The cultures of medieval Scandinavia encountered Christian missionaries as early as the eighth century, but the process of conversion took many hundreds of years. With Christianity came literary culture; in the thirteenth century, Scandinavian Christians from Iceland and Denmark preserved the heroic traditions of their people in sagas written in Latin and Old Norse. These historical tales featured mighty heroes embarking on perilous voyages to unknown lands (including North America) as well as legendary feuds between the ancestors of prominent families. Many of these stories were set in the distant past of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Their purpose was primarily to entertain, but they also preserved with evident pride tales of the pre-Christian past that informed the identity of medieval Scandinavians. While the people of the north embraced their new Christian faith, they refused to abandon the heroes of their own antiquity.

The restless dead play a prominent role in the Scandinavian sagas. Unlike the ghosts of the Christian tradition, which appear to the living to appeal for suffrages to relieve their torment in purgatory, the dead in the sagas were usually a nuisance to their family and friends. Sometimes they lingered in their old homes as an unsettling presence. More often, however, they killed livestock, destroyed property, and terrorized individuals as much with their violence as with their ghastly appearance. Left unchecked, they could turn a settlement into a wilderness. Laying the malevolent dead to rest was a heroic feat of strength. In Scandinavian lore, the decapitation of a corpse could stop its wandering, as could the impaling or burning of its body. But only the bravest of warriors were willing to “struggle under great pressure and in considerable peril” against the unearthly strength of walking corpses.