Two Kinds of Walking Dead

Norse philology distinguishes the draugr proper, tied to a burial mound and its own grave goods, from the haugbui, a related mound-dweller more strictly confined to guarding its barrow and treasure, though saga usage of the terms overlaps considerably and modern scholarship treats them as variations on a single belief rather than two cleanly separate creatures.

Rudolf Simek's dictionary of Northern mythology traces the draugr to a wider Germanic and circumpolar set of beliefs about dangerous, restless dead who remain physically present rather than departing to an afterlife realm such as Hel or Valhalla, and situates the type alongside the aptrgangr, literally "again-walker", another saga term for the same phenomenon. The draugr's combination of superhuman strength, corpse odour, mound-dwelling and vulnerability specifically to beheading and cremation has fed directly into the modern fantasy and gaming image of the "undead warrior", including the popular use of the Old Norse word itself in contemporary role-playing games and fiction, though that borrowing typically strips out the saga draugr's deeper connection to burial custom, inheritance disputes over a dead man's grave goods, and the specifically Icelandic anxiety about a farm's dead refusing to leave the land they once worked.