Five of the best medieval monster stories, Volume IV: The Draugr
How an undead Viking dooms Iceland’s greatest outlaw
Vampires. Mummies. Zombies. The undead are everywhere in modern horror and fantasy, from Salem’s Lot to The Walking Dead. But they’re far from a recent obsession. Long before even the nineteenth-century Gothic novels of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, we find the undead represented in the folklore traditions of every culture—the Ro-Langs of Tibet, the Vrykolakas of Greece, the Sluagh of Ireland, and so on.
Among the Norse, the undead were known as draugr.1 If you’ve ever played Skyrim, you’ll recognize them as the restless corpses haunting the game’s crypts and barrows One of the most iconic draugr stories comes from Grettir’s Saga, a fourteenth-century Icelandic saga that pits its swaggering outlaw hero against the monstrous revenant Glam.
4. Glam the Draugr in Grettir’s Saga
The story:
Grettir’s Saga comes from the rich storytelling tradition of the Icelandic Sagas. Written sometime during the fourteenth-century, it is set during the tenth century, towards the waning days of the Viking Age.
As is typical of Icelandic Sagas, Grettir’s Saga begins long before its hero’s birth. Grettir himself does not enter the story until Chapter 14, and his run-in with the undead Glam does not take place until Chapter 32, well over a third of the way into the book.
By this point in the saga, Grettir has already made quite a name for himself. The younger son of Asmund, Grettir grows up in Iceland, where we are told “he was not much loved by his father Asmund, but his mother was very fond of him.”2 We quickly realize that is not only his father who finds him annoying. Grettir’s avoidance of manual labour, his belligerence, and his penchant for creating insulting rhymes all cause him to make many enemies and get into a fair number of scraps.
In one of these violent incidents, Grettir kills another Icelander during a quarrel over saddlebags (the sagas contain a lot of this kind of casual killing). As punishment, he is outlawed and banished for three years. Grettir finds passage with a ship heading for Norway, and soon enrages the other shipmen by refusing to do any work and making up poems that ridicule them.
Eventually, Grettir reaches the homestead of a rich Norwegian named Thorfinn.3 While staying here, Grettir has his first encounter with a draugr, the reanimated corpse known as Karr the Old who lives deep within a burial mound. Grettir kills Karr and takes a fine short sword from the draugr’s hoard. After three years of adventure, including an episode in which Grettir saves Thorfinn’s wife and daughter by single-handedly slaying a group of twelve marauding Vikings, he returns to Iceland.
At this point in the saga, we are introduced to Thorhall, a wealthy farmer who lives in Vatnsdal (northwest Iceland) and who has trouble retaining workmen to look after his livestock because his lands are haunted by a mysterious wight referred to in the saga as “some evil creature.”
Thorhall ends up hiring Glam, a Swede who is “big and strong and not much to most people’s liking,” and warns him that his steading is believed to be haunted. Glam, however, brushes the concern aside:
“I’m not afraid of ghosts,” said Glam, “and I will find it the less boring.”
As soon as Glam enters Thorhall’s employ, problems arise. He performs his job of shepherding well, but his awkward, surly manner causes people to dislike him. And then there is the issue of Glam’s hostility to Christianity.
There was a church at Thorhallsstadir; Glam refused to go to it. He did not care for singing and was not religious, awkward and uncivil; everyone found him repulsive.
Things come to a head on Christmas Eve. Glam wakes up early and asks for breakfast from the farmer’s wife. But she tells him that Christians do not fast on this day, as tomorrow is the first day of Christmas. Glam scoffs:
You go in for a lot of superstitions that I see no point in. I do not know that people are any better off now any more than then when people didn’t bother with such things. I thought ways were better when people were said to be heathens, and I want my food and no messing about.
Thorhall’s wife is scandalized by Glam’s irreverent behaviour and self-professed sympathy for “heathens” and warns him that things will go badly for him if he chooses to break his fast. Glam ignores her, eats his breakfast, and heads off to watch the flocks.
When Glam does not come home all that night, the farmers send out a search party. Eventually they find his body in an area that bears the signs of a violent struggle, “for stones had been pulled up in various places, and the earth as well.” The prevailing theory is that Glam encountered the “evil creature” that was said to haunt the area, and that, in the ensuing struggle, Glam both slew the creature and was slain by it.
Glam himself is “dead and blue as Hel and swollen up like an ox.” The workmen attempt to bring his body back to the church for burial, but are mysteriously unable to do so, as if, in death as in life, his heathen body refuses to come anywhere near a church. After three attempts, they give up and leave Glam’s body where it lies.
But this is where things become interesting. For:
Soon after people discovered that Glam was not resting in peace.
The undead shepherd soon takes to haunting the countryside. Every night, “Glam began to ride on the buildings.” After a while of this, many people freak out and flee the valley.
Thorhall hires two new shepherds to look after his flocks. But Glam murders them both under the cover of night. Eventually Thorhall gives up and flees:
Now the farmer [Thorhall] decided it was impossible to stay and left the farm with everything he could take with him. But all the animals that remained there Glam killed and after that he went through the whole valley and laid waste all the farms up above Tunga.
