Revenant

This article is about the Revenant in Folklore. For the Tzimisce Revenant Families, see Revenant.

A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living. The word "revenant" is derived from the Latin and French, revenir, "to return"; in French, "revenant" means "returning". Belief in revenants emerged in Western Europe (especially Great Britain, and later carried by Anglo-Norman invaders to Ireland) during the High Middle Ages. Though later legend and folklore depicts revenants as returning for a specific purpose (e.g., revenge against the deceased's killer), in most Medieval depictions they simply return to harass their surviving families and neighbours. Revenants share a number of characteristics with folkloric vampires.

Many stories were documented by English historians in the Middle Ages. William of Newburgh wrote in the 1190s, "one would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around, animated by I don't know what spirit, to terrorize or harm the living, unless there were many cases in our times, supported by ample testimony". Stories of revenants were very personal, always about a specific individual who had recently died (unlike the anonymous zombie depicted in modern popular culture, such as Night of the Living Dead), and had a number of common features.

Although the term revenant has fallen out of popular usage in regards to the entities proper it was first applied to (such entities often being called zombies or ghouls as of Night of the Living Dead), revenant-like creatures continue to be a popular staple in modern horror movies. A recent example from the late 20th century is the character Nathan Grantham in the movie Creepshow, who returns after his death to exact vengeance on his unsuspecting relations. This example may be considered noteworthy as it was both the product of an already-established and well-known horror writer, Stephen King, and because the tale closely followed the personal pattern and established habits of folkloric revenants.

Analysis

Medieval stories of revenants have common features. Those who return from the dead are wrongdoers in their lifetime, often described as wicked or vain or unbelievers. Often the revenants are associated with the spreading of disease among the living. The appropriate response is usually exhumation, followed by some form of decapitation, and burning or removal of the heart.

Several stories imply that sucking of blood has occurred. Because of this, revenants have sometimes been described as "vampires" by a number of authors of popular books about vampire legends, starting with Montague Summers. Medievalists are, however, largely skeptical towards this interpretation, possibly because vampire legends are believed to have originated in Eastern European folklore and became known to the Western public only later through reports coming from the East in the 18th century. Vampires do not appear in Western fiction (with modifications) until the late 18th century and early 19th century, starting with authors such as Robert Southey, Lord Byron and John William Polidori. However, anthropologists and folklorists tend to blur distinctions between the various forms of "walking dead", for which counterparts exist in the myths and legends of nearly every civilization dating back to earliest history.

Selected stories

William of Newburgh

William of Newburgh (1136?-1198?) wrote of a number of cases "...as a warning to posterity." He says these stories were very common and that "were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome".

One story involves a man of "evil conduct", on the run from the law, who hides out in the province of York and makes the ill-fated choice to get married. Becoming jealous of his wife, he hides in the rafters of his bedroom and catches her in an act of infidelity with a local young man, but then accidentally falls to the floor mortally wounding himself, and dies a few days later. As Newburgh describes:

A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.

A number of the townspeople were killed by the monster and so:

Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames....

In another story Newburgh tells of a woman whose husband recently died. The husband returns from the dead and comes to visit her at night in her bedchamber and he "...not only terrified her on awaking, but nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body." This goes on for three nights, and the revenant goes on to repeat these nocturnal visits with other nearby family and neighbours and "...thus become a like serious nuisance", eventually extending his walks in the broad daylight around the village. Eventually the problem was solved by the bishop of Lincoln who wrote a letter of absolution, upon which the man's tomb was opened wherein it was seen his body was still there, the letter was placed on his chest, and the tomb re-interred and sealed.

Abbot of Burton

The English Abbot of Burton tells the story of two runaway peasants from around 1090 who died suddenly of unknown causes and were buried, but:

the very same day in which they were interred they appeared at evening, while the sun was still up, carrying on their shoulders the wooden coffins in which they had been buried. The whole following night they walked through the paths and fields of the village, now in the shape of men carrying wooden coffins on their shoulders, now in the likeness of bears or dogs or other animals. They spoke to the other peasants, banging on the walls of their houses and shouting "Move quickly, move! Get going! Come!"

The villagers became sick and started dying, but eventually the bodies of the revenants were exhumed, the heads cut off and their hearts removed, which put an end to the spread of the sickness.

Walter Map

The chronicler Walter Map, an Englishman writing in the 12th century, tells of a "wicked man" in Hereford who rose from the dead and wandered the streets of his village at night calling out the names of those who would die of sickness within three days. The response by bishop Gilbert Foliot was "Dig up the body and cut off the head with a spade, sprinkle it with holy water and re-inter it".

References

• Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075-1225, Oxford, 2000, ISBN 0-19-925101-0
• Nancy Caciola, "Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture", Past and Present, No. 152. (Aug., 1996), pp. 3-45. (Available on JSTOR)
• Walter Map, De nugis curialium.
• William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs), full text on-line.
• Jason Nolan, "Unearthing Medieval Vampire Stories in England: Fragments from De Nugis Curialium and Historia Rerum Anglicarum" (.rtf format), 2003, full text on-line.