Taming the Wild Hunt

Seeing Ghosts as Christian Messengers

Kirjoittajat

• Christopher White The University of Queensland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.57124/thanatos.163696

Avainsanat:

Wild Hunt, Ghosts, Medieval Culture, Medieval Religion, Death

Abstrakti

The “Wild Hunt” as a categorisation of a type of folk belief has been in use since it was proposed by Jacob Grimm in the nineteenth century, but there are a number of issues with its use when applied to medieval narratives. Instead, in this article I aim to tame the Wild Hunt, and untangle the three distinct types of narrative that Grimm combined into one. This article argues that one of these narrative types, where groups of ghosts suffer post-death purgation, is an intensely Christian type of story reflecting medieval beliefs about sin and penance. I also propose a new route of transmission for these stories, through Continental Europe and into Insular Britain, and how medieval “reformist” beliefs and networks shaped these ghost stories in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. I do so by analysing some of the best-known and most widely-studied Wild Hunts, such as Orderic Vitalis’s mesne Herlechini and Walter Map’s “King Herla” story, alongside others that are less well-known, arguing that the Wild Hunt emerged from Christian stories of the returning dead and Revenant Congregations, rather than from pre-Christian, Norse-Germanic beliefs.