the wild hunt is a story told across europe in many forms and versions and it was jacob grimm a folklorist and whose fairy tales you may have heard of who originally grouped these types of stories into the phenomenon we call today the wild hunt and it was he who thought that odin the old norse god was its leader and that odin was reduced to but a ghosty figure by christianity who influenced these stories however in modern times some scholars have become critical with grimm's analysis and perhaps
one of the better known of these scholars is look at who infers that the stories didn't evolve as grimm suggests and that for example uh the oathing figure of this leader is a post-christian conversion evolution of the story and odin was not his original leader and so who is right where did the world hunt come from what did it mean and who was its leader so welcome to the story of the wild hunt and welcome to krakenford imagine being in a forest at nighttime at midwinter it's so very dark very
cold and the wind is gusting past your face there's a rumble of thunder and you think you hear the sounds of what could be screaming or animals running and squealing naying and screeching branches crack and creak and break the noise and the wind surrounding you but you can't tell where it's coming from it seems to be above you but passes as quickly as it came and if you're unlucky in the wrong place at the wrong time perhaps you are standing in their way in the middle of a path or open field the
n then you may see a dark figure come towards you and the outcome of such meetings are really comforting so due to a number of questions i always get before i start properly i want to say that there was a lot of research carried out to make this video and i've referenced all the books and papers i've cited in the making of this in the description below i've also added chapters to this video if you want to skip to certain parts such as the storytelling sections although i do know some of you like
them and there are also english subtitles so to help you follow along if you need help with my accent pronunciations or spellings and there is of course a like button down below if you want to press that to help others see the video and help promote this and i would really appreciate it if you did that so thank you and let's begin and it's probably best to say at the start that there is no definite answers here we will look at evidence and make educated inferences and i'll give my own view base
d on these but there is no definite proof we can say about the wild hunt source but the first piece of evidence we should look at is the literary sources and the eldest written version of a wild hunt story we know and can date with accuracy here's alderich's futilities written in 1092 and he recorded a story which he called the infernal hunt after talking to a priest who said he encountered the hunt one night and that priest story goes like this that whilst he was walking home after visiting a s
ick man he heard a frightening noise around him and so he went to hide by the side of the road behind some medler trees but he found his way was blocked by a giant warrior waving a club he looked around for a way to go and as he turned he saw in the sky a swarm of shapes flying by weeping and moaning over their sins they were corpse bearers with coffins over their shoulders and he counted over 50 bodies in all and these were followed by women on horseback and they had golden nails in them and th
ey were then followed by many powerful figures from the church on horseback and the priests recognized many of these people as their door died recently and when he turned to look back for the giant warrior he too was now flying through the air joining the procession this version of a hunt is one that is obviously influenced by the christian writer with the talk of sinners and women atoning for their sins which is the reason why they have nails in them and we are aware of other stories where peop
le were said to have had to lie on the ground and make a christian symbology often with their bodies such as the sign of a cross to protect themselves but also within this we see different types of dead being mixed together giants and coffin bearers and this too is reflective of the story evolving from a heathen to a christian themed story and perhaps most interesting of all is this supernatural being who leads the hunt a giant warrior and although a lack of detailed description would normally m
ean we can identify that the leader had a warrior so we don't know whether he was a king or god there are some who would argue that in many stories the descriptions of the old norse god odin make him consciously unidentifiable and it is that inability to identify him via the story that could paradoxically then identify him as a loathing figure but there is no way to be sure but it may be the reason or the reasoning behind making some people believe oathing was the leader of the hunt alongside hi
s role which is associated with the dead but things just aren't that simple to work out and the wild hunt is incredibly complex you see within this single version of the story we see the dilemma facing us and other academics and anyone wishing to understand what the world hunt means in its origins even jacob grimm accepted this he has to many scholars and that is that the world hunt stories have evolved over time over hundreds if not thousands of years creating many variant forms leaving us with
a problem of how to understand its original form of meaning and with so much to consider a scholars are often in disagreement with each other over these origins and where there are hypotheses of the wild hunt's origins a number of the modern day ones include critical assessments of jacob grimm's work now grimm's view of the wild hunt was that it was a nocturnal ride of dead heroes led by a pagan god and his female consult whilst it's accepted that grimm had a time of writing about the wild hunt
