicles); and the hounds’ repast on the hide, fed upon with the blood (heart, lungs, spleen, entrails). All the while the hunters of King Mark voice wonder at young Tristan’s expertise and the impressive effect of his handiwork. They then collect and prepare their own perquisites of venison (also a novelty to them), and the beast is symbolically reconstituted for an elaborate presentation at court.
While we cannot tell what texts Gottfried consulted, it appears that the terms furkîe and curîe came from his main source, Thomas of Brittany’s Tristan romance (now extant only in a fragment), because their phonology betrays Anglo-French or Picard originals. Nevertheless, his embellishments in no way detract from the central dramatic point, which is to amaze with a spectacle that seems to corroborate Erasmus’ perception of a secular ritual disposed to inspire awe.
On cutting up animal bodies, Jean-Louis Durand has written that “the anatomy of animals is the space onto which an order of human needs is secretly projected: a typology,” and chivalric hunting ritual certainly attests to a secret human “need” to inscribe the bodies of beasts of venery. Given the high level of formalization, the emotional investment and the sense of awe, it is compelling to regard such hunting ritual as a cultural reflex of sacrificial practices of antiquity. Much is known about how medieval doctrines of courtliness were informed directly or indirectly by translating Mediterranean classicism to northern ecclesiastical and secular courts, but in the case of medieval woodcraft and ancient sacrifice, the similarity doubtfully came about by diffusion. Whether it is attributable to Indo-European monogenesis (via the worth invested in emblematic animals and ritual killing), or to polygenetic factors (owing to the uniform morphology of big mammals and the logic of meat sharing), for present purposes it does not matter whether the relationship is homological or analogical.
If we take Gottfried and Erasmus together, key points emerge by which to compare their breaking-rituals with the Greek alimentary blood sacrifice (as outlined by Durand). We observe the tendency to obscure the death agony; to focus away from the blood, which is relevant only to the gods or the dogs; to dedicate a particular knife to certain functions only; to regiment the order of cutting; to segregate the viscera; to gaze at the revealed organs, and subject them to some kind of interpretation; and to codify specific portions in terms of prestige and relevance to different groups (the lord, the dogs, the indigent, the hunters).
Significant also is the elevating effect of the perfect performance, of partaking of the flesh thus prepared. With sacrifice, it is the transport felt by acting “under the eyes of the gods.” With hunting it is the feeling of increasing in nobilitas, as Erasmus mockingly attests; or as Tristan says, “dâ hovet ir iuch selben mite” (“you’ll befit yourselves for court thereby”). Of course, hunting’s chief semantic field of reference was the worldly domain of human, social, cultural interconnections, whereas sacrifice indexed man’s relationship to a transcendent pantheon. Certainly hunting may evoke supernatural associations, for example, by establishing links with ancestors. But, as intimated, the most transcendent abstractum that the ritual slaughter of the hunt engaged was the hierarchizing power of the law.
Tristan’s most striking innovation is the idea of the honor portion itself, the “fork,” which falls in the category of the lord’s “fee” or “right,” the droiz dou chasse. Gaston Phébus, who we can be sure dined on not a few of these, clearly recognized a relationship between animal anatomy and personal authority on the hunting grounds.
"The morsels on the fork whereof I spoke above are the tastiest pieces to eat of the hart, and that is why they are put on the fork for the mouth of the lord."
Through Tristan’s interruption of the Cornish hunters, Gottfried (and Thomas before him) in effect dramatized the moment of cultural transition from the common chase to the foresta, from the egalitarian hunt of the heroic age to the chivalric hunt of the courtly warrior-priest.
In the free-capture world, in which hunters stood on an equal footing, the defining act of the hunt, its transformative moment, was the kill, the occupatio, for that was the moment when the wild quarry was transformed into the personal property of the hunter.
