Ewiger Jäger

Variants attribute the hunter's eternal fate to several moral transgressions or ill-judged wishes. In Grimm's summary a huntsman (formerly a lord) begged God to let him hunt until Judgment Day and was answered, forcing him to chase the same deer for centuries. Bechstein's Swabian/Freischütz variants tie the fate to sacrilegious bargains (for example, a marksman who shot into the sun 'in the Devil's name' and was damned). A Belgian variant tells of a farmer's son cursed by his dying father—'So go hunting, hunting, hunting for all eternity'—and thereafter heard eternally in the woods. Pennsylvania Dutch tellings transmit these themes in local settings and dialectal names imported by German immigrants.

Accounts vary by locale. Grimm recounts a ghostly hunter whose face was 'hardly as big as a fist, withered like a turnip and wrinkled like a mushroom.' Bechstein records a Swabian form as 'a gnarled little man dressed in green.' Other variants present the hunter as a man in hunters' attire heard blowing a horn, and some tellings use the alternate name Riesenjäger ('giant hunter')—indicating regional versions that portray him as towering. These descriptions are alternate local forms rather than simultaneous traits.

The defining feature is perpetual pursuit: the hunter is doomed to chase the same quarry (deer, fox, or unspecified game) without ever catching it, sometimes for centuries or 'until Judgment Day.' He is chiefly an auditory and nocturnal phenomenon—sounding horns, baying packs of phantom hounds, and swooshing noises—though occasional visual sightings of a hunter (small and gnarled or regularly attired) occur. Some Freischütz variants include additional motifs (e.g., riding with a stag after being shot through the heart), but such features are attested only in particular tellings rather than as universal powers.