The Spookiest Story from the Icelandic Sagas

Рет қаралды 10,894

Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 69

@JacksonCrawford 2 ай бұрын

Tickets for language and myth classes: www.eventbrite.com/o/jackson-crawford-76655487403 (you can also find tickets for the pay-what-you-want talk on the Thor movies, and any future events like that, there).

@TheWildManEnkidu 2 ай бұрын

We have our own horror movie tropes today, but I would guess the Norse horror trope would be: 'The character that makes light of the aptrgangr is next to get eaten.'

@heilmodrhinnheimski 2 ай бұрын

Which honestly is pretty close to our current horror movie trope of “the person who doubts the monster gets killed by it first”

@mattcarnevali 2 ай бұрын

A saga “tier list” or describing the best/your favorite sagas would actually be really great content

@Simon.Thornley 2 ай бұрын

Seconded.

@arki7730 2 ай бұрын

Thirded.

@al3xa723 2 ай бұрын

Fourthded.

@carlinberg 2 ай бұрын

I agree. The saga of Hervor and Heidrek is great, which Jackson has translated. I would also recommend Rolf the Walker's saga and Norna-Gests thátt

@giuseppeagresta1425 2 ай бұрын

That would be AWESOME

@artcollins6968 2 ай бұрын

Advent, the four-week liturgical season leading up to Christmas, is a penitential season, so fasting would be in character. Also in medieval times, Wednesdays and Fridays were always fast days.

@KebaRPG 2 ай бұрын

Yeah, this is something that people forget since Second Vatican Council drop the requirement for fasting/abstaining on Wednesdays and Fridays for all but Personal Choice and Lent before Easter for Roman Catholics. My dad still does abstaining from Red Meats on Wednesdays and Fridays. Also many Eastern Rite Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches all continue the Full Fast (or Abstain from Red Meats) for all of Advent and Lent.

@al3xa723 2 ай бұрын

I knew of lent fast but not advent.@@KebaRPG

@kimfleury Ай бұрын

@@KebaRPGVatican II didn't drop the requirements. The Wednesday fish day was changed long before then. Where it was still practiced, it was a long tradition, not a Church obligation. Fridays were still days of abstinence after Vatican II, and still are to this day. The difference is that the Faithful may perform another act of penance in place of abstaining from meat, but Friday is a day of penance regardless. A lot of the Faithful were mistaken in the confusion after Vatican II, though. Maybe they heard half of the Friday obligation and thought meatless Fridays weren't required any more.

@Ignat449 2 ай бұрын

In danish a ghost is sometime called a "genganger". That would be translatet as an "again walker" one who walkes after he/she died. In danish folktales draugr is often ghosts/zombies of seamen drowned at sea, they are dressed in seaweeds and fight with oars. In one tale there is a big battle with draugr on one side, who tries to pass a christian graveyard, and the dead christians on the other side. The day after the battle there is oars and planks from coffins, all over the graveyard.

@Ignat449 2 ай бұрын

About the riding, the danish word for nightmare is "mareridt". A "mare" is a ghost of a kind, that sits on top of the sleeping and rides the sleeping person as a horse.

@giuseppeagresta1425 2 ай бұрын

@@Ignat449"mare" in English, even tho it is now an obsolete word, has the exact same meaning; that's exactly where "night-mare" comes from, if I recall well :-)

@alchemicalalek7535 Ай бұрын

@@giuseppeagresta1425 PRECISELY I love the connections between the different Germanic languages, though Danish has a lot both with German and English!

@dianabriggs1032 2 ай бұрын

This is interesting, because I just read my daughter a different Nordic fairy tale that was basically "Farmer can't find employees because they always die in his house at Christmas. Hero is employee #3."

@N_Loco_Parenthesis 2 ай бұрын

The episode was set to music by Icelandic composer Jón Leifs (d.1968), as part of his Symphony "Saga Heroes". Glamur can be heard kicking his heels on the roof, and then the conflict inside the house. The music is pure atmosphere. Try it!

