Åsgårdsreien — the storm that rides through the winter sky
A host of the unquiet dead — criminals, suicides, the unbaptized — that thunders across the sky on the darkest nights of yule, drinks your Christmas ale and borrows your horses. Hear the hooves and you throw yourself face-down in the snow.
For the twelve nights of yule, Norwegians painted tar crosses on the doors of every barn, byre, and beer cellar — because the Oskoreia was riding, and a household that forgot paid for it.
Oskoreia means roughly the terrifying ride: a host of the unquiet dead that swept across the sky on the darkest nights of the year, from Lussinatt on the thirteenth of December through Epiphany. The riders were the ones the churchyard could not settle — executed criminals, suicides, the unbaptized, drunkards, killers — and their horses were black and breathed fire. (The name most people use now, Åsgårdsreien, the ride out of Asgard led by Odin, is the newer reading: nineteenth-century Romantics heard “Asgard” in the old word and handed the host to a god. The farmers who actually feared it never put one at its head.)
You could not fight the host; you could only hide from it. A man who heard the hooves come over the ridge threw himself face-down in the snow, lower than a horse’s belly, and did not look up. The buildings were guarded with the tar crosses, the people by staying indoors and keeping still.
Mostly, the Oskoreia took. It raided the farms it crossed — drank the Christmas ale dry, emptied the larder, and borrowed the horses, riding them across the sky and leaving them foundered and sweat-dark in the stalls by morning. The story told most often turns on a man who forgot the cross on his beer-cellar door. On Christmas morning a stranger thanked him for the ale; the man said he had given none. You slept, the stranger told him, while we drank your cask dry and filled it back with horse’s blood — and the man remembered then being dragged across the night sky until dawn. People left ale and food out partly to be spared exactly this.
The host’s leader changed with the valley. In Telemark and Setesdal it rode behind Sigurd Svein, with Guro Rysserova — Guro Horse-Tail — bringing up the rear; the pastor Magnus Brostrup Landstad wrote the ballad down in Seljord in the 1840s. The thirteenth of December carried its own terror in Lussi, a hag who led her own ride and came down the chimney of any house behind on its yule work.
Peter Nicolai Arbo painted the hunt in 1872, after Welhaven’s poem Asgaardsreien, and titled the canvas The Wild Hunt of Odin — handing the ride to the god the farmers themselves had never named. It hangs in the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo.