Friends, we need to talk about the living dead.

Well, allow me to be a little more specific.

We need to talk about the living dead in the Norse sagas.

One of the many things that makes these medieval Icelandic texts so

fascinating and at times frustrating is their relationship with the supernatural. The sagas give us a

glimpse into a world that is considerably more magical than the one that we currently inhabit.

Monsters, forest creatures, and spirits of all descriptions live alongside the heroic ancestors

whose deeds the sagas celebrate.

Now, this is not especially out of the ordinary four historical sources written during the medieval period.

Most medieval chronicles are peppered with miraculous happenings, portents of doom, and the appearance of strange creatures.

But in most cases, these supernatural occurrences are viewed through the lens of medieval Christianity.

What makes the sagas so interesting is that they preserve an earlier Nordic pagan worldview

that sits alongside a Christian understanding of the universe.

As a result, magical things occur in the sagas that tend to not occur in other medieval European texts. For instance, in the sagas,

the dead have a habit of coming back to life. The saga of the Greenlanders, which is one of our key texts concerning the Norse presence

in North America, has more than one story about a strange, reanimated corpse.

At one point in the saga, the still young settlement founded by Eric the Red in Greenland

is stricken by a terrible disease. Many people die, but in some cases, the dead

seemed to have trouble staying dead. We're told of a much-loved settler named Grimhild,

who was, quote, a very vigorous woman, as strong as a man, but the sickness mastered her, end quote.

After she's determined to have breathed her last breath, her husband sets about building a coffin for her. But before this task is complete,

the corpse starts doing some weird things. One visitor to the house declares, quote,

...