was probably the most knowledgeable source on the hunt we should also consider that grimm's books on teutonic mythology or what the layman would understand today as germanic mythology were published well over 150 years ago and whilst at the time they were considered pioneering and influenced many scholars certainly over the next hundred years modern research and findings have provided significant challenges to his findings but these two aren't without critical analysis three noted modern schola
rs have had the following to say about the hunt first as eva pox who said that by looking at the wild hunt it shows that outlines of a common indo-european inheritance seem to emerge this is connected to the cult of the dead the dead bringing fertility to sorcery and shamanism in relation to different gods of the dead who are linked to shamanism that are ensured fertility by way of the dead and carlo ginsberg called it a night ride of prematurely dead humans led by a fertility goddess and little
two whose recent books are well-read and often quoted on the subject and whose work is considered a viable working hypothesis of explanation by hatton he said the wild hunt is a band of the dead and that it fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship the cult of the dead who are the go-betweens between men and things local toe also called the huntsman the avatar of the ancient tour the avatar of an ancient amblyant deity who decided over death and resurrection a psychopomp you know a guider
of souls and so the only thing that becomes clear if you put all this on a page is that there isn't a clear answer in fact i'd argue that there are some things you just wouldn't normally see even on the same page and so we have a number of different scholarly views on the hunt the origins of the hunt its purpose its leaders so who could be right or could they all be right or wrong so let's start considering what made up the possession of the hunt you know what beans it contained so here the wild
hunt stories are reasonably consistent at a high level in that they show a collection of beings either the dead or their spirits or supernatural beings and occasionally animals often accompanied by furious wind and in a nocturnal possession and led by a huntsman at the front of the hunt although not always and it is the leader is sometimes an animal and sometimes they are mutilated and it is often only the leader that people who encounter the hunt can interact with now from this chart of how a
hunt could be made up then we can say that almost all descriptions of the wild hunt can be separated into its two parts to hunt with its processional collection of beings and the leader the huntsman or another key figure so we've at least disagreed this division how can we start to understand these stories like most stories that were being told during the christian conversion of much of europe we have to thank the christian scholars for writing them down however as they were even elements to the
se stories as they were pre-christian by this definition of when this was happening then there was often an element of christian bars written into these stories to suppress anything that wasn't considered appropriate and it was then these versions when written down became more widely told versions of the wild hunt as they could more easily be retold at gatherings like church sermons or feast soil festivals and so to add to all the disagreement and complexity of the world hunt stories we now can
add this as to why stories have changed and this is how heathen history has been changed by being written in a christian europe but we do have some luck and that is that the non-christian elements of the stories were not written out completely there are characters of the supernatural and pre-christian mythology that were kept in and it's these remnants of the older myths that allow us to have a belief that these stories were being told long before christianity came to northern europe and so befo
re 500 ce but this helps little in finding out the origin of the hunt and so let's look at different leaders of the wild hunt and see if there are any obvious patterns there and we can do this by looking at a map of europe showing where the stories of the wild hunts were told and who led the hunt in those stories in britain we have hectatin hurlithing or king hurler's hunt king arthur hearn the hunter old nick and woden and their original variations we have cain's hunt and the devil's dandy dogs
and gabriel's hounds in scandinavia there are stories of oscar here asgarthia lucy king vold siegert servin and down in front you have artists and harley quinn or hell queen and next to in switzerland you have thurston further south in spain we have count anu and in germany where it seems that most versions of the hunt can be found there is the wild yagud wildes yet watan's army naksha totenslag the tottens session wodan all the many others and even in america the story of the ghost riders is c
onsidered a derivative of this story but looking at this map there's no obvious patterns in the names but there is one link one connection you could infer albeit unconvincing at this point and that is that these stories could be associated with the first proto-indo-europeans that migrated into central and western europe from the russian steps and this is because of the locales of the stories told here within europe and how you can associate them with the language split of the proto-indo-european
s in effect the first wave of the proto-indo-european ancestors spoken language derivative of protein european called centum division and we talked about that split a little more when we looked at the stories of the families of the dead in this video and from this we know that they had a different cosmic belief than later proto-indo-european migrations especially around death and to show what i mean i'll enhance the map with an orange highlight where the centum division settled in europe for tho
