Medieval Ghost Stories

by Andrew Joynes

  Thorod promised to do as she bade him, and so her sickness grew and not many days later Thorgunna died where she lay. The corpse was at first carried into the church, and Thorod had a coffin made for her body, and the next day he had the bed-gear carried outside and fuel brought and piled into a bonfire. Then his wife Thurid went to him and asked what he intended to do with the bed-furnishings. He said he intended to burn them in the fire, just as Thorgunna had requested.

  She answered: ‘It disturbs me to think of such precious things being burnt.’ Thorod said: ‘She spoke a great deal about this, and about how it would not be right to neglect the arrangements she had made.’

  Thurid said: ‘That was because of her envious nature. She begrudged anyone enjoying these things and so she laid this charge on you. But nothing evil will come of it if you do not do as she asked.’

  ‘I am not sure,’ he said, ‘that things will go well unless we do as she asked.’ But then Thurid put her arms round his neck, and begged him not to burn the bed-gear, and pleaded with him so eagerly that he changed his mind. She brought matters about in such a way that Thorod burned the bolster and the mattress, but she took away the quilt and sheets, and all the bed-hangings. Even so, neither of them really liked what they had done.

  After that preparations were made for the burial journey, and it was arranged that trusty men should go with the corpse, taking some good horses that Thorod owned. The body was swathed in linen, but not sewn up, and then laid in the coffin. Then they set out following the road which heads south over the heathland. As they crossed some very damp bogland, the body was often overturned. They went south to Northwater, and crossed it by Isleford. The river was deep, and a storm came on with heavy rain. At last, they came to a farmstead that lay within Staffholts-tongue, called Nether-ness, and there they sought shelter, but the farm-owner would not make them welcome. Night was falling and they judged they could go no further, since it was unlikely that they would have been able to cross Whitewater at night. So they unloaded their horses, carried the corpse into an out-house and then went into the hall and took off their clothes, intending to remain there unfed for the night. The people of the homestead went to bed while it was still daylight, and when they were in bed they heard a great clattering sound from the storehouse behind the kitchen.

  When they went to see what was happening, and whether perhaps thieves had broken in, they saw a tall woman, completely naked and without any clothes, busying herself bringing out victuals. When they saw her, they were so afraid that they dared not go anywhere near her.

  When the corpse-bearers got to hear of this, they too went to see what was happening and realised the woman was Thorgunna. It seemed best to all of them not to meddle with her. When she had made everything ready to her satisfaction, she carried meat into the hall, laid the table, and placed the food upon it. Then the corpse-bearers said to the farm-owner: ‘Perhaps it will turn out before we part that you will pay dearly for not making us welcome.’

  Then the farmer and his wife said: ‘We will certainly give you meat, and provide whatever else you need.’

  And immediately, as soon as the farmer had given them good cheer in this way, Thorgunna went out of the hall and was not seen again. After that, light was brought into the hall, the wet clothes were pulled off the guests and dry clothes given them instead. They went to the table and blessed the meat, and the farm-owner had all the house sprinkled with holy water. The guests ate the meat, and it caused none of them any harm, even though it was Thorgunna who had set it out. They slept there through the night, and found it a most hospitable place. In the morning they got ready for their journey, which passed off well enough; and when these events became known about, it seemed best to most people to give them as cheerful a welcome as they needed. After this nothing of any note happened on their journey. And when they came to Skalaholt, Thorgunna’s precious gifts were handed over to the priests, who received them gladly along with the corpse. Thorgunna was laid in the earth there, and the corpse-bearers set off home. All went well with their journey, and they arrived back in good shape …

  When the corpse-bearers return to Frodis-water, an ominous portent, in the shape of a half-moon which keeps appearing on the panelled wall of the sitting-room, leads the family to conclude that there will be deaths at the homestead shortly.

