Årsgång: to see what the upcoming year holds, take a walk alone in a dark forest!

Imagine a dark, creepy forest on a winter’s night, very silent aside from the delicate crunch of snow under your feet.
Imagine being alone, without any kind of technology, mobil phones or social media, far enough from your village that you couldn’t hear a single voice or dog barking.
You’ve spent all day in darkness, avoiding eating, drinking, or speaking with someone, and told no one of your plans.
Now it’s midnight, and the only things separating you from your goal are the woods, again, and a handful of threatening creatures who want to lead you astray.
That is, according to folklore, that’s how some adventurous Swedes have spent the first moments of a new year!

This ritual, known as årsgång, sometimes translated as the year walk or yearly round, promised information about the future.
At least, if youfollowed the rules and reached the local church or graveyard!
This form of divination is recorded in documents dating back to the 1600s, although many such records refer to it as “ancient,” actually making it unclear exactly when Swedish people began performing the ritual.
Well, årsgång is not the only form of curious divination in Swedish folklore, as exist also rituals like circling the house three times counterclockwise with a porridge scepter before eating your Christmas dinner, that were supposed to provide a little glimpse of things to come. However, the year walker had the potential to learn not only his own fate but that of the entire village.
With greater reward, however, came greater risk.

The walk took place on New Year’s Eve or another winter holiday, when Europeans believed dark forces and supernatural beings were active and the dead mingled with the living.
This let the walker tap into the prophetic power of the season…but also risking frightening encounters, such as Bäckahäst, Huldra, Kyrkogrimen or Nattravnen, a bird that was closely associated with unhappiness and death in Scandinavian folklore.
Of course, cemeteries were particularly active and walkers reported songs coming from open graves, dead spirits walking about, but also fresh graves that did not exist before.
They could also expect to encounter frightening entities like bäckahäst, a brook-horse, who would invite children to ride on it and lengthen its back to accommodate more and more children.
When the horse felt it had enough riders, it would jump into a body of water, drowning all of its riders and taking their souls for its own.
Or the huldra, a beautiful, tree-like nymph, the forest guardians, who would lure people to their homes to either marry them or kill them.
Either way, the victim would be lost forever.
Other creatures did all they could to distract a year walker.
Talking, laughing, or being afraid was forbidden during the disturbing walk, and those who broke these rules sometimes sacrificed their sanity, lost an eye, had their heads distorted, or simply disappeared.

And then there was probably the most terrible of all creatures, Kyrkogrimen.
When churches were built in medieval times, sometimes an animal was buried alive under the floors. Most often they were goats because they were relatively cheap, but there are also some versions that the criminals were buried alive in a similar way. In some cases, the criminal’s heart was cut out and placed in the carcass of an animal that was sacrificed. The spirit of these animals, which became the informal caretaker of the church, was Kyrkogrimen.
Therefore, you should do a walk around the church and look into the door keyhole at your own peril and risk.

In any case, the walk was supposed to be a solitary experience, but walkers were allowed to join each other if they met up while performing the ritual, as long as they didn’t talk.
All this was endured in exchange for seeing omens, which were often bleak and frightening themselves.
For example, the walker might gain information about marriage, the harvest, the possibility of war, or if there will be fires, but the most common information was about who was going to die in the upcoming year.
One learned this by visiting the fresh graves, observing visions through the church keyhole, or even encountering funeral processions during the walk.
Sometimes these signs pointed to the death of the walker himself…

Images from web – Google Research