The Wild Hunt

The Wild Hunt is a northern European tradition of the dead riding through the night, a legend linked to midwinter, fear of the returning dead, and customs in which costumed groups moved through villages. In its Norwegian forms, known as Oskorei or Oskoreia, it becomes a striking point of comparison for Norwegian Black Metal: the book traces parallels in appearance, sound, and destructive imagery, but presents them as correspondences rather than evidence that the old tradition directly caused the modern scene.

Folklore and Midwinter Customs

The Oskorei is described as a host of dead souls seen travelling together across the night sky. In some accounts, the riders descend and carry off a living person; Odin or another heathen deity may lead them. The stories also have a connection to human customs: a few hundred years ago, groups of young men in rural parts of Northern Europe would ride together at night around Yule, sometimes frightening villagers with their arrival. The legends thus bring supernatural danger and public winter performance into the same tradition, though the accounts do not reduce one to the other.

Related customs appear in the Austrian Perchten parades, which the book associates with older worship of Perchta, a Germanic winter and sky goddess. These processions include both benign or beautiful figures and the sinister, demonically masked Schiachperchten. Their persistence offers another example of winter folklore in which disguise and frightening spectacle have a communal setting. The book describes these traditions as possible inheritances from older religious practices, not as a demonstrated line of transmission into Black Metal.

The Wild Hunt also has counterparts in German folklore, where it is known as Wotan’s Host. Wotan, also spelled Wodan, is the continental German name for Odin. The book notes the particular resonance this connection might hold for Varg Vikernes, who regarded Odin as his patron deity and wrote of an Odinic death cult. Across the legends, however, the riders do not have a single, uniformly benevolent character: they may be treated as demonic, and people use crosses to ward them off.

An account from Aschehoug and Gyldendal’s Store Norske Leksikon describes places where the riders stop as sites of fighting and killing. They may drink the Yule ale and eat the food, and may carry away people caught outside after dark. Protection includes making the shape of a cross, lying with the arms outstretched in that shape, placing crosses above doors, or putting steel above stalls. The encyclopedia suggests that the riders were understood as dead people who belonged neither in Heaven nor in Hell, and places the belief in the context of midwinter darkness and the idea that the dead return at Yule. These details make the tradition at once a threat to the living and an account of the unsettled dead.

Vikernes and the Odinic Interpretation

Writing from prison, Vikernes gave the Oskorei an explicitly martial and initiatory meaning. In his account, the riders are connected to Germanic volk-culture and link the living with the dead. He describes an order of werewolf warriors chosen and initiated under strict rules, wearing black shields and war paint as signs of transformation. Their night ride becomes not merely a frightening legend but an image of disciplined group identity and spiritual passage.

Vikernes further describes initiation as leading toward a higher spiritual state and a joint ascent with ancestral spirits. He names this culmination the Transcendental Pillar of Singularity, a phrase also used as a Burzum song title. The book treats these writings as material worth examining rather than dismissing outright, while making clear that this is Vikernes’s interpretation of the folklore, not a neutral account of what all versions of the tradition mean.

The broader Black Metal scene’s turn toward heathen themes was not, the book argues, the starting point for every resemblance. Some details appeared before the scene’s later attraction to Nordic mythology and before Vikernes began publishing his interpretations. It therefore distinguishes his retrospective religious framework from the earlier traits that Kadmon would compare with the folklore.

Kadmon’s Comparison with Black Metal

After reading Vikernes’s writings, the Austrian artist and occult researcher Kadmon investigated possible connections between the Oskorei and modern Black Metal. His essay, reproduced as Appendix II, compares details in recorded folk tales with features of the musical scene: noise, corpsepaint, ghoulish appearances, pseudonyms, high-pitched singing, and arson. The book presents these as uncanny correspondences identified by Kadmon, not as proof that musicians consciously borrowed each feature from the legend.

The comparison draws force from the combination of details rather than from a single resemblance. A night-riding host, frightening appearance, collective performance, and association with death can be set beside a musical movement known for harsh sound, painted faces, adopted names, and destructive acts. Yet the book preserves an important chronological distinction: Black Metal had already developed many of these characteristics before Nordic mythological themes became a central focus for some bands. Similarity, in this account, does not settle the question of influence.

A visual link predates that later thematic turn. The cover of Bathory’s first Viking album, Blood Fire Death, depicts the Oskorei. The book treats it as an early image of the hunt within the music’s cultural field, while emphasizing that the more remarkable point is the recurrence of numerous folkloric details among Norwegian Black Metal adherents before the scene’s overt mythological orientation was established.

The Legend as Portent

The book also considers an old tale that Kadmon’s comparison makes newly suggestive. Collected by Kjetil A. Flatin in Tussar og trolldom in 1930, it is set at Christmas in Aase, Flatdal. Two men, fastened together by a belt, fight; one is killed. The Oskorei then ride in, take the dead man, and leave a burning torch behind. The episode differs from the usual stories in which the riders seize someone living: here their quarry is already dead, and the fire links their arrival with a destructive aftermath.

The author connects the tale’s details, cautiously and retrospectively, to events more than sixty years later involving Grishnackh, Euronymous, and the fires associated with them. The passage does not establish that the old story predicted those events. Instead, it asks whether the folklore and heathen impulses surrounding Norwegian Black Metal might represent a form of resurgent atavism, and allows the tale to function as an ominous allegory when read beside the later history.

That tension defines the Wild Hunt’s significance in the discussion. It is both a body of regional legends and a comparative framework through which the book examines Black Metal’s imagery and actions. The folklore supplies a vocabulary of night, masks, ancestral dead, collective violence, and fire; Vikernes gives it a programmatic religious interpretation, while Kadmon and the author trace parallels whose precise origins remain uncertain. The tradition’s importance lies not in proving a single cause, but in showing how older stories could acquire renewed force when read against a modern scene already marked by related motifs.