Norse Irish Connections In Folklore

The triquetra, the symbol of Irish paganism, was also found inscribed upon viking artifacts throughout Europe.

In Norse mythology a fylgja is the same as the fetch in Irish mythology. In Norway a fylgja has been called vardoger. These terms all refer to the soul of someone who can visit people in dreams and appear at distant places through a process of bilocation. Padre Pio was an Italian who was known to have his spirit bilocate to people he was praying for, people he was praying for would see his spirit near them. That would be described by the IRish as his fetch.

Seeing the spirit realm would be called second sight by the Irish and clairvoyance by the French.

What is called ghosts by the English, fae by the French, faeries by the Irish, elves by the Norse, lutins by the Normans, and huldufolk by the Icelanders are all the same thing. These are spirits of the dead, both ancestors and non-ancestors.

The Irish word gealta means to be driven insane by battle that results in one developing a sort of madness where one can't deal with the world. This word is used in the Icelandic Havamal with the spelling gjalti in verse 129, and has the same meaning. The Madness of Sweeney is the Irish story that relates ot the phenomena of gealta.

The west European pagan spirituality is based on a belief in ghosts and the ability of peoples souls to travel to each other in both dreams and waking. The spirits of the dead can curse the living if they are unhappy, this is evident in the eddic poem grogaldr. This is also why people venerated the ancestors, to gain their protection and avoid being cursed by them.

The other universal idea was the belief in the evil eye to cause misfortune, the hatred felt by a person for another functions as a silent prayer to cause bad luck. But these prayers can also be said out loud in teh form of curses, also love functions in the opposite manner. The afterlife in European paganism actually is earth. The spirits of the dead live on earth and their well being is tied to the well being of their descendants. So to improve ones place in the afterlife you have to do things to improve the fate of the tribe to which you belong so that the tribe is in a good state in the future.