From Home Depot's sold-out 12-foot skeleton to sheet ghosts on social media, reminders of the (un)dead are no less pervasive in popular culture now than in Halloweens past.
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The reanimated dead is not a new concept, said Jill Clements, Ph.D., associate professor of English. Clements researches Old English language and literature — specifically medieval views of death and dying and practices of commemoration — and Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. Her current book project, “Writing the Dead in Early Medieval England,” examines the interplay of dead bodies and texts in early English commemorative genres and in religious and heroic poetry.
During the medieval period, from about the fifth to the 15th centuries, people in Europe physically interacted with the dead in a significantly different way than we do now, Clements said. More people died at home then, meaning that it was usually the family's responsibility to prepare the body for burial.
“Our contact with the dead is really limited by comparison,” she said. “People don't always die at home now. It often happens at a hospital, so they go from the hospital morgue to the funeral home, and may never come back home. In the Middle Ages, it was the family who washed the body, wound them in a winding sheet and dug the grave.”
Across medieval Europe, people were personally involved with the burial process, and many of their stories also revolved around the treatment of dead bodies and graves. In England, tales about the dead were associated with their religious practices, and in Iceland, the dead often featured prominently in the stories about their ancestors. The results are stories about headless saints, spirits haunting people's dreams and dead bodies who come back to life, sometimes for revenge.
When the Vikings were raiding England in the ninth century, a saint named Edmund himself turned over to the invaders rather than have his people be overrun, according to Ælfric of Eynsham’s “Lives of Saints.” Ælfric was an English abbot who wrote hagiographies, homilies and biblical commentaries in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Edmund tried to convert the Viking invaders, and in response they tortured and beheaded him, throwing his head into the forest. Contemporary Christian burial customs dictated the head must be buried with the body for the sake of wholeness, anticipating the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment. A witness who had seen the beheading had an idea where to look, so a search party traveled the woods calling out for Edmund, eventually hearing the head itself respond “Here, here, here!” They find Edmund's head — which was speaking to them — miraculously being guarded by a wolf, which kept the carrion animals at bay. After the head was recovered, Edmund was given to a martyr's burial.
Years later, Edmund's body is exhumed from the local churchyard to be moved to a nicer location. Ælfric wrote that his body looked almost entirely healed, and that the head had apparently reattached to the body, with just a thin red line around his neck, to show where he had once been beheaded.