Draugr

The Old Norse revenant. The walking dead, animated rather than spectral, retaining the body and its weight. The figure is recorded extensively in the Icelandic sagas, where the draugr keeps to the burial mound, defends the grave-goods, and, on occasion, walks abroad. The colour given is *blár*, an old word covering the range from blue to black. The smell is recorded as the smell of the grave. To prevent the dead becoming draugr, the Norse buried with stones placed on the chest, in some cases with the weapons rendered unusable, in some cases with the corpse seated upright so that it could not be reported as having lain down.

The draugr is closer to the medieval English revenant than to the later Slavic vampire. The figure is bodily, troublesome, and bound to the grave from which it walks. The sagas record the remedy as physical: the mound is opened, the body is removed, and the body is burned. The surviving stones, the inverted seated burials, and the iron pinnings recovered by archaeology corroborate the literary account.