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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesA draugr is a dead person who returns bodily in Icelandic sagas, haunting farms or guarding buried treasure.
Also recorded as Draugar
The warrior Grettir lies fully dressed beneath a cloak, his feet braced against a beam. Above him, the dead shepherd drives his heels into the roof. The rafters crack. When the noise stops, the visitor comes down to the door. [1]
Read the manuscriptA draugr is a bodily revenant in Icelandic saga narratives; draugar is the plural. It can wrestle, break a building or retain possession of wealth. Glámr, the dead shepherd of Grettir’s saga, returns to a working farm. Thráinn, in the saga of Hrómundr Greipsson, receives an intruder inside his mound. Neither has surrendered the force of a living body. [4][1][2]
Thorhall-stead lies in Shady-vale, running up from Waterdale in the English names used by translators William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon. Thorhall, its owner, is rich in livestock and desperate for a shepherd: workers are injured or leave, and the farm already has a reputation for haunting. On a lawman’s recommendation he hires Glámr, a powerful Swede whose courage comes with an ugly temper. He has glaring grey eyes and wolf-grey hair. The newcomer takes readily to the sheep. His loud call gathers the animals, but his contempt for church and household makes him unwelcome company. [1]
On the eve of Yule, Glámr refuses the household’s Christian fast and demands food. The housewife warns that his defiance will bring trouble; he threatens her until she gives way. He goes out into worsening snow and does not return. Darkness and the storm prevent a search that night. The farm has employed his strength to protect its animals, and now no one knows what has become of him. [1]
Searchers find scattered sheep and a patch of ground churned as though by violent wrestling. Nearby lies Glámr, dead, blue and swollen to the size of an ox. Great tracks and blood lead toward the rocks. The people infer that the earlier haunting presence killed him but received fatal injuries itself; that opponent is never seen again. They cannot bring the immense corpse to church. Horses fail to drag it across level ground, and when the priest joins the search the body cannot be found. Eventually it is buried where they have managed to leave it. [1]
Glámr soon begins riding the roofs at night. People faint or lose their reason at the sight of him, and many flee. Summer brings enough relief for Thorhall to hire another shepherd, Thorgaut, who laughs at the danger. On the following Yule eve he too disappears. His body is found beside Glámr’s cairn, its neck and bones broken. Unlike Glámr, he is brought to church and troubles no one afterward. [1]
An elderly cattle keeper stays out of loyalty while the farm falls apart. One morning Thorhall finds him dead in the cattle buildings, his spine broken over the stone edge of a stall. The family flees, and Glámr kills the livestock left behind. Spring offers another chance to return, but the next autumn brings renewed attacks and the death of Thorhall’s daughter. Even horses and dogs taken into the valley are unsafe. Each attempt to restore ordinary work exposes another person or animal. [1]
Grettir hears the reports while visiting his uncle, who urges him to leave the danger alone. He goes to Thorhall-stead anyway. Thorhall welcomes him but warns that a guest’s horse will not survive. For one night the animal remains unharmed. After the next, it lies by the door of its broken shelter with its bones crushed. Grettir insists on staying until he has at least seen the creature responsible. That evening he keeps his clothes on, wraps himself in a cloak and braces his feet against a strong seat-beam. The hall’s torn panelling, ruined door and displaced beds show what has happened before. [1]
After pounding the roof, Glámr pushes his enormous head through the doorway. He stretches up beneath the roof, rests his arms on a beam and scans the lighted hall. Then he notices the bundle on the seat. He pulls the cloak twice without moving Grettir; the third pull hauls him upright and tears the cloth between them. Grettir grips the revenant around the middle, but its strength forces him backward. Furniture gives way as Glámr drags him toward the outer door. Grettir fights to remain inside, then changes tactics. Bracing against a stone in the threshold, he drives forward into the chest of the opponent still tugging him outward. Glámr reels through the doorway, breaking rafters and frozen thatch, with Grettir falling across him. [1]
A cloud moves from the moon. Glámr turns his eyes upward, and the sight so unnerves the exhausted Grettir that he cannot draw his short sword. The revenant speaks. Grettir has gained only half the strength that might have been his; he will never grow mightier. His deeds will bring misfortune, outlawry and solitude, and in that solitude these eyes will remain before him until fear brings him to his death. When the spell of astonishment lifts, Grettir cuts off Glámr’s head and lays it beside his thigh. Thorhall comes out, and together they burn the body. They gather the ashes into an animal skin and bury them where people and sheep seldom pass. [1]
The household thanks its rescuer with a horse and new clothes. Grettir rides away acclaimed for courage, but tells another host that his temper has worsened. Darkness now frightens him so much that he cannot go out alone after nightfall. The haunting has ended at Thorhall-stead and continued in the man who ended it.
