Draugr

The Draugr is an undead revenant of Norse tradition, rooted in the mythology and saga literature of medieval Scandinavia and Iceland. It is described extensively in the Old Norse sagas, particularly Grettis saga and Eyrbyggja saga, where it appears as a corpse that continues to act with will and malice after death, dwelling in the burial mound (haugr) where it was interred.

A Draugr is typically described as bloated, corpse-black or deathly pale, and reeking of decay, yet possessed of far greater strength than it had in life. In some tellings it can swell to an enormous size at will and grow heavier than several men, making its corpse difficult to move even after it is finally subdued. It retains the memory, cunning, and grudges of the person it was in life, and it is driven above all by a jealous attachment to the grave goods and treasure buried with it.

The Draugr's powers include superhuman strength, the ability to pass through solid earth and rock as though it were open air, shapeshifting into forms such as a seal, a great cat, or a roiling mass of hide-like darkness, and the power to grow to monstrous size. Some accounts credit it with the ability to curse the living, blight livestock and land, and induce a supernatural terror in those who encounter it, sometimes driving victims mad or to death without a mark on the body. It can be destroyed only through decisive physical means: beheading with the head placed at the buttocks or burned separately from the body, burning the corpse entirely and scattering the ashes (often at sea), or being wrestled and pinned by a hero of great strength until it is overcome, as Grettir Ásmundarson does to the Draugr Glámr in Grettis saga. In some tellings a Draugr must be named or addressed by a hero who does not flinch, since showing fear is said to embolden it further.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Beneath the folklore's physical horror, the Draugr reads as a creature of fixed, backward-looking will rather than any Anansi-style cunning: its intelligence in these tales serves possessiveness and revenge, not schemes or persuasion. It has almost no interest in other living beings except as threats to its hoard or targets of its lingering grudges, and it shows no capacity for growth, negotiation, or change of mind once roused from the mound. Its power is overwhelmingly physical and territorial, expressed through brute strength and the sheer dread of its presence rather than through subtlety, and its "curiosity," such as it is, extends only to defending what it already possesses. It is best understood as consistency taken to a supernatural extreme: the same resentments and appetites it held in life, undiminished by death and amplified by the grave.