There was no need for ceremony in this egalitarian order; with the free estate asserted in the act of killing, the carcass could afterward be chopped apart as a piece of property, as there was no social stimulus to act otherwise. Not so with a hunt conducted within authoritarian space. If Kurt Lindner’s thesis holds true (it is heavily dependent on circumstantial evidence), the medieval craft of hunting developed historically from the professionalization of hunting fraternities of freemen who ministered to magnates in their legal sanctuaries. The distinct impulse toward formalization will have arisen during the era of Carolingian afforestation partly as a response to the disenfranchisement and legal dependency of court hunters, a dependency that blurred the distinction between free estate and slavery. In such authoritarian space, the hunter’s occupation of the animal’s body now indexed a pre-existing personal privilege of, or a personal dependency upon, those few authorities who were empowered with the liberty of the hunt. Ritualization therefore recuperated a semantic of free estate in a legal context within which a man could not freely hunt.
Significantly, it was owing to the nexus of craft and forest law that hunting ceremony eventually realized a critical characteristic distinguishing it from hunting in the common chase: it displaced the transformative moment of the hunt from the kill to the unmaking sequence. This became the revelatory moment of ars venandi, demonstrating the technical mastery of the hunter, and sublimating the violence of the kill in the discipline of denuding the raw interior of the animal soul. It was not till the flowering of French chivalric culture, when the nobility was in expansion and redefining sources of prestige, together with the proliferation of private hunting reserves in England, that this craft became popular and was integrated into the aesthetic of knightly self-presentation.
Thus (and here lies the central paradox of this ritual) Tristan’s precise cutting of the deer into hierarchically decorous components effectually engenders the aura of a whole or integral persona of the courtly type, knowledgeable, disciplined, and essentially noble. It is reflected in Hugh of Rutland’s Ipomedon, when the Princess of Calabria seeks to know if the Unknown Courtier descends from noble stock, and she calls for a great hunting to find out.
For Tristan, however, forever caught between court and forest, this ritualized habitus gives contour to a chivalric subject that the psycho-pathology of adulterous and incestuous love, social and self-alienation, and then physical exile will rend apart.
Ultimately the ritual by itself, without its ideological link to an order of law, its transcendent referent, will become sterile. This larger semantic field remains undeveloped in Gottfried’s poem as the hunt modulates to a more deeply existential theme articulated through motifs of tracking and the actual chase during Tristan’s forest exile with Isolt. It may be observed as well that King Mark’s court never bears the fruit of Tristan’s civilizing labor—it remains “primitive.” The remote marches of Tristan and Isolt’s exile are thought of by Mark’s huntsmen as a wilderness (wüeste wilde, 7 67), not a zone of cultural dominion (ban, vorst). Moreover, they are so inept they confuse Tristan’s tracks with game trails, and finally hap upon the lovers chiefly by accident. Gottfried vividly dramatized the chivalric appropriation of a professional craft, but he developed it as a function of personal talent and education, then as a resource to advance Tristan’s destiny by sustaining his union with Isolt in an eroticized forest sanctum; what Gottfried did not do was dramatize ars venandi as an institution imbedded in the legal and cultural space of its origin." [Hunting law and ritual in medieval english literature]
Hunting homologies in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
William Marvin wrote:
"To get caught with a lady’s sleeve is one thing (as Lancelot gets caught by Guenivere having sported the Girl of Escalot’s sleeve at the tournament of Winchester), but to get caught with her girdel would be construed as his having possessed her in bed (thus Brünhilt’s undeserved shame). Even hidden, however, it only gains power over Gawain by binding him firmer in guilt and isolation. As a metonymy of the Lady’s encircling sanctuary, offering life and survival as a token of love, its signification as erotic bond is consummated in its function as a snare. As Gawain knowingly states it later, she is the huntress.
Virgin is withdrawn, and the breach of word-as-bond obligation to the host, once exposed, promises public humiliation. The Gawain-poet’s word for honor and repute, menske, underscores how heroic ideology equates a man’s renown, or socially constructed identity, with his very humanity, and so highlights how Gawain’s critical split from it, his loss of face, entails a dehumanizing schism.
