{"id":985,"date":"2012-05-27T14:03:55","date_gmt":"2012-05-27T14:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/icelandic\/?p=985"},"modified":"2012-06-01T18:20:06","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T18:20:06","slug":"modir-min-i-kvi-kvi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/icelandic\/2012\/05\/27\/modir-min-i-kvi-kvi\/","title":{"rendered":"M\u00f3\u00f0ir m\u00edn \u00ed kv\u00ed, kv\u00ed."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>“Icelandic ghosts are so different from the ones in my homecountry”, a classmate of mine told me once while explaining why she wanted to write her \u00fej\u00f3\u00f0s\u00f6gur ritger\u00f0<\/em>, folk tales essay, about them. Even having a completely different background I had to agree. Icelandic ghosts, draugar<\/em>, are really a type of their own.\u00a0They can be divided into certain groups that occasionally overlap each other a bit, but usually they tend to be quite easy to tell apart.<\/p>\n

Afturg\u00f6ngur<\/em> are perhaps one of the most common type. They’re the spirits of people who have killed themselves in desperate circumstances and are usually after the people they felt wronged them, no matter how rightful the act would seem to others. Miklab\u00e6jar-Solveig is a good example of this. It tells the tale of a woman who fell in love with a priest but alas, he did not return her feelings. In a bout of depression she slit her throat with shears and returned to haunt the priest until at long last he disappeared, and it’s believed that she finally managed to kill him like she intended to.<\/p>\n

An afturganga<\/em> can also simply be worried for its belongings and guard a place where it hid its money while alive. Another type of a ghost who guards treasures are f\u00e9p\u00fakar\/f\u00e9draugar<\/em>, people who loved their worldly belongings (usually gold) so much that they let some of it be buried with them. This gold weighs their soul into a place and they have to stay with it and keep it safe from others. This ghost type seems to be quite old since the sagas mention killing slaves and burying them with treasure so that their spirits would attack whoever tried to steal it – \u00a0a theme made more famous by pirate stories later on.<\/p>\n

Uppvakningar<\/em> and sendingar<\/em> are, like the names suggest, woken from death and zombie-like. They are sent to harm someone by whoever managed to rise them from death. Then there are ghosts named after where or when they occur – dagdraugur<\/em> can be seen during the day, s\u00e6draugur<\/em> is only seen at sea, and so on.<\/p>\n

M\u00f3rar<\/em> and skottur<\/em> are gang\u00e1ri<\/em>-type ghosts, meaning that they follow someone instead of being tied into a place (place specific ghosts would be called sta\u00f0\u00e1rar<\/em>). M\u00f3rar<\/em> are male ghosts who often wear something brownish or rust red, usually a shirt or a sweater, and skottur<\/em> are their female counterparts. The female ghosts wear the same blood-like colour somewhere about them but more importantly they also wear the traditional women’s headdress,\u00a0kvenh\u00f6fu\u00f0b\u00fana\u00f0<\/em>, which has a curving plate on top – except that a skottur<\/em> wears hers backwards so that instead of turning forward, the top piece is pointing to the back.<\/p>\n