The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif occurring across various northern, western and eastern European cultures, appearing in the religions of the Germans, Celts, and Slavs. Wild Hunts typically involve a chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters engaged in pursuit. The leader of the hunt is often a named figure associated with Odin in Germanic legends, but may variously be a historical or legendary figure like Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the dragon slayer Sigurd, the Welsh psychopomp Gwyn ap Nudd, biblical figures such as Herod, Cain, Gabriel, or the Devil, or an unidentified lost soul either male or female. The hunters are generally the souls of the dead or ghostly dogs, sometimes fairies, valkyries, or elves.
Asgårdsreien [The Wild Hunt of Odin] (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo
"Wodan's Wild Hunt" (1882) by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine
Odin continued to hunt in Norse myths. Illustration by August Malmström.
Wistman's Wood in Devon, England.
Odin is a widely revered god in Germanic paganism. Norse mythology, the source of most surviving information about him, associates him with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, victory, sorcery, poetry, frenzy, and the runic alphabet, and depicts him as the husband of the goddess Frigg. In wider Germanic mythology and paganism, the god was also known in Old English as Wōden, in Old Saxon as Uuôden, in Old Dutch as Wuodan, in Old Frisian as Wêda, and in Old High German as Wuotan, all ultimately stemming from the Proto-Germanic theonym *Wōðanaz, meaning 'lord of frenzy', or 'leader of the possessed'.
Odin depicted on a monument from about the 9th century in Gotland
Odin, in his guise as a wanderer, as imagined by Georg von Rosen (1886)
Woðinz (read from right to left), a probably authentic attestation of a pre-Viking Age form of Odin, on the Strängnäs stone
One of the Torslunda plates. The figure to the left was cast with both eyes, but afterwards the right eye was removed.