Still there is public drama of re-assembly to attend to, and the ritualized division of the animal body, like the spatial divisions in fitt, is to be subsumed under a moment of ritualized presentation. Through their sharing of raw meat and kisses before the court, each man proffers his day’s “take” as a comparison of trophies, eliciting public measurement and estimation in the very act by which guest matches himself to host in a game of dubious loyalty:
What is masked in this public demonstration in the hall is the risk and violence particular to the discrete spaces of hunting ground and penetralia. That Gawain can even offer kisses unto Bertilak advances a fiction that Gawain was the proactive winner of those kisses, whereas in fact he was more frequently subjected to the Lady’s gaze and seduction. The Lady’s vanishing into the background at the moment of Bertilak’s and Gawain’s union anticipates the hunting lord’s later subsumption of her agency, and such is the effect of her having to perform within a space comprehended within the Bertilakian, occupying gaze. Reading by way of her hunting craft—that is, from her subject position as huntress—she must maneuver round Gawain warily. He may, by the third day, have the moral smell of a fox, but as the Lady appears to him willing and disrobed by his bedside, offering her own body as bait, she is positively casting for wolf. Thus the earlier description of her beautiful flesche and felle acquires a new and ominous relevance. As her lord is carving up animals, the Lady entraps Gawain with a knot so binding, luring him with the fantasy of miraculous survival where she could not with flesh, that he rives the Pentangle to free himself from his suicidal troth to the Green Knight.
It is as if the marvelous execution of the Green Knight splits the genre ethoi and unravels the heroic (Bertilak’s hunting) from the romance thread (Gawain and the Lady), only to reconnect them at the assay of “schyre grece” in Gawain’s flesh. The assay elicits proof of the animal in him, the animal that values his own life under the heroic and erotic masks whose formalism obligates him to irreconcilable masters. And the heroic, bound by the ever more subtle and self-abnegating strictures of courtesy, while also having to accommodate the romance license that uses such courtesy to play free with morality, seems destined to break before it changes. These are but poetic reflexes of a cultural pathology of arrested or finally aborted transformation, which is symbolically borne out by the ambiguous and trivializing reception given Gawain upon his confession of shame at King Arthur’s court.
It is this, the hunter’s craft to draw off the integuments of skin and enable a forbidden view of the soul’s volatility, or even absence, that constituted a power arousing scorn in Erasmus, who ridiculed the onlookers’ keen and heretical longing to partake of an ineffable spectaculum.
To view the hunt in sequence, the dismemberment gives way to what Tristan called the prîsant, by which the fragmentation is reversed, and the dismembered deer is symbolically reconstituted as a butchered simulacrum of its former self to be presented at court.
Even aside from the“bastard feudalism” of the late-fourteenth century—where demographic and economic trends undermined the old authority of land-tenure, “chivalry” had lost its edge in warfare and for numerous reasons had with ever more exertion to defend its hold on government—ever since the original flourishing of tournaments and Arthurian literature, heightened ceremony and formalism had barely or never sublimated the violence inherent in the honor-culture, and this failure only grew more conspicuous as ceremony was made to compensate for doubt and decline in the material as well as moral authority of the arms-bearing ranks of society. The impulse toward self-revelation and proofing that is manifested in heraldry, tournaments, and (as Tristan and Ipomadon show) hunting factored powerfully into the textualization of these experiences, which refracted in some instances panicked fantasies of control. Bertilak’s quasi-sacerdotal authority as hunting lord must also be understood to manifest just such a fantasy. But the Gawain-poet, for all the care lavished on the hunting detail of the poem, still apperceives the daemonic or feral aura of venery—he embodies it in the green lord whose magic and woodcraft make him powerful and autonomous. They will have had their differences, but the Gawain-poet would have understood Erasmus perfectly well." [Hunting law and ritual in medieval english literature]
"This is a song for those who will not face equals but boldly hunt defenceless Animals. The cowards and psychopaths who when the situation reverses, run And hide. Pools of dark light like negative halos of hate follow the timid Trophy hunters who travel thousands of miles to shoot African animals, by Sneaking up on them and taking advantage. They would panic, if not armed Wherever they poach, the cowards are safe from danger and would cower And whimper if it was an equal contest. But that is not the way of the afraid, The fearful who need to hurt in safety to feel brave. Hunters with powerful Rifles travel across the world for one-sided violence.