  Deaths at Frodis-water

  Chap. 53

  It happened next that the shepherd at Frodis-water behaved in a very withdrawn manner when he came home one day. He did not say much, and was irritable, so that men thought it most likely that he had been bewitched – particularly as he kept talking distractedly to himself. This continued for a while, and then, two weeks into winter, the shepherd came home and went straight to bed. In the morning when men came to him he was dead, so he was buried at the church there.

  A little while after this the great hauntings began. One night as Thorir Wooden-leg went out to attend to the needs of nature, he turned round to go back through the door when he saw the shepherd standing there. He made as if to go inside, but the shepherd would not let him through. Thorir tried to get away, but the shepherd went for him and, seizing him, threw him against the door of the house. He was terribly frightened by this, but managed to get back to bed, and by then he was coal-blue all over. The result of all this was that he fell sick and died, and was buried in the church. For a long time afterwards, the two of them, the shepherd and Thorir Wooden-leg, were seen in company. Not surprisingly, all this spread great fear throughout the neighbourhood.

  After Thorir’s death a house-carle [a servant or farmhand] of Thorod fell sick, and lay for three nights before he died. By then it was almost time for the Yuletide feast [the start of Advent] although at that time it was not the custom to fast in Iceland. The pile of dried stock-fish was heaped up in the larder so that it filled it and prevented the door from being opened. The pile was as high as the tie-beam of the roof, and a ladder was needed to fetch the stock-fish from the top of the pile. One evening when people sat by the fire eating their meal, they heard the skin being torn from the stock-fish, but when they went to investigate, they found nothing alive in the room. Then in the winter, a little before the Yule feast, Thorod went out to Ness to get more fish for his stock-pile. A crew of six were manning a boat with ten oars, and they were away all night.

  The same night that Thorod went away, it happened that, as the meal-fires were being lit at Frodis-water and men were gathering in the hall, they saw a seal’s head coming up through the floor of the fire-hall. One of the women servants was the first to see it, and she took up a club that lay in the doorway and aimed it at the seal’s head; but it actually rose under the blow, and glared up at Thorgunna’s bed-gear. Then one of house-carles approached and battered away at the seal, but with every blow it kept rising until its flippers were above the floor. The house-carle fainted, and everyone who was watching was filled with terror. In ran the young man Kiartan and, seizing a great sledge-hammer, he struck a great blow at the seal’s head, but the seal only shook its head and looked round about. Kiartan kept hitting one blow after another until the seal began to sink down as though it were a peg being knocked into the ground. He kept on striking at it until the seal had gone down so far that he was beating on the floor above its head. It later turned out, throughout that winter, that the portents and apparitions appeared to fear Kiartan most of all …

  The Companies of the Dead

  Chap. 54

  On the morning that Thorod and his men sailed westwards from Ness, they were all lost off Enni. Their ship and the catch of fish came ashore nearby, but the corpses were not found. When this news became known at Frodis-water, Kiartan and Thurid invited their neighbours to an arvale [a funeral meal], intending to use the Yuletide ale for the ceremony. But on the first evening of the feast, when the guests had arrived and were taking their places, Thorod and his men came into the hall, all of them dripping wet. The company gave Thorod and his men a hearty welcome, for their arrival was thought t
o be a good portent: people believed they would have the favour of Ran [the goddess of the sea] if they came to drink their own burial ale. In those days very little of the old beliefs had been abandoned, although men had been baptised and called themselves Christians.

  Now Thorod and his men walked down the length of the sitting-hall, which had a double door, and went into the fire-hall. They did not acknowledge any of the greetings, and sat themselves down by the fire. The rest of the household fled from the fire-hall, but Thorod and his company stayed on there until the fires burned low and then they got up to leave. The same thing happened throughout the arvale. Every evening these men came to the fire, causing a great deal of talk among the company, with some guessing they would stop when the feast was over. Eventually the guests went home after the feast, and the household seemed rather dreary after they had gone.

