Norse Ghosts (A study in the<i>Draugr</i>and the<i>Haugbúi</i>)

Chadwick, Nora K.

doi:10.1080/0015587x.1946.9717812

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In some cases, such historical metahuman beings have been viewed negatively: they have been believed to exist as a part of human society, but as the bearer of some metaphysical "abnormality", a threat that lurks ominously at society's edge. For example, historically, various cultures have demonstrated folk beliefs in the existence of vampires (Bane 2010; Bräunlein 2012), draugar (Chadwick 1946;Venables 2015), zombies (Venables 2015), and other corporeal undead that had once been natural biological human beings but that, after death, were transformed irreversibly into dangerous quasi-human "others" that are aesthetically repellent, amoral, and metaphysically deficient. At the same time, many historical cultures have held that after the death of its physical body, a natural biological human being may become positively transformed to acquire a new manner of existence; this concept is formally expressed, for example, in the traditional Catholic teaching regarding the "communio sanctorum", according to which the saints already in heaven are believed to remain an invisible part of human society and, through their prayers, work actively to aid those human beings who are still going about their everyday lives on earth, just as those living on earth can aid the souls in purgatory that are preparing to enter heaven (The Holy See 2003, pp.…”

Section: Metahuman Beingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Will Be the Members of Society 5.0? Towards an Anthropology of Technologically Posthumanized Future Societies

Gladden

2019

Social Sciences

180

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The Government of Japan’s “Society 5.0” initiative aims to create a cyber-physical society in which (among other things) citizens’ daily lives will be enhanced through increasingly close collaboration with artificially intelligent systems. However, an apparent paradox lies at the heart of efforts to create a more “human-centered” society in which human beings will live alongside a proliferating array of increasingly autonomous social robots and embodied AI. This study seeks to investigate the presumed human-centeredness of Society 5.0 by comparing its makeup with that of earlier societies. By distinguishing “technological” and “non-technological” processes of posthumanization and applying a phenomenological anthropological model, this study demonstrates: (1) how the diverse types of human and non-human members expected to participate in Society 5.0 differ qualitatively from one another; (2) how the dynamics that will shape the membership of Society 5.0 can be conceptualized; and (3) how the anticipated membership of Society 5.0 differs from that of Societies 1.0 through 4.0. This study describes six categories of prospective human and non-human members of Society 5.0 and shows that all six have analogues in earlier societies, which suggests that social scientific analysis of past societies may shed unexpected light on the nature of Society 5.0.

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Section: Metahuman Beingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Will Be the Members of Society 5.0? Towards an Anthropology of Technologically Posthumanized Future Societies

Gladden

2019

Social Sciences

180

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“…223-24). (For further discussion of such Old Norse narratives dealing with encounters with the dead, see Chadwick 1946aChadwick , 1946bÁrmann Jakobsson 2009Ármann Jakobsson , 2011.…”

Section: Earlier Icelandic Folk Belief Regarding the Spirits Of The D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Contact with the Dead in Iceland Past and Present: The Findings of a New Survey of Folk Belief and Experiences of the Supernatural in Iceland

Gunnell

2024

Religions

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This article focuses on the figures concerning experiences of and beliefs in possible contacts with the dead amongst Icelandic people that have come to light from three national surveys that were undertaken in 1974, 2006–2007, and 2023, focusing in particular on the most recent figures. It starts by reviewing the earliest evidence of such beliefs in Iceland (expressed in both Old Icelandic literature and Icelandic folk legends), which evidently laid down the foundations for modern-day beliefs. After listing the main findings of the surveys and noting the changes in belief that appear to have taken place over the last 50 years, the article offers some brief conclusions relating to what seems to have caused not only some obvious gender and age differences in belief and experience, but also differences in figures between urban and rural areas.

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“…Undead also form a central tenet of European mythology and its slightly more optimistic narratives of folkloric tradition. In Norse mythology Odin is often referred to as Drauga Drott -Lord of Spectresbecause of his ability to raise ghosts, the Draugr of mythic sagas (Chadwick, 1946;Morton, 2015). Yet ghosts in Scandinavia are not the wraiths and disembodied spirits of orthodox tradition they are corporeal reanimated bodies of the dead.…”

Section: Jeremiah 9:21mentioning

confidence: 99%