The Hama and Its Faring: Evidence for a Pan-Germanic Spirit-Travel Complex

Introduction

Among the many difficulties attending the reconstruction of pre-Christian Germanic religious practice, the question of intentional spirit-travel — the deliberate separation of a soul-component from the body for the purpose of journeying to other places or other worlds — is among the most contested. The primary difficulty is asymmetric attestation: the Old Norse corpus preserves relatively coherent testimony to the practice, while the West Germanic record is fragmentary and largely refracted through hostile Christian sources. This essay argues that when the relevant evidence is assembled carefully, it points to a common Germanic conceptual framework underlying both traditions: a belief in a detachable, portable soul-form — the hamr in Old Norse, the hama in Old English — whose capacity for independent travel was a recognized feature of the world as Germanic peoples understood it, and which constituted the theoretical basis for a ritual technology of intentional spirit-travel.

The North Germanic Evidence

The fullest explicit account of intentional spirit-travel in the Germanic corpus comes from Snorri Sturluson’s Ynglinga saga, composed in the early thirteenth century but drawing on earlier skaldic and eddic material. In chapter seven, Snorri describes among Óðinn’s capacities the practice he calls hamfarir — literally “shape-journeys” or “hame-farings” — by which Óðinn’s hugr (mind, animating spirit) could depart his body in animal form, travelling to distant lands in the likeness of a bird, beast, fish, or serpent, while his body lay behind as if asleep or dead. The term hamfarir is significant: it is a compound of hamr (shape, hide, the detachable soul-form) and farir (journeys), and it implies an established practice sufficiently coherent to have acquired a technical name.

The hamr in Old Norse thought is not simply a metaphor for shape. It is a genuine soul-component, distinct from the hugr it carries, and capable of independent existence and travel. The soul-complex implied by Norse sources is plural rather than unitary: a person possesses multiple soul-components with different capacities, and the hamr is specifically the one that can detach. This is not a marginal or eccentric belief; it underlies the fylgja tradition — the fetch or attendant spirit that can appear independently of its owner — and it is presupposed by the widespread saga motif of the hamrammr, the person who is “strong in the hame” and capable of animal transformation.

The fjaðrhamr — the feather-hame — attested in Þrymskviða provides a further crucial detail. In that poem, Freyja possesses a feather-hame which Loki borrows in order to fly to Jötunheimr. The hame is here an object: it can be handed over, worn by someone other than its original owner, and used as a tool for spirit-travel. This is not a metaphor or a poetic ornament. The feather-hame is portable and transferable — it is, in effect, a ritual technology, a material vehicle for the performance of hamfarir.

The Mechanics of Hamfarir: Three Saga Attestations

The Ynglinga saga account names the practice and describes its general character; three further sources illuminate its mechanics in ways that are essential to understanding what the technology was understood to involve.

The first is the account of Kveldulf in Egils saga (ch. 1). Kveldulf — whose name means “Evening-Wolf” — is explicitly described as hamrammr, strong in the hame: at certain times of day he becomes sluggish and strange, withdraws, and is effectively elsewhere while his body remains behind. The quality is hereditary, passing to his grandson Egil Skallagrímsson. The hamrammr designation is not incidental local colour; it presupposes the entire soul-complex of hamr and hugr, and the behavioural description — withdrawal, inertness, and the period of absence followed by return — is the recognizable signature of hamfarir in progress. That the capacity runs in bloodlines is itself significant: the hama is not an acquired skill but a constitutive feature of certain persons, an aspect of what they are.

The second is the climactic battle scene in Hrólfs saga kraka, where Böðvar Bjarki — the “warlike little bear,” son of a man cursed to bear-form — fights in the shape of a great spirit-bear while his body lies in trance in the hall. His companion Hjalti, finding the body apparently absent from the battle, rouses him — and on waking Bjarki rebukes him: the rousing, he says, has not helped the king as much as Hjalti supposes. The implication is unambiguous: the spirit-bear was fighting more effectively than Bjarki’s human body could have done, and the interruption of the trance collapsed the spirit-form’s activity. This is the most mechanistically explicit account of hamfarir in the saga corpus. It demonstrates that the spirit-form and the body are understood to operate in a relationship of dependency — the body in trance sustains the spirit-form’s activity — and that the interruption of one terminates the other.

