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.