Abstract
The usual burial rite of the Viking Age was inhumation in a burial mound accompanied by valuable gravegoods. The Old Norse literature strikingly often makes reference to robbing grave mounds (haugbrot) and fighting the buried "undead" (draugr, haugbúi).
Some other tales of revenants present a more friendly attitude towards the living visitor. When they have a cognate or sworn relationship, the revenants can be voluntarily beneficent to the living.
Neither of these notions of relations between the living and the dead can be proven archeologically, but the analysis of the family sagas and the legendary sagas (íslendingasogur and fornaldarsogur) provides partial reconstruction of the Old Norse concept of what the dead can offer to the living and what can be gained from them. The conclusion sums up the types of contributions from the tombs and the authors suggest an understanding of the burial mound as a boundary between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.