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OTHEE StrPEESTITIONS. 303
the Jomsviking Bui the Thick, who in the battle at
Hj6rdngav% jumped overboard with his two heavy
chests of gold, " that he transformed himself into a
serpent upon the bottom of the sea, and there brooded"
over his treasures."* In later times these serpents
were imagined to be winged dragons (flugrdrekar),
probably after the legends of southern lands had
been heard of, concerning such monsters.
Deeply rooted in the minds of the heathen Northmen
was the belief in ghosts and their apparitions
(aptrganga, phvr. aptrgongur, reimleikar), and this
belief appears to have been intimately connected
with their ideas of a future state. The peculiar doc-
trines of the Asa-faith on this subject have been
before unfolded. The soul was imagined to return
to its original source—to Heaven and the Gods
abiding there—while the body and the grosser life
connected with it wandered to the abodes of Hel or
Death. Herewith was very naturally connected the
belief that the spirit of the departed could leave its
home with the Gods and again visit the earth at
night, in order to unite itself at the funeral mound
with the bodily, shadow, which was set free from
Helheim. The departed were thus enabled sometimes
to appear in the opening mounds in the same
forms which they had worn in life. The old Eddaic
poem of Helgi Hundingsbani makes the hero return
by night jQ-om ValhaUa, called back by the grief of
his deserted wife Sigrlin. Sigrdn sees him with all
his death-wounds, in the open mound ; she goes in to
* Jdmsv. Si 49 in Forum. S. XI.