se who were wondering the protein europeans who remained around the steps spoke what became part of the satan division and i'll do a video specifically on this split at some point in the future as i believe it to be an incredibly important moment in cultural religious evolution especially for european religious belief and seeing that this lit overlaps with this isn't necessarily strong enough evidence in itself and it doesn't prove anything beyond doubt but we shouldn't forget the possibility fo
r now and so from this we have some data that may be useful and may help us understand why stories specifically changed therefore perhaps to look at another wild hunt story may help us and the one i'll look at next is probably one of the most famous toys and this is the story of king hurley's hunt sometimes called hurlithing and this is was written at the end of the 12th century by walter map and it goes like this one day a dwarven king visited the court of king hurler requesting an audience the
dwarf was gailia tired in spotted foreign skin and he had a long red beard reach into his chest his belly was hairy and his legs ended in goat's hooves the strange king rode up to hurler mounted on a large goat and happily announced that hurler's forthcoming wedding to a frankish princess should be brutally adorned by my presence as a guest he then decreed that i shall first attend your wedding and do mine on the same day a year hence without waiting for a response he turned swifter than a tige
r and vanished from view this was a surprise to her especially given that he was not currently engaged to be married to anyone yet soon after dwarf had departed frankish ambassadors arrived to propose such a marriage and hurler quickly accepted during the following wedding feast the dwarf and court provided a vast array of food and served all the guests with such efficiency that hurler's own servants were left sat with their hands before them neither called for nor offering aid the dwarves splen
did clothing and jewels made them shine like burning lights among the company never important never out the way they fixed no one by act or word now one year later the dwarven king suddenly appeared before hurler and called on him to fulfill his agreement by attending the dwarf's own wedding hurler quickly gathered the provisions for a feast with several followers was led by the dwarf into a vast deep cave in a high cliff after an interval of darkness they pass into a light which seemed to proce
ed not from the sun or moon but from a multitude of lamps as i entered the mansion of the dwarves and after the wedding the dwarven king bestowed on her a vast array of gifts but especially numerous were those of horses dogs hawks and every appliance of the best for hunting or found him one of these gifts was a bloodhound and a door formed hurler that none of his companies should dismount from their horses until that dog leapt from the arms of its bearer thanking him hurler's courts began their
ride home on exiting the dwarf's cave in the bright sun hurler spired an old shepherd tending his flock and he rode up to him hurler asked if the old man had heard any news of the queen the shepherd gazed at him with astonishment and said sir i can hardly understand your speech for you are a briton and i as saxon but the name of that queen i've never heard saved that say a long time ago there was a queen of that name over the very ancient britons who was the wife of king hurler and he the old st
ory says disappeared in a company with a pygmy at this very cliff and was never seen on earth again and is now 200 years as the saxons took possession of this kingdom hurler sat stunned by this news a few of his men began to dismount in shock forgetting the dwarfs warning concerning the blood towns and as soon as their feet touched the ground the men instantly turned to dust harlow quickly ordered the rest of his men to stay mounted until the dog obliged them by leaping down but the dog never di
d leap down the ages passed and hurled his company were condemned to a long lonely march through time walter map claims that they were last seen in the marches of wales and hereford in the first year of the reign of king henry the second where matt was a boy of fifteen at that time hurler's company was said to have been accosted by a large group of armed welshman forcing the company to plunge into the river white turn into the air and vanish forever here we have a very magical story you know fan
tasy laden version with themes that are a combination of eternal punishment and perpetual wandering themes that are common in some of the other versions of the wild hunt and the other interesting fact about this ted is what some scholars believe to have happened to king hurla's name and that is that they believe it may have well evolved into the harley quinn name in the french versions of the wild hunt but before we dig deeper there's one more version of the wildhand story i want to tell taken f
or the anglo-saxon chronicles which is a book noted in the history of the anglo-saxons in england and on the entry dated 1127 it states for it was common gossip up and down the countryside that after february 6 many people both saw and heard a whole pack of huntsman in full cry they straddled black horses and black bucks whilst their hounds were pitch black with staring hideous eyes this was seen in their park of peterborough town and in all the wood stretch from there to as far as stamford all
through the night monks heard them sounding and winding their horns reliable witnesses who kept watching the night declared that there might well have been 20 or even 30 of them riding and galloping wildly these three stories i've told so far in themselves only help us so fast to show that there is no obvious common source other than to say stories being told a thousand years ago were already quite different whether with or without christian influence is these that allow us to feel that the wild
hunts toy is older than christianity police was around much of europe before christianity and i'm not sure any reasonable scholar would ever doubt that now with this mix of stories and combinations of beings and the animals that make up the procession within the hunt can we look at these and ask ourselves are there any clues we can see about the beings that made up the hunt's position and we can have two views on this and the first few is from those that support grimm's work these hunt types we
