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Wild Hunt & Wandering Jew

A

Anonymous

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Hello... I hope I'm not guilty of posting this in the wrong section, but I've got a question about these I hope someone can answer...

I hear people refering to these legends quite frequently on these message boards and in FT, but I don't actually know the stories behind the legends - would anyone like to tell me ??

Thanks in anticipation !

Haarp

:confused:
 
Both the Wild Hunt and the Wandering Jew are clusters of
related myths and legends of medieval origin which have their
most full-blown forms in the nineteenth century.

They are widespread geographically but the Black Forest has
a spectral hunter, Fontainebleu has Le Grand Veneur and Windsor
Forest has Herne the Hunter, as celebrated in The Merry Wives.

Some versions have an accursed hunter whose blasphemies have
condemned his spirit to an eternal fruitless hunt. This has its most
elaborate telling by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen around
1870. It is best known these days in the vast , lush musical setting by
Arnold Schoenberg, known as the Gurre-Lieder, 1900 - 11.

The Wandering Jew, accused of various insults to Christ, is in some
versions made identical with the accursed hunter. The theme is also
related to such familiar tales as The Ancient Marriner and The Flying
Dutchman. In his last opera, Parsifal, Wagner gives us a female
version of the Wandering Jew in the wild female form of Kundry.
 
The origins of both figures are probably well before the middle ages- I am not very up on the Wandering Jew, but in both name and description Herne the hunter is very close to Cerrunos the celtic forest god. The wild hunt seems to turn up in various myth groups in some form, possible as a result of humans being at least partly a hunting species by origin and so the image of an ultimate hunt would have a particularly deep resonance.
 
...or, to actually answer the question:

The story of the Wandering Jew has it that, as Jesus (Mr Christ to thee and me) was hanging on the cross, in quite unimaginable pain, he was being mocked by a large crowd of people.

Being rather miffed at the time, the chap nailed to the bits of wood cursed one of his mockers to wander the earth forecer until his (Christ's) return, at which point he could beg for forgiveness.

The mocker was thus cursed with semi-eternal life, and wanders the world awaiting the return of Christ, or, according to some legends, until he can find the Holy Grail, which might also cure his immortality.


The Wild Hunt, in the version which I am most familiar with, is Odin (or Wotan, or the Devil, or whatever) tearing across teh sky in his chariot with a pack of huge, ferocious, snarling hounds (or devils, or damned souls, depending), intent on tearing the life/soul/fashionable footwear from any man, woman etc unlucky enough to lay eyes on it.

It's traditional to cower indoors in terror when the Wild Hunt approaches. It's a myth most common to North Europe, and, it has been suggested, is possibly inspired by (believe it or not) the demonic honkings of migrating geese. Which could be quite terrifying if it was dark, I suppose.

Jon
:D
 
The story of the Wandering Jew dates from the time of Mathew Paris, chronicler of St Alban's Abbey in Hertfordshire,. Who on a visit to the continent, with his Abott, had a boozing session with a porter of a continental monastery, who spun him the story of the wandering jew.

I can't even belive it's an early UL, more the story you hear in a pub, the porter even claimed that the wandering jew would visit his abbott once in a while!!!
 
Breakfast

"When wakum damp in yard to find a court of snails in session around your head. They call you guilty, of no friends, no thoughts, no purpose, point or use and you, you dolt, concur with weeping penance. "Don't hurt me, Mr. Snail."

Is that Chris Morris by any chance?
 
The Wandering Jew has a big part in "The Saragossa Manuscript" - which rocks, by the way.:D
 
Slightly off thread, but in Gabriel Knight - Blood of the Sacred, Boold of the Damned there is an alternate Wandering Jew Legend, if you can find it...

Damn good Fortean game though

8¬)
 
James Whitehead said:
Assuaged? drat! The idea was to pique the curiosity. :p
Click to expand...

Well, actually James . . . you mentioned the spectral hunt of the Black Forest. Do you know of any links/books about that, as I'm interested in that part of the world. Ta!

