Introduction

Summary

The word ‘revenant’ can have both a precise and a general meaning, In French it is the common term for a ghost, with its derivation from the verb revenir, ‘to return’, carrying the notion of the unexpected interruption of a journey on which the spirit has embarked at death. But in the context of medieval accounts of ghostly occurrences, it would be useful to use the term in a more specific fashion, and to apply it to those corporeal ghosts of Scandinavian and Northern European legend whose return has an insistent, repetitive, threatening nature. In these stories, the basic theme is of a return, not merely from death, but from a place of alienation and exile. In some cases the monstrous revenants return to make their nightly assaults on dwelling-places which were once their homes, where their families and former friends still live. In this specific sense, therefore, revenants are dead people who come back in a recognisable physical form, but profoundly altered in that, for the most part, they are now enemies of the living.

The Icelandic term for such a ghost is draugr, and it was in Iceland, in the centuries that followed the country's conversion to Christianity in the year 1000, that heroic and family sagas were written down for the first time. These written accounts, compiled by Icelandic Christian authors raised in a tradition of literacy and pride in antiquarian research, drew heavily on the Germanic beliefs and legends which formed the basis of pre-Christian Scandinavian culture. In a number of the sagas, a draugr features prominently as an opponent of the hero of the narrative; its marauding activities provide scope for much dark detail on the part of the chroniclers, and the circumstances of its defeat allow for an affirmation of the physical strength and courage of the hero. But stories of such revenants are not confined to Icelandic literature and the period of the sagas. As we shall see from the extracts that follow, these corporeal ghosts are to be encountered looming out of the darkness in Britain and Denmark in Anglo-Saxon and Latin manuscripts dating from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries.