Glámr

Something heavy is sitting astride the ridge of the farmhouse, drumming its heels on the turf until the rafters groan. Then it climbs down. The door shudders, and a head comes in under the lintel, huge and misshapen, and keeps rising until it is level with the crossbeams. On a bench against the wall a man lies very still under a shaggy cloak, feet braced, watching through the gap.

The thing in the doorway was once a shepherd called Glámr. His story fills four chapters of the Saga of Grettir, written in Iceland in the fourteenth century about events placed some three hundred years earlier, and it is the most admired ghost story the sagas have to offer. It begins with a staffing problem. Þórhallr Grímsson farmed at Þórhallsstaðir in Forsæludalr, a side valley above Vatnsdalr in the north, and he was rich in sheep and cattle. He could not keep a herdsman. Something unseen walked his pastures, and the men he hired came home hurt or would not stay the season.

At the Althing he took the trouble to Skapti the Lawspeaker, who knew of a man newly arrived from Sylgsdalir in Sweden. Strong, Skapti said, and not to everybody’s taste. Þórhallr met him by chance soon afterwards on a hillside, leading a horse loaded with brushwood: a very big man, strange to look at, with staring grey eyes and hair the colour of a wolf’s pelt. Glámr named his terms. He would mind the sheep, he would do as he pleased, and he was foul-tempered when crossed. Ghosts did not worry him.

He came at the start of winter and the work gave him no trouble. He had a great hoarse voice, and when he bellowed across the slopes the flock ran together to it. Everything else about him gave offence. There was a church on the farm and he would not set foot in it. He wanted no hymns and no prayers, he was sour and stubborn, and the farmer’s wife disliked him more than anyone.

On the morning of Christmas Eve he got up early and called for his food. The mistress told him that Christian people fasted that day. Glámr answered that he could not see what good such customs did and that folk had been better off as heathens, and he threatened her until she fed him. He went out into a day that never properly grew light. Snow was driving, the wind was rising, and his breath, the saga adds, stank. For a while his voice carried down from the high ground. Later it came fainter. By evening there was a blizzard, and he did not come home.

The searchers went out after mass the next morning. They found the sheep scattered through the drifts, and far up the valley a patch of ground where stones and frozen earth had been ripped loose, as if two very strong things had wrestled there. Glámr lay close by. He was dead, black as Hel, and swollen to the size of an ox. A trail led away from the spot toward the cliffs at the head of the valley, each print as broad as the bottom of a cask, with blood splashed along it. People decided that the old evil of the place had killed the shepherd and had taken its own death wound doing it. That creature was never seen again. The saga never says what it was.

They tried to bring him to the church and could not. The first day they got the body as far as the lip of a gully. On the second, oxen could not drag it once the ground levelled. On the third the priest came, and they searched until dark without finding it; when they went back without him, there it lay. So they heaped stones over Glámr where he was and left him.

He did not stay there. Before long people were meeting him about the farm, and some fainted and some lost their reason. After Christmas he took to riding the roofs at night until they nearly gave way, and then he walked by day as well. He eased off as the sun came back, as the dead in Iceland do, and returned with the dark. The next winter’s shepherd, a big foreigner named Þorgautr who had laughed at the whole business, was found on Christmas morning across Glámr’s cairn with his neck snapped and every bone in him broken. He was carried to church and buried and lay quiet. The old cowherd went next, his spine broken over the stone slab that divided two stalls in the byre, while the cattle gored one another around him. Þórhallr fled. Every animal he left behind was killed. Glámr then worked his way down the valley, and no horse or dog on those farms outlived him. Þórhallr’s daughter sickened under the haunting and died.

Grettir Ásmundarson heard about it and came north because he could not leave such a thing alone. His uncle Jökull told him plainly that luck and ability are two different gifts. The first night at Þórhallsstaðir nothing stirred. On the second his horse was dragged from the stable with its bones broken. On the third he lay down on the bench in his clothes.

Glámr took hold of the cloak and pulled, and pulled again, and the two of them tore it in half between them. Then Grettir went in under his arms and locked his hands behind the dead man’s back. They wrecked the hall. Benches splintered and the panelling came away as Glámr hauled him toward the door, and Grettir, who knew he would fare worse outside, dug his feet in against a stone sunk at the threshold. When the pull was hardest he changed his mind and drove forward instead. Glámr went over backwards through the doorway, taking the lintel and part of the roof with his shoulders, and Grettir came down on top of him.

