Scott G. Bruce - The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters

The word undead first appeared in the tenth century, when a Christian preacher named Aelfric of Eynsham (c. 955c. 1010) employed its Old English ancestorthe adjective undeadlicto describe the immortality, the undyingness, of God. The term has undergone an ironic reversal in modern English, where it now denotes dead people who have been reanimated by a supernatural force. This change reflects the intense interest in tales of the living dead that have become ubiquitous in modern societies. The revival of Gothic horror stories like Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stokers Dracula (1897) in movie theaters in the 1930s sparked a popular interest in the undead that persists to the present day. Between the release of cult films like Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the airing of Joss Whedons wildly popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (19972003), stories about the risen dead have saturated the modern imagination. The past decade alone has witnessed the release of dozens of feature-length films about the so-called zombie apocalypse, the catastrophic breakdown of modern society due to an epidemic of living corpses. While similarly restless, ghosts and their kindred spirits have followed a different trajectory in modern media. The psychological trauma of an encounter with a ghost, depicted so vividly in the stories of M. R. James (18621936) and his imitators, has receded in the wake of more sentimental treatments. Unlike marauding zombies, whose malevolent intention is never in doubt, the appearance of a dead soul could evoke pity or sadness or regret in the living, especially when it is recognized as a loved one now lost.

This ambivalent relationship between the living and the returning dead is not new; it has been a persistent theme in Western literature for almost three thousand years. This collection of stories about premodern encounters with ghosts and animated corpses spans fifteen centuries from the height of the Roman Empire in the first century CE to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (15581603). Ancient, medieval, and early modern authors related stories and ideas about supernatural events involving the dead in a wide variety of genres, including epic poetry, histories, hagiography, personal letters, theological and polemical treatises, sagas, plays, and collections of miracles and marvels. The persistence of these stories over such a long span of time speaks to the abiding interest among the living in the fate of the dead, who remained a much stronger presence in the face-to-face communities of premodern Europe than they do in the antiseptic anonymity of most modern societies.

Stories about the dead have an ancient pedigree. In the classical period, from the Trojan War to the ascendancy of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea, the spirits of the recently deceased appeared often to the living to plead for proper burial and commemoration, the obligations owed but not always granted to the dead. Professional necromancers animated the corpses of the slain and compelled them in rituals of divination to share the information that only the dead can know. Even with the religious revolution of late antiquity, during which the Christian church triumphed over Greek and Roman paganism, this commerce with the dead persisted, though with new mediators. As early Christian theologians developed the notion that souls underwent a cleansing in fire in preparation for their entry into heaven, stories about the returning dead became an important medium for asserting the benefits of praying and giving alms on behalf of the faithful departed to speed their way to paradise. By the eleventh century, Christian monks had effectively domesticated the ghost story as a tool to teach the faithful about the economy of the afterlife. The stain of unavoidable sins imperiled every soul, but the prayers of the monks, whose denial of the world made them powerful intercessors before God, could wipe those stains away and gain for the soul a much quicker release from purgatorial flames. Donations of revenue-producing land to cloistered communities in this world would secure their prayerful assistance for the souls of faithful donors and their families in the afterlife.