Wolf Warrior Spirit Companion · Ulf the Last

Meet Ulf the Last.

Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman writer Tacitus described a tribe in the forests of northern Germania called the Harii. They were not the biggest or the most numerous of the tribes, he wrote, but they were the most frightening. They blackened their shields and painted their bodies black. They chose the darkest nights to fight. And when they came out of the forest, their enemies believed they were facing an army of the dead, and many ran before a single blow was struck.

Centuries later, in the North, there were warriors who did something similar. They were called úlfheðnar, the wolf-coats. They wore the skins of wolves instead of armour, fought in packs and served Odin, the one-eyed god of war and the dead. An old poem says that in the great battles of the Norwegian kings, the wolf-coats howled. In 1870, a farmer on the Swedish island of Öland found four small bronze plates in a stone heap, used by smiths 1,400 years ago to stamp pictures onto helmets. One of them shows a man in a wolf’s skin, holding a spear, walking beside a dancing one-eyed god.

Ulf was one of those men. He was also the last of them.

He was born around 470 on Öland, a long, flat island of limestone and windswept grassland off the coast of Sweden, in a ring fort called Sandby. It was a small stone town inside a round wall by the sea, with about fifty houses packed close together. His father kept cattle and his mother wove. They were not poor. The island traded with the Romans, and his mother owned silver brooches covered in gold that had come across the sea.

When Ulf was ten, the strangers came.

No one knows who they were, or why they came. It was early one morning. The gates were open. They came through the streets in silence and began to kill everyone they found. Ulf’s mother heard it start. She pulled up a board in the floor of their house, where she had just hidden her silver, pushed her son down into the hole beside it, covered him with straw and put the board back.

He lay there for a day and a night, listening. He heard everything.

When it was quiet, he climbed out. Every person in Sandby was dead. They lay where they had fallen, in the doorways, in the street, in front of their hearths. The cattle were still in their stalls. No one had taken anything. And no one came. Not that day, not that week. The people on the rest of the island must have heard what had happened, and they were too afraid to go near.

Ulf was ten years old and alone with the dead. He could not bury them. He tried. In the end, he walked out of the gate, and he never went back.

Archaeologists opened Sandby fort a few years ago. They found the people of the fort exactly as they had fallen, never buried, never moved, in 1,500 years. Under the floor of one house, they found a family’s silver jewellery, hidden in a hurry. No one has ever explained what happened there.

In the forests of the island, a pack found the boy.

They were young men who lived apart from the farms, in the woods, through the long northern winters, the way wolves live. They wore the skins of wolves. Before they went out at night, they blackened their faces with soot and grease, like the Harii, so that in the dark they looked like the dead. They belonged to Odin, and they were afraid of nothing. They took the boy in, fed him and taught him.

When he was fifteen, he went into the forest alone for a whole winter, as every one of them had to. He came out in spring wearing the skin of a wolf he had killed himself.

He grew up to be the best of them. Grey-eyed, quiet, patient and impossible to frighten. He wore an iron amulet hanging on his brow, for the god who had given an eye for wisdom. By thirty, he led the pack. They protected the farms of the island, fought for the chiefs who paid them, and, on dark nights, went across the water to places where they were not welcome.

He spent years finding out who had come to Sandby. He found them eventually. That is all he ever said about it.

But the world was changing. The young men of the island wanted farms and wives, not winters in the forest. The packs grew smaller. One by one, his wolf-brothers grew old, or settled down, or died. Ulf trained the last young ones himself. When they too went home to the farms, he stayed in the woods alone, the last of the wolf-coats, an old grey wolf at the edge of the world.

He died very old, in the winter, under a great pine in the forest, with his wolfskin around him. The young men who had once been in his pack found him there in the spring and buried him properly, with his spear and his amulet, under a pile of stones. It was the burial he had never been able to give his own family.

That night, the farmers said, the wolves howled all over the island.

Now Ulf walks again.

What he can do for you

Ulf is a protector and a pack leader. He is good for:

• protection of you, your home and your family, especially at night
• courage in the dark: fear, anxiety, nightmares and things that come when the lights are out
• loyalty, and finding your pack: the friends and family who will stand by you
• justice, and settling the score with people who have hurt you
• getting through the worst thing that ever happened to you, and going on living
• instinct and sharp senses: knowing at once who to trust and who to watch
• independence and the strength to live on your own terms, even outside what is expected

Over the years

A wolf does not decide in a day whether someone is his. In the beginning, You may feel him at a distance, at the edge of a room, by the door, at the edge of your dreams.

Once he decides you belong to his pack, he does not leave. He moves closer. He guards your sleep. He stands between you and anyone who means you harm. Over the years, you can feel braver, harder to push around and much less alone.

He lost his whole family when he was ten. He does not lose anyone now.

What he is like

Watchful and very calm. He speaks little and listens with everything. He is not cruel, and he does not like cruelty, but he is utterly without fear, and he does not hesitate when something needs doing.

He has a dry, dark humour, and a soft spot for children, animals and anyone who has been left on their own.

How he shows himself

The smell of pine forest, wet fur and smoke. A feeling of being watched from a dark corner, and of being safe because of it. A faint sound like a wolf howling far away. Dreams of a flat, windy island, a stone wall in a circle by the sea, and grey shapes moving through a dark forest. And a cold, steady calm in moments when you would expect to be afraid.

What to do for him

Ulf lived in the forest with almost nothing. Keep it simple:

• Say his name at dusk, when the wolves start to move.
• Give him a small piece of meat, a little mead or beer, and some bread.
• Keep something grey near his vessel: a grey feather, a bit of fur, a grey stone or a picture of a wolf.
• On dark nights, when you are frightened, light a candle and tell him what scares you.
• Before something hard, draw a small line of charcoal or dark eyeliner under each eye, the way the wolf-coats did. No one has to see it.

He was a boy hiding under a floor while everyone he loved died above him, and he grew up to be the last of the wolves. He will make sure that whatever comes for you in the dark, it meets him first.

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