Viking farmers vs. an undead seal vs. my pagan shortcomings
Or “explanation is where the weird goes to die”
When a hungry seal peeks through the floorboards of a haunted longhouse in a 13th century Icelandic saga, I don’t recognize this as some emblematic moment of pagan/Christian conflict. I sense something super weird about that seal.
I found this scene in an excerpt from the Eyrbyggja Saga, which is collected in The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (2016), edited by Scott G. Bruce. I reckon it’s as fun as undead animal tales get.
When Viking farmers pound the seal back under the floor using clubs and a Thor hammer, it’s hard to ascribe any sensible meaning to what’s happening. The creature seems to be eating their store of dried fish because wandering undead Vikings keep coming back to warm themselves by the fire. Umm, why? Because the undead Vikings died on account of some selfish shit who didn’t honor last wishes of a rich traveler named Thorgunna, who wanted her nice things to be mostly burned. Okay, but let’s stay focused: where the hell did the seal come from?
Eyrbyggja Saga does not present an order of things I readily understand, and I’m cool with that. I like wondering.
I wanted this encounter with the weird to remain purely wonderful, too, but curiosity got the best of me. I read Bruce’s clear-headed introduction, where he simply explains, “The story illustrated how the new laws of Icelandic society, both oral and religious, now hold sway over the ways of the pagan past.”
I get that, but still ... that seal! Go read it for yourself. It’s weird. And it’s ... funny? Strangely so.
Take what happens when it pops up its head through the floor, and most people who see it seem to just know what to do. Attack!
One of the servants was the first to notice this as she came in. She grabbed a club in the doorway and hit the seal on the head, which only made it rise up out of the ground a little more. Then it turned its eyes toward the canopy of Thorgunna’s bed. One of the farmhands came up and started hitting the seal, but it kept rising farther up with every blow, until its flippers emerged.
Imagine Robert Patrick’s T-1000 with whiskers. I’m laughing. You’re laughing.
Bruce’s historical take makes perfect sense, even though my brain doesn’t want it to. It’s partly because I prefer to keep things weird. Unexplained. The weird is richer for not making sense.
Autobiographically speaking, I think I play dumb because I grew up outside the boundaries of any orderly belief system. For instance, during my wonder years, I sometimes interloped at Sunday mass, sitting quietly with mixed feelings of befuddlement and FOMO as my peers dutifully kneeled for prayer or took communion. Looking around the church, I wondered how everybody knew what to do when they were called to do it. As much as I tried to listen to the priest’s instructions, I just couldn’t figure out how to be, or how to believe rightly, in that space. Or whether to smile or look away when I slid my legs aside in my pew to make way for believers eagerly getting in line for wafers and blessings.
My disconnect from larger, more orderly systems of knowing abides into adulthood. Being curious about, but not knowing too much about, Catholicism or folklore has kept me receptive to the weird. My lack of faith and old-world knowledge aren’t gaps or shameful character flaws (though I keenly felt them to be when I was younger). It’s just my way through the world, and the disorder is fine. I rarely get it, and that’s how I get by. Along my path, my purpose is to stumble upon stories that inspire me to pause and wonder:
Wait, what’s that seal doing there?
Is that animal ghost a punishment for dishonoring the dead?
What did the stories of the Eyrbyggja Saga mean to the people who were telling them first?
Was the seal a symbol of pagan disorder back then, as it might be now?
And what’s that crunching sound coming from my pantry?
I don’t think weird fiction is only what Wikipedia says it is: “a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” And I don’t think anthologists think any body of knowledge’s definition, or any take on a subject like the undead during the last 1,500 years, represents a final say on a matter. Bruce and all of the story-collectors I love are too knowing for that. They’ve read oodles of weirder stuff that wouldn’t fit any book’s thesis.
Anyone who has read Lovecraft or Bierce, for instance, will know that it’s best to just leave behind the need to “get it” and go with the uncanny feeling of “that’s both familiar and profoundly strange.”
Anyone who has followed Kafka’s K in The Castle will feel better by accepting that not getting to the castle is, and is not, the hero’s journey. Just deal with it! Or don’t.
And that a portal to an upper dimension in Blackwood’s “The Willows?” It might be cosmic. It might be murderous. It might be neither. Or both.
I don’t want to accept orderly understandings of undead Vikings or a silly seal ... or the Eucharist or any of the strangely depicted things I’m drawn to. When I encounter the weird, I don’t want to unweird it. Instead, I want to fear. I want to smirk. I want to be confused. And ever and always, I want to wonder.
If I steadfastly believe anything about how to enjoy really strange stuff, it’s this: explanation is where the weird goes to die.
And what kind of monster would want to kill a defenseless, hungry seal, anyway?
—
Image: Cover illustration by Anton Semenov for The Penguin Book of the Undead.