They live in a circle of self-love and glibly talk their loving but do not act it. They are predators who take advantage of others using charm, deceit, violence And other methods often of those weaker and enjoy watching the discomfit. The physical chaos unleashed upon the order of nature by the ignorant who Seek excitement without danger in shooting animals, sometimes with bow and Arrow which is a mark of human evil that also travels from the heart to the face, Leaving women wrinkled and ageing early.
They sit and smile, their smooth tongues flashing like serpents as they lie Without blinking when they say they are humane, and don’t learn from experience. They don’t even hunt but stalk animals who are living naturally and eating in the Only way they can, as nature designed them to do, but hunters break the order of Nature, crouch safely behind protective fences out of danger, to kill rhinos and Shoot from behind firm fences, like the sick sadist who shot a tiger in front of her Cubs. For the hunters’ protection rhino are put into penned off areas. It’s a perfect Shooting holiday for the anxious and frightened, with no courage.
An evil government allows the craven to compensate by assassinating Animals who don’t have fingers to pull triggers. Is it not time western leaders Prevented it? Bullies are cowards and run from a one to one battles. Most Current politicians are classic softies who would pay other kids at school for Protection. When they grow up the pattern continues, to be nasty and tough To defenceless wildlife. They have an agenda to cull birds like pied wagtails That are not a threat; wildlife is an nuisance cluttering their estates, and cause Minor problems in towns and cities.
If madness can change the shape, cruelty changes faces and the ugliness of the Heart seeps through causing distorted features. Women go to make themselves Feel good and get a safe thrill by having photographs taken next to dead animals They shot; but their distorted faces go with them. Disturbed parents take the children For a pleasure holiday to shoot giraffes while they are eating. A woman lay beside A giraffe she had shot, her crows feet rippling in folds like ridges being blown in the Desert sand by an arid wind. Joy spreads across the land if an elephant turns and Becomes the hunter and tramples a tormentor. People cheer, when lions turn on stalkers.
A young slayer grins widely with her rows of teeth bulging out like a buckled fence as She boasts of killing animals who cannot fight back. So ugly, so young, as hate twists Her features and an unattractive aspiring model baited Cecil’s mourners, by killing a Giraffe and bragged of slaying a harmless wildebeest, her looks changed showing her Evil heart. A wimpy lion slayer ran and hid when a hunt was turned on him and he Became the hunted. Ha, ha, what a coward you are!
Politicians and bankers fight wars from offices with other people’s Children, and bravely order the slaughter of London’s foxes and badgers. Easy targets are picked by cowards and psychopaths from safe places. To See them get it back delights many who celebrate on social media. Psychopathic politicians do not send their own children to fight in their Invasions of other countries but talk tough in plush Westminster offices, Their unused swords gleaming in cabinets on the walls. Old kings were Brave and fought at the front but these send the children of others to die For shady causes.
Modern fireworks are pyrotechnics and should only be used at public events, Supervised. Selling dangerous weapons as toys to the public is irresponsible. As we walked through a wood a White Hart stood watching us. What a surprise Some psychopath has not been along and shot it, we thought. The act is cowardly And cannot be separated from the lack of danger in committing it. Hate and evil Stain the soul, and ravage the face, breeding ugliness where beauty once peeped."
"For this boy worrying was a way of holding on to some thing, a form of storage. It transpired from our conversations that worries were like gifts he kept for his mother, and he was fearful of running out of them. What better gift to give to one's mother-especially if she was unsure of herself-than a worry she could resolve and so feel fully empowered as a good mother?
