head was a mass of seaweed.
Stories are told of both Catholic and Lutheran clergy in Iceland who were learned in magic and dabbled in the black arts, including the raising of corpses. They often studied the black arts through books, but legends recount how some clergy attended ‘the Black School which lay over the water’. Some folklore experts have suggested that the ‘Black School’ referred to in the legends was in fact the University of Paris, otherwise known as the Sorbonne.
Once a draugr had been raised by a sorcerer he or she would have to do the sorcerer’s bidding, which generally meant seeking out a particular man or a family against which the sorcerer had a grudge to wreak vengeance on them.
The family would often be fooled into taking the draugr into their household, believing him or her to be a stranger in need of hospitality or a servant seeking employment. Once there, not only would the draugr consume all their precious reserves of food, he or she would cause havoc – maddening livestock, spoiling crops, and terrorizing anyone who stayed in the house overnight. Whatever a man’s personality had been in life, once dead he became cruel and malicious, bent on hurting the living in every way he could.
Since a draugr appeared to be a living person, it was useful to know the signs by which they could be detected. One clue that you were being addressed by a draugr was the repetition of a word or a phrase in a verse-like taunt. But the word or phrase could only be repeated by the draugr twice, for any repetition of a word three times in succession was said to invoke the Holy Trinity, at which point the draugr would be forced back into the grave.
Once the draugr had completed whatever task it had been raised to accomplish, the sorcerer had to be able to send it back into the grave, otherwise it would follow him and his descendants for nine generations, all the while growing stronger. Forcing the corpse to return to the grave was not something to be undertaken without considerable risk, for the draugr would not return to his lonely tomb willingly and was likely to seize the sorcerer in a vice-like grip and carry him down into the grave with him.
Mummy
The use of human corpses in medicine is recorded as far back as ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. But even as recently as the eighteenth century, mummy was still included in European herbals. As early as the twelfth century, tombs in Egypt were being ransacked for embalmed corpses, and throughout the Middle Ages there was a lively trade in embalmed bodies, looted by Syrian merchants from Egyptian tombs, which were sold to European apothecaries to make mummy.
It was considered such an important medicine that no apothecary’s shelf would have been complete without it. Mummy mixed with other ingredients could treat abscesses, skin complaints, paralysis, epilepsy, diseases of the liver, heart, lungs, spleen and stomach as well as treat wounds and serve as an antidote to poison. Little wonder that the wealthy liked to have a stock of it to hand.
Mummy was also used to treat ailments in valuable horses, hunting hounds and falcons. It was listed by the medieval writer Pero López de Ayala, chancellor of Castile, as one of the sixty essential preparations which a falconer should always have to hand. López believed that mummy was the most efficacious ingredient in the treatment of any wounds on a falcon, and according to him the best-quality mummy was obtained from the human head. Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541) invented balsam of mummy and treacle of mummy which both proved to be very popular. It could also be dispensed in the form of tinctures, elixirs, pills, ointments and powders.
When the supply of ancient Egyptian corpses began to run out, the merchants and apothecaries were forced to use modern cadavers. In Othello Shakespeare refers to a handkerchief that was said to be ‘dy’d in mummy, which the skilful conserved of maidens’ hearts’. Some herbalists, such as John Parkinson (1567–1650), were still of the opinion that the best mummy was obtained from bodies which had been embalmed in the Egyptian manner, but others, like Oswald Croll (1580–1609), recommended that mummy should be made from the corpse of a hanged criminal, preferably of ruddy complexion and around twenty-four years old.
Hid-woman
The tall woman, Heidrun, who befriends Eydis and Isabela, is a huldukona, a hid-woman, meaning a ‘hidden woman’, which the Icelandic