The Wild Hunt Summary
Jane Yolen

The Wild Hunt Summary

Yolen has made the use of folktales and legends her specialty. She believes that folklore is not the exclusive property of its country of origin, but should be available to storytellers everywhere. Accordingly, she feels free to take whatever she needs from any source if it fits a given story. She calls herself an "empress of thieves," but argues that we instinctively use what is at hand for our view of reality. Yolen pulls "threads from magic tapestries to weave my own new cloth," because gifted writers can, in her words, "reinvigorate the literature with cross-cultural fertilization." The Wild Hunt is an example of this process. In this novel, Yolen has produced an amalgam of a medieval Scandinavian legend, the Hunt itself, a myth of changing seasons, and a riteof-passage adventure for a young boy. To these are added the magical properties of rowan trees, a naming of...

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