An Old Woman Seen Leaving, and What It Meant

Njals Saga, one of the longest and most carefully constructed of the Icelandic family sagas, stages one of the clearest surviving depictions of hamingja taking visible, almost embodied form. Shortly before the household at Bergthorshvol is burned with Njal and his family inside, a character is shown seeing an old woman leaving the farm, an image the saga's internal logic and later scholarly commentary read as Njal's hamingja departing ahead of his death, abandoning him at the exact moment his luck was about to run out entirely. The scene works because it assumes an audience already fluent in the underlying belief, that a person's luck could be perceived, however briefly, taking a form separate from the person themselves, connecting hamingja conceptually to the fylgja tradition of guardian spirits that likewise sometimes appeared visibly at moments of crisis.

Modern scholars of Old Norse religion, including Rudolf Simek, treat this passage as one of the strongest pieces of literary evidence for how concretely hamingja was imagined, not as a mere figure of speech for good fortune but as something close to a quasi-personal companion whose presence or absence a sufficiently perceptive onlooker could actually witness.