Draugr

The dead came in dripping wet and sat down by the fire, and the household let them. It was their own funeral ale at Fróðá. Thorod and his crew had drowned off the headland that week and the sea had kept the bodies, so when the men walked into the hall on the first evening of the feast the guests welcomed them, because a drowned man who turns up at his own wake was reckoned to be in good standing with the sea. They came back the next evening, and the one after. Then a second company came in behind them, six men caked in grave-mould, and shook the dirt out of their clothes over the first lot. The living gave up the hall. They lit a smaller fire in another room and found the dead sitting at that one too.

Nothing about this is ghostly in the way English wants it to be. The saga dead have bodies, and the bodies are the problem. Old Norse called such a creature an aptrganga, the one who walks again, or a haugbúi, the howe-dweller who keeps to his mound. Draugr is the word that has since swallowed the rest, and it did most of that swallowing late. The dictionaries record its oldest sense as a dry log or trunk, a word for a man in the circumlocutions of the old poets, and only in prose does it settle down to mean the dead inhabitant of a cairn. The tidy modern category owes a great deal to the nineteenth century, when Jón Árnason sorted his 1862 collection of Icelandic folktales into a section of Draugasögur along a scheme borrowed from the German scholar Konrad Maurer. The sagas are less organised than that. They mostly just report that a man is walking after death.

Up close the description barely varies, which is its own kind of evidence. The corpse has gone helblár, a word the dictionaries render “black as death”, or else nárfölr, corpse-pale. Glámr, when they found him out on the moor, was blue as hell and as big as an ox. Thorolf Halt-foot, dug out of his howe a season after burial, was undecayed and evil to look on, blue as death and swollen to the size of an ox, almost the same phrase word for word. There is a smell. When Grettir broke into the barrow of Kárr the Old he came down into the dark and a stink none of the sweetest before he found the gold. And there is weight. Drag-horses could not shift Glámr on level ground. When men tried to move Thorolf to a better grave the first pair of oxen foundered on the slope, and the second pair went mad at the brow of the hill, bolted down the hillside into the sea, and burst.

What raises a man is usually something that was already wrong with him while he breathed, and the sagas are blunt about it: the greedy and the overbearing come back. The surer sign, though, is the shape he dies in. Hrapp of Salmon-river-Dale, a bully to the last, asked his wife to bury him standing upright in the doorway of his own fire-hall so that he could keep a closer eye on the household, and she did not dare refuse him. He killed most of his servants inside the year. Thorolf ate nothing, said nothing, and was found the next morning still sitting in his high seat with a face so loathsome that nobody would go near it; his son had to come at him from behind, wrestle him down, and then have the wall broken open to carry him out rather than take him through the door. A body that will not lie down is a body that has not finished.

The greatest of these stories belongs to a Swedish shepherd nobody could stand. Glámr came to Thorhallsstead with grey glaring eyes and wolf-grey hair, refused to keep the fast on Yule eve, ate his meat and walked out into a blizzard. They found him the next day near a patch of ground beaten flat as though something had wrestled there, with stains of blood running up to the sheer rocks above. Whatever killed him was never seen again, a detail the saga drops and never picks up. Glámr got up. He rode the roofs at night until the rafters cracked, killed the next shepherd and left every bone in him smashed, and broke the old cowherd’s spine over the raised stone edge of a stall. Grettir came for him and lay wrapped in a cloak on the bench, and when Glámr hauled at the cloth the two of them tore it in half between them. They wrecked the hall, went out through the doorway and took the doorframe and part of the roof with them, and Grettir came down on top of him in the snow just as the drift slid off the moon. That, Grettir said afterwards, was the only sight in his life that ever dismayed him. Glámr held his eyes and laid a weird on him: never stronger than he was at that moment, wrongs and killings ahead of him, outlawry, a life spent alone, and Glámr’s eyes in front of his own for as long as he lived. Then Grettir struck the head off and laid it against the thigh, burned the body to cold coals, gathered the ash into a beast’s skin and buried it where sheep did not graze and men did not walk.

