The Norse Twin Revenant Haunting Me For Days
There are a few reasons that Norse mythology’s been at the forefront of my thoughts recently. Number one: Ari Aster’s MIDSOMMAR is one of my favorite horror films, and any time I think about it a fresh hell awakens. Number two: I saw Robert Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN in theaters, which was epic in a way I didn’t know the Norse could be till I saw my girls Anya Taylor-Joy and Bjork both cast as witches. Number three: I just read Sarah Moss’ folk horror novel Cold Earth, in which six archaeologists embark on a Viking grave dig in Greenland and end up potentially releasing revenants. (If you haven’t yet read this book, do yourself a favor and Add to Cart.) It’s true that all three examples are horror-adjacent, genre-wise, but I can’t shake the idea that Viking culture (and its contemporaries) were pretty horrific all around, as were most cultures in and around the medieval period.
Still, there’s something about the surviving Nordic folkloric texts that make me feel personally like they were beyond the pale. I should clarify that I’m not an archaeologist—I’m not even a true historian—I’m a writer who gets to cherry-pick the most interesting aspects of both those fields and do a selective deep dive. Usually, that means I have to hunt around through some archives, but at the very least, the shit I want to find is never at the top of the pile. Sometimes I bike up to the Atlanta University Center’s special collections to read some out-of-print books where I freeze my ass off because they keep it cold to stall decomposition, and the media can’t leave the room. Sometimes I beg my friend who’s still associated with a university system’s library to “just do me a quick search, Sara, please!” in the middle of the night so I can evade some particularly steep paywalls. My point is, I’m not a quitter. I have some strategies, and I don’t generally expect information to come easily.
Sometimes I beg my friend who’s still associated with a university system’s library to “just do me a quick search, Sara, please!” in the middle of the night so I can evade some particularly steep paywalls. My point is, I’m not a quitter. I have some strategies, and I don’t generally expect information to come easily.
But it’s not until hunting down this particular Norse myth from Cold Earth that I’ve ever found almost nothing. And that creeps me out.
Anthropologists are going to cringe when I compare this hunt to finding Beowulf written in a bar’s ledger—I know they’re not the same. I know that. But for non-industry people, that’s my best metaphor. The Crusades tried and succeeded in stamping out many old Norse beliefs (along with many others) so the surviving ephemera is not as easy to come by as that of some other civilizations (take, for example, how many Egyptian ruins survived not only because of environmental factors, but because Napoleon was convinced they were cursed and left them the fuck alone).
Still, with Norse mythology in popular culture lately, I assumed some of the actual research would be available to a plebe like me. To be fair, some of it was. Remember when the cult members in MIDSOMMAR hanged Simon (Archie Madekwe) and apparently disemboweled him in the greenhouse? That’s the blood-eagle. Scholar Roberta Frank says, “The blood-eagling procedure varies from text to text, becoming more lurid, pagan, and time-consuming with each passing century,” starting with scratching a picture of an eagle onto Ælla’s back, either outlining in blood or pouring salt into the wound, depending on whom you ask. Later, the Orkneyinga saga describes it as “Einar carved the bloody-eagle on [Halfdan’s] back by laying his sword in the hollow at the backbone and hacking all the ribs from the backbone down to the loins, and drawing out the lungs; and he gave him to Odin as an offering for his victory.”
It’s debated whether ritual was performed as a means of ritual execution or posthumously to indicate victory (it certainly does indicate a victory… you turned my lungs into wings… you won, homie), but its representation in the sagas themselves (just twice directly) were both performed specifically on noblemen as retaliation for the murder of a father. See? Even though there’s not hard proof either way, someone has articulated the discrepancy, which is, in these times, sometimes as close as you can get.
Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN depicts some nutso Norse folklore, too, like the nude murder-sculpture Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) creates on a village’s thatch roof, of which the shaman says, “This violence is not human.” Or the berserker Sons of Fenrir, which I’m convinced is the precursor to werewolf.
If it seems like these examples are kind of a reach, it’s because they are. I’m setting you up for a passage in a new favorite book that directly references a narrative of Bjorn saga. The novel itself is full of Viking and Inuit history and allusions, and most of them I’m able to research at least preliminarily, like what I’ve listed above. Or that the revenants, for example, or draugr haunted the living via the bodies of the dead until vengeance for their death was exacted.
Naturally, though, the one aspect that I can’t substantiate is the one I’m the most obsessed with. Here’s how Sarah Moss relays the narrative in Cold Earth:
Ingibjorg and Kristin…were twin sisters, and their father was tangentially involved in a long-running feud of the sort that defines most of the sagas. One day Kristin was found dead and ‘unpleasantly damaged’ on the beach. No one knew who’d killed her, or trusted their guesswork enough to attempt vengeance, which was the usual way of stopping the dead coming back. The buried her quickly and thoroughly because everyone expected someone killed like that to make trouble. She did. Every night she came creeping into Ingibjorg’s bed in a state of advancing decomposition, muttering allegations, until Ingibjorg ‘spoke no more sense but uttered strange prophecies until she died.’ After that one or other of them often sat on the roof of the house and woke people by shouting, but that bothers me less. It’s the idea of someone who loves you turning into a revenant who comes to decompose in your bed and drive you mad that’s particularly disturbing. Would you rather be haunted by your rotting beloved or lose her entirely? (25)
I can’t find that story. Anywhere. I’ve looked for days, skimmed translations of the Bjorn saga for them, and while Ingibjorg is present, no one mentions her twin, much less that she returned in this revenant state to drive her sister mad. It’s almost like Kristin is returning to me and driving me mad because I can’t see the story of who killed her or why. And I’ve tried to figure it out. I could do more, but I really feel like I’ve tried if not My Hardest, at least My Pretty-Hardest.
At the risk of sounding like the side of a milk carton, do you know anything about these sisters? If you do, will you please get in touch with me so I can put her to rest?
Sources:
Frank, Roberta. “Viking atrocity and Skaldic verse: The Rite of the Blood-Eagle.” The English Historical Review, Volume XCIX, Issue CCCXCI, April 1984, Pages 332–343, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XCIX.CCCXCI.332
Moss, Sarah. Cold Earth. Counterpoint, 2010.
Tracy, Larissa. “The Matter of the North: Icelandic Sagas and Cultural Autonomy.” Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity, Boydell & Brewer, 2012, pp. 108–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt3fgnmw.8. Accessed 26 Jul. 2022.
