Draugen — the drowned man who never came home
Coastal Norway's sea-revenant — a sailor drowned and never buried, sailing a half a boat against the wind with a crew of the dead. See him and one man on your own boat is not coming home.
A boat sailing against the wind with only half a hull — split lengthwise, crewed by the dead — was the worst thing a fisherman on the outer coast could see. It was the draugen, and it meant one man on his own boat would not be coming home.
The draugen is the spirit of a sailor drowned at sea and never recovered for burial in consecrated ground, held to the water by an unfinished funeral. He belongs to the fishing communities of the outer north — Nordland, Lofoten, Vesterålen. What he looks like depends on where you ask. In the north he is headless, hunched in oilskins at the tiller; in Trøndelag and the south he wears a knot of seaweed where his face should be, and one Trøndelag tale has the two kinds meet on the shingle and fight over a drowned man washed up between them.
He is as much a sound as a sight. He cries a long wail across the water before a storm — h — a — u, or sometimes just so cold — and a knock against the hull on a calm night is the draugen trying to climb aboard. To hear the cry from your own boat is already the wrong sign. Answering it from the deck sinks you; not answering does not save you.
The figure came down from the Old Norse draugr, the corpse that would not stay in its mound in the Icelandic sagas. Over the centuries his home moved from the burial mound to the sea, and his grievance from disturbed grave-goods to a body the sea would not give back. The parson Andreas Faye gathered what fishermen said and put it in print in 1844; Theodor Kittelsen, who kept the Skomvær lighthouse on outer Lofoten from 1887 to 1889, drew him afterwards; and the fishing town of Bø in Vesterålen set the half-boat on its coat of arms in 1987 — a working fishing community on the outer coast putting the drowned man’s boat on its civic seal.