  On the evening when the guests departed, the meal-fires were lit as usual, but when they were blazing away, in came Thorod and his company, all dripping wet. They sat down by the fire and started wringing out their clothes. Then, after they were seated, in came Thorir Wooden-leg and six of his followers. They were all muddy, and they shook their dirty clothes and threw mud at Thorod and his folk.

  Not surprisingly, the household stayed well away from the fire-hall, and were left without light or a warm hearth or any of the benefits of the fire. The next evening fires were lit in another room, since it was thought the two groups would be less likely to come in there, but it was not to be: exactly the same thing happened as on the previous night, and both companies [Thorod, Thorir and their ‘undead’ followers] came to the fires. On the third evening Kiartan thought it best to make a long fire in the fire-hall and light meal-fires in another room. This was done, and the result was that Thorod and his men sat by the long fire and the household by the little fire. So it went on till Yuletide was over …

  A sickness which accompanies the appearance of the ghosts and the decay of the food-stores at Frodis-water kills many of the servants and farm-hands. Eventually, however, the ghosts are banished with the help of Snorri the Priest, using an effective combination of Christian ritual and Icelandic common-law in the form of a ‘door-doom’ – a local court or tribunal which arraigns the ghosts for the trouble they have caused.

  The Ghosts on Trial

  Chap. 55

  Now when all these strange things had been continuing for some time, Kiartan set off eastwards to Holyfell [the monastery of Helgafell] to see Snorri the Priest, his mother’s brother, and seek his advice about the unnatural events that had occurred. At that time there was a priest at Holyfell whom Gizur the White [one of the first Christian converts in Iceland] had sent to Snorri the Priest. Snorri sent this priest out to Frodis-water with Kiartan, along with his son Thord Kausi and another six men. In addition, his advice was to burn Thorgunna’s bed-gear, and to summon all those who ‘walked’ [after death] to a door-doom; and he instructed the priest to sing holy offices there, to provide holy water and take confessions. They invited people from the nearby farms to join them on the road, and they arrived at Frodis-water on the eve of Candlemas just as the meal-fires were being lit. By then Thurid had fallen sick in exactly the same way as those who had already died.

  Kiartan went straight into the house and saw Thorod and his company sitting by the fire as usual. So he took down Thorgunna’s bed-gear, went into the fire-hall and gathered up embers from the fire to take outside, and in this way burned all of the bed-furnishings that Thorgunna had owned. After that Kiartan summoned Thorir Wooden-leg, and Thord Kausi summoned Thorodd and they formally charged them with coming and going about the household without permission, and with despoiling men of their lives and their good fortune. Every one of those [the companies of the ‘undead’] who had sat by the fire was charged in this way. A door-doom was assembled, and the cases were put forward, and everything was done in accordance with the rules of legal assembly. Verdicts were delivered, cases were summed up, and sentence was pronounced.

  As soon as the sentence on Thorir Wooden-leg was given out, he got up and said: ‘Here I sat for as long as I was able,’ and after that he went out of the door around which the court had not assembled. Then the sentence on the shepherd was passed. When he heard it he stood up and said: ‘I am going away from here; and I think it would have been better if I had gone before.’ When Thorgrima Witch-face heard the sentence pronounced on her, she also stood up and said: ‘I stayed here as long as I should have done.’ They charged them all, one after another, and each of them stood up to hear sentence and say something as they prepared to leave. From the tenor of their remarks, it seemed that they were all reluctant to depart. The last of the judgments was pronounced on Thorod, and when he had heard it he stood up and said: ‘It seems to me there is little peace to be had here. Let us all go somewhere else.’ Then, as he walked out, Kiartan and his people came back in, and the priest took holy water and relics and blessed the house, and on the next day they sang the holy offices and mass was held with great solemnity. This brought an end to the walking of the dead and the hauntings at Frodis-water …

  Source: Adapted from The Story of the Ere-Dwellers, a translation of Eyrbyggja Saga by W. Morris and E. Magnusson, Vol. II, The Saga Library, London 1892, pp. 89–92 and 145–52.