Winnicott writes, for example, of the "nuisance-value" of the symptom. The parent's worry can signify a hidden preoccupation in the child, a loss of contact through a breakdown of understanding and an excess of pain. In adolescence we see a different stage of this in the use of what can be called symptoms-but are often bemusing forms of privacy-to get out of the parents' orbit even while maintain ing sufficient contact with it. Parents keep the necessary link alive through worrying. It is curious, in this light, that worry ing tends almost always to be talked of pejoratively. It may be part of our terror of dependency that we never hear anyone described as a good worrier.
We were once, even if we are not now, the object of some one else's worry. And, clearly, the way one was worried about-the quality of the worry we received-will to some extent be reflected in the way one worries about oneself In object-relations theory, worrying can cover the whole spec trum from ordinary self-care to a thwarted conversation with an unlocatable object. How one uses other people in the process of worrying-to whom one tells what, and when, or whether one keeps one's worries to oneself-will be a repetition, with variations, of earlier relationships or transactions with objects. In other words, what worries are used for-what kind of medium of exchange or currency they become in one's relation ship with other people and oneself-may be as revealing as what prompts them. (The question may not be "What are you worried about?" but "Whom is this worry for?") What one finds preying on one's mind, or rather, what worries are made of, may be related to what and for whom they are made. It is, of course, easy to forget that worries are imaginative creations, small epics of personal failure and anticipated catastrophe. They are, that is to say, made up. And like inverted masturbation fantasies, they are among our most intimate inventions. It is almost as though we recognize ourselves too well, are perhaps overly familiar with ourselves, as worriers. Indeed, one's own personal history of worrying-the subjects chosen, their mod ification over time, the people involved, the relative pain and pleasure of the experience-all this would seem to be a poten tially lucid revelation of character. But Freud, of course, made us unusually suspicious of the foreground; and worries, when they are there, crowd to the front of the stage.
Don't worry; it may never happen.
- Traditional saying
We can be both the subjects and the objects of our own worries. Worrying, like being concerned, preoccupied, or absorbed but unlike dreaming, thinking, or feeling-can be done to us, according to ordinary usage. I can say, "It worries me" and also "I am worried about something." I can say "I dreamed about something"-although this, as we shall see, is different-but not as perhaps I should, "It dreams me." So in relation to my worries I can be-in the language of a traditional mystification - both active and passive. I can be their victim and I can try to master them. Worries, unlike dreams, thoughts, and feel ings, are something to which we give agency. We can, with the irony that characterizes the defenses, allow them to be beyond omnipotent control, whereas for dreams we claim authorship. We can be worried, but we can't be dreamed.
The history of the word worrying is itself revealing. Deriv ing from the Old English wyrgan, meaning to kill by strangula tion, it was originally a hunting term, describing what dogs did to their prey as they caught it. The Oxford English Dictionary has, among several meanings from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century: "To swallow greedily or to devour . . . to choke a person or animal with a mouthful of food . to seize by the throat with the teeth and tear or lacerate; to kill or injure by biting or shaking. Said, e.g., of dogs or wolves attacking sheep, or of hounds when they seize their prey." Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 has for worry: "To tear or mangle as a beast tears it prey. To harass or persecute brutally." A worrier for Johnson is someone who persecutes others, "one who worries or torments them." Two things are immediately striking in all of this. First there is the original violence of the term, the way it signifies the vicious but successful outcome of pursuing an object of desire. This sense of brutal foreplay is picked up in Dryden's wonderful lines in All for Love: "And then he grew familiar with her hand / Squeezed it, and worry'd it with raven ous kisses." Worrying, then, is devouring, a peculiarly intense, ravenous form of eating. The second striking thing is that wor rying, until the nineteenth century, is something one does to somebody or something else. In other words, at a certain point in history worrying became something that people could do to themselves. Using, appropriately enough, an analogy from hunting, worrying becomes a consuming, or rather self-con suming, passion. What was once thought of as animal becomes human, indeed all too human. What was once done by the mouths of the rapacious, the desirous, is now done, often with a relentless weariness, by the minds of the troubled.
