Oskorei

Oskorei is the Norwegian Wild Hunt, a winter host imagined as dead souls riding through the night and also remembered through customs performed by groups of young men. Its folklore brings together supernatural danger, masked disguise, noise, transgression, and rites tied to the dead and the fertility of the land. The book treats Oskorei both as a subject of Nordic folklore and as a powerful parallel for Norwegian Black Metal, while distinguishing resemblance from proof of direct continuity.

Names, Riders, and the Winter Host

The Norwegian tradition appears under several names: Oskorei, Oskoreien, and Oskoreidi. The term was variously interpreted as a horrific or thunderous ride, or as a ride from Asgard. Across Scandinavian traditions, the host could be understood as a procession of dead souls crossing the night sky at particular times, especially around the winter solstice and the twelve nights when spirits were believed to walk. Some accounts make the riders dead warriors returning to their homeland; others place Odin or another heathen deity at their head. German versions connect the same complex of legends with the Wild Hunt and Wotan’s Host.

The riders occupy a boundary between the living and the dead rather than belonging securely to either world. In one account collected in a Norwegian encyclopedia, the host could arrive at a place, consume its food and drink, and sometimes carry people away if they were caught outdoors after dark. Cross-shaped gestures, lying with the arms spread in a cross, or placing crosses over doors were described as protections; steel placed above animal stalls could also serve as a defense. The host was sometimes regarded as a company of dead people who had earned neither Heaven nor Hell. Midwinter darkness and the belief that the dead returned at Yule helped give the legend its seasonal force.

From Legend to Rural Custom

Folklore about Oskorei did not consist only of reports of a spectral army. The book describes historical customs in which groups of young men, often masked or wearing furs, appeared in rural communities around the winter solstice. Such circles persisted in Norway until the beginning of the twentieth century. Participants assumed false names and travelled on foot or horseback, obscuring their ordinary identities as they enacted a force beyond everyday social order.

Their customary role could include punishing people said to have violated rural traditions, but the acts attributed to them were not limited to a clear or proportionate enforcement of rules. They might hide or damage tools, obstruct chimneys, fasten doors shut, or take livestock. Horses could be ridden until exhausted or released so that their owners had to search for them. Beer was a particular object of attention: it could be taken, secretly emptied, or replaced with water or horse urine. These acts made the host at once a threat to household order and a recognized part of the seasonal ritual landscape.

Christine Johannessen’s account emphasizes how forceful the tradition could become: Oskorei might break into cellars, take beer and horses, carry people far from where they were found, or return them in a severely weakened state. The imagery is not of a polite visitation but of a raid. Yet the customs could also have a reciprocal meaning. Some farmers supplied food or drink, or left horses available to the riders, because the offerings and the apparent thefts were associated with prosperity and fertile fields. In this understanding, accepting the host’s demands could be part of securing a good harvest. Related Alpine traditions allowed the Perchten to receive food or plunder a pantry; the book also describes the Latvian werewolf Thies as interpreting stolen food, drink, and animals as a sacrifice connected with fertility.

That understanding did not remain stable. As farmers became less willing to tolerate theft and disruption, the older ritual explanations faded. The masked young men came to be viewed less as embodiments of the dead or agents of fertility than as troublemakers and wrongdoers. Oskorei therefore signifies not one settled belief but a contested custom whose meaning could shift between sacred exchange, seasonal license, and criminal nuisance.

Initiation, Disguise, and Destruction

The book connects Oskorei customs with a broader interpretation of Germanic mystery societies. The folklorist Otto Höfler argued that the Wild Hunt could not be reduced to a mythological explanation of storms, thunder, or flocks of birds. In his account, the legends preserve a union of mythology and lived custom, including associations with initiated groups of young, usually unmarried men. Their knowledge was secret, and their disguises and animal or demonic appearances represented more than decorative costume: the masked participants were understood as taking on a supernatural identity and joining the dead.

