lorian gray

Art by Ujjal Santra on Artstation.

you’re in luck–i actually spend a solid chunk of time earlier today explaining the wild hunt in my group chat. i’m going to paste that explanation here for you!

the wild hunt is a common folkloric archetype across most of europe which has also been brought over to the americas (mainly the united states). various different hunts have presence all across the celtic world, in germanic folklore, northern european folklore, spain, france, and many other places. the key feature of what makes a wild hunt a wild hunt is that they ride through the skies and on the wind and are usually in or accompanied by a storm. generally i have found that there are three main traits that characterize individual hunts: who the leader is, who the members are, and what its purpose is.

some classifications I’ve identified, with some examples–not every possible one, just something to give you an idea of what the descriptors mean:

the leader might be:

a deity (manannán mac lir, woden, gwyn ap nudd)

a folkloric hero (fionn mac cumhaill, king arthur, herne the hunter)

a legendary ruler or a real ruler who was mythologized (herla, theoderic the great)

the devil

a saint

or there may be no leader, and the hunt be composed of a mob. if there is a leader, they are nearly always male, but not entirely always.

the members of the hunt might be:

faeries

the restless dead

sinners specifically

demons and/or devils

the company of its leader (fionn’s fianna, king arthur’s knights)

a company of legendary heroes, saints, or folkloric figures

the purpose of the hunt might be:

rounding up the souls of the past year’s dead

warning of the dead to come in the next year

actually just hunting otherworldly game

hunting humans to steal away to the otherworld

collecting the souls of sinners and the damned

punishing its members by forcing them to ride eternally with no rest

literally just roaming around killing people

for the most part the wild hunt isn’t a mythological group, it’s folkloric–that is, not legends or myths or written literature, but the oral folk traditions and tales of the common people. this is what the american version of the wild hunt is–if you’ve ever heard the song ghost riders in the sky, it’s a piece of cowboy folklore that is fairly obviously derived from the wild hunt.

that’s the historical and folkloric information; the rest of this post is heavily upg-based, and entirely about my own experiences.

i deal with the irish hunts, which are largely faeries and/or the restless dead, and led by deities or mythological/otherworldly heroes. my personal perspective of the way the hunt works is that there are “local chapters” all around the world wherever faeries are found, and that the leader of each different hunt is a sort of “ultimate authority” over all hunts of that variety, and he chooses a new one to ride with each year.

i see most of the hunts as being a sort of unit of each local court–there are some fey who belong to the hunt and form the core of it, and then there are others who ride with it for a shorter period of time (a year, or seven years, or the like) who get the chance to join the hunt in recognition of some service or great deed.

my hunts are manannán’s, which is faeries and/or the restless dead collecting up the souls of the past year’s dead and warning of death to come, and sometimes taking people to the otherworld; nuada airgetlám’s, which is the tuatha dé danann and the aos sí hunting otherworldly game, and sometimes taking people to the otherworld; and the sluagh, a leaderless mob of faeries and/or the restless dead who just roam around the skies indiscriminately killing, maiming, and generally causing mayhem. manannán’s and nuada’s hunts are connected with the courts, while the sluagh I’ve always sort of thought of as being outside the courts–they’re exiles and solitaries and otherwise too antisocial to belong to a troop.