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Remnants
of Revenants: The Role of the Dreaded Draugr in Medieval Iceland
"Just as the day is given over to the living, the night is the
domain of the dead." European legends of deadly revenants date from ancient Germanic folklore and literature. Like their ghostly namesake, the stories were resurrected in post-Icelandic Conversion sagas and in medieval ghost stories from northern England. This paper will study the nature of the revenant theme, its appearance in Icelandic sagas after 1000 A.D., and its manifestation in northern England from 1200 A.D. on. The term "revenant" is a French term for ghost, derived from the verb revenir, "to return." The Icelandic term is more specific to the returning and violently unhappy dead: the feared draugr. These Scandinavian ghosts are almost always purely physical. They rise from the burial grounds (howes), bash the living, and generally make horrible nuisances of themselves until heroes overpower them and destroy their corpses for good. They owe their place in folklore to earlier Germanic literature: a heroic and supernatural tradition that shows up in the medieval Icelandic sagas and ghost stories from northern England. Tracing the Ancient Germanic Story However, ancient Germanic tradition thrived in Iceland where the Viking settlers did not have to contend with a native culture. Even though Iceland converted to Christianity in 1000 A.D., its 12th to 14th century poets and writers produced an amazing body of work modeled on the ancient Germanic traditions of their Viking ancestors -- complete with Germanic monsters, gods, heroes and ghosts. The Scandinavian Ghost Story Their resting place was quite important in the draugr scheme of things. Scandinavian barrows, called howes, were reported to be ringed by barrow fires that formed a barrier between the living and dead worlds. In The Saga of Grettir, Grettir sees such a flame on the barrow of Kar the Old. Grettir commented that the fires may signal the presence of buried treasure, but the farmer he was speaking to replied, "The owner of this fire, I think, is one whom it is better not to enquire about." Some draugr stayed in their howe, only stirring themselves to attack grave robbers and treasure hunters who ventured to enter their domain. Other draugr would poke about just outside their howes, waylaying any beast or human unlucky enough to pass by too closely. In these cases, moving the howe to a more remote site usually stopped the attacks. However, the most feared and violent of all the draugr would roam an entire region. These draugr traveled into towns and broke into great halls to kill people and animals and to ride the rooftops of the houses, apparently a favorite sport among the giant-like creatures. The Draugr at Home -- or Not Sometimes the living came seeking advice, helpful spells or items they had some right to. In the 14th century Hervarar Saga, Chapter IV, a female warrior named Hervör insisted on visiting the haunted island where her father and uncles were buried so she could claim a famous sword from her father's grave. When she approached, she saw cold fires blazing around the howes and the dead men standing in the dark doorways. She roused them by reciting a ritualistic verse claiming her right to speak with the dead: Awake, Angantýr! Hervör rouses you- Her father seems nice enough about it, but warns her about her actions: Hervör, daughter, why call you so? Indeed the sword Tyrving was cursed, and the girl's comment at the end of the chapter proved prophetic: I seemed to be lost between the worlds, Around the Howe. Some draugr would leave their howe to haunt the surrounding countryside, attacking people or animals that approached too closely. In these cases, the living would move the howe to a more remote place. This often did the trick, since the revenant would only charge out of its resting place if a living being got too close. This happened in a morbidly funny story where a cruel and violent man named Hrapp insisted to his wife Vigdis that she bury him upright underneath the doorway of his great hall ("fire hall") so he could "keep a more searching eye on my dwelling." When he died she buried him according to his wishes, too frightened to do anything else. Sadly he kept walking out of the grave and killing the servants, so Vigdis left to live with her brother. The hero Hoskuld took his men and went to Hrappstead, dug Hrapp out of the floor, and buried him in a remote place. This cut down on Hrapp's walking about, but a curse seemed to cling to Hrappstead. After her son died there "in a frenzy" Vigdis flat-out refused to go home. (Laxdaela Saga, Chapter XVII) Wide-Ranging Revenants. Some draugr were so driven, strong and bold that they left their howes far behind to ravage an entire region. These powerful draugr ripped great hall doors off their frames, danced on town roofs, and smashed beasts and humans to smithereens. The story of Grendel from Beowulf is this type of draugr, and so is the revenant Glam from the Grettis Saga (see the Appendix for Glam's story and the bitter fate of the hero who beat him). Living with the Dead Some draugr never even made it to the howe before being burned. In the Flóamanna Saga, a witch's body kept trying to get up and kill people on its way to the burial ground, so the exasperated bearers put her down and burned the corpse. Due to the threat of the roaming daugr, most Icelanders knocked on doors using code. This is because one night, an unfortunate servant heard a single loud knock on his lord's door and went to investigate. He was a long time returning, and when his master and men went out to look for him they found him stark raving mad from sighting a draugr (Floamanna Saga). To make sure this didn't happen to them; most Icelanders would knock on each other's door three times after dark. Only evil creatures would give one thundering knock. Weather and the time of year also played a part in hauntings. The