Vardøger — Your double, arriving a few minutes before you

A vardøger is the sound of a person arriving before the person does. Footsteps on the entry stair, the scrape of the boot-mat, the latch, the cough of a man stamping snow off his boots — and then no one there, the man himself still half a kilometre down the road. Fifteen minutes later he comes in and does all of it again, exactly.

It is a kind of half-soul that runs ahead of its owner out of habit or affection. The word is traced to Old Norse varðhygi — vǫrðr, a guardian element, the same root as English warden, plus hugr, the travelling mind-soul of older Norse belief — a lineage that runs back to the saga-era fylgja Fylgja × The Dream Wife, from G. W. Dasent, Gisli the Outlaw (1866) About this image ▸ Old Norse attendant spirit — a companion soul bound to a person from birth, normally unseen, showing itself in dreams or at the edge of waking sight in animal form, or as a guardian woman (fylgjukona) attached to a whole family line, passing to a kinsman at her holder's death. To see one's own fylgja plainly was a death-omen: in Njáls saga (written c. 1280) Þórðr sees a blood-drenched goat lying in the hollow that no one else can see, and Njáll tells him he has seen his fylgja and is a fey man. Else Mundal's Fylgjemotiva i norrøn litteratur (1974), the standard study, traced the two forms — animal double and guardian-woman, kin to the dísir of household worship — through the sagas and Eddic prose. Also discussed in Worshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian Norway , the spirit-companion whose saga forms Else Mundal’s standard 1974 study mapped.

Most of the time it was domestic and unalarming. A wife hears her husband come into the kitchen, hang his coat, set down the milk pails — turns, and the room is empty; he is still on the road. What makes it uncanny rather than terrifying is the direction it faces. The German doppelgänger is a thing you see, and to see your own was an omen that you were about to die; the vardøger is above all a thing other people hear, and it walks in front of its owner instead of confronting them.

But the vardøger had an edge. Heard too often, or heard for someone not expected home at all, it was read as a sign of coming illness or death — and the wives of fishermen on the coast were said to hear, some evenings, the boots and the latch of men who would never come through the door.

The vardøger is the one figure of Norway’s old company the country never had to revive, because it never went away. The word is still printed in the current Bokmålsordboka, still alive in the old dialects as vardyvle and vardøgle — Jeg hørte vardøgeret hans i går kveld (I heard his vardøger last night) is a sentence the language still knows how to say — while the trolls Troll × Theodor Kittelsen, Skogtroll (1906), Nasjonalmuseet About this image ▸ The supernatural mountain-dweller of Norwegian folketro — sometimes gigantic, like the valley-striding jutul, sometimes small — living inside mountains and deep forest. Legends set the troll against the church: it hurls boulders at church buildings and flees the sound of church bells. Sunlight turns a troll caught above ground to stone. Andreas Faye's Norske Sagn (1833, expanded as Norske Folke-Sagn in 1844), Norway's first legend collection, put the tradition on paper; Asbjørnsen and Moe's Norske Folkeeventyr (1841–44) fixed the man-eating troll of the tales in print — "De tre bukkene Bruse" was first printed in 1843. Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) gave the troll its modern visual form; his Skogtroll (1906) is in the Nasjonalmuseet. Also discussed in Troll — the monsters of the mountainsStedssagn — local legends, told as warningsSoria Moria — the shining castle always out of reachNorske eventyr — the folk tales almost lost foreverHuldra — the girl in the forest with a secretBytting — the changeling left in the cradleTradisjoner — celebrations across the Norwegian year and the nøkk Nøkken × Theodor Kittelsen, Nøkken som hvit hest (1907) About this image ▸ The shape-shifting spirit of fresh water in Norwegian folk tradition — most at home in still water: lakes, tarns, and mill ponds — recorded as luring people, children above all, into drowning. He appeared as a handsome young fiddler, as a white horse that tempted children onto its back, as a drifting log, or as two pale eyes among the water lilies. The white water lily is named nøkkerose after him. The name descends from Old Norse nykr, 'water spirit.' Andreas Faye's Norske Sagn (1833), the first printed collection of Norwegian legends, placed nøkker "in most waters and rivers"; Theodor Kittelsen's 1904 Nøkken (Nasjonalmuseet) fixed the modern image — a black, lily-choked tarn and two eyes at the surface. The roaring falls belonged instead to his relative, the fossegrim. Also discussed in Nøkken — the water-spirit who pulls you underFossegrimen — the waterfall fiddler who teaches you to play stay shut in their books.