It is not until the early nineteenth century, a time of signifi cant social transformation, that we get the psychological sense of worrying as something that goes on inside someone, what the O.E.D. calls "denoting a state of mind," giving as illustra tion a quotation from Hazlitt's Table Talk: "Small pains are . . . more within our reach: we can fret and worry ourselves about them." Domestic agitation replaces any sense of quest in Hazlitt's essay "On Great and Little Things. " By the 1 850s we find many of Dickens' characters worrying or "worriting." Where once wild or not-so-wild animals had worried their prey, we find Dickens' people worrying their lives away about love and money and social status. From, perhaps, the middle of the nineteenth century people began to prey on themselves in a new kind of way.
Worry begins to catch on as a description of a new state of mind. It is now impossible to imagine a life without worry. In little more than a century worrying has become what we call a fact of life, as integral to our lives, as apparently ahistorical, as any of our most familiar feelings. So in Philip Roth's recent fictional autobiography, The Facts, it is surprising to find the word made interesting again in the narrator's descrip tion of his hard-working Jewish father: "Despite a raw emo tional nature that makes him prey to intractable worry, his life has been distinguished by the power of resurgence." The pun on prey suggests the devotion of that generation of American Jew to a new God. But the narrator also implies that his father's nature and history make him subject to his own persecution in the form of relentless worrying, and also that something about his life is reflected in the quality of his worry, its intractability, its obstinate persistence. A new kind of heroic resilience is required to deal with the worries of everyday life.
Even in this most cursory bit of philology we find worry as pursuit and persecution, two things that in psychoanalysis tend to be associated with desire. But worrying, as the word is used now, is manifestly countererotic; no one says "I had a really erotic worry last night," or indeed thinks of himself wor rying his loved one's hands with kisses. In A. S. Byatt's novel Still Life one of the heroines is propositioned on a French train by a Frenchman, who offers her a "taste of Cointreau, Grand Marnier, Chartreuse" in his sleeping compartment. "Frederica replied brightly that that would be very agreeable. This was despite a strong sense that the man was unduly anxious about the outcome of his overture: anxiety is a great destroyer of response, and Frederica had no taste for being closed in a sleep ing compartment with a worried man." The strong sense here is that worrying is a form of insulation, that in the excess of worry something in the proposition, to the young heroine's relief, is retracted.
But Byatt alerts us to a distinction between anxiety and worrying that she cannot make. As in the seduction, something is implied and glossed over at the same time. The distinction we tend to make is that worry always has an object, that worrying is beyond displacement, whereas one can feel anxious without knowing what the anxiety is about. Interestingly, anxious, which we may think of as a nine teenth-century medical term, is in its conventional psycho logical sense an older word than worrying. The O.E.D. offers a seventeenth-century meaning of anxious as "troubled or uneasy in mind about some uncertain event; being in painful or disturbing suspense; concerned; solicitous." Anxiety, of course, immediately found a place in the language of psychoanalysis, while worrying still has not. It has been subsumed by, or implicitly included in, a broad range of psychoanalytic cate gories, from obsessionality to phobic terrors. And this despite the rather obvious point that most adults who speak English come for psychoanalytic treatment because, in their own words, they are "worried about" something.
Depression, for example, has been the subject of extensive psychoanalytic speculation, but not sadness; mania has been accounted for theoretically, but not the intense pleasure of erotic excitement. It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible-the word does not occur-but it seems peculiar that the word cannot be found in the index of the Standard Edition of Freud's work.
"I have a life without latent content."
