An icy dark winter storm roars over the land and with it in the sky an unmanageable gloomy mythological horsemen horde, anciently armed with bows and arrows or daggers, on their way pulling women up to them by the hair. When Peter Nicolai Arbo's "Åsgårdsreien" ("Odin's Wild Hunt") was shown in Copenhagen in 1872, the painting, like Arbo himself, did not exactly belong to the avant-garde, and art critics were not really enraptured. And yet the artwork became famous.
Norway as an independent state did not even exist when Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831 - 1892) lived. After centuries of belonging to Denmark, the Danish king had ceded the country to Sweden in 1814, a highly unpopular move in the Norwegian parts of the country. Arbo, who studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and lived in Paris for a long time, often depicted scenes from the so-called Nordic-Germanic mythology and hit the spirit of the times with his paintings. Like the pictures with Norwegian landscapes and "typically Norwegian" scenes (genre painting), the depiction and exaltation of the pagan, the northern European mythology played an important role in the 19th century in creating its own Norwegian national feeling - incidentally, as well as the development of its own language, because Norwegian as a language did not exist at that time and was created through the emphasis on vernacular dialects and addition of old Norwegian texts, including Old Norse sagas and fairy tales, only in the course of the 19th century. The idealization of the legendary past and the search for and formation of an identity-forming community - the nation - were typical of "Norwegian national romanticism," whose currents dominated cultural life in Norway around 1850.
For the cultural elite, Peter Nicolai Arbo was thus more of a "late-comer" when, among other things, with the "Wild Hunt" of his "Åsgårdsreien," he staged the Old Norse saga treasure as a natural, heroic Norwegian life experience with great pathos. But this did not diminish his popularity, and today many of his paintings are part of the large collection of the "Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design", the Norwegian National Museum in Oslo.
Art critics had also not foreseen that Peter Nicolai Arbo's work would once again play a prominent role more than a century later: "The Wild Hunt," the Nordic storm of gods that chases across the sky as a wild horde, became a popular theme in music with the rise of folk and especially metal in the 1980s. And here Peter Nicolai Arbo's "Åsgårdsreien" again played a prominent role: in 1988 the Swedish metal band Bathory made it the cover image of the album "Blood Fire Death", a key album for the development of Pagan and Black Metal and one of the earliest examples of the thematization not only of the "Wild Hunt" from the Northern European saga world.
Peter Nicolai Arbo lived in the last years of his life in Christiana - a city that was not given its present name until well after Norway's independence (1905) in 1924: Oslo.
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.jpg "The Wild Hunt of Odin by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Wild Hunt of Odin by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Wild Hunt of Odin, 1872 by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Valkyrie by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Dreaming by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Olav Trygvasson is chosen to be king of Oreting by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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_-_(MeisterDrucke-1319732).jpg "The Holy Olav in a prayer before the Battle of Stiklestad by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Saint Olav at the Battle of Stiklestad by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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_-_After_the_Battle_-_par_Peter_Nicolai_-_(MeisterDrucke-1011127).jpg "After the Battle by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Wild Hunt of Odin by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Fall of Saint Olav in the Battle of Stiklestad by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Fall of Saint Olav in the Battle of Stiklestad by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "King Sverre Escapes by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Dead Souls by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Ice Racing by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "King Sverre")
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.jpg "Battle of Stamford Bridge by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Old Poplar, Section of Gulskov Garden by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Valkyrie, 1865 by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Battle of Stamford Bridge by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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_-_(MeisterDrucke-1326092).jpg "Water Station by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "Valkyrie")
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.jpg "Haakon the Good and Farmers at the Sacrifice of Cage by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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_by_Arbo_Peter_Nicolai_(1831-1892)_Oil_-_(MeisterDrucke-1028560).jpg "The Walkueren (Valkyrien) by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "The Battle of Stamford Bridge by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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.jpg "After the Battle by Peter Nicolai Arbo")
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