#DRAUGEN GHOST ARCHIVE#

Fishermen like Morten have been forced to diversify. Between January and April, the peak fishing season here, Morten is so busy at sea that he sometimes sleeps just 20 hours a week, casting out lines every day from 3 o’clock in the morning until 8 o’clock at night.īut even in these plentiful waters, cod isn’t the lucrative business that it once was – overfishing has depleted supplies and demand for stockfish has dwindled. Morten Nilsen is a fifth-generation Lofoten fisherman and left school at 15 to join his father aboard his trawler, Hellvåg. Stockfish, or dried cod, has historically been Norway’s most valuable export commodity – these ugly creatures made Norway rich. They come to see the magnificent Lofotenveggen (Lofoten Wall – so-called because of the way the islands’ mountains stretch out across the sea in a seemingly unbroken chain) and to explore the deserted beaches, hidden fjords and patches of virgin green behind each spiky peak.įishing still dominates island life, and the evidence is everywhere you look – from the seafood dishes listed on each restaurant menu to the giant, A-shaped drying racks in every harbor, where gutted cod are hung in pairs. Holidaying Norwegians making the short hop from the mainland now occupy some of the simple wooden huts built to house fishermen. Once the people who came here were at the mercy of nature, but now they rush to embrace it.

Morten Nilsen is a fifth-generation fisherman and joined his father’s trawler at age 15 – during summer months he takes visitors out to see the Moskenesstraumen Until the first rorbuer (fishermen’s cottages) were built here in 1120, Lofoten fishermen used to sleep beneath their upturned vessels before flipping them over for a day at sea. Towers of granite loom over these insubstantial red and yellow structures, which are scattered along the water’s edge like Lego bricks tossed aside by a petulant giant.īut these modest homes are palatial when compared with those of the islands’ first inhabitants. The tiny wooden fishermen’s huts that cling to the shore of Norway’s Lofoten Islands look too flimsy to survive in this prehistoric landscape. In this piece from 2010, writer Orla Thomas visits Norway’s Lofoten Islands to find that the surrounding Arctic waters are far more than a scenic backdrop – the sea is the islands’ lifeblood, a source of great wealth and unforgettable stories.

#DRAUGEN GHOST ARCHIVE#

The concept of a haunted ship emerging in the fog is reminiscent of the legend of the Flying Dutchman and any other ghost ship.With so much of the world inaccessible right now, we’re taking a look through our archive of travel writing to revisit our past trips and to look at how Lonely Planet has spent decades exploring the world in the hope of better understanding it.What is remarkable, the word Draug itself is translated from Icelandic as 'ghost', but it means a revived dead man (like a zombie), and not just a disembodied spirit.‌.It is believed that during a storm, you can hear the howling of the strandvaskare souls. The prototype of the draugen is most likely the creatures of the Swedish and Danish folklore Strandvaskare - the ghosts of the sailors who died in the shipwreck (The name of the spirit translates as 'washed ashore').It is possible for Draugen to become regular ghosts again once they return to land.

Any sailor captured by Draugen has the right to challenge the Draugen for a race back to safe harbor, and shall be freed at once if he/she wins.

They prefer stormy weather and are thus unlikely to be encountered on a sunny day. Like ghosts, they can fly and phase through solid objects. Their ghostly bodies however are of a greenish color, while regular ghosts are bluish. In many ways, Draugen look just like ghosts transparent, humanoid beings, with transparent, spectral bodies, glowing skulls and their bones visible inside their bodies. However, when Hilda encounters them, it turns out they voluntarily stay at sea because they prefer being Draugen over being regular ghosts, and they can return to shore if they want to.

According to Wood Man they are doomed to stay at sea, sailing a ghost ship and remaining forever seperated from their loved ones. They do not appear in the graphic novels.ĭraugen are spirits of sailors that died at sea. ' Chapter 2: The Draugen' Draugen are a species of Ghosts, that first appear in Chapter 2: The Draugen of the Hilda series.

Draugen ghost