Draugr

For this week's episode, we're heading back over to the Norse mythos for the first time in a little while and looking at the creepy Draugr! How can you get this monster back in it's grave? How are they linked to good ol' England? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:

Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

It’s the last week of June meaning that I’ve got to rewrite my whiteboard of monthly monsters - July looks exciting though, so don’t panic, I’ve got plenty more where that came from! It’s lovely and warm in the UK at the moment, although I can say that without aircon, I am permanently melting.

Anyway, enough about that - let’s get on with today’s monster of the week.

DESCRIPTION:

This week we’re heading back over to Norse mythology for the first time in a little while, and we know that I love a European monster - it might be biased to be completely fair. We’re looking at the fearsome Draugr this week. Have you heard of this one? I’ll be honest, it’s slightly new for me and I certainly didn’t know much about them before this week. 

The Draugr are classified as undead warriors who reinhabit their corpses, they tend to haunt around castles, palaces and graves of themselves and others. They are usually guarding treasure in the place they’re haunting, however, they are not ghosts - they’re actually more like zombies. Whilst they don’t actually possess the bodies they end up using, they actually have their own form, which have the same abilities that they had in life.

Usually, they look like semi-decayed viking warriors, with exposed bones and muscle, and ice-blue skin - often dressed in their finest armour which they were buried in. As they were a Norse monster, they would usually also be adorned with their traditional viking look, such as the helmets, plaited beards and hair and their axes, shields & broadswords. They apparently have superhuman strength, can control the weather, shapeshifting, dream walking and prophecy sight.

So how does a Draugr come about? This is usually when a person is buried either sitting up or laying upright, and was an evil or greedy person in life. The Draugr would stay on the earth out of pure spite and greed, rather than moving onto the afterlife, which backs up that they’re slightly different to ghosts - as ghosts tend to stick around to sort out their unfinished business, and Draugr stick around to guard their own wealth or bodies.

There is another way where you could turn into the Draugr, and that’s through traditional zombie means. You can actually be infected by another Draugr, and that’s when you die in the presence of one, it would find your body and get you to replace them in their grave, and they would move onto He, the Norse Underworld.

And how could you prevent Draugr spawning up other tha, ya know - burying them properly? Well the Vikings believed that bodies could move after death, even if they were buried correctly and that the soul would only leave through the way it went in. So for nastier people, they would bury the person with their toes tied together, a pair of scissors on their chest, and a cloak filled with straw placed around their shoulders so they wouldn’t be able to move. Even within the burial, the coffin bearers would make signs of scissors before putting the coffin in the grave, and if they were carried through a corpse door, which was a hole in the wall to the burial chamber basically, they would be sealed into it. 

Could you kill one though? Hmm, I wouldn’t really advise trying it - these are Viking warriors. But you could take them out with iron based weapons, but no other weapons, then cut off its head, and burn it and dump the ashes into the sea. The other way is to force the Draugr back into its own grave, which a couple of heroes did, and we’ll go into that later.

ORIGIN:

Now onto etymology, the word Draugr is obviously Old Norse - which means either a ghost or spirit, specifically the dead inhabitant of a cairn. A cairn is a burial stone if you didn’t know - this word is actually Gaelic, but the Vikings have loads of links to the Scots and the English due to the locations, and actually war history of the countries. Another word for Draugr is haugbúi  which means barrow-dweller or aptrganga, which means again-walker. 

Barrow-dwellers are usually wights, a type of spirit, especially in old English or Gaelic - so again, really nice to link this back to old Blighty and actually Tolkien coined the term Barrow-wight.

Now where did the history of this monster emerge from? This monster originated from Iceland originally, although this does mean that it counts as a Nordic monster - which is why I’ve not mentioned this beforehand. The first mention of them was in the Grettis Saga, which was written around 1400 AD, and is one of Iceland’s great sagas or family stories. This one is about a man called Grettir Ásmundarson who was an Icelandic outlaw. 

The Draugr is introduced into the story by a shepherd called Glamr who refused to fast on Yule-tide, and so Grettir then finds his body in the snow and he’s become a Draugr. Grettir then defeats him in battle, but before he’s taken down, Glamr curses Grettir, which curses him to lose his strength, make him afraid of the dark, everlasting loneliness and make him destined to die young. And he does, but we don’t actually know when.

I did mention some other names for this monster earlier - but there are actually different monsters under these names too, but they’re immensely similar and that’s the haugbui and this is the mound-dweller, very similar to the Draugr obviously. It would also be water based and swim alongside the ships, and then disguises itself as a mossy rock.

They’ve actually changed in the modern times too, which are called the Draug instead, it was said these were the ghosts of dead fishermen who died at sea, and were not buried in Christian soil. They are much more modern monsters, and are said to wear leather jackets and have a seaweed vase as their head. They were very much linked to the Scandinavian norm of dying on a boat or at sea, due to their reliance on the ocean for their livelihoods and their survival.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Onto cultural significance in modern media, we don’t have a lot for art this week, as even though they’re an old monster - the Norse were never particularly good at documenting their monsters through literal art. However, there are some great independent pieces of art, such as the one I used in the advertising this week which was on DeviantArt by JakubJagoda called Draugr Valley, which I thought was super cool. 

In movies, we have quite a few like; Lord of the Rings, Corpse bride, Paranorman, Cabin in the Woods, Creepshow, The Crow, Friday 13th, Mama, Drive Angry, Field Guide to Evil, Dylan Dog, My Boyfriend’s Back, RoboCop, The Revenant, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Ghost Town, Godzilla & Undead or Alive.

For TV, we have; Hilde, Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Game of Thrones, In the Flesh, iZombie, Ghost Whisperer, Doctor Who, Lexx, Masters of Horror, Merlin, Tales from the Crypt, Young Blades, Wynonna Earp, Supernatural, Santa Clarita Diet, Les Revenants, The Punisher, DuckTales, Ugly Americans, Teen Titans, Torchwood & Pushing Daisies.

In video games, we have ones such as; God of War, Skyrim, Valheim, Eve Online, Blood, Doom, Darkstalkers, Dark Souls, Code Vein, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls 3, Duel Saviour Destiny, Gungrave, Final Fantasy 10, Mortal Kombat, Pathfinder, Pillars of Eternity, Resident Evil: Village, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sunless Skies, Street Fighter 5, Shantae, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Warframe, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare & World of Warcraft. 

My book recommendation this week is Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst, for some specific zombie facts, as these monsters fall mostly into this category, but otherwise, for more norse myths - I would recommend Nordic Tales: Folktales from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark by Chronicle Books.

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed?

I’m going to say probably not for this one, but also, as they’ve kind of ghosties, it makes it a little different. For usual undead monsters, I would say the chances of you bumping into one is pretty slim, but who knows when you’re going to bump into a Viking grave with shiny treasures in? 

However, the idea that these are the souls of evil, greedy people from the Viking era is a great idea for self-punishment after death, and definitely encourages people to be better in life, so I get that it was most likely a very real threat to not make it to Valhalla or the other Norse Underworld entities, especially for the proud Norsemen of old. 

But what do you think? Did Draugr roam the earth? Let me know on Twitter!

OUTRO: 

I love me an undead monster, and I really like ones that are similar to other ones too actually - they’re also really different to things we’ve done in the past as they’re not quite ghosts, 

Next week, we’re heading over to the rest of Europe and looking at what you might have a statue of in your garden at home - but be careful, you might find that things might start to go missing! Join us next week for the Gnome from European folklore!

For now, thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got the twitter for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok, Youtube and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, and twitter is mythmonsterspod. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk - you can also find us on Goodpods and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast too.

Come join the fun and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.