- Alexander Portnoy
In beginning to consider the worrying of everyday life as the product of an extreme form of secondary revision-a worry, that is to say, as a stifled, indeed an overprotected dream-it may be useful to remember the possible implications of the etymology of the word itself. After all, even spurious etymol ogies were once a respectable source of psychoanalytic speculation. When we worry, then, what are we trying to eat? What is there to pursue or get rid of? How does one hunt for some thing in oneself-or, more obviously, prey on oneself-and what would it mean to devour what one caught? We are familiar with the notion of worrying away at a problem, like a dog gnawing a bone, but is it absurd to suggest that we are doing a kind of violence to ourselves when we worry? Worrying can, for example, be an aggression, a critique turned against the self. When we lie awake at night worrying, there may be a dream we are trying not to have. Certainly people are more often starved of dreams than of worries. And the ordinary worry that projects a catastrophe into the future can easily be seen as the equivalent in consciousness of what Freud called punishment dreams, which "merely replace the forbidden wish-fulfilment by the appropriate punishment for it: that is to say, they fulfil the wish of the sense of guilt which is the reaction to the repudiated impulse." Worries, then, can be punishments for wishes, or wishes cast in persecutory form; in the familiar act of worrying we may wish to avert the catastrophe and also to precipitate it. Flirting with possibilities, we are both the hunter and the hunted. There are, one could say elaborating Freud's phrase, those wrecked by success, and those wrecked by antici pating failure; or rather, those apparently wrecked by the wish to fail or the fear of success. Even if worrying is a covert critique of the fantasies of success in the culture, it is clear that worrying has an equivocal relationship with the wishing that in Freud's view dominates mental life.
The unconscious, Freud writes, "consists of wishful im pulses. These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate with one another . . . and are exempt from mutual contradiction . . . There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty." Since worrying by definition implies conflict, we must infer that the unconscious doesn't, so to speak, have any worry in it. We have to imagine, according to Freud, that there is a part of ourselves that has nothing to worry about, that is exempt from this most persistent form of self-doubt. Worrying, like dreaming, is born of conflict, and therefore of censorship. It involves the compromise of representation and derives from instinctual wishes. But the dream-work that Freud described is ingenious in its transformation of the forbidden into the sufficiently acceptable. Compared with the dream, the worry is almost pure, uncooked day-residue; indeed, it is addicted to reality. There is apparently little condensation or displacement; there seems to be no question of intelligibility, although there is a noticeable intensity of feeling. Worrying, that is to say, often has the appearance, the screen, that we associate with a certain version of reality.
Compared with the extraordinary invention of the dream, the ordinary worry seems drab. As remote as possible from the forbidden, the worry, unlike the dream, is part of the routine, the predictability of everyday life. A moment's thought will tell us what, if anything, we have to worry about tomorrow. No amount of thinking will tell us what we will dream tonight. All of us may be surrealists in our dreams, but in our worries we are incorrigibly bourgeois. It may be worth considering, then, a glib Freudian paradox: that some of the most efficient forms of censorship are those that render themselves invisible. How would one begin, or bother, to think that a shopping list or a telephone directory was a product of censorship? To worry about one's health, or about one's children, about money, or being late, or losing one's job, is not in any obvious sense enigmatic or puzzling. And yet it may be one of the functions of worrying to cramp and contain-to overorganize-more imaginatively elaborate or even violent responses to such very real predicaments. As a furtive protest, worrying is an attempt at simplification. It can give a local habitation and a name to a diversity of grievance and desire. A worry, one could say, is a muted dream, an overprotection of the self. But one could feel baffled, indeed radically misrecognized, if one's ordinary worries were interpreted as a Freudian analyst might interpret a dream. There is no obvious reason, though, why our associa tions to any of the elements in a worry should not be revealing. It may not be the dream that is the royal road to the unconscious, but the style of interpretation it makes possible.
Nevertheless, from a psychoanalytic perspective, "What did you dream about?" and "What are you worried about?" are quite different kinds of questions. The answers to them confront us with our assumptions about interpretation-both what is subject to what we call interpretation and what, in the form of interpretation, we might pertinently say. Clearly, the demand, or invitation, in the answers to these questions are different. And when we answer the question "What are you worried about?" we, in a recognizable sense, mean what we say; we have conviction about what we are referring to. But when I say that I dreamed about a green cat last night, I am giving a true report, yet we can assume that a process of substitution, of symbolization, has been in play. We infer that work has been done on the stuff of emotional life, that there is an overnight history of transformation that opens into a vast unconscious personal history, whereas worrying seems like a reaction to and not a reworking of our experience. By binding us to the present and the future it abolishes the past that is, so to speak, behind this particular piece of worrying, that existed prior to its appearance as a preoccupation. It seals time by encapsulating a sequence. When we worry, we look forward but are not tempted to look very far back. We are dutiful in the way Or pheus should have been.
