The soul in Scandinavian mythology

The Wanderer by Your Side

This too is planned to be a chapter in my book Werewolfs in Sweden, since the concept of a dual (or even trippel) soul is core in understanding a werewolf transformation.

In old Scandinavian lore, every person was believed to walk through life with an unseen companion – a vård. Stemming from the Old Norse word vǫrðr meaning “warden” or “watcher,” the vård was envisioned as a personal guardian spirit bound to an individual’s soul​. This spirit double wasn’t just an abstract idea; it was as real to Norse folk as the flesh-and-blood person it shadowed. From the moment of birth until the final breath, one’s vård kept vigil. It was part protector, part mirror of the soul, and sometimes a harbinger of things to come. In essence, the vård is the wandering soul – a second self that could step outside the body and roam free, yet always remained tied to its human counterpart.

A Guardian Spirit and Soul-Double

According to Norse tradition, the vård followed its person through every joy and peril of life. People thought of it as the soul itself in an independent form – a hugr (mind/spirit) with its own presence​. In folklore accounts, this guardian might appear as a flickering light or take on the person’s own shape (known as their hamn or hamr)​. If you were especially perceptive or had “second sight,” you might catch a glimpse of someone’s vård or feel its presence. Many a farmer or traveler claimed to have seen a little light bobbing through the woods at night, believing it to be a vård guiding or protecting its human in the darkness. Others spoke of sensing a familiar figure ahead on the path, only to find the actual person arriving moments later – an eerie experience that meant the vård had arrived first to scout the way​.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “How They Met Themselves” (1860s) depicts an encounter with one’s own double, echoing folklore of seeing a spirit twin​. Such Victorian art captures the eerie feeling of meeting a phantom self, much like the Scandinavian vård or Irish fetch as a harbinger.

Protector, Messenger, and Omen

The primary role of a vård was as protector – a spiritual guardian angel before Christianity introduced that term. It was a benevolent presence meant to guard one’s luck and well-being. In some tales, a strong vård could even ward off misfortune, much like a personal deity watching over its charge. Yet the vård could also act as a messenger or omen. If danger loomed or a moment of destiny approached, the vård might give a varsel (warning) by making itself known. Often this wasn’t a straightforward apparition; it might be subtle: a sudden chill, an inexplicable itch on your nose or hand, or a shiver down the spine with no obvious cause. Folks believed these odd sensations were caused by encountering another’s roaming spirit​. For instance, your hand might itch just before a friend you’d been thinking of shows up at your door – a sign that perhaps your friend’s vård touched you first. In Norwegian lore, someone with sharp senses who hears footsteps or a knock before the person actually arrives is said to have witnessed a vardøger, the fore-running spirit of that visitor​. Rather than being frightened, people often took comfort in these signs, seeing them as proof that souls have a life beyond the body’s confines.

The Vård Appearing Ahead

One of the most striking aspects of the vård is how it could precede its person. Scandinavian storytellers loved to share accounts of this phenomenon. A classic example: a household hears the familiar sound of Father’s footsteps on the porch and sees the door open, yet when they look, no one is there – a little while later, Father himself arrives home for real, none the wiser. In Finnish, this ghostly forerunner is called an etiäinen, meaning “firstcomer,” an invisible double that arrives early to do what the real person will do later​. The Norse understood it similarly: the vård ran ahead as a scout, ensuring the path was safe or simply announcing someone’s approach​. In fact, one poetic description says the spirit “moves ahead of its host, making contact before they arrive,” almost like an envoy​. This could serve as a friendly heads-up, but it could also be a premonition of fate. If a person was doomed never to return from a journey, some believed their vård might show itself to loved ones as a way of saying goodbye or warning of tragedy. Thus the vård was not only a guardian, but at times a mute prophet of one’s destiny, blurring the line between protection and portent.

Ancient Norse Beliefs: Soul Parts and Nature Spirits

Roots in a Pagan Worldview:

To truly grasp the vård, we journey back to the pre-Christian Norse worldview, which was richly animistic and saw the self as multi-faceted. The Norse believed a person’s being had several spiritual components. One was the hugr, the thought-soul or consciousness. Another was the hamr (or hamn in Swedish), the shape or form that a soul could take on​. And then there was the fylgja, meaning “follower,” often envisioned as a guardian spirit that could appear in animal form or as a supernatural double​. The vård fits into this scheme as a personal nature-soul – essentially a friendly spirit of nature attached to you, a naturvätte as Swedish folklore calls it​. It was common for Norse people to think that everything alive or even inanimate objects had a spirit or essence. Just as a great tree might have a tree-spirit, a person had their vård-spirit.

