Hamingja - Personal Luck
Hamingja is one's personal luck or fortune, an entity that can be cultivated and passed through families.
Hamingja is personal luck that functions almost as a spiritual companion. It can be strengthened through honorable deeds or weakened through shameful ones. Hamingja can be shared with allies and is passed down through family lines, accumulating or diminishing.
His hamingja was with him that day; no sword could find his flesh.
Hamingja represents the Norse understanding of personal fortune as a cultivated quality.
Various Sagas
Written about in
- What the Havamal says about knowing yourself
Luck is described as something you carry and can spend, strengthened by honourable acts and worn down by shameful ones. It is also the part of a self that a family inherits.
- What Norse wisdom says about being wronged
Hamingja is personal luck treated almost as a companion — strengthened by honourable deeds, weakened by shameful ones, shareable with allies and passed down the family line. So the manner of a revenge is priced inside the system itself: a shameful one diminishes the luck, and the diminished luck is what the next generation inherits.