The Wild Huntsman.
Earl Eberhard von Wurtemberg rode one day alone into the forest to amuse himself with the chase. Suddenly he heard a loud roar and noise, as of a hunter riding furiously past; he was terrified, dismounted in haste from his horse, and approaching a tree, as if for defence, cried aloud to the imagined huntsman, asking if he intended violence.
"No," replied the now visible form of the hunter, "I am a man like thyself, and stand before thee quite alone. I too was formerly a noble.
"I found such pleasure in the chase, that I besought God to permit me to hunt until the judgment-day. Unhappily my sinful wish was granted, and for four hundred and fifty years I have hunted the same deer. But my race and name are known to no one."
Thereupon the ghostly hunter vanished.
Hans von Hackelberg, a master of the hunt in Brunswick, had an unhappy dream one night on the Harzburg; it seemed to him in his dream as if he struggled with a huge wild boar which conquered him after a long combat, and that he died of his wounds.
He could not drive this terrible dream from his mind. Shortly after he encountered a boar in the Harz similar to the one in his dream. He attacked him; the struggle remained long undecided; at length Hans conquered and slew the animal. Rejoiced to see the boar stretched at his feet, he kicked the tusk with violence, exclaiming, "Thou shalt not yet kill me!"
But he had struck with such force that the sharp tooth pierced his boot and wounded his foot.
At first Hackelberg paid no attention to the wound, but continued the chase. On his return, however, the foot was so swollen, that the boot had to be cut off. He hastened back to Wolfenbüttel, but the vehicle shook the foot so that he was obliged to stop on the way at Wülperode, where he died.
Before his death he expressed a wish that he might hunt for ever, and his rash desire was granted.
The Tut-Osel, or Tut-Ursel, always accompanies him.
At midnight, when in storm and rain, Hackelberg with horse and dogs tears through the Thuringian Forest, the Harz, and the Hackel Forest, the night or death owl flies before him, which the people call the Tut-Osel.
The wanderer, when he hears the ghostly hunt, listens in terror to the barking of dogs, and hears the hu! hu! of the chase, and the uhu of the death-owl.
In a Kloster in Thuringia lived, in the primeval days of convents, a nun called Ursel—Ursula—who always disturbed the choir of nuns by her howling singing; hence she was called Tut-Ursel. But after her death she disturbed them even more than in her lifetime, for at eleven every evening she poked her head through a hole in the church tower and tooted dreadfully, and every morning at four she joined her voice in the matin-song.
For some days the holy sisters bore this lamentable disturbance; but at last one morning one of the nuns whispered in fear to her neighbour, "That is certainly the Ursel!"
Instantly the music ceased, their hair rose to mountains, and the nuns rushed out of the church screaming: "Tut-Ursel! Tut-Ursel!" And no punishment could induce a single nun to enter the church again until a Capuchin monk from a monastery on the Danube, noted for his sanctity, was summoned.
He condemned Tut-Ursel to banishment in the Harz, and to bear the form of a death-owl.
Here she encountered Hackelberg, and found as much delight in the hu, hu! of his eternal hunt as he in her uhu! and so they hunt for ever in company.
Another story is that the screech-owl is a nun who was false to her vows, and left her convent to follow Hackelberg.
The origin of this legend belongs to the ancient pagan days. It is even disputed that a person called Hackelberg existed, and if so, the legend is ages older than the sixteenth century, the time when he is said to have lived.
The Wild Hunter, the Wanderer, was Wodan himself in the pagan days.
At the introduction of Christianity we find a new development of the ancient myths. Wodan becomes the foul fiend, then the godless Hunter, and the Wandering Jew. In the Black Forest the eternal Hunter and the eternal Jew are regarded as the same person. They both always carry a groschen in the pocket. In some parts of Germany the harrows are placed in the fields with the teeth together, that the wanderer may rest himself. According to some authorities, he may only rest Christmas night, and then only when he finds a plough in the field; only on that may he sit down.
Every seven years the Huntsman passes over the seven mining towns of the Harz, and woe to him who calls after him.
According to one legend, the Wild Huntsman met Christ at a river where He sought to quench His thirst, and would not permit Him to drink; he also drove Him from a cattle trough, and when the Saviour found water in a horse's foot-print, and would drink there, he drove Him away. As a punishment, he is doomed to wander for ever, and eat only horse-flesh. This is the pagan legend Christianized. In West and South Germany we find the Wild Army. Odin, or Wodan, was the god, too, of armies, and always went out from Walhalla at the head of his ghostly array, while his nine Walküren conducted the fallen heroes back to Walhalla.