Carole
 
Yes, Carole, the most easily available vesion of the Wilde
Jäger legend is Sir Walter Scott's ballad called The Wild
Huntsman of 1796. It is a loose translation of Bürger's
German ballad. There is a short preface as follows:

"This is a translation or rather an imitation of the Wilde Jäger
of the German poet Bürger. The tradition upon which it is
founded bears, that formerly a Wildgrave, or keeper of a royal
forest, named Faukenberg, was so much addicted to the pleasures
of the chase, and otherwise so extremely profligate and cruel,
that he not only followed theis unhallowed amusement on the
Sabbath, and other days consecrated to religious duty, but
accompanied it with the most unheard-of oppression upon the
poor peasants who were under his vassalage. When this second
Nimrod died, the people adopted a superstition, founded probably
on the many various uncouth sounds heard in the depth of a
German forest, during the silence of the night. They conceived they
still heard the cry of the Wildgrave's hounds and the well-known
cheer of the deceased hunter, the sounds of his horse's feet, and
the rustling of the branches before the game, the pack and the
sportsman, are also distinctly discriminated; but the phantoms
are rarely, if ever, visible. Once, as a benighted Chasseur heard
this infernal chase pass by him, at the sound of the halloo, with
which the Spectre Huntsman cheered his hounds, he could not refrain
from crying, "Gluck zu Falkenburgh!" [Good sport to ye, Falkenburgh!]
"Dost thou wish me good sport?" answered a hoarse voice; "thou
shalt share the game;" and there was thrown at him what seemed to be
a huge piece of foul carrion. The daring Chasseur lost two of his best
horses soon after, and never perfectly recovered the personal effects
of this ghostly greeting. this tale, though told with some variations, is
universally believed all over Germany.
The French had a similar tradition concerning an aërial hunter, who
infested the forest of Fontainbleau."

There is a very cheap complete paperback edition of Scott's poetry
in the Wordsworth Poetry Library - widely available for around £2!
Alternatively any old bookshop might yield a nice leather bound, gold
leaf edition for a fiver or so. Scott was steeped in weird lore and
he became something of a cult on the continent.
 
I

Thanks muchly James! I also found a v good webside from the University of Pittsburgh which covers all sorts of legends from all over the world, but the wild hunt wasn't covered in as much detail as you gave me! I can supply the website name if anyone's interested.

Carole
 
James Whitehead said:
Alternatively any old bookshop might yield a nice leather bound, gold
leaf edition for a fiver or so. Scott was steeped in weird lore and
he became something of a cult on the continent.
Click to expand...

As if I need an excuse to go poking around secondhand bookshops!!

Carole
 
I've always loved stories of the "Wild Hunt" and here's a good one (reported by two separate authors) dating all the way back to 1127:

There are literally scores of medieval and early modern references to the wild hunt from western Europe. What makes the events of 1127 unusual is the quality of the evidence and its early date. We have two separate sources recording the extraordinary events of that spring: one contemporary and one written by an author who, though writing as much as a generation later, had lived through the terror.

"The huntsmen were black and huge and loathsome, and their hounds all black and wide-eyed and loathsome, and they rode on black horses and on black billy-goats. This was seen in the very deer-park of the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods there were from that same town to Stamford; and the monks heard the horns blow that they blew in the night. Honest men who kept watch in the night said that it seemed to them there might well have been about twenty or thirty horn-blowers."

"wonderful portents were seen and heard at night during the whole of Lent, throughout the woodland and plains, from the monastery as far as Stamford; for their appeared, as it were, hunters with horns and hounds, all being jet black, their horses and their hounds as well, and some rode, as it were, on goats and had great eyes and there were twenty or thirty together. And this is no false tale, for many men of faithful report both saw them and heard the horns."
Click to expand...

http://www.strangehistory.net/2018/01/28/wild-hunt-1127/
 
Some more modern references....

The Witcher 3 - The Wild Hunt is a video game about...erm...The Wild Hunt.

The Wandering Jew is Tom Hardy's character in Peaky Blinders.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
Some more modern references....

The Witcher 3 - The Wild Hunt is a video game about...erm...The Wild Hunt.
Click to expand...


Aye. A damned fine game, too.

It's based of the series of novels and short stories by Andrzej Sapkowski. Polish writer. Polish dev team too.

There are multiple variations of The Wild Hunt myth across Europe. Some Nordic, some Germanic and clearly Polish too. Some version associate storms, and rolling thunder, as signs of the Wild Hunt in progress... ;)

I don't know that we've ever really had the legend here in the UK though. Did we have a regional variation with Herne?
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
The Wandering Jew is Tom Hardy's character in Peaky Blinders.
Click to expand...
I hadn't thought of Alfie Solomons that way. He was well-travelled and world-weary, agreed. What makes you connect him with the Wandering Jew, though?
 
stuneville said:
I hadn't thought of Alfie Solomons that way. He was well-travelled and world-weary, agreed. What makes you connect him with the Wandering Jew, though?
Click to expand...

