Dreams and Doubles – Thorstein and the Fylgja

 

I am back in the Iceland of the sagas. In the Vatnsdal Saga, the chronicle of a Norwegian family that moved to northern Iceland before Christianization, we read about dream visitations and the need to listen to a dream advisory, especially when it comes from a fylgja, or companion spirit. 
     Groa the witch invites Thorstein to a banquet. However, three nights before he is due to leave home, he dreams he receives a visitation from a fylgja, in this case his family's protective spirit. She appears in human form and asks him not to go to the witch's house. He objects that he promised to be at the feast. She responds, "It seems unwise to me, and harm will befall you from this." She appears for three nights in succession, scolding him for not heeding her warning. She touches his eyes as if to tell him he must open them and see clearly. 
     Thorstein must have listened, because on the day of his departure he says he is sick and tells the people who were going to travel with him to go home. At her place, Groa walks backwards around the house chanting spells. A rockfall on the house kills everyone inside. "Ever afterwards the place where Groa lived seemed haunted, and men had no wish to live there from that time on."
    Although fylgja is sometimes translated as "follower" we know from other tales - and from first-hand experience today - that it often travels ahead of its protege, and may be seen by others before a traveler reaches their destination.   

Quotations are from Andrew Warn's traslation of Vatnsdal Saga, chapter 36, in The Sagas of the Icelanders: A Selectuon (New York: Viking, 2000) with one significant change.  Warn turns the Icelandic word fylgja into "fetch". This is not satsfactory,  since in English "fetch" is usually taken to mean a personal double, whose appearance is ominous since it often heralds death. The fylgjur ("those who accompany") are constant companions, most visible and especially active in dreams. A fylgja is a guardian spirit rather than a shadow self, though the term has shiftng meaning in different contexts. in and out of the Old Norse polypsychic houses of selves. The fylgja watches over an individual but may also protect a whole family and be passed down through generatons. The fylgja is often seen in animal form. When it appears as human, it is apparently always female, which leads some to suggest that it be a matriarchal presence.

Photo: Vatnsdalsá River, in the landscape of the Vatnsdal Saga

Huge and Hugr: The Norse Polypsychic Self

"The air and the paths were alive with magic." The words come from the Volsunga saga, which excited Richard Wagner and Tolkien and still excites the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. They are spoken when völvas – seers, forest witches - are doing some body swapping. They are arranging for two men to swap bodies for sex in one case and for deception in the other. Swapping bodies, how is that possible? 

We are deep in a world of sorcery and magic, of dreaming and dream travel, in which the self is not recognized as some kind of unitary thing. There are four members in the polypsychic family. They travel in and out of bodies where they reside and can take different forms. They can become animals or birds or aquatic creatures. They can change gender. Gods do this. Giants do it. Seers and sorcerers do it. Any human may release one of their parts to wander beyond the body, in one form or another, in their dreams. 

In early Scandinavia a human body was a house for at least four separable and mobile aspects of energy and identity: the hamr (“shape" or "form”), the hugr (“thought” as in the name of Odin's raven), fylgja (“follower”, a double in animal, human or hybrid form), and hamingja (“luck”, sometimes like a personal god). Human identity is interwoven with both gods and animals.

The Norse self is a family, not a unity: different members come and go their own ways, leaving the body at will or under direction. This generates several forms of the double, such a key feature of this mindscape that a leading scholar of Old Norse traditions, Régis Boyer, titled a book about them Le monde du double. None of the Norse terms translate as “soul” in the sense of a unique and nontransferable core self. The Old Norse word for “soul,” sál, was a Christian import. [1]   

Hamr (pronounced like “hammer”) is literally “shape” or “skin.” The hamr is the form that others perceive. It can be changed. Shapeshifting is skipta hömum, “changing hamr.” One who can do this is called hamramr, “of strong hamr.” [2] If the hamr of an individual os injured, the physical body receives the same wound.  

Hugr is “thought” or “mind.” It corresponds to a person’s conscious cognitive processes. It can perhaps be called the ego-self.  The hugr generally stays in the house of the body, but can reach across distance as a mental act and have notable effects. Someone with strong hugr reaches and changes things with their mind.  