The Fylgja and the Vård

The fylgja and vård are closely related concepts – in some stories they blur together. A fylgja could appear in dreams or as a spirit animal that reflects a person’s character or fate (for example, a warrior’s fylgja might be a bear or wolf). Like the vård, the fylgja often arrived before its person, leading the way or appearing as an omen of what’s to come.

One saga tale describes a boy stumbling in a hall; an older man chuckled and remarked that the boy must have tripped over his fylgja that had run ahead unseen​. Such anecdotes show how real these invisible companions were in Norse imagination – even an accidental fall could be attributed to bumping into one’s soul-double! The key difference is that fylgja literally means “follower” whereas vård means “watcher/warden,” but both imply a spirit attached to a person. Some scholars think the fylgja was more often familial or tied to fate, while the vård was more personal and protective in everyday life. In truth, by later folklore times, people didn’t draw fine distinctions – they simply knew they had a spirit companion at their side.

Hamingja, Hugr, and Hamr

Alongside the vård and fylgja, Norse lore included the hamingja, often understood as a person’s luck or fortune, almost a transferable soul that could be passed down through generations. There’s also the concept of hugr, the part of the soul that contains one’s thoughts and emotions, which could sometimes leave the body in trance or sleep​. In Finnish tradition (which had many parallels to Norse), the itse or self-soul could wander from the body and even manifest as an etiäinen (that “firstcomer” ghost)​.

All these ideas paint a picture of how fluid and mobile the spirit was in Northern belief. The body was just one vessel; the soul or its aspects could travel, appear in different shapes, and even exist in multiple places at once. The hamr or shape was especially important – a shaman or sorcerer might send out their hamn in the form of an animal to do their bidding, and heroes could project their spirit in dreams. Thus, the vård as a soul-double wasn’t a bizarre notion but rather a natural part of this spiritually rich landscape. It was the friendly shadow of your soul, inherently you yet able to act independently.

Nature Spirits at Home

The Norse and later Scandinavians also believed in a plethora of nature spirits (vættir) that inhabited the world around them – elves in the woods, water spirits in lakes, house gnomes in barns, and so on.

The vård was essentially the human’s own nature spirit. In fact, one Swedish encyclopedia from 1921 defines the vård as “the human soul imagined as a personal nature-being and protective entity”​. People thought of their vård almost like a little house spirit assigned just to them, the way a brownie might be attached to a certain farm. This personal nature-soul watched over its human, but also had a life in the spiritual ecosystem. It could interact with other spirits, and after a person’s death, the lore says the vård might linger as a restless ghost if not properly laid to rest​. (In Sweden, a dead person’s guardian spirit appearing afterward was given a special name: genfärd, a kind of echo of the departed​.) Here we see how pagan and Christian ideas blended over time – the old vård concept merging with notions of ghosts and revenants. Yet even as a ghost, the vård was different from a spooky undead draugr; it was more like a memory or imprint, without the violent will of the legendary zombies (draugar) of Norse myth.​

Appearances and Warnings: Tales of the Vård

Shape-Shifter and Signal-Giver

Storytellers often described how a vård might appear if it chose to show itself. One common form was a small bright light – akin to a will-o’-the-wisp – flickering in the dark of night​. Many rural folk tales from Scandinavia tell of a mysterious light seen near a homestead or along a path, which people interpreted as a person’s warden spirit scouting ahead. Another form was a visible double of the person – perhaps indistinguishable from the real individual except for its sudden, startling appearance. Imagine turning a corner and coming face to face with yourself in an uncanny silence; that would certainly make your heart skip! Such an event was rare and usually meaningful. If someone saw their own double (whether in a mirror or in person), it was often regarded as a bad omen – a sign that death might be approaching. This is similar to the Irish belief in the fetch, a spectral double whose appearance often foreshadows death​.

However, seeing another person’s vård, especially before a meeting, wasn’t necessarily dire; it could just mean that person was on their way or thinking of you strongly. In one humorous Norwegian folktale, a wife hears her husband’s spirit knock and enter, and she scolds the phantom for tracking in mud – only to later realize it was his vardøger visiting, since the real husband arrives clean boots and all!​

Such stories, sometimes told with a wink, reinforced that these spirits were part of daily life and could even be cheeky.

