The Draugr

Here is how a draugr situation begins.

A Viking dies. This happens. Vikings die in all sorts of ways, and the sagas describe these in considerable detail with what I can only call enthusiasm. But when a notable Viking dies, the important thing is that you bury him correctly.

Correctly means: in a mound. With his things. Weapons, treasure, ships in some cases. The grander the burial, the better protected the soul. Or the body. Or whatever you want to call the thing that is going to animate the corpse later.

The burial mound sits in the landscape after that. For years. For centuries, sometimes. The family farm is nearby. The hill is just there, on the property, with someone's grandfather or father or great warrior uncle inside it.

You do not go near the mound at night. This is understood.

You do not talk disrespectfully about the man inside the mound. This is also understood. The man inside the mound can hear you. He has excellent hearing, for a dead person, and he has strong opinions about his reputation.

The mound itself is not just a grave. It is, for lack of a better word, the draugr's home. His territory. He guards it. The treasure inside the mound is his treasure, and he is very clear on this point. Anyone who tries to take the treasure out of the mound will get a personal demonstration of exactly how clear he is.

In the Eyrbyggja saga, there is a haunting so thorough and sustained that the family eventually has to hold a legal trial. A trial. For ghosts. In a real court. The draugar were summoned and formally ordered to leave.

This worked, actually. Partially. The Norse legal system apparently had jurisdiction over the undead, which is either impressive or very concerning depending on how you think about it.

The mound sits in the dark. The mound is very patient. The mound is waiting for someone to make a mistake.

Let us talk about the powers. Because the draugr is not simply a dead body walking around. If it were simply a dead body walking around, it would be manageable. You could probably outrun it.

You cannot outrun a draugr.

First: the draugr is supernaturally strong. We are talking capable-of-tearing-a-man-apart strong. Capable-of-wrestling-a-bull-to-death strong. The hero Grettir, in the Grettis saga, was considered one of the strongest men in Iceland, and his fight with the draugr Glam is described as one of the most brutal physical contests in the entire saga literature. It goes on for quite a long time. It causes significant property damage.

Second: the draugr can grow. This is the part I find most unsettling, personally. When a draugr becomes agitated, which happens easily, it can swell in size. It gets bigger. Larger than a man. Larger than a horse. Just continuously more. This is not a metaphor. The sagas are describing a literal physical expansion, the way some animals puff up when threatened, except the animal is already dead and also the size of a barn.

Third: shapeshifting. Some draugar can change form. They can become animals, mist, shadow. They can appear as people you know. They can travel in ways a corpse technically should not be able to travel.

Fourth: magic. Certain draugar learned seidr, Norse magic, while alive, and they can still use it. Cursing. Prophecy. Weather manipulation, sometimes. The draugr of a sorcerer is a particular problem.

Fifth, and this is just rude: they spread disease. Being near a draugr long enough makes people sick. Makes livestock sick. Turns milk sour. Causes a farm to fail slowly from the inside out.

I want to emphasize that these are all described in the sagas as matters of established fact. Not legend. Fact. Things that happened. Things to plan around.

The Grettis saga gives us Glam. Glam is the gold standard.

Glam was a farmhand in Iceland, a large and unpleasant man who did not attend church and had no time for religion. He died on Christmas Eve after his employer's farm was troubled by a draugr, which suggests the farm had a prior draugr situation already, which is a detail the saga does not fully explain and I find somewhat troubling.

After Glam died, he became a draugr immediately. He was very committed to it. He began haunting the farm the same night. He crushed the bones of animals. He rode the rooftops at night, which is specifically a draugr behavior, they sit on roofs and press down, and the sagas use a word for this that translates roughly to 'roof-riding.' You can hear them up there.

The local farmers tried to bury him. The body was too heavy to move. They tried three times. Eventually they got it into an improper burial, which made things worse.

Glam haunted the valley so thoroughly that all the farms nearby were abandoned. Just gone. Everyone left. This went on for years.

Finally the hero Grettir arrived. He was young and wanted to prove himself. He stayed alone at the farm at night and waited.

Glam came. They fought. Inside the farmhouse, then outside. The saga says Glam was larger than any man Grettir had ever seen. They destroyed the farmhouse. Eventually Grettir pinned him and cut off his head.

Here is the part where the saga becomes its most interesting: just before he died, Glam cursed Grettir. He looked at him from the ground and said words that meant, roughly, that Grettir would be haunted by Glam's eyes for the rest of his life. That he would be afraid of the dark forever.

Grettir was. He was afraid of the dark until he died. The strongest man in Iceland. Afraid of the dark.

Glam got in the last word.

Good news. You can kill a draugr. It takes a while, but it can be done.

Step one: you have to physically wrestle it. There is no avoiding this step. You cannot kill a draugr with a sword or a spear or an arrow. Normal weapons do not work. The draugr is already dead, and it would like you to know that your sword is not impressing it.

You have to grab it with your hands and bring it to the ground. This requires being significantly stronger than a draugr, or at least more determined. Most people do not meet this qualification. This is why you call a hero.

Step two: cut off the head. This part requires a weapon, but by this point you have the draugr on the ground and you have a moment. Use the moment.

Step three: and this is critical, do not skip this step: put the head between the legs. Place it there. Specifically. This prevents reassembly. The draugr cannot put itself back together if it cannot find its head, and apparently it cannot find its head if the head is near its knees.

I do not make the rules. The Norse did.

Step four: burn the body completely. All of it. The ash then needs to go into the sea or be scattered where no one will walk. If any piece of the body remains whole, you have not finished.

Step five: if burning is not possible, very deep burial with very heavy stones. Every account that uses stones instead of fire seems to result in an eventual recurrence. Stones are the budget option.

The entire process, if a hero is involved, typically covers several chapters in a saga, involves at least two significant fights, some property damage, a curse or two, and a lengthy community discussion afterward about what to do with the remains.

The Norse were very thorough. You had to be. You were living next to the mound.

Here is what makes the draugr more than just a monster story.

The Viking funerary traditions were extremely specific. What you buried a person with. How you positioned the body. The rites you performed. Whether the person died at home or abroad. Whether they were respected in life.

All of this mattered because the Norse believed it affected what came after. A proper burial meant rest. A proper burial meant the person stayed down.

But an improper burial, a disrespected death, a man who felt cheated or dishonored or whose family failed to perform the rites correctly: that created conditions for a draugr. The corpse's agitation, its unfinished business, its refusal to accept the situation, became literal physical reanimation.

Glam became a draugr partly because he was irreligious. Partly because his burial was botched. The combination was unfortunate.

Other draugar in the sagas rose because of greed, because they refused to release their treasure, because they had been murdered and not avenged. The draugr is almost always the result of something left unresolved. Something that should have been handled and wasn't.

So the Norse were meticulous about funerals not because they were superstitious, or not only because of that, but because a botched funeral had a known, documented consequence. There was a body of case law on this. There were saga heroes who specialized in cleaning up after it.

The burial mounds are still there, by the way. All across Scandinavia. Iceland still has them. Norway is full of them. They have been there for over a thousand years.

The archaeologists who open them report no unusual incidents.

Mostly.