Wight

Here came walking in a spider-wight. He had his harness in his hand and said that you were his horse. He laid the traces on your neck, and the two of them began to travel out of the land, and as soon as they were clear of it the fever started to cool.

That is a piece of an Old English charm copied into the manuscript now known as the Lacnunga, and it is a prescription for a fever. In the charm the illness is a dwarf. The cure is a second creature that walks in through the door of the house, bridles the sick person, and rides the sickness away over the boundary until the heat goes out of it. Nobody says what the spider-wight looks like. It arrives, it does the work, and the charm hands over to the dwarf’s sister, who swears an oath that the illness will never trouble this patient again.

The word doing the heavy lifting there is *wiht*, and it did not mean monster. In Old English it meant a creature, a being, a made thing, anything at all that had been brought into existence. The Anglo-Saxon dictionary tradition records it applied to flies and maggots, to asps, to the aurochs of the rune poem, which is a *módig wuht*, a proud wight, and to the entire population of the world under the phrase *ealra wihta*. The Exeter Book riddles use it constantly as the polite placeholder for whatever the answer turns out to be. *Ic eom wunderlícu wiht*, says one of them: I am a wondrous wight. The answer is a leather bottle.

So a physical description is not available, and never was. The word describes membership rather than anatomy. What the beings called wights have in common is not a shape but a status, which is why the sources are perfectly comfortable using the same term for a bottle in a riddle and for the thing that comes down off the moor at night.

That night end of the range is well populated. Grendel enters *Beowulf* as *wiht unhælo*, the unholy creature, and when the poem reaches the dragon two thousand lines later the men on the plain look down and see *syllicran wiht*, a stranger wight, lying by its gold. Old English poetry uses *werge wihta* for devils. The glossators who worked on the Lindisfarne Gospels reached for *yfel wiht* to translate *phantasma*, the word for what the disciples thought they were seeing when a figure came walking towards their boat over open water at night. An early vocabulary glosses the Latin *satyri vel fauni* as *unfæle wihtu*, unholy wights, alongside *wudewásan*, wood-men. Ælfric called wizards foul wights. The word slid comfortably from the divine to the disgusting, and stopped nowhere in between.

North and east of England the same word was busier still. Old Norse *vættr* covers beings of the same kind, and the compounds tell you where they lived and what they did: *meinvættr*, a harm-wight; *bjargvættr*, a helping wight; and *landvættr*, the wight of a country. The land-wights of Iceland were taken seriously enough to appear in law. The Book of Settlements records the rule that ships approaching the island had to take down the gaping heads carved on their prows, so that the landvættir would not be frightened off by them. A nation defending its coast by asking sailors to be polite is not the usual shape of a border policy.

The best scene involving them is in Snorri Sturluson’s *Heimskringla*. Harald Bluetooth, planning to move against Iceland, sends a sorcerer ahead in the shape of a whale to see what is there. The whale comes in along the west coast and works north around the island, and finds every mountain and every hill full of wights, some enormous, some small. At each fjord where he tries to land, something is waiting. A dragon comes at him out of one valley with a train of smaller creatures behind it. A great bird comes down out of another with a wingspan wide enough to touch both slopes. A bull wades out into the sea bellowing. At the last landing a rock-giant walks down the shore with an iron staff, its head higher than the hilltops, and more of them behind it. The whale turns for Denmark. The four of them stand on the coat of arms of Iceland to this day, bull, bird, dragon and giant, arranged around the shield.

Wights could also be turned. In *Egil’s Saga*, Egill Skallagrímsson, driven out by King Eiríkr, walks to a headland facing the mainland with a hazel pole in his hand. He sets a horse’s head on the pole, plants it in a cleft in the rock, and points the empty eyes inland. Then he carves the curse into the wood and speaks it aloud: he turns the insult against the land-wights themselves, so that every one of them will wander lost and find no rest until they have driven Eiríkr and Gunnhildr out of the country. He is not asking the wights for help. He is making the land unlivable for its own spirits until they solve his problem for him.

