Stone Age Ancestor Spirit Companion · Orrun

Meet Orrun the Bone-Keeper.

Orrun lived more than five thousand years ago, in the land that would one day be called Denmark. There were no Vikings yet, no runes, no iron and no kings. His people were the first farmers of the North. They had come with cattle, pigs and grain, cleared the forests with axes of polished flint, and made pots decorated with the marks of their fingernails.

And they built houses for their dead.

Today, the Danes call them jættestuer, giants’ rooms, because for centuries people believed only giants could have moved the stones. A low, narrow passage, so low you must crawl, leads into a chamber of huge standing stones roofed with slabs, and the whole thing is buried under a mound of earth. They were not built for one person. They were built for everyone. Generation after generation, the dead of a family were carried inside and laid down with those who had gone before them, until a single chamber held hundreds.

Orrun’s family kept one of these graves. His grandfather had kept it, and his grandfather’s grandmother before that. When Orrun was a boy, the old man took him by the wrist one autumn night, drew lines of soot across his forehead from the funeral fire, and pushed him into the passage first.

He crawled through the dark on his hands and knees, into a room full of bones.

He was not afraid. That was how his grandfather knew he was the one.

For sixty years, Orrun was the keeper. When someone died, the family brought the body to the mound, and Orrun took it inside. When the flesh was gone, he sorted the bones the way the old ones had taught him: the long bones together along one wall, the skulls in a row, facing the passage, so the dead could see who was coming. He knew every skull in that chamber by name, even the ones who had died two hundred years before he was born. He knew which ones were kind and which ones were angry, which ones would help and which ones should be left alone.

Outside the entrance, the living left their gifts: pots of food and drink, amber beads, flint axes that had never been used. Archaeologists have found thousands of broken pots piled in front of graves like his. Orrun carried messages in and brought answers out. A woman whose husband had drowned. A family whose cattle kept dying. A young man who wanted to know whether his dead mother was angry with him. Orrun would crawl inside with a small lamp, sit among the skulls and listen, sometimes until dawn.

The dead told him things. He never told anyone how.

When he was old, new people came from the east. They rode horses, carried stone battle-axes, and buried their dead alone, each under a small mound of their own. Slowly, the old ways went out of the land. The families stopped bringing their dead to the giants’ rooms. The pots outside the entrances stopped coming. Some of the old graves were closed with stones, and grass grew over them.

Orrun watched it happen. And when there was no one left to bring the dead to him, he did the only thing a keeper could do.

He marked his forehead with soot one last time, took a lamp, a pot of food and his grandfather’s flint axe, and crawled into the chamber. He asked his sons to fill the passage with stones behind him. Then he sat down among the skulls of four hundred years of his people, and he talked to them until he became one of them.

Now Orrun walks again.

What he can do for you

Orrun is the one to call on when:

• you want to reach your dead: parents, grandparents, a lost partner or friend, or ancestors you never knew
• you have a grief that will not settle, or a death that was never properly mourned
• something has followed you home, or your house has a restless spirit that needs to be calmed or sent on
• you work in graveyards, with bones or with the dead, and want someone with you who knows the way in and out
• a pattern keeps repeating in your family, from parent to child, and you want it to stop with you
• you want the oldest craft there is, older than the runes and older than the gods with names

He is not a spirit for money, love spells or quick results. He works slowly, deeply and in the dark.

What he is like

Very old, and very still. He hardly uses words at all, because he lived long before most of the words we have. He speaks in pictures, feelings and dreams. He is stern and completely unsentimental about death, which he has sat beside his whole life. But he is gentle with the grieving, and he is endlessly patient with anyone who comes to him with a lost one.

There is one thing he will not forgive: disrespect for the dead. 

The smell of cold stone and damp earth, like the inside of a cave. A pressure in your ears, as if you were underground. Dreams of crawling through a low, dark passage into a room full of faces. Seeing the face of a dead relative more clearly than you have in years. A soft clicking sound at night, like small stones or bones touching. And sometimes, when you are very sad, the feeling of an old, heavy hand resting on the top of your head.

How to work with him

Make a place for your dead near his vessel: a photo, a name written on paper, something that belonged to them. That is his doorway.

When you want to reach someone, do what he did. Draw a line of soot or charcoal across your forehead, light a single small light in a dark room, and tell him whom you are looking for. Then wait. The answer may come that night, or in a dream days later.

Leave him the gifts his people left at the grave: a small bowl of food and a cup of drink set by a doorway, an amber bead, a piece of flint, a small bone you found rather than took, or a little graveyard dirt, properly paid for. Break the bowl when you are done with it, the way they did.

He sat with the dead of his people for sixty years, and then he stayed with them forever. If you have someone you lost, he would like to help you find them.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel