Vardøger — your double, arriving a few minutes before you
The sound of a person arriving before the person does — footsteps, a cough, the latch — and then no one there, the real arrival still minutes away. The one figure in the section the country never had to revive, because the word is still in everyday use.
A vardøger is the sound of a person arriving before the person does. Footsteps on the entry stair, the scrape of the boot-mat, the latch, the cough of a man stamping snow off his boots — and then no one there, the man himself still half a kilometre down the road. Fifteen minutes later he comes in and does all of it again, exactly.
It is a kind of half-soul that runs ahead of its owner out of habit or affection. The word descends from Old Norse varðhygi — vǫrðr, a guardian element, the same root as English warden, plus hugr, the travelling mind-soul of older Norse belief — and the medievalist Else Mundal traced it back to the saga-era fylgja, the spirit-companion bound to a person from birth to death.
Most of the time it was domestic and unalarming. A wife hears her husband come into the kitchen, hang his coat, set down the milk pails — turns, and the room is empty; he arrives for real a quarter of an hour later. What makes it uncanny rather than terrifying is the direction it faces. The German doppelgänger is a thing you see, and to see your own was an omen that you were about to die; the vardøger is a thing other people hear, and it walks in front of its owner instead of confronting them.
But the herald had an edge. A vardøger heard too often, or heard for someone not expected home at all, was read as a sign of coming illness or death — and the wives of fishermen on the coast were said to hear, some evenings, the boots and the latch of men who would never actually come through the door.
It is the one figure in the section the country never had to revive, because it never went away. The word is still printed in the current Bokmålsordboka, still alive in the old dialects as vardyvle and vardøgl, and still said plainly — Jeg hørte vardøgeret hans i går kveld, I heard his vardøger last night — at a Norwegian breakfast table, half-shrugging, while the trolls and the nøkk stay shut in their books.