The Folklore of Magic #5
Yesterday, we looked at vampires and banshees, two classes of beings that have, on the surface, very little to do with one another but are etymologically linked. It was terribly subtle, I tell you. Then, the card Banshee, from The Dark, came along and ruined everything. You see, Banshee’s mechanic, despite being vaguely vampiric, possesses nothing of the banshopric (Note: Most folklorists don’t tell you when they make up words. I do: That’s the Grydehøj Guarantee.), and its flavor text throws everything into a muddle by referencing another widespread folk belief, that of the Wild Hunt. I’ll help you out by refreshing your presumably limited memory of flavor text on cards from The Dark: “Some say banshees are the hounds of Death, baying to herd their prey into the arms of their master.”
Although traditions concerning the Wild Hunt exist in Central Europe as well as Northern Europe, my expertise is limited to the latter. Briefly, the Wild Hunt was a group of spectral huntsmen and hounds that rode through the sky or just above the ground, searching for human prey. The leader of the hunt was usually a specific figure though never Death, since Death as a concrete being is a French and Continental concept foreign to Great Britain and Scandinavia. In ancient times, the leader of the hunt was Odin (who, after all, even in Nordic mythology, was god of the dead), but it is, perhaps, more correct to view Odin’s status here as a post-Christian conversion concept. While the fact is little known today, the missionaries and early Christians in Europe did not deny the existence of pagan gods; instead, they took these gods to be devils. Even in the 1600s, we have serious British scholars and religious men writing of Odin and Zeus in the same context as Satan. Hence, Odin, as the premier Nordic deity, came to be a distinctively Nordic devil in the Christian age. As knowledge of Odin passed out of popular belief and became a mere scholarly relic, the Wild Hunt’s leader was more and more likely to be Satan himself. There were also a number of highly localized Wild Hunts attributed to locally infamous men who, having died in extreme sin, came again after death to torment the living. An example of this is the corrupt Cornish priest, Dando, who went hunting on Sunday and was taken by the Devil for it, only to return as leader of the hunt.
Because the only spectral pack dogs in folklore are those belonging to the Wild Hunt, one can view such cards as Vampire Hounds, Hollow Dogs, and Ghost Hounds as representatives of this tradition.
The earliest reference we have to the Wild Hunt is from England’s Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1127:
“It was common gossip up and down the countryside that after February 6th many people saw and heard a whole pack of huntsmen in full cry. They straddled black horses and black bucks while their hounds were pitch black with staring, hideous eyes. This was seen in the very deer park of Peterborough town, and in all the wood stretching from that same spot as far as Stamford.”
Surely, however, the most gruesome of these tales is the following, recorded by Baring-Gould:
“A moorman (according to one account, he lived at Chagford) was riding home one night from Widecombe and passed a circle of standing stones. Suddenly and silently, past him flew a pack of jet-black hounds, followed by a dark horseman. Recklessly, the drunk moorman cried, ‘Hey, hold on, mister; what sport? Give us some of your game!’ ‘Take that,’ replied the horseman coldly, and tossed something to him as he passed. The moorman caught at a bundle, but could not in the dark distinguish what it was. He rode on home, dismounted, called for a lantern, and peered at the object in the bundle. It was his own baby, dead and cold.”
Although all Wild Hunts in Northern Europe were dangerous to living men who chanced upon them, they were not all aimed at hunting the living. Often, the Devil took his sport by hunting the souls of the damned, and sometimes, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the baying heard by witnesses belonged to hounds or Satan’s victims.
Of late, Magic has broadened its worldview, and the Mirrodin and Kamigawa Blocks offer considerably less for the European folklorist than do the game’s earlier sets. Still, one can safely say that all of the game’s major, long-standing creature types have a basis in Northern European folklore. From trolls to ogres, dwarves to mermen, zombies to treefolk, Magic is grounded in a genuine Northern European tradition that went virtually unchanged in popular belief for at least eight hundred years (until circa 1850). This tradition probably reaches farther back still, but lack of documentation prevents us from making any solid claims. The fact that folkloric creatures and supernatural events play so small a part in histories and literature after the Middle Ages is, in part, a sign of just how thoroughly they were believed in. When every farm had a brownie, when every coast had a mermaid, when every burial mound housed elves, there was no need to write of them as something special. These beings were seen as components of everyday life, and to misunderstand their attributes is to misunderstand our ancestors.
Today, in Denmark, brownies (in Danish, nisser) have been transformed into either Santa’s elves or a distinctively Christmas-season creature that plays harmless tricks. Nonetheless, most everyone is aware that people a few hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, believed in these creatures. What, then, do people think of their ancestors? That they were dimwits who, as adults, believed in Santa Claus and his present-making brownies? That the brownies, castigated by the clergy as minor devils, took great joy in Christmas cheer? The majority of people say they have no interest in folklore because “it’s all made up,” and yet, in its own way, knowledge of folklore is of far greater significance for comprehending the past than the memorization of important dates is.
1066? 1776? 1945? I’ll take elves any day.
Skål!
Adam Grydehøj
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