worse the weather was the worse the attacks; which made draugr invasions quite the problem in the winter time. Some draugr didn't have to wait for weather, but could create their own darkness or mist to hide their actions in daylight. Not all revenants were that bad. One ghost walked after death but was frightened by the living and ran away, while another was rather sad. This ghost, from the Svarfdæla Saga, was a warrior named Klaufi. Klaufi was murdered and returned to haunt the woman who caused his death. The woman's brothers cut the corpse's head off, but Klaufi simply tucked his head under his arm and kept on coming. He spoke with his kinsmen, who fought to avenge him, but later decided that Klaufi was a bit too active and burned him to ashes. Sometimes the revenants appear in groups, as with the plague victims from Eyrbyggja Saga who try to come back home, and a crew of drowned sailors who drippingly appear in the Laxdaela Saga. In all these cases, when the bodies are dug up and burned the hauntings stop. Sometimes householders took matters into their own hands and made sure the dead couldn't return home - they knocked a hole in a wall and took the corpse out that way, then walled it up again. Since a corpse could only come back the way it had been brought out, it would be confronted by a solid wall! Contemporary Iceland was Christian, and many of the anti-draugr measures had Christian elements. In the story of Glam from the Grettis Saga, the men who found Glam's cursed corpse fetched a Christian priest to exorcise it, but Glam's body disappeared until the priest gave up and went away. Icelandic priests were apparently used to dealing with the walking dead and didn't turn a hair when asked to protect their flock against a revenant. In the Eyrbyggja Saga, the Christian priest Arnkel builds a high wall around the suspect grave of Thorolf Halt-Foot. And Snorri the Priest, the lead character in the saga, advises a haunted community to use a sort of ghost trial to banish errant spirits. Not all revenants come back on their own power but are forced back by witchcraft and sorcery. The Saxo Grammaticus, Book I tells the story of an unsavory giantess and shape-changer named Hardgrep. She raised an orphaned prince named Hadding from birth, and then later seduced him. The two traveled together, and one night they passed a hut where a man had died. Hardgrep practiced black arts to draw the spirit back from the underworld. The spirit cried out and cursed Hardgrep: "For when the black pestilence of the blast that engenders monsters has crushed out the inmost entrails with stern effort, and when their hand has swept away the living with cruel nail, tearing off limbs and rending ravished bodies; then Hadding, thy life shall survive, nor shall the nether realms bear off thy ghost, nor thy spirit pass heavily to the waters of Styx; but the woman who hath made the wretched ghost come back hither, crushed by her own guilt, shall appease our dust; she shall be dust herself." That same night, a disembodied giant's hand tore Hardgrep to pieces in front of Hadding. It was a fearful thing to rouse the dead. Many of the draugr are outright jealous of the living, which fueled their attacks. They are also really, really hungry. One encounter in Gautrek's Saga (also told in Saxo Grammaticus), was between the sword brothers Aran and Asmund. The two of them had sworn to each other that when one of them died, the other would keep watch for three days inside the howe. Aran later died, so Asmund brought Aran's living hound, hawk and horse with him into the howe and settled down to wait. The first night, Aran's corpse got up and killed and ate the hawk and hound, and the second night did the same to his horse. The third night Asmund stared to feel drowsy, and before he knew it Aran was munching on his ears. One assumes that Asmund left after that.
The resulting ghost stories are called miracula (miracles) and date roughly from 600-1000 A.D. They follow the literary form of the lives of the saints (hagiographical literature), and come almost exclusively from monastic writers. The ghosts are purely spiritual sendings, species umbratica: "appearance of a shadow." However, the non-corporeal nature of the ghosts did not make their appearance unimportant. These were matters of heaven and hell. Two brothers were quite surprised to see their dead father striding through the air towards them. He looked as he had in life, bearing a spear and wearing fine armor. The father told them that he had seized land from a nearby monastery and so was suffering torment, and his sons must grant the land back to the monastery immediately. When the brothers pointed out that their father didn't look like he was suffering overmuch, the father replied that every bit of armor and each of his weapons burned his skin like hellfire, which indeed they were. He held out his spear to them and one son grasped it, only to drop it because it burned. The father also mentioned that the sons were subject to the same fate. The sons agreed to return the land, and upon their agreement their father reappeared in different garb, thanked them, and said he was released from torment. The brothers kept their word: they gave back the land, became monks, and told the story to Pope Leo IX himself. But as time went on, even miracula showed a stubborn tendency to imbue the imago with corporeal tendencies and minds of their own. By 900 A.D., Augustine's philosophy about the imago was itself buried, and stories of physical hauntings and threatening creatures dramatically increased. Augustinian clerics began to write ghost stories in the tradition of the mirabilia, the "marvelous." Some of these mirabilia, and the secular ghost stories that would appear two centuries later, contained startling plots containing the Scandinavian draugr. Unlike the divine miracula, mirabilia reported on current supernatural events and shared many literary traditions with secular writing. They were still full of