Norse Winter Spirits: Húsvættir, Draugr and more
Winter in the old Norse world was more than snow and silence - it was a season when the boundary between the living and the unseen thinned. Families honoured house spirits, elves wandered near the homestead, and the Wild Hunt roared across storm-heavy skies. This blog explores the húsvættir who guarded farmsteads, the álfar linked to land and ancestry, the restless winter dead, and the echoes of these beliefs in later Scandinavian folklore. Through sagas, folk customs and historical insight, we uncover how the North understood winter as a spirit-haunted time - and why those ideas still resonate today.
Haunted North: The Norse Understanding of Ghosts and the Supernatural
The Viking Age world was alive with unseen forces. To the Norse, the dead did not simply vanish into a distant afterlife - they lingered, walked, warned and sometimes rose again in flesh and fury. Ghosts could be physical revenants, dream visitors, protective ancestors or restless spirits tied to land and lineage. Alongside them lived trolls, wights, elves and other beings who shaped daily life as surely as storms or seasons. Drawing on sagas, Eddic poems and later Scandinavian folklore, this exploration reveals a world where the boundary between living and dead was thin, fate was ever present, and the unseen was woven into the fabric of existence.