re as follows they were humans sometimes recently deceased and often the damned or sinners or those who left in purgatory uh they were often seen wearing the clothes they died in or holding sessions they were close to them there are sometimes armies phantom armies furious armies they had fought and died in battles and if you take schmidt's opinion of the white hunt where there are armies led by a king such as king arthur's wild hunt these armies actually aren't possessions of the dead all chaoti
c and rampant but an army in the aristocratic point of view with no cosmic significance and sometimes the procession represented the dead who had escaped purgatory to come to warn the living also within the possession there were often mythical beings such as elves and wolves but also fairies or pixies witches giants ogres and demons and finally there were animals with horses and dogs often being the most common types but we also have stories of birds cattle pigs and snakes and the participants o
f the procession whether human or animal or otherwise may have sometimes been mutilated or have had extra body parts such as additional arms or legs or even heads and so looking at these participants there is such a variation such different themes that to find a hint of an original all encompassing element is just difficult to pin down but the difference between humans and animals in the hunt is that animals are generally ageless i mean their appearance doesn't require humans knowledge of a rece
nt war or death meaning that animals may be a more consistent theme than looking for individuals and so therefore could allow a belief that an animal may be the oldest leader of a hunt or at least a being or beings that did not require personification to understand who they were but then there is the other view of hunt types a more modern view pushing against grimm's thoughts and that is that the huntys split in two types of possession first being one of female spirits that visited humans and th
eir homes to bless them to feast and living people could join the hunt and these hunts tended to be led by a supernatural female a diana or herodias and it is this type that pushes against the odin figure as his leader as you can't really say this plot is a line to hoving's mission of miranda you know his purpose and then the other type of hunt was predominantly made up of dead human beings and was really regarded as been a sign of bringing good to the world and whilst some scholars have tried t
o link these two types together when investigating the wild hunt they really should be treated as two separate types in analysis and even though we can't rule out for sure that they're not both reflexes from the same myth you know long long before any of the myths that survives up until today so as i say we can't link these two types of possessions of fertility one and the army of the dead as they seem quite different and one can argue that both have strong prehistoric motifs you know death and
fertility these are the drivers for life we cannot save sure what would come first but we can certainly have the evidence that for at least one of these being very old indeed and to me the wild hunt is about the possession of the dead with a supernatural or righteous leader now this is the wild hump proper and i come to this conclusion because of its age and i'll show you how we can understand that in a minute or two and so with this version of the world hunter one with uh king's leading hunt fa
ntastical beings such as giants or the devil or more common leaders like hearn or harley quinn and king arthur and those in this version which had had variations written down over the last thousand years at least you know this version of the hunt tended to take a shape of having a ghostly leader and howling black hounds and flew through the sky at night often as a warning of an oncoming event or tragedy such as war or death and with these hunts the leader of the hunt was placed in one of three c
ategories as defined by medieval and early modern scholars they're either a demon who chases sinners a sinful man who has been condemned to rome without rest and the wild man chases other worldly prey now the demon and sinner huntsman both seem to leverage christian values within their stories suggesting on the surface at least that the wild huntsman is the earlier form of leader who evolved and this leader was initially probably without any personification and possibly an animal or being but wh
ere are these pre-christian versions of the story well here we have to look at leaders of the hunt who were supernatural to see if there are any commonalities to give us hints on this two good examples we have are infested the giant who has myths about him building valhalla for odin or valhalla for odin how we prefer to have your pronunciations and auxy the ogre who would hunt down a sacrificial virgin in a forest and what is curious about these stories with supernatural leaders is that it isn't
uncommon for these leaders of the hunt to not be riding a horse a motif that is seen as common in ham myths today and so it could be inferred that this is a more modern feature that evolved with time these supernatural versions of the wild hunters are more unique and more infused with folk myth and the first story i read with the jar to elder club who stopped the priest from hiding in the woods could well be considered a reflex of this story type especially because there's no sin that's taking
place so there is no christian morality being applied to the leader to the plot in fact if you consider this and consider how widespread and varied the myth is it would be reasonable to assume that with these supernatural and mythological elements that it was being told long before christianity came to europe and therefore this may have implications on who or what could have been the original leader of the hunt and i think we're now in a position to know who this original person leader being or
