Haugbui

I've been reading through Kobold Press's Tome of Beasts lately, and I just passed, recently, the entry for haugbui. Frankly, I think it's a little silly to have an entry called haugbui. Haugbui or haugbuinn is an Old Norse term that is translated loosely as "howe-dweller", cairn-dweller, or barrow-dweller. William Morris, in his translation of Grettis Saga translated that into English as barrow-wight, a term which Tolkien himself, of course, also later used. A haugbui is therefore literally the exact same thing as a barrow-wight, not a new unique monster. 

However, if they wanted to make a more nuanced version of it, why not use an Anglicized word? The Danes famously ruled over Anglo-Saxon England during Cnut the Great's North Sea "Empire" and the Danelaw, and a number of Norse words and Norse folkloric elements passed into English and Scottish because of the number of Danish settlers in England. And yeah; maybe hog-boy (from haugbui) or shag-boy (from hog-boy) don't sound very much like scary undead monsters, but frankly, neither does haugbui. In English that sounds kind of silly. The Scots reflex of the word, hogboon sounds—slightly—less ridiculous. At least it sounds like some kind of native folklore instead of a very odd foreign word.

I've been saying for years now, however, that I'm a little bit miffed by D&D's predilection of over-splitting the same concept into slightly different mechanical variations, particularly in the realm of undead monsters. (The earliest post I could find where I made that point was from 2013, although it was mostly just an offhand comment back then.) And sadly, if D&D did it, then chances are the fantasy culture in general has followed suit in the many decades since D&D's ascension to the single most prominent influence in the genre, for better and for worse. There are a good dozen variations on what a "ghost" is, all with different names: ghost, poltergeist, banshee, specter, allip, wraith and more if you dig into more esoteric monster books. 

I'll reiterate what I said most recently (although still four years ago now) on the subject, reworded slightly; there are only a few types of undead creatures, and they don't need to be broken out into all kinds of unique variations. These include:

1) Corporeal Sentient: Undead who have physical bodies, and some degree of free will and sentience as we understand it.  At the top of the heap here would be vampires and liches and maybe powerful wights and mummies.

2) Incorporeal Sentient: Intelligent and free-willed, yet ethereal or incorporeal ghosts.  The real iconic example from fantasy fiction is the Ringwraiths, but other concepts of free-willed and intelligent ghosts of all kinds are here.

3) Corporeal Mindless: There's a vast throng of more or less mindless creatures like skeletons, zombies, and whatnot. They are basically automatons; golems who use a human corpse instead of a constructed statue or whatnot as the corporeal element. Some creatures, like wights or even mummies, have trended more into this territory, depending on the particular interpretation, although in Dark Fantasy X these creatures move into category 1.

4) Incorporeal Mindless: There are fewer examples of this, but the ghosts of the Dresden books qualify; basically just echoes of a brief moment in time of someone that remains causing havoc, but which can only react to things in certain rather pre-scripted ways, and which don't do much else.  Haunts from my rules qualify.

5) Undead Monsters: These guys are not specifically based on human corpses or spirits, as the other four so far discussed are, but are instead strange monsters made like the undead.  Stuff like the dracolich or zombie dragon (or fell ghast from my rules) is the perfect example.  When Harry Dresden brought "Sue" the T. rex skeleton back to unlife, cloaking it in ethereal ectoplasm and riding it into battle against the necromancers, that would qualify too.

6) Associated Hangers-On: Sometimes ghouls, wolves, bats, and other vermin get lumped in here; they're not Undead themselves per se, but they are associated with them. I've even parsed these down; ghouls, for example, are like "larval vampires"; savage and relatively low power, but some exceptional ghouls claw their way to lucidity and essentially "evolve" themselves into vampires.