Oskorei (Wild Hunt)

Oskorei (Wild Hunt) is presented as a Norwegian form of the Wild Hunt: a spectral procession whose riders embody dead warriors and whose earthly counterparts enact violent, masked customs. The book follows the tradition from wintertime folklore and village rites to its later appearance as an interpretive lens for Norwegian Black Metal. That comparison rests on specific resemblances—disguise, assumed identities, altered voices, and a taste for destructive transgression—but it does not claim that the modern urban music scene simply reproduces an ancient cult.

The riders and their seasonal world

The Wild Hunt appears in legends as a dark company moving through the night, often on horseback and led by Odin, ruler of the dead, or, in some accounts, by a female rider. The riders were understood as dead souls and dead warriors returning to their homeland at particular times, especially during the twelve nights around the winter solstice. The book also places the tradition in the season of Fasching. In Christian accounts, an older image of the procession could be recast as the Archangel Michael and his host: the underlying company remained, but its religious interpretation changed.

The Norwegian name Oskorei had several forms in earlier usage, though the book notes that it was no longer current in contemporary Norwegian. Its meanings were understood variously as a terrifying or thunderous ride, and as a ride associated with Asgard. The several associations make the name more than a label for a ghostly spectacle: it binds noise, supernatural movement, and the world of the gods to a tradition rooted in local folklore.

Drawing on Otto Höfler, the book rejects an explanation of the Wild Hunt as merely a mythological way of describing storms, thunder, or flocks of birds. Höfler instead understood it as a meeting of mythology and folklore, with importance in Nordic mystery cults. The account connects the legends to secret communities of young men, usually unmarried, who underwent initiation and were expected to keep what they learned secret. Such groups made the boundary between the living and the dead less fixed: through disguises and ritual conduct, participants could be understood as taking part in a community that exceeded the individual and joined the living to their ancestors.

Rites, raids, and changing meanings

The book describes Norwegian communities of masked young men wearing furs as persisting until the beginning of the twentieth century. Their conduct could be violent and destructive, but the account warns against reducing it to undirected youthful temper. Christine Johannessen’s research, as presented here, emphasizes that the customs had traditions and rules, even where a specific justification for an act was not required. The riders appeared around the winter solstice, concealed themselves, used false names, and traveled by foot or on horseback. Their stated social function included punishing those who violated rural traditions.

The raids took a range of concrete forms. Participants hid or destroyed tools, blocked chimneys, nailed doors shut, and confined a he-goat in a kitchen. Beer was a particular target: kegs might be taken or emptied, sometimes refilled with water or horse urine, and horses might be stolen and ridden until exhausted or turned loose for their owners to find. In Johannessen’s account, the Oskorei were not imagined as making a harmless seasonal visit. They were a frightening force capable of invading homes, disrupting work, and endangering people and animals.

Yet the raids could also be understood within a reciprocal ritual logic. Some farmers left horses in their stables for the riders to take, believing that the theft would promote the fertility of their fields. Food and drink offered to supernatural visitors might bring prosperity; accepting their demands and offenses could be part of the hoped-for bargain. The book compares this pattern with the Alpine Perchten, who could be given food or allowed to plunder a pantry, and with Thies’s account of stolen food, drink, and animals as sacrifices associated with fertility. In this view, theft was not only damage: it could be a ritual transfer through which the community sought a productive year.

That interpretation did not last. As the cultic background receded from memory, the raids became superstition rather than a recognized exchange with the dead or fertility spirits. The surrounding population grew less sympathetic, and the masked participants came to be regarded as troublemakers and wrongdoers. The same behavior could therefore carry sharply different meanings over time: an accepted or bargained-for custom in one understanding, an intolerable intrusion in another.

Folklore and the sound of Black Metal

The book reads the Oskorei alongside Black Metal that emerged in Scandinavia, especially Norway, in the early 1990s. It identifies a cluster of formal echoes: musicians paint their faces in black-and-white demonic designs, wear Nordic clothing or emblems of death, adopt pseudonyms, and use voices that can recall the altered, high-pitched voices of masked performers. In both settings, disguise and assumed identity make the participant less legible as an ordinary individual. The comparison extends to age: Oskorei participants were usually between fifteen and twenty-five, an age range the book also associates with the musicians.

The analogy is not limited to appearance. The book describes Black Metal as electronically amplified heathen noise: dark, forceful music whose ghostly vocals may combine whispers and hoarse cries. Repeated musical motifs, an oppressive atmosphere, and tracks sometimes exceeding ten minutes can create a dense sonic landscape in which melodies emerge only after repeated listening. This sound and its performance conventions, the account argues, make the modern music legible through the older folklore—not as a direct historical survival, but as a striking set of affinities in mood, disguise, and transgression.

The difference in social setting is decisive. The Oskorei belonged to a rural cultural landscape and village community; Black Metal was primarily an underground culture of Scandinavian cities. Its musicians were not simply continuing the work of the masked rural groups. The book leaves room for Nordic cosmology to remain active in modern music, consciously or unconsciously, while acknowledging that many Germanicists and folklorists would reject a claim of continuity. The comparison is therefore suggestive rather than proof of an unbroken institution: it locates a shared repertoire of images and practices across very different historical settings.

Church arson and the modern afterlife

The connection becomes politically charged in the book’s account of Norwegian church arsons in 1992. Fires struck churches including Storetveit, Fantoft, Holmenkollen, Stavanger, Ormøya, Skjold, Hauketo, and Sarpsborg; a firefighter died while fighting the Sarpsborg blaze. Among the buildings attacked was Fantoft Stave Church, one of the few remaining stave churches. The book sets these acts beside the older folklore of destructive masked rites, but does not make the folklore itself an explanation for who set the fires or why.

Some Black Metal musicians interpreted church destruction as vengeance against Christianity, which they regarded as having violently displaced or Christianized Nordic sacred places. Varg Vikernes said that he had not burned a church, while expressing approval of those who had and presenting the destruction of Christian buildings on heathen ground as a new beginning. This stance gives the folkloric comparison a modern ideological edge: destruction becomes a claimed act of historical reversal, not merely a prank or seasonal raid. At the same time, the difference between a village custom embedded in ideas of punishment and fertility and the arson of churches remains essential. Oskorei provides the book with a way to trace recurring forms of disguise and transgression, not a license to collapse distinct acts and contexts into one tradition.