Sagas of Iceland · Part 7 · Ghosts, love and law · A2–B1
The Ghosts of Fróðá
Part 7 of the Sagas of Iceland: the Fróðá wonders from Eyrbyggja saga, Iceland’s most famous ghost story. A strange woman’s bedclothes, a shower of blood, drowned men who come home every night to sit by the fire, and the only way the family could get rid of them: by taking the ghosts to court. Time clauses (when, as soon as, until, every time), would for repeated past actions, and the language of the strange and the scary, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight is a ghost story, the most famous in all the sagas. It happened, they say, at a farm called Fróðá, around the year 1000. The dead came back, and they wouldn’t leave.
No, Marcos. This is Iceland. They took the ghosts to court, with witnesses and a judge, and charged them with trespassing in the house. And the ghosts obeyed the law.
A legal system so strong that even the dead respect it. I like these Icelanders.
Fróðá, in the west of Iceland, around the year 1000
Eyrbyggja saga (“The Saga of the People of Eyri”), written in the 13th century, tells the history of a district in the west of Iceland, and in the middle of it is a famous ghost story: the Fróðá wonders (Fróðárundur). A woman from the Hebrides called Thorgunna came to stay at the farm of Fróðá. She had beautiful bedclothes, which the lady of the house, Thurid, wanted very much.
When Thorgunna was dying, she asked for her bedclothes to be burned. Thurid persuaded her husband not to burn them, and after that, terrible things happened: a shower of blood fell, a seal’s head rose from the floor, and people began to die. Every night, the drowned farmer and his men came in, wet from the sea, and sat by the fire, and the dead from the sickness sat with them.
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