Once Glam’s hauntings lessen somewhat, Thorhall returns to his homestead and attempts to go back to life as normal. But Glam comes out of hiding again, this time targeting the farmer’s daughter “and in the end she died of it.”
The saga writer ends the chapter with the ominous remark:
Many things were tried, but nothing worked. It looked to people as though the whole of Vatnsdal would be laid waste if no remedy was found
Enter Grettir. While staying with his friend Jokull in Vatnsdal, Grettir learns the details of how Glam terrorizes the people. He soon resolves to go and deal with this undead shepherd himself.
Jokull, however, warns him against this plan:
“For it is tempting providence, and your kinsmen have a great deal at stake in you,” he said. “There is no other young person who comes anywhere near up to you, but ‘only evil can come of evil’ in the case of Glam, and it is much better to be involved with human beings than with such monsters.”
Grettir shrugs off Jokull’s warning and continues on to Thorhallsstadir. There he meets with Thorhall and offers to stay the night. Thorhall is pleased but also expresses his concerns that Glam will attack Grettir. Even if Grettir should get away alive, Thorhall assures him, “I know for certain that you will lose your horse, for no one who comes keeps his mount here unscathed.”
The first night passes unremarkably, with no visit from Glam at all. Grettir spends another night, and still “there was no visit from the villain.” Thorhall is relieved, and begins to think that they have seen the end of Glam. Just to be sure, though, he checks the stable and finds the building broken and Grettir’s horse “dragged out to the entrance and every bone in its body was broken.”
Thorhall races back to Grettir, and tells him he needs to flee, “For death is certain if you await Glam.”
Grettir dismisses the advice and agrees to spend a third night in Thorhall’s home. At last, he gets what he’s been waiting for: a visit from the draugr Glam:
When about a third of the night had passed, Grettir heard outside a great banging. Then something climbed up onto the building and rode the hall and beat with its heels so that every timber creaked.
Glam’s assault on the roof goes on for some time, before the creature decides to enter the house itself:
Then it came down from the building and went to the door and when the door opened, Grettir saw the villain stretch in its head and it seemed to him enormously big and amazingly large-featured. Glam moved slowly and straightened up when he got inside the door. He towered high up into the roof, turned towards the hall and laid his arms up on the cross-beam and leaned in over the hall.
Thorhall pretends to be asleep and Grettir stays very still, wrapped in a long fur coat. Glam comes to him, takes hold of the coat and tugs mightily. But to the undead monster’s astonishment, he is met force for force. Again and again, he pulls until the fur coat tears in two, showing that the unusually powerful Glam has finally met his match.
Grettir rushes forward, seizing Glam around the waist, and a deadly wrestling match ensues, destroying everything within the house:
They had an almighty struggle, for the villain wanted to get him outside the farm, but bad as it was to have dealings with Glam inside, Grettir realised that it would be worse to wrestle with him outside, and so he resisted going outside with all his strength.
As Glam begins to overpower Grettir, the hero employs new tactics:
Glam put on an extra burst of strength and jerked him towards himself when they got to the porch. And when Grettir sees that he cannot hold back with his feet, he does two things at once, he leaps as hard as he can into the villain’s embrace and kicks back with both feet at a stone part buried in the ground that stood on the threshold. The villain was not expecting this. He had been struggling to pull Grettir towards himself, and so Glam toppled over backwards and was flung in reverse out against the doorway so that his shoulders caught the lintel and the roof gave way, both the beams and the frozen thatch. Thus he fell face upwards and backwards outside the building with Grettir on top of him.
Outside the hall, they are bathed in moonlight, and Grettir suddenly beholds Glam clearly. The sight fills him with terror:
Then he felt so weakened by everything, his weariness and seeing Glam squint at him fiercely, that he was unable to draw his cutlass and lay just about between life and death.
While Grettir is frozen in terror, Glam begins to speak, pronouncing a terrible curse against his foe:
And such was the greater power of evil in Glam than in most other revenants that he then spoke as follows:
“You have displayed great zeal, Grettir,” he said, “in seeking me out, and it will not seem surprising if you don’t gain a great deal of good fortune from your encounter with me. But I can tell you this, that you have now acquired half the strength and development that was intended for you if you had not met me. I cannot now deprive you of the strength that you have already acquired, but I can ensure that you never become any stronger than you are now, and yet even now you are strong enough, as many will find out to their cost. You have become renowned up to now for your deeds, but from now on you will become guilty of crimes and deeds of violence, and nearly everything you do will lead to your misfortune and failure. You will be made outlaw and be compelled always to live in the open on your own. I also lay this upon you that these eyes of mine will be always before your sight, and you will find it hard to be alone and this will bring you to your death.”
As Glam completes his dire speech, Grettir rallies:
And when the villain had said this, then the weakness that had afflicted Grettir passed from him. He then drew his cutlass and cut off Glam’s head and put it by his rump.
