Haugbúi

Also Known As: Old Norse haugbúi, “mound-dweller”, from haugr, a burial mound, and búi, one who lives in a place; rendered barrow-dweller, barrow-wight and barrow-bider by the saga’s Victorian translators
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Icelandic Mythology, Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A dead man who keeps his body, his strength and his temper inside his own burial mound, and defends the wealth buried with him against anyone who digs down for it.
Role in Mythos: The haugbúi is the obstacle at the bottom of a mound-breaking story, the thing a young man has to beat in the dark before he can carry out the gold.
Relation to Humans: Left alone in its barrow it does the living no harm, and the sagas take the trouble to say that a man under the right protection gets no scathe from one. Break the roof in and the arrangement ends, because it is grave goods the mound-dweller is holding, and it holds them with both hands.

Late in a winter evening on the island of Haramsey, walking back from a neighbour’s farm, Grettir Ásmundarson saw fire come out of the ground. It stood over a headland to the north, on open earth where no one lived. He asked the farmer Audun what it was. Audun answered in the manner of a man who would rather not have been asked: that fire was ruled by one into whose matters it availed little to pry. Grettir said that at home in Iceland they held such a flame to be burning above hidden treasure. He came back the next morning and asked for the digging tools.

Under that headland stood the barrow of Karr the Old, and Karr had been dead for years without letting it slow him down. The saga says he so haunted the place that he swept away every farmer who held land there, until his son Thorfinn owned the whole island by default. This is worth pausing on, because Karr is the most famous mound-dweller in Norse literature and the tidy modern rule about his kind says he should never have left his grave. Retellings sort the Norse undead into two clean boxes: the draugr walks abroad, the haugbúi stays home with the gold. The sagas are not that tidy. Their writers used the words loosely, and Grettir’s saga alone reaches for five of them across its own restless dead, haugbui and draugr and afturganga and troll and ovaettr, without ever settling which is which. The very best example of a stay-at-home corpse had been out ruining the neighbourhood for a decade.

What is consistent is the setting. A haugbúi is made by burial rather than by death. Put a man in the ground with his weapons, his horse and a chest of silver under his feet, and something in the arrangement can refuse to settle. Daniel Sävborg, going through where the mound-breaking motif actually appears in Old Norse tradition, found it to be old and frequent and native to the sagas of Icelanders rather than borrowed in late from legendary romance. The Norse had been telling this story for a long time. Somebody is buried rich. Somebody else wants the money.

Ask what a haugbúi looks like and the record goes quiet in an interesting way. Grettir never saw Karr. He broke the mound open, tore away the rafters, and went down a rope into a dark the saga calls total, with a smell in it none of the sweetest. He worked by hand. Horse bones first, scattered on the floor. Then the arm of a high chair. Then a man sitting in the chair, and heaped gold and silver, and a small chest of silver set beneath the feet. Not one line describes a face. The swollen blue-black corpse that gets attached to this creature in modern retellings belongs to Glamr, further on in the same saga, who is found dead on the mountain blue as Hel and as big as an ox. Glamr walks. The mound-dweller in chapter eighteen is a pair of hands coming out of nothing.

Grettir had the treasure gathered at the rope’s end when the grip took him. He dropped the gold and turned into it, and they went at each other without much care, breaking apart everything in the chamber, until they staggered back to where the horse bones were and wrestled there a long while, each of them going down on one knee and getting up again. Above ground, Audun heard the fall come through the earth and decided his friend was dead. Audun ran away. He left the rope, which meant that when Grettir had drawn the sword Jökulsnaut, Jokul’s gift, cut the head from the barrow-dweller’s neck and set it against the body’s rump so it could not knit itself back together, he had to climb out of the mound hand over hand and then haul the treasure up after him on a line.

He carried it into Thorfinn’s hall at dinner and tipped it out on the table. One piece he kept back until last: a short-sword, the best weapon he had ever handled. It turned out to be Thorfinn’s own family heirloom, the one thing his father had refused to leave him, and Thorfinn took it, put it at his bed-head, and told Grettir he would have to earn it. He did, later, against berserks, but that is a different chapter.

The pattern repeats across the corpus with the details shuffled. In Harðar saga, Hörðr and his foster-brother Geirr open the mound of a long-dead viking called Sóti in Gautland and take a gold arm-ring, and Sóti answers them in verse, promising that the ring will be the death of every man who owns it. In Hervarar saga the mound talks back at greater length still, when Hervör comes to her father Angantýr’s grave on Samsey and stands there through fire and argument until the dead man gives up the sword Tyrfing, along with a warning that it will destroy her whole family. The mound-dweller is not always a beast. Often it is a relative with an opinion.

Its powers are the powers of an ordinary strong man who has stopped needing to breathe, rest or let go, which turns out to be enough. Its limits are just as plain. It is tied to its ground, and beyond the barrow it has no reach at all, so the simplest defence against a haugbúi in the whole of Norse tradition is to leave the mound shut. Once you are inside, the remedy is manual: beat it, behead it, and put the head where the body cannot reach it.

The mound was not only a threat. Þorleifr jarlsskáld lay in his and gave poetry away out of it; a shepherd named Hallbjörn hali, who wanted to make verse and could not, slept on the grave and woke able to do it. The idea outlasted the language. In Orkney and Shetland the word wore down from haugbúi into hogboy and hogboon, and the mound-dweller became a household guardian who took milk and a share of the bannock in return for keeping the farm right. In the tale of the hogboon of Hellihowe the family let the offerings lapse, the spirit turned on them, and they loaded the cart and moved away, and they were barely over the hill when a cheerful voice from inside the butter churn remarked what a fine day it was for flitting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a haugbúi?

A haugbúi is an undead being from Norse and Icelandic saga literature: a corpse that stays inside its own burial mound and defends the treasure buried with it. The name is Old Norse for “mound-dweller”, from haugr, a burial mound, and búi, one who lives in a place. Victorian translators of the sagas rendered it as barrow-dweller, barrow-wight and barrow-bider.

What is the difference between a haugbúi and a draugr?

In modern usage a haugbúi is the mound-bound undead that stays in its grave, while a draugr is the corpse that walks abroad and troubles the living. The medieval sources are far less consistent than that, using haugbúi, draugr and aptrganga loosely and sometimes applying more than one to the same corpse. Karr the Old, the best-attested haugbúi in the sagas, is explicitly said to have haunted his island and driven the farmers off it.

What does a haugbúi look like?

No saga actually describes one. In Grettir’s saga, the fullest account, the hero fights Karr the Old in complete darkness and knows him only as a body seated in a high chair and a grip that seizes him from behind. The swollen, blue-black, ox-sized corpse often attributed to the haugbúi is drawn from the description of Glamr, a walking revenant elsewhere in the same saga.

How do you kill a haugbúi?

By hand, in its own mound, with no charm or prayer involved. Grettir wrestles Karr the Old among the horse bones on the chamber floor, cuts off his head with the sword Jökulsnaut, Jokul’s gift, and sets the severed head against the corpse’s rump so the body cannot rise whole again. The easier answer is avoidance, since a haugbúi cannot leave its barrow and can do nothing at all to anyone who leaves the mound closed.

Is a haugbúi always hostile?

No. The poet Þorleifr jarlsskáld gave the gift of verse from inside his grave mound to a shepherd called Hallbjörn hali, and in Hervarar saga the mound-dweller Angantýr, though he resists, finally hands his daughter the sword she has come for. In later Orkney folklore the same figure survives as the hogboon, a mound-dwelling household guardian who protected a farm in exchange for offerings of milk and bread.