Draugr

The draugr appears throughout Old Norse and Icelandic saga literature as a physically animated corpse that remains in or near its burial mound, retaining much of its living strength, its grudges and often a supernatural increase in both. Sagas such as Grettis saga and Eyrbyggja saga describe draugar as capable of crushing livestock, driving farms to ruin through fear and misfortune, wrestling the living with monstrous force, and in some cases growing larger or heavier in death than they were in life, a detail scholars read as marking the corpse's continued unnatural vitality. Causes vary across the sources: a person of malicious, greedy or generally difficult temperament in life was considered likelier to walk again, and burial itself could go wrong, so some saga heroes take pains to bury a dangerous person with specific precautions meant to keep the body from rising.

Unlike ghosts in the modern sense, the draugr is emphatically physical, smelling of decay, leaving tracks, and requiring physical combat rather than exorcism to put down, most famously beheading the corpse and burning the remains, or otherwise removing and disposing of the head separately from the body so it cannot be reattached.

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.