@CharlesSchaum 2 ай бұрын

Cool. I wrote a paper in German based on the Old Norse text back in the day for my Germanic folk tales course with Dr. Marlene Ciklamini. Takes me back over 30 years. Grettir Amundarson, the high mimetic hero, doomed.

@chinmayhejmadi7902 2 ай бұрын

10:38 that is EXACTLY how I wrap my blanket around me when I sleep at night 😂

@TheInstitute91 2 ай бұрын

As far as the “riding” of the roof, I have heard that there is a sexual connotation to the act, like an act of expressing domination of the household and a way of unnerving and shaming the residents, similar to klámhogg etc. in a way. There is a channel called “the Reykjavik grapevine” that did a pretty good summary/overview of this saga in one of their series that’s more from a modern Icelandic standpoint, I can’t remember exactly which video but they are all worth checking out, their saga series and spooky tales series is pretty good. Got a cool one on huldufólk/elves as well.

@nightmotherasmr 2 ай бұрын

That's interesting! I can also imagine people in a longhouse late at night, it's dark outside and maybe windy, you hear creaking and other sounds from outside, and it's easy to imagine some creature is outside or up on the roof.

@odinnatlason5873 Ай бұрын

Fun fact: the word ‘afturganga’ is still used in modern Icelandic. The direct translation is as you described (again walker), however it is commonly used as the Icelandic word for zombie.

@klausolekristiansen2960 2 ай бұрын

Long ago, Christmas eve was a time for fasting. That is difficult to imagine today, where it is the greatest feast of the year. This is the origin of the Danish tradition of eating cod on new year's eve. It was moved rom Chrismas eve when Christmas eve changed from fast to feast.

@BathrobeKeck 2 ай бұрын

"Again walker" sounds like a Revenant

2 ай бұрын

Aside from all the famous sagas and the eddas, there is a lot of folklore in Icelandic literary history, stories about evil spirits, elves, trolls, sea monsters etc. Unfortunately, most of it has never been translated but there are still some volumes that exist in English, Spanish, German and French.

@coranova 2 ай бұрын

Thank you for your time🌻

@anthonywritesfantasy 2 ай бұрын

I love that you talked a bit about draugr here. Would you be against doing a more detailed video about that term, and its use (and misuse)?

@tohe0000 2 ай бұрын

Hrankel Freygodes saga is unsettling too

@dannelson5267 2 ай бұрын

Thanks!

@brianroberts783 Ай бұрын

Overly Sarcastic Productions made a video with a very entertaining retelling of this story. I'd be interested in how it holds up from an academic perspective.

@juslitor 2 ай бұрын

really tickles my fancy when something as old as aptrganga, can be found as eftergångare in old swedish academy lexicons, with various meanings, one being to persecute or to cause harm to someone.

@fraserhaywood4857 2 ай бұрын

I wonder if Grettir's symptoms can be seen as PTSD through the lens of modern psychology

@catansfr3532 2 ай бұрын

10:48 in Nils Gaup's Pathfinder (Ofelás) it was the hunter who finished off the bear and thus gained a hazardously powerful aura, whom only could be looked at thru a ring for the following days, this belief could be going back to stone age

@corpi8784 2 ай бұрын

"Again walker" called Wiedergänger in German.... Interestingly an important traditional topic in the Balkans (especially also Romanian ) folklore/ mythology where these Undead are called Strigoi or.Moroi (and not vampires). My personal theory is that a lot of this "Undead /Widergänger" mythology /folklore is closely connected to with the switch from pagan incineration ritea to christian inhumation method of dealing with the deceased... Incineration seems to have been the method of choice of the majority of Indoeuropean pagan peoples until their conversion to christianity during late antiquity/early middle ages.