I've never seen the programme! A couple of mates were discussing it the other day and they kept referring to Tom Hardy as 'the wandering jew'. I saw this thread literally seconds later.

Weirdly, if you Google 'Tom Hardy wand' or 'Peaky Blinders wand' it autocompletes to 'wandering jew', but he doesn't seem to be officially referred to in that way on the resulting hits.
 
stuneville said:
I hadn't thought of Alfie Solomons that way. He was well-travelled and world-weary, agreed. What makes you connect him with the Wandering Jew, though?
Click to expand...

We watched an episode of Peaky Blinders from series 3 the other night, and Alfie Solomons was definitely called “The Wandering Jew”. None of us here can recall if he said it, or if he was described in that way by one of the Shelbys.... I may have to rewatch the episode just to check (nothing to do with the amazing Tom Hardy/Paul Anderson/Cilian Murphy combo, you understand!)
 
Ah! Must have passed me by then. Looks like it's the Blinders' nickname for him. He is unusually durable.

..though not actually that durable, we discover at the very end. Don't blame me. I did spoilerise it.
 
Kingsize Wombat said:
I've always loved stories of the "Wild Hunt" and here's a good one (reported by two separate authors) dating all the way back to 1127:



http://www.strangehistory.net/2018/01/28/wild-hunt-1127/
Click to expand...

As have I.

I've been looking for a single work about the topic--particularly in Britain--does anybody have a suggestion?

Failing a full-length work, an essay would suffice?

Edit: covers all of Europe, but this (translated from the French) would seem to be the only full-length treatment:

https://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Armies-Night-Ghostly-Processions/dp/1594774366
 
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Kingsize Wombat said:
I never found a book on the subject. Here's a German web page with a bit of background to its origins and myth in various European cultures:
https://www.videospielgeschichten.de/the-witcher-monsterbuch-die-wilde-jagd/

The German Wiki page on the subject only lists general works on Germanic religion and folklore.
Click to expand...


That's in direct relation to the videogame The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Which is itself based upon the fantasy series by Polish writer of Andrzej Sapkowski.

It's very difficult to find definitive written texts on the Wild Hunt legend itself, rather than its inclusion in other mediums of fiction. It seems very much to be a folk tale told verbally for hundreds of years, but not really recorded in any definitive fashion.
 
Kingsize Wombat said:
I never found a book on the subject. Here's a German web page with a bit of background to its origins and myth in various European cultures:
https://www.videospielgeschichten.de/the-witcher-monsterbuch-die-wilde-jagd/

The German Wiki page on the subject only lists general works on Germanic religion and folklore.
Click to expand...

There's a little bit in Ronald Hutton's book, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy.

Screenshot 2019-06-01 at 02.18.23.png
Screenshot 2019-06-01 at 02.18.41.png


(The dreadful consequences he mentions at the start are witch-hunt manias)
 
You have first to leave modern rationalism behind: that was a simplification of the quadrivium, where music was the right-hemisphere expression of left-hemisphere arithmetic (putatively numerology), contrasting with astology-cosmology-astronomy as the right-hemisphere expression of geometry (putatively geomancy) as exegeses on the meme under examination.
 
Rahere said:
You have first to leave modern rationalism behind: that was a simplification of the quadrivium, where music was the right-hemisphere expression of left-hemisphere arithmetic (putatively numerology), contrasting with astology-cosmology-astronomy as the right-hemisphere expression of geometry (putatively geomancy) as exegeses on the meme under examination.
Click to expand...

You mean 'just play along and pretend'?

I'm all for attempting to think oneself into the mindset of those who thought up and experienced such phenomena (as far as that can be achieved), but what you disparagingly call 'modern rationalisation' mostly involves stripping away mumbo jumbo to see whether anything at all remains. But that's not necessarily to say the mumbo jumbo didn't serve a purpose (in the past tense).

I'm not foolish enough to think that we are wiser than our historical forbears, nor that we have nothing of worth to gain from examining the interpretative models they assembled to understand the world and their place within it, but I will confidently state that we have gained far more in the way of understanding than we have lost since, say, the early-Christian era; accordingly, it very often is helpful to see whether one can 'explain away' phenomena as properly belonging to a more ignorant (in a non-pejorative sense) age.

What survives such a process--the part that cannot be reduced or dismissed--is likely the valuable core.
 
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