In Eyrbyggja saga, a farm called Fróðá is overrun by the dead. Corpses that will not stay buried sit by the fire every evening, an inexplicable seal's head rises out of the floor, a shepherd is found dead and starts walking, and the household dwindles as one after another dies and joins the group in the corner.
The remedy is procedural. The surviving heir summons a court at the door — a duradómr — and the dead are prosecuted individually, by name, for trespassing on the property and depriving the household of health and life. Sentence is passed. And each of them gets up, makes a short remark on the way out, and leaves. One says he sat while sitting was permitted.
Then a priest sprinkles holy water and carries relics round the house, and nothing else happens.
That is the Icelandic approach to the undead: identify the problem, convene the correct legal forum, obtain a ruling, and follow it up with the appropriate paperwork.
What a draugr is
The Old Norse draugr — plural draugar, with the related terms haugbúi, mound-dweller, and aptrganga, again-walker — is not a ghost. It is a body, still in its grave, still solid, and usually stronger than it was alive.
The saga literature gives them consistent properties. They are heavy — sometimes described as swollen, blue-black or corpse-coloured, hel-blár. They can increase in size. They guard the treasure buried with them. They kill livestock and men by crushing or tearing. Some ride the roof-ridge of a house at night, drumming with their heels. Some drive people mad by being looked at.
Killing one is physical work. The standard method in the sagas is to wrestle it down, cut off its head, and place the head at the buttocks or thighs; often the body is then burned and the ashes carried out to sea or buried somewhere remote. This is a procedure, described the same way a saga describes a legal settlement or a boat repair.
Glámr
The most famous of them is in Grettis saga. Glámr is a large, surly, irreligious Swedish shepherd hired at a haunted farm; he refuses to fast before Christmas, goes out into a storm, and is found dead and blue-black. He then walks — riding the roof, breaking men's backs, making the valley uninhabitable.
Grettir Ásmundarson comes to fight him and the encounter is the finest scene of its kind in medieval literature. They wrestle through the hall and out of it; the door-frame comes away; and at the moment they fall outside, the clouds part and the moon comes out and Glámr's eyes catch the light. Grettir, who has never been afraid of anything, freezes.
Glámr then curses him: that he will grow no stronger than he now is, that his deeds will turn to ill fortune, that he will be outlawed and always alone, and that he will never again be able to bear the dark. Grettir cuts his head off, burns him, buries the ashes — and lives the rest of the saga inside that curse, unable to be alone at night, which is what eventually kills him.
It is one of the earliest sustained treatments of fear as a permanent injury in any European literature.
The mound-breakers
The other kind of draugr encounter is deliberate. Heroes go into burial mounds to take the sword or the treasure inside, and fight the occupant for it — Grettir does this too, with Kárr the Old, whose mound he opens in Norway and from whom he takes the short-sword he carries afterwards.
There is a real practice behind this. Mound-breaking is archaeologically well attested across Scandinavia: major burials including Oseberg and Gokstad were opened and robbed in antiquity, sometimes within a few decades of the funeral, and the disturbance was often done in a way that looks targeted rather than casual — going for the body, not just the goods. Whether that was theft, political dynasty-breaking, or a ritual, it happened, and the saga motif of the fight in the mound is describing something people actually did.
Why Iceland, and why these stories
Icelandic saga hauntings are notably domestic and notably legalistic. The dead come into the house, sit at the fire, and take places at table. They are dealt with by summons, by exhumation, by moving a body to a new site — Eyrbyggja has a corpse dug up and reburied on a headland, and the mischief follows the body. This is a society without kings or executive power, in which the þing is the only mechanism for settling anything, applying that mechanism to the one category of neighbour it was not designed for.
There is also a physical explanation available and worth stating: cold ground preserves bodies, winter burial in Iceland was often deferred, and a corpse that has not decayed as expected is unnerving. Several sagas describe exhumations in which the body is found uncorrupted, which is presented as evidence of the problem rather than of sanctity.
The word now
Draugr is one of the very few Old Norse terms to enter global popular vocabulary intact, largely through The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which populated Nordic barrows with them in exactly the guarding-the-treasure role the sagas describe. Their presence in fantasy generally — the barrow-wight in Tolkien is drawn from the same material, and Tolkien knew the sagas well — makes them the most successful export of Icelandic prose after the sagas themselves.
For the ordinary destination of the Norse dead, see Helheim and Hel; for the drowned who come back, Rán; and for the Norse overview.
Are draugar in the Eddas at all?
Barely. The word appears in poetic compounds and kennings — a warrior can be called a draugr of some possession, in the way skalds use "tree" or "pole" of a man — and Hávamál has a stanza about runes that can make a hanged corpse walk and talk, which is Odin's own claim, not a haunting. The sustained material is entirely in the prose sagas, written in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries about events set in the ninth to eleventh. That makes the draugr a folk-belief with a much better documentary record than most of the pantheon, and one that is not dependent on Snorri.
Did people take physical precautions against the dead walking?
The archaeology suggests yes, though intent is always inferred. Viking-age and earlier Scandinavian graves sometimes show bodies weighted with stones, decapitated with the head placed apart, buried face-down, or pinned. Icelandic sources describe hel-skór, hel-shoes, bound onto the dead for the journey — mentioned in Gísla saga — and carrying a corpse out through a hole in the wall rather than the door, so it could not find its way back. Similar practices are recorded elsewhere in medieval Europe. What they show is that the walking dead were not a story people told; they were a contingency people prepared for.