In the north they say the dead do not always stay where they are laid.
He fell at the end of a long war, far from home, and his men buried him the way the north buries its chiefs: under a mound of earth and stone, in his horned helm and his cloak of fur, with his gold beside him, so that he would want for nothing in the world below.
But some of the dead are too stubborn for the grave. In the old tongue they are called draugr, the again-walkers. They do not rot like other corpses. They grow heavy and cold and strong, and they keep watch over everything that was buried with them. The flowers of a hundred summers may grow over the mound, and still he lies awake beneath them.
You will know him by his eyes. In the saga of Grettir the Strong, the bravest man in Iceland fought one of them by moonlight and won; yet for the rest of his life he could not bear to be alone in the dark, because he could never forget those eyes.
Seen from above, he is only a dead warrior sunk in blossom. Then the eyes inside the helm begin to burn green, and the dead man looks back.
Among the fallen of the realm, he is the one who refused to stay fallen.
The night half of a diptych with The Sleeper in the Valley: the dead man who will not sleep, and the dead man taken for sleeping.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in July 2024.)
