Vardøger

Gravel gives twice under a boot outside, the way it does when a man shifts his weight to lift a latch. The porch boards take him. A key turns, the hinge complains, the door swings inward on a draught of cold air. Nobody comes through it. Half an hour later the same sequence repeats in the same order, and this time there is a man standing in the doorway with snow melting off his shoulders, wanting to know why the coffee is already poured.

Norwegians have a word for what happened the first time. Vardøger. It is not the man and it is not a ghost, but it belongs to him, and it gets home before he does.

Almost the whole tradition is auditory. The accounts gathered from every part of Norway keep returning to the same modest domestic noises: a door creaking, a tread on the stair, boots scraped on a mat, and above all a cough, that one throat-clearing rasp so specific to a particular person that a wife could pick it out of a crowded room. Sometimes what arrives is simply the rhythm of a walk, unmistakable and half a room away. What almost never happens is the thing outsiders expect. Vardøger are rarely seen.

When they are, they look exactly like the living person, doing precisely what that person will do a few minutes later. The rarity is part of the record rather than a modern hedge. Sigrid Undset, writing in Aftenposten in 1937, laid it out for her readers without any fuss: hearing a vardøger was common enough, seeing one was a good deal rarer, and she had seen one twice.

The word is older than any of the stories that survive around it. Its first element is the Old Norse vǫrðr, a warden or watchman, the same root that gives English “ward”. The second element is where the certainty runs out. The most repeated gloss pairs the warden with hugr, mind or thought, producing something like a guardian mind, which is tidy and satisfying and may well be right. The standard Norwegian dictionary is more careful, reconstructing a compound that means little more than guardian, or watch and keeping, from the verb for guarding.

Behind the sound there was once a whole being. In older Norwegian belief the vardøger is not an event but a companion, a following spirit carried from birth, and at that depth the word becomes interchangeable with fylgje. Jonas Lie, in 1873, gave a character who could see every man’s vardøger or fylgje, the two terms set side by side as one thing. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson has a man reckon that if any vardøger at all is following him, it is certainly a bear, which is a joke that only lands if the reader already knows a following spirit can wear an animal’s shape.

Living with one required manners. Jens Andreas Friis, travelling in the Norwegian mountains and writing it down in 1876, recorded a piece of dairy-hut etiquette: when someone had gone out and the door had already been shut behind them, the girl minding the summer farm was to open it again and let the vardøgle out after the departing person. A door held ajar into the cold for something nobody could see, so it would not be shut in and left behind.

The other side of it was darker and much simpler. Ruth Hult, collecting folk memory in Østfold in the 1930s, wrote down the rule as her informants gave it. Do not turn round. Whoever saw their own vardøger would soon be dead.

Norway is not alone in any of this, though it seems to have kept the neatest vocabulary for it. Finland has the etiäinen, a double that turns up ahead of a person and does what that person is about to do. On Iceland the related word fylgja settled on a different meaning, the spirit of a dead kinsman going before a living relative. Ireland’s fetch does comparable work but is bound up with warnings of death and sickness rather than with supper being ready. Sweden has no word for it at all and tells the stories anyway, about people who come before they come.

What the vardøger can actually do is narrow and very odd. It shifts a person’s presence forward in time by a matter of minutes. It reproduces sound with a fidelity that fools the people who know that sound best, which is the whole point, since a stranger’s footstep announces nothing. It operates without the knowledge or intention of its owner, who is generally still out on the road, thinking about the weather.

The limits are just as narrow. It carries no message and answers no question. It cannot be summoned, sent, bribed or interrogated, and there is no ritual anywhere in the tradition for making one appear. It reports exactly one fact, that somebody is nearly here, and the instant they walk in it has nothing left to say. Mostly it is just a noise in an empty house.

None of this died with the lamp-lit farmhouse. Norway’s national encyclopedia notes that legends of the vardøger are found across the whole country and that belief in it is still alive among some people today. In 1987 Georg Hygen, a botanist and a leading figure in the Norwegian Parapsychological Society, published a book-length study of it subtitled “our paranormal national phenomenon”. The word has also slipped its folkloric moorings altogether. Aftenposten in 1946 could call an economic downturn a financial vardøger, a thing that makes its noise before it turns up. The metaphor needed no explaining. Every reader had already heard a door open on nobody.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vardøger?

A vardøger is a spirit in Norwegian folk belief that arrives somewhere shortly before the living person it belongs to, usually announcing itself through sound. Witnesses hear footsteps, a door, or a person’s distinctive cough, and then the person themselves turns up minutes later and repeats the whole sequence. Every person is said to have one.

Is a vardøger the same as a doppelgänger?

No. A doppelgänger is a double that generally means trouble, while the vardøger is a benign herald that simply gets somewhere first. Older Norwegian belief treats it as a guardian companion, essentially the same being as the fylgje, rather than as an omen of misfortune.

What does a vardøger sound like?

It sounds exactly like the person it belongs to going about ordinary business: a creaking door, boots on the stairs, a key in the lock, or a familiar cough. Norwegian accounts are overwhelmingly about noise rather than sight, and the sounds are recognisable precisely because they are so particular to one individual.

Is it bad luck to see your own vardøger?

Yes. Norwegian tradition recorded in Østfold in the 1930s held that seeing your own vardøger meant you would die soon, and the advice was not to turn round. Seeing anyone else’s carries no such penalty, and in any case sightings of any kind are far less common than hearings.

Do Norwegians still believe in the vardøger?

Some do. Norway’s national encyclopedia records that stories are found throughout the country and that the belief remains alive among some people, and the word has also become a general Norwegian metaphor for anything that announces itself before it arrives.

Related Entries

Fylgja, Hamingja, Gjenganger, Draugr, Myling, Hulder, Norns, Etiäinen, Fetch, Doppelgänger, Wraith, Banshee, Ankou, Qareen