  The Saga of Grettir the Strong

  The Grettis Saga, which was written early in the fourteenth century, tells of the deeds of the outlaw Grettir Asmundsson, who is likely to have lived in Iceland during the early eleventh century. The saga tells of his travels across the North Atlantic to Norway, and of his many victorious encounters with his foes, whether living men or dead tomb-dwellers who had come back to life as revenants and draugar. Although Grettir is the hero of the saga, he is not a particularly admirable figure by the noble standards of late medieval chivalry. In his youth, he is a typical folk-tale ‘Bear’s Son’ character: he is lazy, quick to anger, and the basis for his outlawry is the crime of murder. Expelled from the company of law-abiding men, he subsists in the glacial wilderness of the Icelandic highlands by stealing sheep. There are times indeed in the saga when the figure of Grettir can almost be regarded as a kind of living counterpart of the predatory revenants whom he defeats by his quick wits and physical strength. At the end of his fight with the ghost of the shepherd Glam, which is one of the pivotal events of the saga, there is a kind of ‘recognition’ between himself and the defeated ghost, who curses Grettir and leaves him with a fear of the dark and a hunted sense of his own luckless destiny. Earlier in the saga, before Grettir’s luck has begun to turn, there is an account of his successful raid on the tomb of Kar in the island of Hamarsey. Grettir’s attention had been drawn to the likelihood that treasure was buried within the tomb by the sight of a fiery glow on the headland where the howe was situated. The description of the tomb-dweller’s existence within the ‘howe’ or tumulus, and his fierce defence of the possessions of this underground domain, convey a strong sense of Scandinavian notions of the after-life.

  The Tomb of Kar the Old

  Chap. XVIII

  Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; his companion implored him not to go down, but Grettir urged him to attend to the rope, saying that he meant to find out what it was that dwelt there. Then he descended into the howe. It was very dark and the odour was not pleasant. He began to explore how it was arranged, and found the bones of a horse. Then he knocked against a sort of throne in which he was aware of a man seated. There was much treasure of gold and silver collected together, and a casket under his feet, full of silver. Grettir took all the treasure and went back towards the rope, but on his way he felt himself seized by a strong hand. He left the treasure to close with his aggressor and the two engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed. The howe-dweller made a ferocious onslaught. Grettir for some time gave way, but found that no holding back was possible. They did no
t spare each other. Soon they came to the place where the horse’s bones were lying, and here they struggled for long, each in turn being brought to his knees. At last it ended with the howe-dweller falling backwards with a horrible crash, whereupon Grettir’s companion above bolted from the rope, thinking Grettir was killed. Grettir then drew his sword Jokulsnaut, cut off the head of the howe-dweller and laid it between his thighs. Then he went with the treasure to the rope … He was very stiff from his struggle with Kar, but he turned his steps towards Thorfinn’s house, carrying the treasure along with him …

  As the saga proceeds, Grettir gains a reputation for being a hero who, by his strength and cunning, is suited for the always-difficult task of ridding communities of ghosts and revenants. The central episode of the saga is his defeat of the ghost of the shepherd Glam, who is one of the most fearsome draugar in all Scandinavian literature, with a strong resemblance to Grendel in Beowulf.A key to the ghost’s later malevolence is given in the description of Glam before his death. His master, the bondi or landholder Thorhall, is struck by his sinister appearance as ‘a big man with an extraordinary expression of countenance, large grey eyes and wolf-grey hair …’ The living Glam’s surliness, his blasphemous contempt for Christian convention, and his deliberate seeking-out of employment as a shepherd in a landscape which is already haunted, seem to mark him out as an individual who is somehow pre-destined to become a nuisance to the community after his death.

  Glam the Shepherd

  Chap. XXXII

  Glam rose early and called for his meal. The mistress said: ‘It is not proper for Christian men to eat on this day, because tomorrow is the first day of Yule and it is our duty to fast today.’