The third is the remarkable passage in the twelfth-century Historia Norwegiae describing a Sámi wizard whose gandus — a term used in this Latin source for the spirit-form — travels in the shape of a whale through a lake, encounters an enemy spirit-form in the shape of sharpened stakes concealed in the depths, and is fatally pierced. The wizard’s body, lying in the hall, dies simultaneously from the wound. The Historia Norwegiae is a Latin Christian text, not a saga, and the author regards the practice as diabolical; but the mechanism he describes is identical to what the Norse sources assume. The wound to the spirit-form kills the body. The body and the hame share a single life; what destroys one destroys both. This is the clearest single statement of the body-spirit feedback that makes hamfarir a technology of genuine existential risk rather than a mere imaginative exercise.

Taken together, these three accounts establish the mechanics of the practice with some precision: the body enters a state of trance or inertness; the hamr departs in animal form and operates independently in the world; the body-spirit connection remains live and bidirectional, so that harm to the spirit-form harms the body; and the capacity for this form of travel may be constitutive of certain persons rather than universally available. This is a coherent technical account, not a scattered collection of folk motifs.

The West Germanic Evidence

Against this background, a passage in the Old English charm Wið Dweorh (Against a Dwarf), preserved in the Lacnunga collection (British Library, Harley MS 585), takes on considerable significance. The dwarf — not a creature of later folklore but a malevolent spirit capable of causing illness through physical contact with a victim — approaches in a form described as spider-like, and he carries his hama in his hand.

The word hama is the direct West Germanic cognate of Old Norse hamr: the same root, the same meaning, the same conceptual range. And here it appears in precisely the same configuration as the fjaðrhamr of Þrymskviða: as a portable, separable object, carried in the hand of a spirit-being who is himself in transit across the world. The dwarf is doing, in malefic mode, exactly what Óðinn does in the Ynglinga saga account: traveling to a distant point in spirit-form, with his hame about him, to act upon a body he encounters there.

The significance of this parallel cannot be overstated. The Wið Dweorh charm does not argue for or explain the concept it presupposes. The hama in the hand of the traveling dwarf is presented as an understood given — a feature of the world that requires no elaboration for its audience. This is the texture of genuine embedded belief, not learned borrowing or literary convention. The West Germanic peoples clearly shared the same underlying soul-complex as their Norse-speaking neighbours: a detachable, portable soul-form capable of independent travel and physical effect upon the world it moves through.

A closer reading of the charm reveals a further dimension of the hama-complex that the Norse sources, for all their relative richness, do not make equally explicit. The spiderwiht does not merely arrive in spirit-form: it claims the victim as its hæncgest — its horse — and lays a teag (tether, leash) about the victim’s neck. The hama is therefore not simply a travel-garment enabling the spirit’s own locomotion through the world. It is the instrument by which a spirit interfaces with and takes possession of a physical body, riding it as one rides a horse. The technology works in both directions: the practitioner goes out into the world in the hama, and the malefic spirit comes in and rides a body through it.

This places the Wið Dweorh charm in direct relationship with the Old English mære tradition — the nightmare-riding spirit, cognate with Old Norse mara — and with the broader European complex of spirit-riding beliefs that runs from the Norse mara through the Latin incubus to the later folklore of the Alps and beyond. The spiderwiht of the charm is doing precisely what a mære does: it comes in the night, claims the sleeper’s body as its mount, and rides. The hama in its hand is the enabling instrument of that possession. The charm tradition thus preserves not one but two aspects of the hama-complex: the soul-form as vehicle for the spirit’s own travel, and the soul-form as the mechanism of spirit-body coupling more generally. These are not separate beliefs but two expressions of a single underlying technology.

What the West Germanic record does not preserve, by contrast, is first-person testimony to the intentional practitioner’s experience of hama-faring. This absence is almost certainly a function of the sources rather than of the practice: the penitential and homiletic tradition that mediates most of the surviving Old English magical vocabulary is systematically hostile to any claim of intentional spirit-travel, and would have had no interest in preserving such accounts. The charm tradition gives us the cosmological furniture; the native descriptive literature that might have told us how practitioners worked within it does not survive.