animal was you know being is a a psychopomp someone who must travel someone who has a personality that matches a man who is mad in both ways as in angry and crazy and we do know this person this is someone who is often perceived today as being the leader of the hunt and that is odin the same other thing that modern scholars say wasn't deleted hunt by trying to link his name to the written stories of the hunt and this is one of the arguments against grimm's views as whilst ozin fits this figure h
e isn't attested to in any of the early versions of the story now for those who think odin was the leader of the wild hunt this problem yeah has manifested itself the first known citation voting as a leader of the hunt was printed towards the end of the 16th century i believe over 500 years after christian conversion has formerly happened in scandinavia and so for this point of in time the stories of the wild hunt are often being told has also been led by a devil figure and this figure is one wh
ich some christian scholars noted as odin in effect as time has passed odin has seemed to become an epithet for the devil as more people became christian or as grim said one which christianity has turned into a ghostly figure and this is why he adds reasoning behind many modern scholars saying that there is no proof in his original leader of the hunt here's a later addition to the stories even though the attributes of his character seems to be a good match and that many of these stories come fro
m the germanic region of europe is just that these german stories have no older currencies of this god and so we could easily give up at this point and say we really are no closer to finding out about the source of the hunt above i'm saying is a position of the dead so perhaps to find the leader we should change tact and not consider post-christian conversion texts as being the best source for understanding the wild hunt and this means we should look at other historical texts that may help us an
d this takes us to tactus in his book germania written towards the end of the first century in this book tacitus describes the warriors of a german tribe as painting themselves black in the hope their enemy would mistake them for an army of the dead an unreferralist and it doesn't take much thought to understand how this could be interpreted as inferring that there was a belief of the germanic tribes that armies of the dead wandered the earth and so bringing that part of the wild hunt to life bu
t that influence isn't as short you know there is no birth of evidence to support this view we could infer that for this to be noted it must have had some cultural significance much like technicians notes about the earth goddess nurse and uh for those who are aware of that so i mean we can supplement this as well um from a report from the byzantine historian uh pro copious he wrote that he had heard of a myth uh when the peoples of northwest gall so france shipped invisible armies that are dead
across the seas towards britain on certain nights of the year and so we see hints of stories that could have evolved from or evolved into the wild hunt stories so why haven't some of the academics picked up on this to try and find out the source of the hunt to me it feels like lakota and schmidt and others were looking for wild hunts with figures that could be seen by people visualized or at least mythologized as being seen by people so there would be a tangible evidence for them and written sto
ries about them as their key source of evidence personifications and it is here i think that some scholars may show a lack of awareness for indo-european ancestors their language their culture and perhaps maybe a lack of appreciation in the strength of etymology as a tool but before i go into this let me mention one more version of the story an old norse version and for those who follow this channel we know that the old norse has stories that directly linked in those europeans and here we have o
ne version of their wild hunt story known as osgoria or asgarth syria which really means ride of the ascas in these versions of the story the hunt was led by gurudis or the troll gudrun horsetail hurricane first evolved from the better known gudrun gyakadotiya she was the wife of sigath the dragonslayer of old norse mythology who himself was a very popular character in old norse smith and within some versions of this story sigeth actually appears but as an old man however gudrun wasn't particula
rly nice to cigarette and so she has had a solid reputation to say the least and this would deliver people who deserve to be punished to be cursed to further ride through the night leading the wild hunt and with this story we can also infer that this is an older version of story almost certainly being first millennium in creation as it is have leaders and hunt taken from famous characters of old norse poems and then it would be sensible to infer that they were added because they were popular cha
racters in myth at the time and that would help this version of the story become more popular you know more people to listen to it so here we see pre-christian versions of the stories containing the evolution development that christian versions of the story eventually had it steps in further that there was an evolution and sometimes a significant evolution of stories that would have happened long before christianity started writing down and so we also can't say that sigirth and gudrun were more
popular than odin so why isn't he leading hunt i mean looking at this we have found some reasonable evidence at an early origin for the hunt one that would need a god-like leader but none of it can really stand up on its own or to say that other was the leader so now it's worth looking at what we know about the evolution of the germanic and old norse scots what we can tell from traces left in the language used in the hunt stories so let's go back in time back to our proto-indo-european ancestors
