May Day Dance

The May Day festival used to be very important in England and Germany, many of the traditions such as the dance of the Fool and the Hobbyhorse were carried on by young men in towns and villages for thousands of years only for the traditions to end during WWi, due to the amount of young men that were killed. In some German and English towns the dance survived or has been renewed. Similar characters to the Fool and Hobbyhorse appear in French, Polish and Scandinavian cultures, but this illustration is mostly based on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Odinkirks are canonically of Saxon decent and are implied to have reintroduced the dance to their village, which is situated in Pomerania. May Day was celebrated all across Europe but in Germany and England in some places the horse dance had either faded or evolved; even before WWi the Christian church suppressed the dance as it originated from an ancient horse-cult; as a result it survives in the more Saxon regions today and many English and German people haven't heard of the dance of the Fool and the Horse.