That is most of what a draugr can actually do, and it is a good deal less than the modern retellings hand it. Its strength is past reckoning and it does not tire. It kills stock and farmhands and empties valleys. Its mound can burn with a light that hangs over buried treasure, which is how Grettir knew where to dig, and it objects strenuously to being robbed of what was laid in the ground with it. What the sagas do not give it is a catalogue of spells. The shape-changing so often attached to the draugr, the flayed bull and the earless grey horse and the cat that settles on a sleeper’s chest and grows heavier, comes out of Icelandic folktale collections made centuries after the sagas. The nearest saga case is stranger and less convenient than shapeshifting: after Thorolf was burned on the shore and what ashes they could catch were thrown seaward, a cow licked the stones where the ash had blown, and the calf she bore grew into a dapple-grey bull that a blind old woman kept insisting was a troll. That is not a corpse changing shape. That is contamination.

In Norway the word went to sea. There the draugen narrowed to one specific dead man, drowned and never laid in consecrated ground, sailing a half boat in a leather oilskin with a bundle of kelp where his head should be. Hearing him or seeing him was a death notice. Fishermen would not take a seaweed-covered stone aboard for ballast in case it turned out to be him.

Steel on its own settles nothing. A sword can hack a walking corpse all night without laying it to rest, so the work is done with the hands first: get hold of the thing, master it the way one man masters another, then take the head off and set it by the thighs where the neck cannot find it, burn what is left, and put the ash into the sea or into ground nobody crosses. Occasionally there is a colder method. At Fróðá the household stopped fighting and sued instead, summoning the dead to a door-court for entering a house without leave and robbing men of life and luck, and as each sentence was read out the defendant stood up and left with a grumbling parting line. Every version of the job costs something. Grettir won the most famous of these fights and could not be alone in the dark for the rest of his life, which the saga sets down without comment as the price of the work. A draugr can be beaten. It cannot be beaten cheaply.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a draugr in Norse mythology?

A draugr is the corporeal walking dead of Norse and Icelandic saga tradition: an actual reanimated body climbing out of its grave, not a transparent spirit. The sagas more often call such a creature an aptrganga, “the one who walks again”, or a haugbúi, “howe-dweller”, and describe the corpse as undecayed, blue-black or corpse-pale, and swollen to the size of an ox.

What makes a person become a draugr?

The sagas link it to character and to posture at death. Greedy, cruel and overbearing men are the ones who come back, and the clearest warning sign is a corpse that is not lying flat: Hrapp of Laxdæla saga had himself buried standing upright in his own doorway, and Thorolf Halt-foot of Eyrbyggja saga died sitting bolt upright in his high seat. Both walked afterwards and both had to be dug up and dealt with.

How do you kill a draugr?

Weapons alone do not work, so the hero wrestles it down by hand, cuts off its head and lays the head against its thighs so the neck cannot rejoin it, burns the body to ash, and disposes of the ash at sea or in ground where nobody goes. Grettir does exactly this to Glámr in Grettis saga. At Fróðá the household instead summoned its dead to a formal door-court and sued them out of the house, which also worked.

Can a draugr shapeshift or use magic?

Not in the sagas. The shape-changing draugr that turns into a flayed bull, an earless grey horse or a suffocating cat belongs to Icelandic folktales collected centuries later, not to the medieval saga episodes. The nearest saga case is Eyrbyggja saga’s bull Glæsir, born to a cow that licked stones where Thorolf Halt-foot’s ashes had blown, which is a corpse infecting something else rather than a corpse changing form.

What is the draugen in Norwegian folklore?

In later Norwegian coastal belief the draug became a drowned man who was never buried in consecrated ground, and so bore a grudge against the living. He was pictured in a leather oilskin with a clump of seaweed for a head, sailing a half boat, and to see or hear him foretold a death. Fishermen avoided taking seaweed-covered stones aboard as ballast in case one of them was the draug.

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