The word undead first appeared in the tenth century, when a Christian preacher named Aelfric of Eynsham (c. 955–c. 1010) employed its Old English ancestor—the adjective undeadlic—to describe the immortality, the undyingness, of God. The term has undergone an ironic reversal in modern English, where it now denotes dead people who have been reanimated by a supernatural force. This change reflects the intense interest in tales of the living dead that have become ubiquitous in modern societies. The revival of Gothic horror stories like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in movie theaters in the 1930s sparked a popular interest in the undead that persists to the present day. Between the release of cult films like Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the airing of Joss Whedon’s wildly popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), stories about the risen dead have saturated the modern imagination. The past decade alone has witnessed the release of dozens of feature-length films about the so-called zombie apocalypse, the catastrophic breakdown of modern society due to an epidemic of living corpses. While similarly restless, ghosts and their kindred spirits have followed a different trajectory in modern media. The psychological trauma of an encounter with a ghost, depicted so vividly in the stories of M. R. James (1862–1936) and his imitators, has receded in the wake of more sentimental treatments. Unlike marauding zombies, whose malevolent intention is never in doubt, the appearance of a dead soul could evoke pity or sadness or regret in the living, especially when it is recognized as a loved one now lost.
This ambivalent relationship between the living and the returning dead is not new; it has been a persistent theme in Western literature for almost three thousand years. This collection of stories about premodern encounters with ghosts and animated corpses spans fifteen centuries from the height of the Roman Empire in the first century CE to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Ancient, medieval, and early modern authors related stories and ideas about supernatural events involving the dead in a wide variety of genres, including epic poetry, histories, hagiography, personal letters, theological and polemical treatises, sagas, plays, and collections of miracles and marvels. The persistence of these stories over such a long span of time speaks to the abiding interest among the living in the fate of the dead, who remained a much stronger presence in the face-to-face communities of premodern Europe than they do in the antiseptic anonymity of most modern societies.
Stories about the dead have an ancient pedigree. In the classical period, from the Trojan War to the ascendancy of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea, the spirits of the recently deceased appeared often to the living to plead for proper burial and commemoration, the obligations owed but not always granted to the dead. Professional necromancers animated the corpses of the slain and compelled them in rituals of divination to share the information that only the dead can know. Even with the religious revolution of late antiquity, during which the Christian church triumphed over Greek and Roman paganism, this commerce with the dead persisted, though with new mediators. As early Christian theologians developed the notion that souls underwent a cleansing in fire in preparation for their entry into heaven, stories about the returning dead became an important medium for asserting the benefits of praying and giving alms on behalf of the faithful departed to speed their way to paradise. By the eleventh century, Christian monks had effectively domesticated the ghost story as a tool to teach the faithful about the economy of the afterlife. The stain of unavoidable sins imperiled every soul, but the prayers of the monks, whose denial of the world made them powerful intercessors before God, could wipe those stains away and gain for the soul a much quicker release from purgatorial flames. Donations of revenue-producing land to cloistered communities in this world would secure their prayerful assistance for the souls of faithful donors and their families in the afterlife.
As Christianity pushed inexorably northward into Scandinavia and Iceland around the first millennium, it collided with indigenous non-Christian beliefs about the living dead. From the eleventh century onward, Christian authors on the northern frontiers began to relate stories about unruly corpses that broke loose from the confines of their tombs to plague their communities with acts of violence and their disease-bearing breath. While monastic ghost stories emphasized the empathy of the living in response to the suffering of the dead, these tales of rampaging revenants left Christian authors in doubt about the moral of the stories they were telling. In most cases, only the most wicked individuals rose from the grave as living corpses, animated by the power of the Devil to wreak havoc among their family and friends until put to rest by the equally violent intervention of brave monks and stalwart young men. These events were wonders; their cause and purpose were known only to God.
In the sixteenth century, these age-old relationships between the living and the dead were called into doubt, when Protestant reformers attacked the Catholic doctrine of purgatory as an invention of the papacy and denied that apparitions were genuine manifestations of the souls of the dead. To be sure, Protestants believed that ghostly spirits frequently appeared to human beings, but these spirits were either angels in disguise or, more likely, devils in human form intent on deception and ruin. For their part, Catholic theologians held firm to the medieval doctrine of purgatory. While the Protestants maintained that the inscrutable judgment of God sent souls directly to heaven or hell after death, the Catholics placed their hope in the cleansing fire that prepared all but the most utterly wicked for entry into paradise.
In the premodern imagination, the restless dead appeared in many forms. In this book, the reader will find a macabre menagerie of agitated souls and unquiet corpses: moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins; dead souls appearing to their loved ones in dreams; the ghosts of sinful monks returning to beseech the prayerful assistance of their brethren to escape the fires of purgatory; great armies of spirits clad in white armor and marshaled for battle; hordes of tormented souls doomed to never-ending nocturnal marches through desolate hinterlands; bloated corpses shambling from their graves to sicken the living with their deathly breath; spectral crows and dogs and cattle encountered on lonely moors; and, perhaps most strangely of all, the tiny ghost of a miscarried fetus rolled up in a sock. To be sure, medieval Europeans lived in a world very different from our own, but, as this volume shows, their stories of supernatural encounters with the dead are no less capable of evoking anguish or pity or even genuine fear in the modern reader.
SCOTT G. BRUCE