around 8 000 years ago around the time when the centrum division split happened from the russian steps and what we know of this is that the european people uh proto-indo-european speaking culture started to migrate from the steps eastwards and on their way across europe back then our ancestors primitive gods were anthropomorphic they lived as ideas in your head they weren't personified and you worship them out of fear you sacrificed to them out of fear as the gods brought bad weather failed cro
ps and they brought death and this understanding is well written by unworth and diverse and so what we're trying to say here is that there was no named god a name that could change over thousands of years in those stories and so what were these gods called do we know now before i answer that i'll put the question out there of can we say the oldest character we can apply as a leader of the world hunt as odin well even considering this revelation then we still have no proof that he was in fact the
actual personification of ozin with the wide-brimmed hat and cloak on one eye that version voting certainly hasn't been around for more than 2000 years and i'll talk about that in another video soon but i will touch on the subject now by saying that what is interesting to us is one of the origins of his name and i say one of the origins as it is believed he is the sum of multiple influences in the build-up to hit the personification we know the other thing we know today is in effect a complex c
ombination of myths including that of the world hunt and not to say i'll talk more in detail about that as this will complicate a very complex subject even further so i'll just mention this one origin and that is inferred by a god called author and other means mad as an angry wild and crazy and is often considered a title that arrived from being as a leader of the wild hunt and it is accepted by most old scholars to other then merged into oathing and it is more complicated now i know and we'll d
eal with that in another video i promise but what we see here is a name of a god cognate with odin whose name means mad and so it could be associated with the world hump based on the evidence we have now at the same time as out thought was being worshipped in scandinavia and this was long before there was any personification of oathing there was a god in germania who was considered the same as jose and that was waden or wodin and well on one of many other names you could have called him dependin
g on your dialect now her waden also influenced the creation of odin and this is by in part the dropping of the w at the start of words by scandinavia whether you see the veil so woden becomes odin and therefore turns into odin but why are we worried about that well this is where odin fits into the origin of this story you know the god rhoden was first attested to by takitus at the end of the first century and he was being compared to mercury the messenger or traveler he's a god who's also a psy
cho pump and again we could link this to the leader of the world hunt but just that on its own is again isn't strong enough evidence and so this doesn't mean that the world hunt was a story back in time of ticketus even if rodan was an existing figure and so for those who want literary references then we could should consider the work of axel olix odin the hunter or doddvalley's contributions to the study of odin especially in his relation to agriculture practices in modern popular law and altho
ugh anatoly lieberman says in his book prayer and laughter and even who's a scholar with a skill in languages and memory that makes his work truly inspiring he says perhaps the most important works in the understanding of odin and the wild hunt are those that are least quoted they are of enters the legend of the world hunt and game hunting and flash digs harley quinn about germanic myth during the time of the romans and so what do these scholars tell us that modern day scholars don't well what i
s reiterated is that the north gods were spirits non-personified and probably like this as late as when tacitus was writing woden was probably called wothanas in the first century ce his indo-european form of his name and this name is cognate with wad or woad and so cognate with woden and therefore etymologically linked to wothiness and so here there is evidence that the leader of the world hunt a woad which is a recognized name as a leader has been linked to woden but again that again is the st
rongest piece of evidence by far you know wothen as the indo-european form of boden is cognate to woethu and that is a protein in the european word and is the word reconstructed from that language that means a collection of spirits a collection of wild hunters not just human spirits but birds dogs horses and it would not be unreasonable then to believe that the hunt almost certainly had a horse as its leader at some point perhaps a man-eating horse which would eventually turn into a man half hor
se which would eventually turn into a man riding a horse before turning into just the man and these evolutions are written about and some say this gives a tantalizing glimpse perhaps into the possibility of the mythological birth of slept there housing's eight legged horse but again that's diverting a bit from where we're going here lieberman then goes on to show that the name of water existed long before the formation of indo-european pantheons and it wasn't suggestive of a human form the way t
here was no individual it was a group of spirits a host of world hunters fighting and friended and of different forms and it is from these that the personification of the first leader of the hunt would eventually come from woethu to wothenaz so to wode to waden as i mentioned earlier one must remember that odin is a magical sorcerer in the books of the edis this was not his original role and this may not have been considered by some of those arguing against grimm's position odin is a complex cha