Fylgja, literally “follower”, is generally perceived in an animal form by those with second sight, although human fylgjur are also mentioned in literature. The fylgja is a companion spirit whose fortunes and that of its owner are intimately connected; wound or kill the fylgja and you wound or kill its owner. Though its name means “follower” it is depicted traveling ahead of its owner, like the vardøger who arrives ahead of its person. The fylgja may appear in the dreams of someone who will encounter its owner in the future. Mysteriously, the term is also applied to the afterbirth.[3]

Hamingja is the fourth of these separable selves. The word is used in the abstract to signify “luck”. [4] However, hamingja is a personified and transferable force. It can be passed on within  families. It can be loaned to someone to help them in danger or sickness. [5] It may be comparable to the personified shimtu of Mesopotamian sacred psychology. When a person dies, his or her hamingja is often reborn in one of their descendants, particularly if the child is named after them. In Viga-Glum’s Saga, the hamingja bequeaths itself to a relative, without special naming. In the sagas the action is often driven by prophetic dreams, 'voices from destiny' conveyed through the hamingja. 

Apart from language differences, none of this would seem strange to many ancient and indigenous cultures, which also regard humans as composite beings. The work of Swedish anthropologist Ernst Arbman sent legions of anthropologists in quest of "free souls", "vital souls", and "ego souls" among aboriginal peoples. [6] The recent work of German Assyriologist Annette Zgoll may help us to understand what is going on in the sagas and the Eddas through lenses from a more ancient civilization that have been brilliantly reground.

In ancient Mesopotamia, Zgoll observes, humans are "permeable beings full of beings" [7], open structures through which permanent residents and transients, including personal deities, protective spirits, dream doubles and demonic intruders, come and go. A human is like a house. The body is a defined structure that gives space to a variety of entities - some more external than internal - that work in humans. So why not call the composite self what it is - oikonomorphic, which is to say, "house-like"? [8] It's a great suggestion, though I doubt that "oikonomorphic" is going to become a household word; for now, you won't even find it on Google. However the description plays well when applied to the Norse polypsychic self.  

With or without the old names, the double is still very much part of folk practice as well as belief in Northern lands. Girls at midsummer hope to call up the image of a potential lover or husband. Psychics are credited with helping police by summoning the double of a criminal. Forest witches talk of sending a double in animal form at a distance to gather information or support someone in need of strength.

Then we have the phenomenon of the vardøger, the double who goes ahead of you. "Harbinger", "forerunner", and psychic predecessor" have been suggested as kennings of vardøger. "Advance guard" or "spirit guard" might be closer to the Old Norse roots. The derivation is from Old Norse varðhygi which combines two names for aspects of our composite nature: (a) a protector, a "guard" or watchman" (vǫrð) and (b) a mobile, separable aspect of "mind" or spirit (hugr). Georg Hygen, a Norwegian scientist and psychic researcher, wrote a book om the vardøger that he subtitled "our national paranormal phenomenon.” [9]

References

[1] Raudvere, Catharina. “Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia” in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 3: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 

[2] Price, Neil S. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. 2^nd edition. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013.

[3] Price op cit p. 59, Raudvere op cit, p. 102

[4] Ellis, Hilda Roderick. 1968. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. New York: Praeger, 1968. p. 132.

[5] Ellis pp. 132-3.

[6]Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185. Arban's most famolus dstudent, felow-Swede Åke Hultkrantz, gave us tyhe spendid work Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians: A Study in Religious Ethnology Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden. Monographic Series. no. 1, 1953. 

[7]Annette Zgoll, “Der oikomorphe Mensch Wesen im Menschen und das Wesen des Menschen in sumerisch-akkadischer Perspektive” in Bernd Janowski (ed) Der ganze Mensch Akademie Verlag, 2012. p.86

[8] ibid., p.91

[9] Georg Hygen. Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalsfenomen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1987.

Illustration: "Leaving the Body in Uppsala". Text by RM+DALL-E 3