The Grettis Saga, which was written early in the fourteenth century, tells of the deeds of the outlaw Grettir Asmundsson, who is likely to have lived in Iceland during the early eleventh century. The saga tells of his travels across the North Atlantic to Norway, and of his many victorious encounters with his foes, whether living men or dead tomb-dwellers who had come back to life as revenants and draugar. Although Grettir is the hero of the saga, he is not a particularly admirable figure by the noble standards of late medieval chivalry. In his youth, he is a typical folk-tale ‘Bear's Son’ character: he is lazy, quick to anger, and the basis for his outlawry is the crime of murder. Expelled from the company of law-abiding men, he subsists in the glacial wilderness of the Icelandic highlands by stealing sheep. There are times indeed in the saga when the figure of Grettir can almost be regarded as a kind of living counterpart of the predatory revenants whom he defeats by his quick wits and physical strength. At the end of his fight with the ghost of the shepherd Glam, which is one of the pivotal events of the saga, there is a kind of ‘recognition’ between himself and the defeated ghost, who curses Grettir and leaves him with a fear of the dark and a hunted sense of his own luckless destiny. Earlier in the saga, before Grettir's luck has begun to turn, there is an account of his successful raid on the tomb of Kar in the island of Hamarsey. Grettir's attention had been drawn to the likelihood that treasure was buried within the tomb by the sight of a fiery glow on the headland where the howe was situated. The description of the tomb-dweller's existence within the ‘howe’ or tumulus, and his fierce defence of the possessions of this underground domain, convey a strong sense of Scandinavian notions of the after-life.

The Tomb of Kar the Old

Chap. XVIII

Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent.