11. Borrowing from their eponymous mythological counterparts, the Wild Hunt of The Witcher are inspired by historical legends of spectral horseman terrorizing villages and bringing damnation upon their victims
The Wild Hunt, also known as the Wraiths of Mörhogg, are a group of huntsmen who gallop across the sky in pursuit of their prey. Believed by the inhabitants of the world to be ghostly specters, in actuality, they are merely a brigade of elves. Initially formed to capture slaves from other worlds to serve their people, the Wild Hunt betray this purpose in pursuit of power and glory for themselves. Leaving behind a trail of death and destruction, the Wild Hunt of The Witcher is heavily inspired by the eponymous real-world legend.
A recurring motif throughout European folklore, the Wild Hunt takes many forms in Middle Age mythology. From the “Wild Jagd” in Germany, the Herlaþing in Anglo-Saxon England, to the Asgårdsreia in Scandinavia, the Wild Hunt is broadly seen as a harbinger of catastrophe. Captained by a figure often associated with the Norse deity Odin, who by the Middle Ages had fallen into disrepute and was more feared than revered within German paganism, stories involving the Hunt included the abduction of persons to serve in the underworld, the coming of a great plague, as well as the slaughter of those who laid eyes upon the horsemen.