"From Beneath the Waves": Sea-Draugr and the Popular Conscience

Alexander Hay

The sea looms large in human psychology, both as a source of guilt and its metaphor. As Joseph Conrad noted, the sea has never been "friendly to man" (Conrad 1907), nor has it shown generosity towards him or time for any of his professed values. Fittingly, Conrad's Pincher Martin had its protagonist undergo a purgatorial experience as he drowns in the sea, his 'survival' an extended penance where his guilt and sins are scourged (Sinclair 1982, pp.175–177).

For Coleridge's ancient mariner, meanwhile, the sea is a place of unending dread and a guilty conscience that cannot be absolved. As Miall has observed, the sea was the stage upon which Coleridge explored his own sense of guilt, haunted by the death of his father and a looming sense of some unfathomable judgement for sins committed (Miall 1984, pp.639–640).

Just as significantly, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1908) features walking corpses, in the form of the reanimated crewmates of the mariner, brought back to life once he admits his sins, who then steer his ship back to land. The Mariner himself is now the property of Life-in-Death, a sinister female figure that condemns him to a living death of his own, doomed to tell his story forever more. As the chapter will argue, this juxtaposition of reanimated corpses, guilt and the sea has become a recurring motif in popular culture, a means whereby guilt is confronted though not always resolved.

Walking corpses and the restless dead have, of course, been prominent in recent decades as metaphors and means of satire. As representations of mindless conformity and relentless social conflict, zombies are of course one such example. Though recently neutered in potency by over-exposure and their relegation to the rank of 'macguffin' for soap opera and sadistic, faintly right wing survival fantasies, as most notably depicted in The Walking Dead comic book and its attendant spin-off media.

Vengeful aquatic spirits are a common theme in horror films, as are tortured souls in need of salvation: in The Devil's Backbone (2001), we have a juxta-position of both, as is the case with Ringu (1998), though both involve a well as both crime scene and root of the ensuing horror, rather than the sea per se.

As this paper will discuss, however, the Sea-Draugr not only combines these but also demonstrates a recurring reckoning with guilt and its consequences. This has become more subliminal over time, to the extent that we have Sea-Draugr in function if not form, where there is no reanimated corpse per se, but there is a substitution that serves the same role. In other cases, the presence of Sea-Draugr swings towards the other direction, where these creatures are Sea-Draugr not only in function but in all but name. They have even begun to manifest themselves in our news media and press coverage, where depictions of disasters and tragedies at sea have strange parallels to the drowned dead and their role as both conscience and nemesis.

Sea-Draugr and other revenants

What, however, is a Sea-Draugr? The archetype that will now be discussed is what can be best described as the Draugr, or reanimated corpse, an invariably malignant and dangerous reanimated corpse that figures large in Scandinavian mythology. They are sentient, calculating, cannibalistic objects of fear (Chadwick June 1946a, p.50). Draugr spread diseases and grow long talons. They inhabit their barrows, often full of treasure, and violently resist any tomb robbers. Those slain by a Draugr are sometimes bound to their killer as enslaved ghosts (Jakobsson 2009, p.310). Unlike their mainland counterparts, Icelandic Draugr are free-roaming, able to roam far from their barrows and pose a threat to any human they encounter, though a certain mischievousness means they may sometimes grant a gift rather than a violent death onto their victims (Chadwick 1946a, pp.54–55). They are fearsome foes, often requiring a ritualistic means of exorcism to be fully quelled. This ranges from being decapitated with their own sword, to being wrestled into submission, to being staked through the heart, and incineration – their ashes scattered, significantly, into the sea (Andrews 1913, p.48, Keyworth 2006, p.244, Chadwick 1946a, p.55).

While primarily land-based Draugr come in another variety, however, namely that of a drowned seafarer. A particularly vivid example of this is given in Eyrbyggja saga (Morris and Magnusson 1892), where a seafarer named Thorod Scat-Catcher and his men drown in mysterious circumstances. Their ship and its catch of fish are found but with none of its crew. Yet at their burial feast the drowned crew appear dripping with water, and take up their seats. At first they are welcomed but when they continue to appear in the subsequent evenings, now joined by another group of undead, they cause the mortal men to flee in horror, and subsequently cause the outbreak of an un-named sickness.

In response to this, the living organise a Thing, or court, and proceed to pass judgement on each of the Draugr who each say, in mitigation, that they had simply remained...