Good and Evil Doubles

As Christianity spread through Scandinavia (circa 1000 AD and onward), people’s interpretation of the vård underwent a transformation. Christian doctrine taught of guardian angels and tempting demons, and this lens caused the singular pagan guardian to split into two in popular belief: one good and one evil guardian spirit, each vying for influence over a person​.

Folklore from the late Middle Ages talks about a bright, shining figure on one shoulder and a dark, ominous figure on the other – not unlike a haloed angel and a little devil whispering in each ear. The good vård would appear white or radiant; the evil one might appear as a black dog with burning eyes, a raven, or even a little horned imp​.

It’s fascinating that even as the old pagan idea was reinterpreted, it wasn’t entirely discarded – people still believed something spiritual accompanied them, just now filtered through a Christian moral view of cosmic good vs. evil. This shift also brought new vocabulary: rather than a single neutral “vård,” folks might refer to one’s “good angel” or lament that someone was pursued by a personal evil spirit. Yet in remote areas and in the subconscious of tradition, the idea of the singular vård as one’s soul-double persisted, especially when explaining those uncanny premonitions or encounters that didn’t fit neatly into church teachings​.

Even priests and ministers in eighteenth-century Scandinavia recorded cases of parishioners experiencing these “forerunner” events (like hearing of a visitor twice). They often chalked it up to the Devil’s tricks or simply superstition, but one senses a continued respect for the old ways beneath the surface.

Omens of Death and Fortune

In folklore, not all manifestations of a vård were benign warnings of a friendly visit. Sometimes, encountering a vård could be grave news. There was a belief that if a person’s spirit-double appeared to someone far away, especially in a distressed or lifeless form, it meant the person was in mortal peril or had just died. This is very much like the Irish fetch and Scottish wraith traditions, where seeing the wraith of a loved one – essentially their ghostly image – often signaled that they had died or would die soon​ (Indeed, the English word “wraith” itself likely comes from vǫrðr, suggesting how widespread the concept of a death-signal double was​.) Conversely, a more positive twist said that seeing someone’s double in the morning was actually lucky – an omen of long life for that person, as noted by some Irish folklore sources.

In Scandinavia, they sometimes spoke of a “förebåd” (foreboding sign) that could be either good or bad. The context mattered: a peaceful, brief glimpse of a person’s spirit might simply be their vård paying a courtesy call; a terrifying, persistent apparition likely foretold disaster. Through these stories, one sees the broader human attempt to find meaning in uncanny experiences. Rather than dismissing a strange vision or sound, people wove it into a narrative: the spirit world was sending a message. The vård, as that ever-loyal soul, usually tried to communicate care or caution. And even when it portended death, it gave the living a chance to prepare or say prayers – a final act of guardianship, perhaps, guiding one into the next world.

Kindred Beliefs: Etiäinen, Fetch, and Wraith

Across Borders and Cultures

The idea of a spirit double or guardian soul is far from unique to Norse lands; it seems to be a near-universal human fascination. Finnish folklore has the etiäinen, which we’ve mentioned – an audible or visible “first-comer” that is essentially the Finnish cousin of the vård. In a typical Finnish tale, if you’re at home and suddenly hear the yard gate creak and someone call your name, you might rush out thinking a friend arrived, only to find no one there – you shrug and say, “Ah, an etiäinen,” knowing the friend will likely show up later. Finns considered etiäinen as either a part of the person’s soul acting as a messenger or sometimes a friendly house spirit that mimics arrivals.

Interestingly, Finnish folk belief broke the soul into components much like the Norse did; they had the concept of itse (self) and luonto (spirit/nature), parts of soul that could venture out. The itse could appear elsewhere as an etiäinen, making it almost exactly the same phenomenon Norwegians call vardøger​.

Moving to the Celtic lands, Irish folklore gave us the concept of a fetch – a person’s double seen by others. The fetch (from fetch-life, as in to fetch one’s soul) was usually a portent of death if seen in the evening​.

One old Irish saying was, “If you see your own fetch, you’ll not live long after,” underscoring how ominous it was to encounter your doppelgänger. In Scotland, the term wraith came to describe a spectral figure, often of someone still alive, that appears as an omen or guardian. An early example in literature has someone exclaim “Wraith of the future!” upon seeing a ghostly figure resembling a living person in distress.

