In the play Riders to The Sea, Maurya had a vision of her sons riding on horses. There is an underlying or implied theme of the Norse god Odin in the play.

Odin had an eight-legged horse. A spider has eight legs and spins. The Norns, goddesses of fate, spun the fate of individuals on their spinning wheels. Since the Norns spun yarns, a person couldn't be sure if his fate was based on truth.

Sleipner was Odin's horse, and, of course, he was the greatest of all horses. He was sometimes linked with the color blue just as Garm might be. Perhaps this was because the Celts painted their bodies blue with woad before they went into battle and had blue tattoos on their bodies. The color blue was thought to have intrinsic magical properties.

Odin's horse, Sleipnir, was suggestive of funerary imagery, since Odin is the Lord of the Dead. Sleipnir's eight legs were thought to represent four men (two legs apiece) carrying a corpse.

In some legends, Odin leads the Wild Hunt, riding Sleipnir. Whether under the name of Grim or Wotan, Odin the Gallows God led a terrifying hunt in the sky, but who or what was his prey? It may be that the Wild Hunt was practiced by his devotees, not in the sky, but on the ground in the name of their god.

This myth served as a memorial of all the dead from the Wild Hunt and the physical routes they had taken to and from their graves.

The theme of resurrection occurs in this myth. If you look at the Viking burial customs described by Ibn Fadlan, you can see that when the corpse of the king was dug up after its first burial, he was still considered one of the living.

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