ABSTRACT
Apparitions of dead people – ghosts – form a common theme in medieval European sources, including popular tradition, even though some Church Fathers had insisted that the dead could not return.2 In thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Old Icelandic saga literature, which was based on an oral tradition several centuries old, ghosts appeared frequently. The essence of these saga revenants was corporeal: they were dead people appearing to the living in their physical, recognizable, and undecayed bodies. These physical revenants – or restless, reanimated, and living dead, as they will also be called in this study – had both malevolent and benevolent functions in sagas: they gave assistance and advice to people, but could also cause the living trouble and fear as well as madness, disease, or death. If malevolent restlessness was expected or occurred it could be prevented by burying the body in a faraway place, possibly on a shore where the sea level changed periodically, by decapitating the corpse, or by burning the body and burying the ashes (which still
1 I thank Philip Line for comments and for correcting my English. This research has been undertaken as part of the Mind and the Other project funded by the Academy of Finland’s Research Program Human Mind, 266573.