In English the word then went quiet in a particular way. Through Middle English *wight* drifted steadily towards meaning simply a person, and by Chaucer’s day it is doing ordinary work: a sweet wight, a wicked wight, no manner of wight. Spenser and Shakespeare kept it as a slightly archaic flourish, and by the time Keats wrote about a wretched wight alone and palely loitering, it was a word you used to sound old. Nothing in that whole stretch makes a wight a corpse.

The corpse arrives in 1869. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, translating *Grettis saga* into a deliberately antique English, needed a word for *haugbúi*, the mound-dweller, and coined barrow-wight. In the saga Grettir breaks into the howe of Kárr the Old, ropes himself down into the dark, and gropes about among horse bones until his hand finds the arm of a high seat with a man sitting in it. There is silver heaped around the chair and a short sword he says is the finest he has seen. As he turns to leave, something takes hold of him. They fight in the mound until Grettir gets the thing down, cuts off its head, and sets the head against the thighs, which is what you did with a corpse that would not stay in its grave. Tolkien picked up Morris’s compound for the Barrow-downs, Dungeons and Dragons made the wight a standard undead in 1974, and the meaning stuck hard enough that most English readers now think it was always there. The undead wight is about a hundred and fifty years old.

What a wight can do depends entirely on which wight it is, and that is not evasion, it is the point of the category. The powers attributed to them across the record are territorial and contractual rather than personal: the land-wights hold ground and can refuse entry to a fleet, the mound-dweller keeps what was buried with him, the house-wights of the later Scandinavian tradition keep a farm in order, and the wights of the charms can put a fever into a person or carry one out. Some are strong enough to physically bar a coastline. Others are small enough to live under a stone and be offended by a plough.

Their limits are equally consistent. A wight is bound to its place, which means that leaving that place, or being driven from it, undoes most of what makes it dangerous. It can be frightened, as the Icelandic figurehead law assumes. It can be insulted into acting against its own interest, as Egill demonstrates. It can be bargained with, and it can be cheated, and in the sagas the barrow-dweller loses because a living man is willing to come down into the dark and wrestle it on its own floor. The oldest sense of the word carries the oldest weakness with it. A wight is a created thing, and created things can be dealt with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a wight?

A wight is a being or creature. The word comes from Old English *wiht*, which could refer to anything that exists, from an insect to a monster, and its Old Norse cognate *vættr* refers to supernatural beings such as land-spirits and household spirits. In folklore the term covers a broad class of Germanic spirit beings rather than one specific creature.

Are wights undead?

Not originally. In Old English, Old Norse and Middle English sources a wight is a creature or a spirit, and no early text uses the word to mean a walking corpse. The undead meaning entered English in 1869, when William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon coined barrow-wight to translate the Old Norse *haugbúi*, and it was fixed in popular use by Tolkien and by Dungeons and Dragons in 1974.

What is the difference between a wight and a draugr?

A draugr is specifically an animated corpse of Norse and Icelandic saga tradition, while a wight is a much broader term for any creature or spirit. The overlap comes from the modern compound barrow-wight, which was invented as an English translation for the mound-dwelling undead of the sagas. Every draugr can be called a wight, but most wights are not draugar.

What does the word wight mean in Old English?

In Old English, *wiht* means a creature, a being, or a created thing, and it is used for animals, people, objects in riddles, devils and monsters alike. Beowulf calls Grendel *wiht unhælo*, the unholy creature, and the Lindisfarne Gospels use *yfel wiht* to translate the Latin word for a phantom. The same word also functions as a pronoun meaning “anything” or “a whit.”

What are the landvættir?

The landvættir are the land-wights of Norse and Icelandic belief, guardian spirits attached to specific places. Icelandic law required ships to remove the carved heads from their prows so as not to frighten them, and Snorri Sturluson’s *Heimskringla* describes four of them, a dragon, a bird, a bull and a rock-giant, driving off a sorcerer sent to scout the island for invasion. Those four appear on the modern coat of arms of Iceland.

Related Entries

Vættir, Landvættir, Draugr, Haugbúi, Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel’s mother, Wyrm, Elf, Dwarf, Woodwose, Fylgja, Tomte, Revenant, Undead