Once Glam is slain, Thorhall rushes out and thanks Grettir “for having defeated this unclean spirit.” Soon, everyone in the valley is made aware of what Grettir has done and all are “greatly impressed by this deed,” concluding that there is “no one comparable in the whole country as regards strength and valour and all kinds of ability with Grettir Asmundarson.”
But Grettir does not get to savour his victory. For as Glam’s curse takes hold, he immediately begins to change. His temper, which was always pretty fiery, has become far worse:
He was now much worse controlled than before, and found it harder to bear being crossed.
And, more concerningly for a great, powerful warrior like Grettir, after his night-time encounter with the draugr, he has acquired a fear of the dark:
He had become a person so afraid of the dark that he dared go nowhere on his own after it got dark; there appeared to him then all sorts of apparitions,
The rest of Glam’s grim prophecy comes true as well. Grettir soon encounters a series of misfortunes. He goes to Norway, where he accidentally kills a house full of people by setting it on fire, and is promptly outlawed by the Norwegian King. Grettir then returns to Iceland only to find out that his brother Atli has been murdered and that he, Grettir, has been declared an outlaw by the Althing.4 Because he fears the darkness, Grettir finds himself drawn again and again to human settlements, but his status as an outlaw means that he is always in danger. He survives for a surprisingly long time on the island of Drangey until at last he is overcome by enemies who utilize witchcraft to overpower him.
What we learn from the story:
It’s been a common theme throughout this series that monsters pose both an existential and a physical threat to the civilized world. The monster is, in many ways, a stand in for the outcast, the outsider who refuses to abide by the norms and social mores of his world. The most interesting monsters act as a foil to the hero, mirroring and exaggerating their failings.
Glam checks all of these boxes.
He’s a pagan at a time when Christianity has overtaken the Norse world. Over the course of the ninth century, the Viking conquerors who settled in England gradually adopted the Christian faith of their Anglo-Saxon neighbours. At the tail end of the tenth century, King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway embraced Christianity, was baptized, and began the forcible conversion of his country. And in AD 1000, the Althing in Iceland voted to legally adopt Christianity as the island’s official religion.
Grettir’s Saga is set during the early eleventh century, at a time when a great many people would likely have remained pagan in practice if not belief. The history of the Christianization of Germanic cultures is replete with such examples of syncretism—the blurring and combining of two religious and/or cultural identities. Someone like Glam, who despite Christianity’s status as official religion, still clings to the old ways, would have represented many people’s lived experience. The saga itself was written during the fourteenth century, more than three hundred years after Iceland’s adoption of Christianity, at a time when most pagan practices had long since died out.
All of the sagas were written in this post-conversion context, which fundamentally shapes their approach to the gods and creatures from Norse mythology. It is common in these writings to cast monsters such as trolls and draugr as belonging to the Norse world’s pre-Christian past, a part of the evil gradually expunged by Christianity.
We see this clearly in Grettir’s Saga, where Glam’s paganism goes hand-in-hand with his monstrosity. His refusal to fast on Christmas Eve and his mockery of Christian customs as “a lot of superstition” directly precede his terrible death at the hands of the evil creature and his newfound status as a draugr. This conflation of monster and pagan is further emphasized when Glam’s dead body refuses to be taken to the church, and when it cannot be found at all so long as the search party includes a priest. This all cements the picture of Glam as a heathen beyond the grace of God and his church, a doomed soul unable to find rest.
Glam also serves as a foil to Grettir, reflecting his weaknesses as a hero. Like Grettir, Glam is unusually strong. Even before he dies and becomes a draugr, he is belligerent and prickly, standing apart from those around him. After his encounter with the “evil creature,” Glam is solidified as an outsider, a monster given to terrorizing the civilization he was once awkwardly a part of.
Glam’s story prefigures Grettir’s own decline, and it is fitting that it is Glam who predicts the hero’s tragic fate. For Grettir, the great warrior and slayer of monsters, is to become himself a kind of monster, an outlaw with a bounty on his head, forced to shun civilization and to prey on peaceful farmers for his survival.
The authors of Grettir’s Saga seem to suggest that the bond uniting hero and monster is stronger and more complex than first imagined, and the line separating them permeable. The very qualities that make Glam so terrifying—his strength, stubbornness, and capacity for violence—are the same that give Grettir his fearsome warrior’s reputation, and which see him quickly pass from hero to notorious outlaw.
I hope you enjoyed this fourth instalment of the medieval monster series. If you haven’t already, check out the previous three entries (links at the end of this post).
Andrew LiVecchi
If you enjoyed this post, consider checking out my epic fantasy novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess. It builds on a lifelong love of mythology and literature and engages with a lot of the themes I explore in my Substack posts.
Five of the best medieval monster stories:
The Norse used many different terms for revenants, but draugr is the one conventionally used by modern scholars to apply to all undead figures.
I am citing J. M. Dent’s translation of Grettir’s Saga included in the collection Three Icelandic Outlaw Sagas published by Viking Society for Northern Research in 2004.
There are a lot of characters in this saga whose names begin with “Thor.”
The Althing: a general assembly of the Icelandic Commonwealth first established in AD 930.