A second West Germanic instance of hamfarir is a story of King Gunthram of Burgundy. Gunthram lived in the 6th century, and this particular tale was written down by Paulus Diaconus in the Historia Longobardorum in the 8th century:

“When he went once upon a time into the woods to hunt, and, as often happens, his companions scattered hither and thither, and he remained with only one, a very faithful friend of his, he was oppressed with heavy slumber and laying his head upon the knees of this same faithful companion, he fell asleep. From his mouth a little animal in the shape of a reptile came forth and began to bustle about seeking to cross a slender brook which flowed near by. Then he in whose lap (the king) was resting laid his sword, which he had drawn from its scabbard, over this brook and upon it that reptile of which we have spoken passed over to the other side. And when it had entered into a certain hole in the mountain not far off, and having returned after a little time, had crossed the aforesaid brook upon the same sword, it again went into the mouth of Gunthram from which it had come forth. When Gunthram was afterwards awakened from sleep he said he had seen a wonderful vision. For he related that it had seemed to him in his slumbers that he had passed over a certain river by an iron bridge and had gone in under a certain mountain where he had gazed upon a great mass of gold. The man however, on whose lap he had held his head while he was sleeping, related to him in order what he had seen of it. Why say more? That place was dug up and countless treasures were discovered which had been put there of old.”

This rather remarkable passage has Gunthram, like Odin, projecting as a “reptilis” which in Latin is used rather broadly to refer to snakes, lizards, and worms, and like Odin again, subsequently crawls into a “mountain.”

The Christian Refraction

Bede’s account of Dryhthelm in the Historia Ecclesiastica (V.12), composed in the early eighth century, is relevant here not because it preserves pre-Christian belief intact, but because of what it reveals about the conceptual infrastructure that Christian vision literature was working with and against. Dryhthelm dies — or appears to die — and his animating principle departs his body, journeys through otherworldly landscapes under the guidance of a luminous figure, witnesses scenes of purgation and paradisal peace, and returns to re-animate his body. The narrative is thoroughly Christianized in its framing and its interpretation. But the underlying mechanism — a soul that leaves the body, travels independently through other realms, and returns — maps exactly onto the framework of hamfarir, and Bede presents it as intelligible to his Northumbrian audience rather than as something that requires elaborate theological scaffolding to make thinkable.

It would be incautious to argue that Bede’s Dryhthelm account is simply a Christian hamfarir narrative in disguise. What can be said with more confidence is that the concept of a soul departing the body for journeys to other realms was sufficiently established in the mental furniture of eighth-century Northumbria that it could serve as the vehicle for a Christian vision narrative without apparent strain. The Christian and the pre-Christian frameworks share a common structural premise, and neither requires the invention of the other.

Linguistic and Structural Conclusions

The linguistic evidence reinforces what the textual parallels suggest. Old Norse hugr and Old English hyge are cognates — the same word, the same concept: the animating mind or spirit, the essential self, and in Norse sources the specific soul-component that undertakes hamfarir while the hamr serves as its vehicle. The coexistence of both cognates in their respective traditions is consistent with the hypothesis that the soul-complex they reflect is common Germanic inheritance rather than Norse innovation or West Germanic borrowing.

Taken together, the evidence supports the following conclusion, offered as a well-grounded inference rather than a demonstrated certainty: the concept of a detachable, portable soul-form — the hama/hamr — capable of independent travel through the world and through other realms, was a common feature of Germanic cosmological thinking across both the North and West Germanic traditions. In the Norse corpus, this concept generated an identifiable ritual technology (hamfarir) with its own technical vocabulary. In the West Germanic corpus, direct testimony to the practitioner’s experience of this technology is absent, but the cosmological framework it requires is clearly present, surfacing in charm material as an unremarked-upon given.

The term drȳcræft — attested in the West Germanic magical lexicon and covering a range of practices involving specialist knowledge of the unseen order of the world — may plausibly be understood as encompassing, among other things, the craft of hama-faring. This specific identification cannot be directly evidenced from surviving texts, and should be held as inference. What the evidence does not allow us to doubt is that the Anglo-Saxon audience for the Wið Dweorh charm understood, without being told, that a spirit could travel the world with its hame in its hand.

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Primary sources:

Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga, ch. 7

Þrymskviða

Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ch. 1

Hrólfs saga kraka, trans. Jesse L. Byock (Penguin, 1998), chs. 17–34

Historia Norwegiae, anon., 12th century

Wið Dweorh, in Lacnunga, British Library, Harley MS 585

https://thelatinreadingblog.blogspot.com/2017/07/paulus-diaconus-remains-of-unknown.html

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, V.12