A Shared Thread

These various cultural beliefs are remarkably similar in essence. All speak of a spirit that is connected to a person but exists separately as well, capable of showing up independently. Whether it’s called etiäinen, vardøger, fetch, wraith, dopplegänger in German (literally “double-walker”), or even the ancient Roman genius, the core idea is an alter-ego soul. Often this soul-double has a protective or guiding aspect: the Finnish etiäinen was sometimes interpreted as a kind of guardian spirit doing tasks in advance to make the person’s life easier​ – for example, an etiäinen might scare away a dangerous animal on the road just before the traveler comes by. In other cases, it’s purely a psychic omen, like the British tales of crisis apparitions (where someone sees a loved one at the moment of that loved one’s death far away). Anthropologists and folklorists note that almost every culture has grappled with the idea of bilocation or dual souls. The Norse themselves had another term, “fylgja,” typically translated as “fetch” in English because of this very equivalence​. And just as the Norse spoke of a guardian spirit and sometimes an accompanying bad spirit, the Greeks spoke of a good daimon and bad daimon for each person​, and the Romans of a personal genius and juno. We see in these comparisons that the vård is part of a wider family of folklore beliefs that attempt to explain the unexplainable: those moments when the boundary between the physical self and the spiritual self seems to blur.

Linguistic Legacy

The word vård itself evolved in interesting ways across Scandinavia and beyond. In Old Swedish it was varþer, essentially the same word adapted to medieval tongue​. In modern Swedish, vård came to commonly mean “care” or “guard” (a hospital in Swedish is sjukhusvård, literally “sick-care”), retaining that sense of guardianship. But in dialects and folklore, vård kept its mystical meaning. Norwegians, as we noted, often use vardøger (or vardøger with modern spelling) to specifically mean the pre-echo of a person’s arrival – a term still known to many today for a déjà vu-like occurrence. The English language quietly carries a piece of this history: the word “wraith,” meaning a ghostly apparition, likely traces back to the Scots dialect influenced by Norse várðr​. Even the word “ward” (as in warding off danger, or being a ward of someone) is a cognate, sharing the same ancient root. It’s poetic that a term for a supernatural guardian became, in English, a term for protection and guardianship in the mundane sense. Meanwhile, regional folklore lexicons in Scandinavia have many entries derived from vård: a vålnad in Swedish is now a general word for a ghost or phantom (originally it meant an apparition of a person’s vård). And a vårdträd (“warden tree”) is the name given to a venerable tree planted on a farm believed to house protective spirits – quite literally a tree that hosts the collective vård of the homestead​. This concept of the warden tree survived strongly into modern times; there are farms today in Sweden and Norway with a big old ash or linden tree standing central, revered and never cut down because tradition says the luck of the family resides in it. In those cases, the family’s vård might be said to live under or in the tree, blending ancestor spirit, land spirit, and guardian soul all together​

The Human Fascination with Spirit Doubles

Reflections of Ourselves

What is it about the idea of a spirit double that so captivates the human imagination? Part of it may lie in something as simple as seeing one’s reflection. Imagine early humans peering into a still pond and not understanding the physics of mirrors – it must have seemed like a magical window into another world, where an exact copy of oneself looked back​. Some cultures indeed believed that your reflection was your soul, or that harming the reflection could harm the person (think of the superstition about breaking mirrors). Likewise, one’s shadow was mysterious – that dark outline following you around could easily be seen as a spirit companion, perhaps an extension of the soul​. In fact, some old folklore equates the shadow with the “dark fetch” and the reflection with the “light fetch,” giving each person two spirit followers, one dark, one light​. It’s a poetic way to explain natural phenomena: our ancestors created stories of guardian spirits to account for these everyday wonderments. The vård, as a concept, answered deep-seated questions: How can a person be here one moment and gone the next? How do we sense someone’s presence or think of them right before they arrive? Could a part of us exist outside our body? These questions have tickled minds across eras.

