The narrative of this somewhat complicated saga, which is likely to have been written at the Icelandic monastery of Helgafell about the middle of the thirteenth century, tells of the lives and deeds of several generations of immigrants and settlers in the peninsulas of Western Iceland. It spans the period from the late ninth to the eleventh centuries, dealing with the anarchic events of the so-called ‘Viking Age’ through to the arrival of Christianity in AD 1000. It traces the development, under the supervision of charismatic figures such as Snorri the Priest (an ancestor of two of the later abbots of Helgafell) of a body of laws which provided for a more orderly and settled society. The ghosts of the Eyrbyggja Saga have a mixture of characteristics. Thorolf Halt-Foot is a typical draugr, a frightening marauder who leaves his tomb to cause devastation in the neighbourhood where, even during his lifetime, he was known for his ill-humour; he leads a retinue of the dead which has overtones of the Wild Hunt legends, and is finally constrained by the device of a high wall which is erected by his son Arnkel. Thorgunna, the Hebridean woman whose death leads to a series of ghostly developments at the farmstead of Frodis-water, at first seems to be a somewhat homely phantom: during her lengthy death-procession to the Christian church at Skalaholt she gets up from her bier stark naked to cook a meal in symbolic reproach of the farmer who refuses hospitality to her coffin-bearers. Later, in a detail which is reminiscent of later Hebridean stories of ‘silkies’ or seal-people, she takes the form of a seal which tries to struggle up through the floor of the living-room at Frodis-water and can only be overcome by the young man to whom Thorgunna had taken a fancy when she was alive. The ghosts of the drowned crew of a fishing expedition continue to frequent Frodis-water as they did when alive, sprawling in front of the fire beside their surviving relatives and brawling with a rival band of ghosts. Significantly, however, they respond to the mixture of Christian ceremonial and Icelandic legal procedure which Snorri the Priest, whose advice is sought from his holy sanctuary at Helgafell, recommends as a means of ensuring their departure.