the glory of God -- the writing came from 13th century clerics who were attached to courts as scribes and poets. But since most of medieval Europe was Christian, the Church was no longer fighting pagan beliefs tooth and nail as it had before 1000 A.D. If the miracula used supernatural events to convert its readers, the mirabilia ghost stories retold wondrous happenings for their own sake. Mirabilia development coincided with the Church's cult of the dead; not a third-rate Hammer horror film, but the development of the formal liturgy of the dead. The liturgy involved specific prayers for the deceased on set days following the death, and ended with making offerings to the poor in memory of the deceased. Writers reported that if the liturgy was rushed or neglected, the dead were likely to return and violently protest. Although the usual subjects of mirabilia were apparitions, dreams and visions, several of them included dangerous spirits like the draugr. One political commentary from the monks at Peterborough Abbey reported monster sightings when an unsuitable French abbot was assigned to them. The English monks saw supernatural villains riding about in the Abbey's deer fold. The hunters were dark and huge and ugly and all their hounds dark and broad-eyed and ugly; and they rode on dark horses and dark stags…. The monks heard the sound of the horns that blew in the night… about twenty or thirty horn-blowers. Some mirabilia even reported ghostly physical violence. In this report, a church's dead congregation bears more than a passing nod to Scandinavian tales of groups of draugr. (One wonders which Christian concepts this particular congregation ascribed to.) Bishop Baudry had presided over the rebuilding of a church that the Slavs had destroyed. Early one morning, the priest who was placed in charge was disturbed to witness a congregation of the dead singing psalms and celebrating the Mass. He reported this to his bishop, who told him to reenter the church and sleep there, presumably to frighten away the spirits. The priest did, but the angry congregation threw him out on his ear, bed and all. He told this to the bishop, who insisted that he return and not leave under any circumstances. The priest did so, but the congregation - who apparently had had enough - grabbed him and lifted him onto the altar, then set him on fire and held him down until the poor man died. The shocked bishop ordered three full days of a penitential fast for the hapless priest's soul. The Draugr in a Green and Pleasant Land Other draugr-like ghosts appear in a set of Yorkshire tales from William of Newburgh. William, a Yorkshire monk born in 1136, wrote an English history called Historia Rerum Anglicarum and included reports of hauntings in contemporary Scotland, Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire. The stories with their threatening corporeal ghosts were quite unusual for the England of miracula and mirabilia literature, and display a commonality with the Scandinavian revenant stories. One of the stories concerns a revenant from Buckinghamshire with distinct similarities to Hrapp from the Laxdaela Saga, the draugr who haunted his own house. After the Buckinghamshire man died, his ghost repeatedly entered his house and kept trying to sleep with his wife. The alarmed woman fought him off three nights in a row, at which point she got people to stay with her. The ghost then turned from her to haunting his brothers in the same house, and when they got companions too he started to annoy the local livestock. The community sought advice from their Archdeacon, who in turn consulted the bishop of Lincoln. The bishop's advisors told him quite candidly that it was common to dig up the body of the restless dead and cremate it - another holdover from Scandinavian ghost stories and folklore. But the bishop was appalled at the idea and instead told the community to open the grave, place a scroll of absolution from the bishop on the corpse's chest, and close it up again. This was done, and to the community's vast relief the man lay still after that. William included several more ghost stories starring the physical undead. One blood-sucking ghost, an early form of vampire, is also found in the Saxo Grammaticus. An anonymous monk from the Cistercian abbey of Byland in Yorkshire reported another set of alarming regional hauntings. He observed some miracula conventions like suffering souls seeking help from the living to end their torment. The difference between other miracula tales and the Byland monk's is the physical nature and shape-changing abilities of the Yorkshire ghosts. One of them is the ghost of a former mercenary soldier that takes the form of a rearing horse, then changes into a haystack with a light in the middle of it, and finally assumes a human shape. In this shape, he suggests that the living man he is confronting carry the ghost's sack of beans as far as a waterfall! Other ghosts from the Byland reports are quite similar to Scandinavian draugr. In one of them, a revenant named Robert escapes from the cemetery every night to scare the nearby town and make the dogs howl. And the ghost of a curate is even worse - he comes back to visit one of his ex-mistresses and gouges out her eyes. The living's defense is also similar to the Scandinavian tales. The wicked curate is dug up and thrown into a pond, and a large villager manages to hold the ravaging Robert at the cemetery entrance until a local priest could arrive to exorcise it. Conclusion The end of Grendel's life was Synopsis: The Story of Glam from the Grettis Saga Anglo-Saxon Verse Form: The Story of
Glam In addition to the documentation, I wrote two versions of the poem: the
longer one contains most of the story elements from The Grettis Saga's
version but the Anglo Saxon verse form isn't as strict. The shorter version
doesn't have all the details but is a stricter historical form. This is
the one I performed.
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