racter evolving from several different causes but in his earliest form of oath or and that is his uh germanic equivalent of bothanas he was a deaf demon a psychopomp mad he moved with a frenzy similar to the roman gods mercury in some ways with his ravens a traveler with messages but was not necessarily personified here we can now connect the key attributes of the leader with good etymological evidence and if you want to understand this in more detail i'll talk about more about that in woden and
the wild hunt video but now i will also point out that i'm not going to use also the argument to link odin with storms and a storm god to align him to the wings in the wild hunt and in fact i show evidence in that odin in the wild hunter video that that is not his his purpose or why he was created he is a mad crazy friended person but is not associated with the wind or storms he just affects the atmosphere around you locally if he was leading the hunt but it's not responsible for the weather at
all and so by removing this remove one of the weaker arguments for odin leading the hunt but piecing all the evidence we do have together we show that we are still missing mythology or at least tangible traces of the evolution of the wild hunt from our proto-indo-european ancestors and we have these tales told today some of which uh wod woad wodan or ozin have as the lead but there are tales that are different involving over a thousand years of christian influence and the earlier tells are gone
only leaving the name of the leader of the hunt behind and named the influence to whoa dan and othering and possibly some connection to the animals they could have also led the hunt and also with this we lose the origin of the tale of fertility that is also linked with the wild hunt phenomenon and this is something we must also consider with the tales of the edits too for example so the poetic edda and the prose edda written after the belief of god's tried to be raised from the nordic peoples a
nd then written again and especially alongside snoy sterlison's prose edda that he hemorrhages oden and gives him that altogether more personified sorcerer character and therefore we must suffer caution when trying to understand these myths through the name of woethu along with its evolution we can see the world hunt was believed at the time of the proto in the europeans in fact the name and understanding of the religious belief suggests it was known before the proto in the european pantheon exi
sted and that helps explain its spread and explain the maybe not so coincidental overlapping with the protein the european centrum division language split and the migration into europe to align with the understanding of the original leader of the hunt that was not personified but a group of friends and spirits who probably weren't human but the original stories we now have to accept has been lost you know with what remains been no better than a collection of somewhat shuffled and scuffed myths a
nd motifs topped with a large helping of evolution christian influence and which evolved as the gods and kings came in the doubt of favor changing the leader and with so many variations a confident reconstruction of a soulsmith will be all but impossible and so of limited value but to me to suggest to saturn and look at odu that odin wasn't the original leader of the hunt is not to look at the whole picture holdings ancestors were leaders of the hunt they were psychopomps leading a possession of
the dead and this story shows hints of being built around the story of the dead traveling at night in winter and the winter solstice was almost certainly one of the most sacred nights of the year for our ancestors before burial mounds and kurgans and tombs and the like perhaps this was a way of acknowledging the dead what some have called a cult of the dead but we almost certainly never know for sure and so for now all we can feel reasonably assured of is that the only remains of the wild hunt
story from a time over several thousand years ago the story of a psychopomp leading the dead somewhere whether animal or human is the ancient name of its leaders the these were originally a group of supernatural spirits and which would eventually evolve into the god the germanic tribes would name as the derivatives of woven who become oath or a cognate of bothu and then the old norse god o thing but the story of the world hunt doesn't end there not quite as before the time of the proto-indo-euro
peans our ancestors were hunter-gatherers and hunting was an important and necessary part of life it was critical to our survival and this is why these stories survive and so stories of hunting would have been part of our ancestors culture these pre-proto-indo-european times were almost certainly when the story of the world hunt started but when exactly at the last ice age maybe earlier how could we ever find out well what if i told you that we do know of a story that was told back then all thos
e tens of thousands of years ago and that story we know today is the cosmic hunt and so i'll end now with the assessment of a hugely pulled and complex topic which i've really only just scratched the surface of and to me is a lack of understanding of all the evidence that is available in all its context and with specific notes to lieberman and his thoughts on the origin of odin which has led to certain conclusions to be made by other academics not in support of grim although also bear in mind i'
m not saying grimm was right for the right reasons either and with that i want to say i really hope you enjoy that journey through the wild hunt sergeant and its leader please like and share and comment about the video if you did let me know if any questions any challenges any stories you'd like to know more about and remember to subscribe to crickenford and hit the notification bell if you want to see more videos like this when they come out and so until the next video please stay safe and say
well and this was crack and ford [Music] [Music] you
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