Boundaries Between Body and Soul

The notion of the vård sits at the intersection of life and death, the physical and the spiritual. It affirms the idea that we are more than just our bodies. In Norse myth and saga, heroes and seers regularly cross that boundary. For example, Odin sending out his ravens Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) can be seen as him dispatching parts of his spirit – almost like Odin’s own versions of a vård​. When people dreamt vividly or had out-of-body experiences (say, in a fever or trance), the framework of the wandering soul was there to make sense of it. Rather than mere hallucinations, these were the ventures of one’s free soul roaming the worlds. This belief was not only comforting (because it suggested some part of you could live on or travel afar) but also a bit unnerving – after all, if your soul can wander, might it not get lost or stolen? Many cultures developed rituals to protect the roaming soul. In Finland, if someone looked pale or “not all there,” a shaman might check if their itse soul had wandered off and perform a ceremony to call it back​. In Scandinavia, encountering a person’s vård when the person was actually far away raised concerns: is the person ill? Do they know their soul is loose? Such encounters with doubles were thus treated with a mix of awe and caution.

Folklore to Fiction

Over the centuries, the idea of spirit doubles transitioned from folklore into literature and art. Writers found in it a rich metaphor for the duality of human nature. We see echoes of the vård/fetch concept in classic stories like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a single person with two personas) or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double. While those are psychological tales, they tap into that age-old idea that perhaps there is “another me,” whether as a ghost, a conscience, or a split personality. In Gothic literature and Victorian ghost stories, apparitions of the living – known as doppelgängers – abound as harbingers of doom, the same way a peasant in Norway might tell of the vardøger he saw the night before an accident. Even today, the concept persists in our expressions. We talk about “guardian angels,” about “feeling someone walking over our grave” when a sudden shiver hits (a phrase implying a spiritual intrusion), or having a “sixth sense” about someone. All these show that the line between accepted religion, superstition, and cultural memory is thin. The vård may not be explicitly invoked in modern conversation, but whenever someone says “I swear I could feel my grandmother looking out for me” or “It was like I left my body for a moment,” they are, in a way, speaking of the very phenomenon this chapter explores.

Seeing the Unseen

Visualizing the vård is challenging – by nature it’s invisible, rarely seen except in extraordinary moments. Yet people have tried to depict it. Medieval Scandinavians, once Christianized, sometimes painted the concept in roundabout ways. For example, in church art one might find a scene of a tiny human figure (representing a soul) emerging from a sleeping body, or an angel and demon wrestling for a man’s soul on his deathbed – symbolic renditions of what had once been the singular vård. In folk art, the idea of the double might be shown through reflection motifs (a person looking into a river at their reflection, perhaps unaware their reflection has a life of its own in the painting’s narrative). In the 19th century Romantic period, artists became fascinated with doubles and ghosts. One famous painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “How They Met Themselves,” shows two lovers in a twilight forest encountering what appears to be their identical selves, glowing spectral in the gloom​. It captures that jarring mix of beauty and horror that seeing one’s spirit double would entail. Meanwhile, around old Scandinavian farmsteads, the warden trees stood as living symbols of guardian spirits. To this day, you can visit heritage farms in Sweden or Norway and see a great gnarled tree with perhaps a shrine or ribbon tied around it – a quiet tribute to the belief that in its roots and branches dwells a protective soul watching over the place​. Whether in art, nature, or story, the concept of the wandering soul-double endures, continually reimagined but fundamentally the same: a reminder that the human soul, restless and curious, might have the power to roam beyond the bounds of the body.

Sources

• Nordisk Familjebok (1921), “Vård” – A Swedish encyclopedia entry detailing the folk belief in the vård as a personal guardian soul​ runeberg.org

• Sabine Baring-Gould (1906), A Book of Folklore – Chapter VII “Fetches” discusses the widespread belief in doubles or wraiths as guardian spirits and omens​

  sacred-texts.com

• Reimund Kvideland & Henning K. Sehmsdorf (1988), Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend – A collection of authentic folktales, including examples of vardøger encounters (e.g. “She Heard Her Husband” and “He Saw His Mother”) that illustrate the vård concept in Norwegian tradition.

• Hilda R. Ellis Davidson (1943), The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature – Scholarly work examining Norse soul beliefs (fylgja, hugr, hamingja), providing context for how a concept like the vård fit into Norse views of life, death, and the soul.

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti – How They Met Themselves (watercolor, c.1860). A famous artwork depicting an encounter with one’s ghostly double, reflecting the enduring motif of the spirit twin in European art and aligning with the Scandinavian vård/fetch lore.