The rites could be harsh. One account describes the young men’s destructive conduct as governed by inherited rules and tradition, but not necessarily requiring a specific offense as justification. The book also records examples in which arson belonged to this sphere of ritualized terror. Höfler discusses the Öja-bursar, a Swedish secret community whose members were bound to secrecy, and describes fires set during its masked processions as having a sacred origin. Johannessen found Norwegian accounts in which disorder, custom, and drunkenness could culminate in damage by fire, including harm to animals or the burning of a farm. These reports place fire within the wider pattern of seasonal transgression; they do not establish a direct historical line from those customs to later acts of arson.

Sound was another means of transformation. Höfler’s research describes bells, drums, cymbals, cries, rattles, and other loud instruments as tools for intensifying ecstasy. Legends might announce the approaching host through extraordinary music that grew into a tumultuous din. In this folkloric framework, noise was not incidental accompaniment but part of a ritual approach to the other world. Disguise, masks, intoxicating drink, movement, singing, and falsetto speech likewise helped participants present themselves as supernatural beings rather than ordinary people. Nightmarish clothing and coal-darkened features completed the transformation.

Oskorei and Norwegian Black Metal

The book’s comparison with Norwegian Black Metal is built from these linked practices and images. Black-and-white corpse paint, macabre dress, pseudonyms, ghostly or hoarse singing, and loud, forceful music recall elements of the masked host: altered appearance, concealed identity, falsetto voice, and ritual noise. The comparison also extends to the use of Nordic names and symbols. As Oskorei participants assumed identities other than their everyday selves, many musicians took names drawn from Nordic history and mythology. The book notes that some members of the scene adopted ancient Nordic clothing or emblems of death, while their sound could be dark, violent, and extended in form.

The analogy is deliberately qualified. Oskorei customs belonged to rural communities and a seasonal culture in which relations between the living, the dead, and the fertility of the land were interwoven. Black Metal, by contrast, developed primarily as an underground culture in Scandinavian cities. The musicians were not members of the village communities described in the folklore, and similarities of appearance, sound, or conduct do not by themselves prove an unbroken tradition. The book presents the correspondences as significant and potentially conscious or unconscious, while acknowledging that folklorists may reject the idea of continuity.

Varg Vikernes gave the comparison an especially explicit ideological form. Writing from prison about Nordic heathen cosmology, he described Oskorei as a demonic, Odin-associated death cult linking the living with the dead, and presented its masked warriors as undergoing a transformation through initiation. His account connected the folklore to a spiritual ascent with ancestral spirits. The book notes that Vikernes was not the only Black Metal musician interested in native folklore, but portrays him as its most overt heathen advocate. It also stresses a historical reversal: the scene’s early public image was often framed as Satanic, while later musicians increasingly turned from explicit references to the Devil toward less specific invocations of old gods and Nordic religious themes.

Memory, Arson, and the Limits of the Parallel

The book gives the Oskorei comparison an ominous literary charge through a tale collected by Kjetil A. Flatin. At a Christmas gathering in Aase, two men fought with knives; after one was left dead, the Oskorei arrived, carried the body away, and left a burning torch on the floor. The account differs from the more usual legend in which the host carries off someone living. The author reads its conjunction of a dead man, the winter riders, and fire as an uncanny parallel to later events involving Vikernes, Euronymous, and church arsons. It is offered as an allegorical resemblance, not evidence that the tale predicted those events.

That distinction matters to the book’s broader account of Oskorei. Its importance lies not in a demonstrated historical identity between an old custom and a modern music scene, but in the way a flexible body of folklore can make later styles and actions newly legible. The masked rider gathers together anonymity, youth, violence, noise, the dead, and winter fire; Black Metal could echo those features without belonging to the same rural ritual order. Oskorei thus functions as both a folklore tradition with changing local meanings and an interpretive lens through which the book considers how older images of transgression can reappear in modern subcultures.