Forget the translucent veil-ghost. The draugr of the Old Norse sagas comes back in the flesh – heavy as an ox, darkly discoloured, uncannily strong, and with a very bad temper. He guards his grave-hoard, kills livestock and men, and rides the rooftops at night. A look at the real again-walkers of the Icelandic sagas, beyond game and cinema.
When we hear "undead", we picture translucent shapes or rattling skeletons. The draugr of Old Norse tradition is something quite different, and in a way far more unpleasant: he is the corpse itself, come back from the burial mound. He is also called aptrganga, "again-walker", literally one who walks once more. He is massive, physically present, often monstrously heavy, with dark, blue-black discoloured skin. You can touch him, wrestle with him, and he can crush you to death.
This idea is rooted in a very concrete fear: that the dead one is not truly gone, that something remains in him and does harm. Not everyone becomes a draugr. Especially at risk are the greedy, the malicious, the discontented – people who quarrelled with the world already in life. Death does not improve their character; quite the opposite.
The most famous again-walker story stands in Grettis saga. A surly, godless herdsman named Glámr dies in an eerie manner on Christmas night and is not properly buried on the farm. Soon afterwards he begins to walk: he rides the roof until the beams groan, kills livestock, breaks men's necks. The farm falls desolate, no one can bear to stay there.
Only the hero Grettir dares to face him. There follows a tremendous wrestling match in the dark, man against corpse, in which the whole house threatens to burst. Grettir finally overcomes Glámr – but before the again-walker falls for good, he speaks a curse over him. From then on Grettir is stricken with a paralysing fear of the dark that dogs him to his death. The draugr is beaten, yet he takes his revenge even from the grave. It is one of the most striking scenes in all of saga literature.
Not every draugr terrorises a farm. A second, old form is the haugbúi, the "mound-dweller" – a dead man who stays in his burial mound and guards the treasure buried with him. Grettis saga tells of this too: Grettir breaks open the mound of old Kárr to reach the gold and weapons, and must fight the dead man in the darkness of the chamber to get them.
Then the mound-dweller rose and gripped at him, and they wrestled long in the dark, until Grettir struck off his head and laid it against his hams.after Grettis saga, public-domain translation tradition
These mound-fights follow a fixed pattern: climb in, wrestle, behead the dead one and place the head so that it cannot grow back on. The treasure is the reward, but the courage it costs is the true test of the hero.
Eyrbyggja saga offers perhaps the densest picture of a haunting by the dead. The malicious Þórólfr Bægifótr, "Lame-foot", walks so badly after his death that he is dug up and reburied elsewhere – yet the peace does not last. In the same saga the famous "wonders of Fróðá" describe how a whole band of the dead returns to a farm and settles down by the fire evening after evening, while the living sit beside them in horror.
The remarkable thing: the Icelanders do not fight these dead with holy water or spells alone, but with an actual legal proceeding, the "door-court". They formally summon the again-walkers, pronounce a verdict, and one by one they rise and leave the farm. Law and order against the uncanny – that is very Icelandic and says much about the worldview of this society.
From the sagas a fairly clear toolkit against again-walkers can be read off. Raw strength helps: you must force the dead one down in a wrestling match. Then comes the decisive part – beheading, often combined with laying the head against the buttocks or thighs of the corpse so that it cannot become whole again. Frequently the body is then burned and the ashes carried off, thrown into the sea or buried far away, so that nothing more can return.
Prevention was known too: certain dead were carried out not through the door but through a hole specially broken in the wall, so they would not find the way back. You sense how seriously this danger was taken. For the people of the saga age the draugr was no fireside horror tale but a real worry about the dead who would not lie still. How they met them with burial, memory and honour our piece on Germanic honouring of the dead shows.
The Icelandic sagas – above all Grettis saga (Glámr, Kárr the old), Eyrbyggja saga (Þórólfr Bægifótr, the apparitions of Fróðá) and Laxdæla – consistently depict the draugr as a bodily returned corpse: physical, strong, dark, dangerous. He is overcome by wrestling, beheading and burning or removing the body. The motif is broadly attested in the written saga literature of the 13th century.
The draugr is Icelandic saga-age folklore, not a god and not an Edda figure. He must be sharply distinguished from the realm of the dead, Hel: Hel is the place the dead go to; the draugr is precisely the dead one who does not stay there. The bloated, horde-like draugar of today's games and films greatly exaggerate the picture – in the sources they are single, named again-walkers in clearly told cases.
Hel – goddess and realm of the dead · How the Germanic peoples honoured their dead · Draumar – dreams as omens · The sleeping kings in the mountain · Seiðr – the magic.