Worrying implies a future, a way of looking forward to things. It is a conscious conviction that a future exists, one in which something terrible might happen, which is of course ultimately true. So worrying is an ironic form of hope. But dreams are always set in the past, both in Freud's sense of their being the disguised fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish and in the more verifiable sense that you cannot, by definition, ask someone what he is dreaming because a, dream is always a retro spective report, never the so-called thing-in-itself. And always the question "What did you dream?" in its most straightfor ward sense is notoriously difficult to answer. The dream, or perhaps the dreaming subject, "fades," as Lacan puts it, when the dreamer awakens. The dreaming subject is even more elusive -almost impossible to construct-than his or her product, the dream. "Who is dreaming?" is clearly a less ludicrous ques tion than "Who is worrying?"
What people do to their dreams effortlessly-that is, forget them-people have to try to do to their worries. To remember a worry is as easy as to forget a dream. Worries are present and tend to recur, and we are manifestly present in them. They show a coherent subject in an intelligible, if unsettling, narra tive; they assume a pragmatic self bent on problem-solving, not an incurably desiring subject in the disarray of not knowing what he wants. We use worries to focus and are prone to use them to simulate purpose just as when we are intimidated by possibility. When people describe a known task-passing an exam, paying a debt, being cured of an illness-they do not seem to allude to an unlocatable lack or, more absurdly, a certain death. As an integral part of a familiar internal environment, these specific worries can be very reassuring because they preempt what is in actuality an unknowable future. The worst thing that could happen is more comforting than the unimagin able thing.
Worrying tacitly constitutes a self-or, at least, a narrator - by assuming the existence of one; for how could there be a worry without a worrier? It is, of course, difficult to imagine a dream without a dreamer, but also to know what the dreamer looks like. A worrier has, so to speak, a familiar face; the iconography of the dreaming self is nowhere to be found. And it is exactly in this elusive area of inquiry that worrying focuses a contemporary dilemma in psychoanalysis. In what could, broadly speaking, be called object-relations theory, we have potentially guaranteed subjects or selves in relation to potentially knowable and facilitating objects in search of per sonal development through intimacy. A modernized Freudian, on the other hand, can easily see the self as merely a function of representation-where else is it except in its descriptions? in a world of comparably oblique objects. Here fantasies of growth or purpose conceal the impossibility, the unexorcizable lack, at the heart ofbeing. Relationships, in this view, are neces sarily ironized, because although they are essential to survival, the persistence of desire prefigures defeat. Desire implies a lack that no object can appease. Worrying, in this kind of arena, looks silly. It seems to lack metaphysical ambition. But from an object-relations point of view we could say that worrying prepares the self, at best in collaboration with responsive others. And we could also say that potentially, through refusing the benefit of others, worrying impoverishes the self by attacking the possibility ofits imaginative modification. As a medium of exchange, then, worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying as a reflex response to demand-never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.
If we adapt Wittgenstein's famous question "Is belief an experience?" to the matter in hand and ask "Is worrying an experience?" we are left more empty-handed than we may want to be. If we were anthropologists who had discovered a tribe that engaged in a pervasive activity they called worrying, how would we go about getting a sense of what they meant? I seem to know when I'm worried-I recognize the signs-but this in itself can preclude my finding out what I'm doing when I worry. The tendentious comparison with dreaming reveals, I think, how worrying sets limits to the kind of curiosity we can have about it. We can think about thinking, but perhaps we don't worry enough about worrying. If worrying is, say, a defense against dreaming, if the worry is the contrived, con scious alternative to the dream, at the opposite end of some imaginary spectrum, then there may also be something, paradoxically, that they have in common. They both incorporate reality to defeat interpretation, and they do not always succeed." [On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life]
