THE WOLF SONG

A haunting Swedish lullaby (Vargsången)

At 2 AM this morning I was in the Forest, singing a wolf song in Swedish. It is an old lullaby, with an interesting twist or ancestral wisdom teaching embedded in it.

I have reached the middle point of five weeks of total solitude. I said “Hej!” (Hello!) from a 10 meter distance to our neighbours this morning and that has been the full extent of my in-person human interactions so far. Solitude is a landscape one traverses. It has hills and dales, rivers and roaring oceans, also very dark forests where unknown presences lurk and great teachers suddenly step out from behind trees. Prolonged solitude always takes me into the realm of fairy tales. They are not only stories, but places in my own psyche, landscapes of the human soul (I often call them “soul-scapes”). Previous essay: Power Animal or Aspect of Our Own Soul?

In “real life” there are two wolf packs in our local area. Our local Master Boar Hunter told me this. To British or American ears his words may sound strange, but he was actually complaining about the fact that there are too few of them, meaning that the deer population has exploded. And this, in turn, means that the farmers struggle because large herds of deer are eating all their crops. (We all like delicious fast food, don’t we?) His wisdom teaching (delivered as a rant!) was that wolves keep the local eco-system balanced, or as finely tuned as a concert piano.

Perhaps unsurprisingly grief work has been a major theme, during this time alone. As I have committed to wild swimming (in the lake here on our doorstep and also in the Baltic Sea) those interactions with water have stirred my inner ocean and cooked up some (healing) storms.

Lone Wolf: Opener of the Ways (painting by Imelda Almqvist)

Old Norse had two words for wolf: úlfr and vargr. The word úlfr has positive connotations and Ulf remains a common first name for a man in contemporary Swedish. The word vargr has a very different energy signature: it sounds frightening and refers to a monster lurking in darkness on the fringes of human society. It was often used to denounce someone as an outlaw or evildoer. A lowlife, you could say, though the proper Old Norse word for that was níðingr, where níð refers to the direction “down”. Going down, pointing down, being the lowest of the low.

Old Norse also has the word vargljóð, meaning wolf songs, the howling of wolves. And that term describes best what happened to me last night. Painful memories were floating up. I tossed and turned in bed for two hours but could not sleep. I decided to get up instead and sing the Wolf Song (on loop) in the forest (in what passes for darkness, at this time of year). The English version of the lyrics appears below (in my own translation):

A wolf howls in the forest at night

He cannot sleep, though he wants to

Hunger tears through his wolf-belly

And it is cold in his den

You wolf, you wolf, do not come here

You will never have my child!

You wolf, you wolf, do not come here

You will never have my little one!

A wolf howls in the forest, late at night

He howls from sheer hunger and laments

But I will give him the tail of a pig

Such things are suitable for a wolf-belly

You wolf, you wolf, do not come here

You will never have my child!

You wolf, you wolf, do not come here!

You will never have my little one!

As I kept singing this song, I woke up the birds. They joined in and added a lighter (and higher) note. Together we became the dawn chorus as the sky continued to brighten and Sunna (the sun) turned around and popped above the horizon again.

Not only that, the song also turned around. I discovered that it contains a frequency (or vibration) which actually attracts wolves (well, it may be the promise of a pig’s tail!) So I felt our local wolves drawing closer and listening attentively - but of course I never saw a glimpse of them. There was one moment when the song was bouncing off the trees and their seemed to be an echo (or reply) from only a short distance away.

Night Flight: Witch Flying On A Wolf Bone (painting by Imelda Almqvist)

The singing had expressed my grief, my yearning (soul howling) for a fairer world. A world where all children have a parent or protector who says: “YOU WILL NEVER HAVE MY LITTLE ONE!”

The line about the pig’s tail also points at a profound wisdom teaching, one that I am most familiar with from the practice of Tibetan Chod: Cutting the Ego, where we do inner work to locate the “demons” inside ourselves. They are really hungry beings, or hungry ghosts. By acknowledging and feeding them, something miraculous and profoundly healing occurs: our “demons” become our allies. They are no longer hungry, so they can focus on other things and become supportive and helpful.

We can keep our children safe AND feed hungry ghosts or hungry ancestors! We can also give wild animals their due: enough wild land for them to support themselves and raise their young. We can choose to step away from black-and-white thinking (or demonizing) and accept that all non-human beings have their place and role in the Web of Life too, that we are all equal in the eyes of the Creator, Prime Mover, Great Goddess (or however you conceptualise this). We all have an equal right to exist - so we need to learn how to co-exist peacefully.

I went home and fell into a deep sleep for a few hours.

Our neighbour (who is a retired sheep farmer here in the “outback”) likes saying that he too once had his 15 minutes of fame. A pack of wolves appeared and killed many of his sheep. (Tame sheep being the “wolf version of fast food!”) This “massacre” made it onto Swedish national TV and he was interviewed by journalists about co-existing with wolves.

For those who follow the issue: Sweden compensates farmers for losses from wolf attacks and also subsidizes protective fencing. But, in all fairness, farmers argue that the compensation does not cover their full costs or balance out the anxiety and disruption caused to their lives. In truth farmers often shoot wolves, even out-of-season, when hunting is not allowed. I once met a farmer with a rifle in the forest, further north in Sweden, who was on an obsessive quest to kill the local wolves. In Sweden this is an illegal act.

On a related note: five years ago my brother sent me a picture of a wild wolf sighted in my native Netherlands. It had not escaped from a zoo. There is now an established wolf pack in the Veluwe area (a forested and heathland region in the Netherlands). Wolves are protected animals in my country of birth. More information

Below this essay you will find the Swedish version of the song and a YouTube link so you can hear the song (sung by a professional, not me in my croaky raven voice!)

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out one essay a week, due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). If you would like to see regular posts about about sacred art, Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

Vargsången

Vargen ylar i nattens skog

Han vill, men kan inte sova

Hungern river i hans vargabuk

Och det är kallt i hans stova

Du varg, du varg, kom inte hit

Ungen min får du aldrig!

Du varg, du varg, kom inte hit

Ungen min får du aldrig!

Vargen ylar i nattens skog

Ylar av hunger och klagan

Men jag ska ge'n en grisa svans

Sånt passar i vargamagar

Du varg, du varg, kom inte hit

Ungen min får du aldrig

Du varg, du varg, kom inte hit

Ungen min får du aldrig

Sung by Jonna Jinton

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.

Website:                           

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

YouTube Channel:             youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist

Online School:                  https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook:                            https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

Instagram:                          https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/

Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist