Draugr

The Draugr were undead warriors who haunted Midgard and the other Norse realms, the restless dead of fighters too stubborn and angry to accept their passing. Among the most frequent threats encountered by Kratos and Atreus, they were husks driven by rage rather than any purpose of their own.

How a Draugr was made#

A Draugr was born when a warrior died in battle but his soul proved too stubborn and angry to rest. When a Valkyrie arrived to carry such a warrior to Valhalla, the embittered dead, often consumed by a desire for revenge, would mistake her summons for a trick and turn on her in a duel. The intensity of that fight burned the warrior, and rather than ascending he was doomed to roam forever as a raging husk, his body warped and twisted into something other than it had been in life. According to the lost lore of the Norse myths, one such man had belonged to a tribe that worshipped Freya and lived by the single rule never to yield; when a Valkyrie's blade made him relive the battle that killed him, he fought her and so became a Draugr.

Nature and behavior#

Draugr were husks of their former selves, retaining little of the men they had been beyond their fury. They fought anyone they could find and were feared for their extreme brutality and savagery, behaving less like disciplined warriors than like a band of crazed killers. They were widely scattered, appearing across Midgard and into the other realms, though they were absent from Helheim. In some places they could be found in a dormant state, their husks standing still and unlit with the upper body bent as though sleeping, until disturbance or attack roused them to violence. Atreus learned from his mother that Draugr came back in many shapes and sizes, some bearing powers that others did not, and that though they wielded dangerous weapons they were not truly skilled with them.

Forms and powers#

No two Draugr were alike. Some fought with a single weapon and were dangerous chiefly in the groups they almost always traveled in, while sturdier brutes carried far greater endurance and were difficult to knock off balance. Others wielded a weapon in each hand and chained together swift flurries of blows, and some hurled deadly fireballs from a distance while their kin shielded them. Rarest of all were those able to deflect an attacker's blade. Beyond these basic forms, certain Draugr carried added powers: some stored energy in their bodies and burst apart in fire, some channeled energy into their weapons to deliver blows that could not be turned aside, and some drove fire into their legs to move with unnatural speed. In the time of Ragnarök the Draugr could pour forth from burning fissures known as Draugr holes, and a hateful female Draugr named Hertha rose among them.

Marks left on the realms#

The presence of the Draugr left its trace on the living world. The dwarf Brok knew of a substance called Draugr oil, drawn from the creatures or their remains, which could be used to quench steel in the forge. His brother Sindri regarded the creatures with open disgust, describing them as being made of filth, though whether that filth was their own or merely gathered in their savage wanderings was never made clear.