@afterzanzibar Ай бұрын

Could you please cover more of Grettir's Saga? The thumbnail edition you showed in the beginning is the only saga I've made it through so far, and I find Grettir to be such an interesting character. His weird wit, odd, smug, lazy-loner personality that really fleshes him out as a character and humanizes him, and the fights he has with the drauger in the mound and the black being you speak of that curse him are just such fun stories and I had a great time reading it. Would love to hear more direct translations of it from you. Thank you.

@kimfleury Ай бұрын

Having just listened to some descriptions of the wendigo, I see a similarity, at least in this saga. The shepherd here doesn't act like a Christian in that he doesn't fact when he's expected to do so. He's greedy and demands food. The wendigo is usually associated with greed and the hunger of starvation. It could be parallel or it could be variations of much earlier folklore.

@sirnilsolav6646 2 ай бұрын

The thing about riding places that the aptrganga does sounds similar to what the Mara does in folklore. The Mara is where we get the name "nightmare" and in Norwegian it is called "Mareritt" which means "Mara ridden". The idea is that she rides the person while they sleep and he gets nightmares from her because of it. It is possible that the reason the aptrganga rides different places is because it is trying to curse the different places somehow.

@robbabcock_ 2 ай бұрын

A spooky tale indeed! 😲⚔👻

@HoNewerth 2 ай бұрын

Hi, regarding the student discount, I inquired about this through the contact from a few days ago but didn't get any response still!

@JacksonCrawford 2 ай бұрын

I appreciate the note; we dug back through the emails and found one it looked like I hadn't responded to and I just did.

@HoNewerth 2 ай бұрын

@@JacksonCrawfordthanks so much, I got your reply!

@MCshowuhz Ай бұрын

I heard somewhere (credible source I swear) that "riding the roof" of a building was akin to f***ing the building and , therefore, by extension the owner. Weird how it always comes back to boning.

@megankwisdom 2 ай бұрын

OK i'm confused - in another video recently you said "au" sounds differently than how you pronounced "draugr" in this video? what is the reason for the difference?

@JacksonCrawford 2 ай бұрын

I use Old Norse pronunciation when discussing Old Norse literature, whereas in other shorts or videos I might explain Modern Icelandic pronunciation. I discuss some of the differences here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/m5enpWBvYs9mlcU

@ElizabethT-nn5nt 2 ай бұрын

Very interesting and appropriately spooky! Grettir's Saga is the one that contains an unusual lot of proverbs, is it not? Maybe those are worth coverage on your channel?

@einarkristjansson6812 2 ай бұрын

´´Þau tíðkast nú hin breiðu spjótin´´ is one famous proverb from this saga.

@abandoninplace2751 2 ай бұрын

i'm sorry, did you use an apostrophe to make a plural [flyka's], or is that a possessive i don't understand?

@jamiegallier2106 Ай бұрын

❤❤❤

@charlessaintpe8574 Ай бұрын

I wonder if the aptrganger riding the church is at all related to volvas riding their seiðhjallr.

@EGULL97 2 ай бұрын

When are so gonna see the Johan Hegg interview?

@John-rw9vm 2 ай бұрын

its the advent fast 40 days before Christmas

@kimfleury Ай бұрын

It's 4 Sundays plus however many remaining days after the 4th Sunday, but yeah.

@zenosAnalytic 2 ай бұрын

is aptr related to after in any way?

@mattcarnevali 2 ай бұрын

7:00 how is it described, what makes it grim?

@upyr1 Ай бұрын

Advent is the period before Christmas is a fast, the West doesn't observe it anymore but in the Orthodox Church we still do

@kimfleury Ай бұрын

Advent is still a period of fasting and penance in the Western Catholic Church. It's just that so many of the countries in the West are Protestant, and they are confused. They party before Christmas and then stash the creche before New Year's Day. So unfortunately, most Catholics go along with it, if only because we'd have to be reticent and standoffish towards our coworkers and neighbors in order to strictly observe the fasting and penance.