Both encounters give the struggle a confined space. Grettir uses the fittings of a damaged home to resist being taken outside; the moonlit threshold then exposes him to a gaze he cannot withstand. Hrómundr has a rope back to the world above, but insists on provoking the figure below. At the farm, the dead person invades the living household. In the barrow, the living man has deliberately entered the dead man’s home. [1][2]
The Morris and Magnússon Grettir translation first appeared in 1869; the edition used here was printed in 1900. Its archaic English is the translators’ chosen voice. Nora Kershaw’s Stories and Ballads of the Far Past followed in 1921. She explains that Hrómundr’s saga survives in late paper manuscripts, apparently no earlier than the seventeenth century, while the rhymed Gríplur preserves an earlier form. These are stages in the tales’ transmission, separate from the periods in which their characters live. [1][2][3]
Christopher Fee’s teaching account places Glámr beside the roof-riding Thorolf Twist-foot and the returning dead at Frodriver in Eyrbyggja saga. He describes a door-court, a legal proceeding used to evict the Frodriver dead. Judgment supplies another response to unwelcome residents where the two extended encounters above use bodily force. [4]
Kershaw translates draugr as “ghost” but explains that the word here means an animated corpse. Her Thráinn also becomes a troll during the struggle. Those overlapping names describe what the story is doing to one particular opponent. Neither this encounter nor Glámr’s makes blood drinking its central danger, despite the resemblance to other tales of feared returning corpses. [2][1]
Thráinn is robbed before he is challenged. He initially values peace on his throne more than possessions, and the visitor must shame him into defending them. Hrómundr’s courage is real, but so is his part in creating the fight. Glámr offers no comparable bargain: people lose their work, animals and family members until someone confronts him. The two victories therefore answer different needs. One rewards an expedition’s appetite for wealth and glory; the other restores a community at a cost its champion bears alone. [2][1]
Literary scholar Marjorie Burns describes the aids Morris and Magnússon supplied for unfamiliar readers: an outline, chronology, notes, indexes and explanations of proverbial and figurative language. The translators anticipated difficulties with the saga’s long ancestral opening and romantic ending. Glámr’s encounter reached English readers inside this expansive work. [3]
Burns also recounts Morris’s visit to Iceland in 1871. Seeing Grettir’s mountain refuge made the hero appear more monstrous to him. In 1911, May Morris included the translation in her father’s collected works without altering its text, but appended Magnússon’s corrections. Admiration, discomfort and editorial loyalty all shaped the English saga’s later life. [3]
The farm’s church, refused fast and failed burial give Glámr’s return a Christian setting; they cannot simply be stripped away to reveal a uniform older belief. Grettir has destroyed the body, buried the ashes and received a new horse. What can he do with the eyes he still sees after dark? [1]
Grettir chapters XXXII–XXXV follow the shepherd’s death, the ruined household and the rescue. Kershaw’s Hrómundr introduction traces the text’s transmission; chapters III–IV contain the complete barrow adventure, and her notes explain “ghost.” Burns follows the English translation’s reception. Fee supplies the door-court comparison. [1][2][3][4]
Anonymous Icelandic saga author; translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon · Longmans, Green & Co.; Internet Archive historical reproduction · 1900 · New Edition 1900, retaining the Morris and Magnússon translation and preface dated April 1869 · English translation · Translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon
Chapters XXXII–XXXV, printed pp. 95–111 in the 1900 New Edition
Checked 2026-10-10
Anonymous saga author; Nora Kershaw, translator and introduction author · Cambridge University Press / Project Gutenberg · 1921 · English translation · Translated by Nora Kershaw
Introduction pp. 58–62; complete chapters III–IV, pp. 65–69; notes to chapters III–IV, pp. 232–233
The transmission history follows Kershaw’s 1921 assessment of the surviving texts.
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑Hrómundr’s barrow adventure begins with someone else’s losses. In Nora Kershaw’s translation, King Olaf’s men have raided cattle in the Hebrides. Their owner, Máni, suggests a more honourable target: the treasure of the sorcerer-king Thráinn. Hrómundr pays him and returns his cattle. The party sails south for six days to Valland, then spends another six breaking into the mound. Through a trap-door they see an enormous dark figure in glittering gold, seated on a throne and tending a fire. Hrómundr descends by rope, gathers treasure and ties it to the line. He takes the sword hanging from a pillar. The occupant still does nothing. [2]
Thráinn had shut himself inside while alive, when age prevented further fighting. Now he asks only to remain quietly on his throne, but Hrómundr taunts him for watching his possessions disappear. The old king proposes wrestling rather than facing his own sword unarmed. Hrómundr throws it down. Thráinn prepares a cauldron over the fire, then rises to meet him. Their struggle tears up stones and rubble. Forced onto one knee, Thráinn changes into a troll; a terrible stench fills the mound, and his crooked hands and talon-like nails rip the fighter’s flesh from neck toward loins. Still Hrómundr mocks the scratching creature as a cat. [2]
At last Hrómundr trips him. The fallen king laments that his sword, Mistletoe, has turned against him. The victor takes it up and asks how many men it has killed in single combat. Thráinn claims a hundred and forty-four, without receiving a scratch himself. Hrómundr cuts off his head and burns the body on the fire. He climbs out with the ring, necklace and Mistletoe as his chosen share; everyone receives some of the money. The other men ask how the meeting ended. His answer is the decapitation. [2]
Marjorie Burns · University of Iowa William Morris Archive · English
Complete introduction before Suggested Reading
Morris’s Icelandic travel response is read through Burns’s account.
Checked 2026-10-11
Christopher R. Fee · Gettysburg College faculty teaching site · English
Hvamm text page
The door-court comparison follows Fee’s summary of Eyrbyggja saga.
Checked 2026-10-10