Åsgårdsreien — the storm that rides through the winter sky
A storm of dead riders thundering across the winter sky between Christmas and Epiphany, led depending on who's telling it by Sigurd Svein, Guro Rysserova, or Odin himself. Hear the hooves and you ought to throw yourself face-down in the snow.
Of all the figures in Norwegian folklore, the Åsgårdsreien is the loudest. It is not a single creature but a host — a storm of riders on black horses, the restless dead, thundering through the night sky in the deep of winter. The name means roughly the ride of Åsgard, the ride out of the old gods’ country, and the sound of it overhead was, by the old reckoning, one of the worst things a person could hear.
The dark twelve nights
The hunt rides in a specific season: the twelve nights of yuletide, from Christmas through to Epiphany — the darkest, coldest stretch of the Norwegian year, when the sun barely clears the horizon and the night is enormous. This is the same season the nisse must be fed and the same season modern Norway fills with light and warmth and kos; the Åsgårdsreien is the dread that all that cosiness is holding off. The hunt is the winter dark, given horses.
Who leads it depends on which valley is telling the story. In some tellings it is Sigurd Svein, a hero-figure. In Telemark and Setesdal, where the song-tradition that preserved the cycle was strongest, it is often Guro Rysserova — “Guro Horse-Tail” — a fearsome female figure at the head of the ride. And underneath all of them is the oldest layer: Odin, Wodan, the one-eyed god of the dead leading the slain across the sky, the Norse face of a Wild Hunt that turns up under different names across the whole of northern Europe.
The riders, and the rule
The host is made of the bad dead and the unquiet dead — executed criminals, people who died by their own hand, the unbaptized, the ones the consecrated churchyard would not take. They ride to punish, to carry off, and to swell their own numbers, and a living person caught out under the open sky when the hunt comes over is in real danger of being swept up into it.
So the folklore, as folklore does, supplied rules. Hear the hooves and the howl coming, and you throw yourself face-down in the snow and stay there until it passes — make yourself low, make yourself nothing, do not look up. Leave food on the table through the twelve nights, so the hunt finds an offering and rides on. Mark the doors of the house and the barn with a cross. The Åsgårdsreien could not be fought. It could only be waited out, flat in the snow, very still.
The image
The Wild Hunt was fixed in the Norwegian visual imagination by a single enormous painting: Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Åsgårdsreien, also called The Wild Hunt of Odin, finished in 1872 and bought the same year by the national gallery in Oslo, where it still hangs. Arbo painted the host the way the folklore feels it — a chaos of black horses and streaming hair and raised spears pouring across a dark sky, ravens around them, one white horse at the front. It is one of the most dramatic images in Norwegian art, and it is the reason the modern country, which long ago stopped fearing the actual ride, still knows exactly what the Åsgårdsreien looked like coming.