There was a moon that night with cloud racing across it. As Glámr fell the cloud cleared and he turned his eyes up into the light. Grettir said afterwards that it was the one sight that ever frightened him. The strength went out of him and he lay between the worlds, unable to draw his sword, and in that pause Glámr spoke. Grettir had come to only half the strength he would have reached, he said, and would get no more. From this night his deeds would turn to bad luck and killings. He would be outlawed and made to live alone. And those eyes would be in front of him always, so that solitude would be hard to bear, and that would bring him to his death.

When the fit passed, Grettir drew the short sword he had once carried out of a burial mound in Norway, cut off Glámr’s head and set it between the thighs. He and Þórhallr burned the corpse down to cold ash, tied the ash in a skin bag and buried it where neither people nor animals had cause to go.

What Glámr could do follows from what he was. He was not a spirit. He was a body, heavier and stronger than in life, and everything he did was done with weight: straddling roofs, breaking spines, resisting the pull of oxen. He drew his strength from winter and darkness, and whatever killed him seems to have passed into him, since the valley traded one haunter for a worse one. His eyes could empty a strong man of his strength. His words, spoken at the edge of a second death, held.

His limits were just as physical. He faded with the long days of summer. He could be gripped, thrown and cut. A head removed and placed out of reach of the neck, and then fire, finished him, and after the burning the valley had peace. Holy ground would not take him, which is why he walked at all, and the men he killed and who were given church burial did not rise.

The curse outlasted him. Grettir was outlawed within a few years and spent close to two decades hunted across Iceland, so afraid of the dark that he risked his life for company, until his enemies killed him on the island of Drangey. Icelanders kept a saying from the story: a person who sees things other than as they are has been lent Glámr’s eyes. The modern word for that kind of false sight still has his name in it. The name is older than the shepherd, too. An early list of poets’ terms gives glámr as a word for the moon, the same pale thing he was staring at when he spoke.

Readers have set this fight beside Beowulf’s struggle with Grendel since the 1870s: a hall at night, a waiting hero, a wrestling match that tears the building apart. Victorian retellers gave Glámr another label. Sabine Baring-Gould called him a vampire in 1863, and the tag stuck for a generation. The saga’s own word for what he does is simpler. He walks again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Glámr in Grettis saga?

Glámr is a Swedish shepherd in the Icelandic Saga of Grettir who is killed on Christmas Eve and returns as a draugr, a walking corpse. He haunts the farm of Þórhallsstaðir in Forsæludalr, killing people and livestock, until the hero Grettir Ásmundarson wrestles and destroys him. His name is usually written Glam in English translations.

How did Glámr die and become a draugr?

Glámr refused to keep the Christmas Eve fast, ate, and went out to the sheep in a snowstorm. He was found the next day black, swollen to the size of an ox, and dead after a fight with the unseen creature that had haunted the farm before him. His body could not be brought to a church, so he was buried under a cairn in the open, and soon afterwards he began to walk.

What was Glámr’s curse on Grettir?

Glámr told Grettir that he would never grow stronger than he was that night, that his deeds would turn to bad luck, and that he would be outlawed and forced to live alone. Glámr also said his eyes would always be before Grettir, making solitude unbearable and leading to his death. Afterwards Grettir was afraid of the dark, and he was eventually killed as an outlaw on the island of Drangey.

How did Grettir kill Glámr?

Grettir waited for Glámr in the hall on the third night, wrestled him, and threw him backwards out through the doorway. He then cut off Glámr’s head with a short sword and laid it between the corpse’s thighs. Grettir and the farmer Þórhallr burned the body to ash and buried the ash in a skin bag far from any path.

What does it mean to have Glámr’s eyes?

In Iceland, a person who sees things other than as they really are was said to have been lent Glámr’s eyes. The saying comes from the moment in the saga when Glámr’s moonlit stare drained Grettir’s strength and left him seeing phantoms in the dark. The modern Icelandic word glámsýni, meaning an illusion or false sight, preserves the name.

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Draugr, Haugbúi, Gjenganger, Vættir, Hel, Myling, Grendel, Beowulf, Wight, Revenant, Undead, Nachzehrer, Strigoi