The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Stoker KNEW about Dracula!
15:11 Aug 21 2010
Times Read: 920












This is for the people who speculate that Stoker never knew about Dracula!









Elisabeth Miller made a good research but she exaggerated the conclusions.Stoker knew about the Transylvanian beliefs about vampires and also had an idea about Dracula and his character and both the folklore and Dracula were main sources of inspiration!Not the only sources but important ones!







The quotes are from:



The Many Lives of Count Dracula

How Bram Stoker's Count created the template for modern vampires

By Gail-Nina Anderson







"From the notes, we know that Stoker read up on Romanian folklore in Emily Gerard’s 1885 article Transylvanian Superstitions (he never visited the country). Belief in vampirism was never an official doctrine subject to written dogma, so Stoker was effectively reading about oral traditions written down in the name of folklore but quite probably, in their native environment, subject to local variations and changes over time. Ironically, by putting so much of this material into the mouth of his “vampire expert” Van Helsing, Stoker himself helps create the immutable “rules” of vampirism endlessly cited thereafter."



So the Transilvanian folklore is not a late add to the book!



...





"Stoker’s vampire was originally Count Wamyr (which inflicts his leading character with a rather obvious label) but he changed this to Dracula after reading about the 15th-century Wallachian warlord Vlad III Dracula, a voivode (Prince rather than Count) of the house of Basarab. Stoker found the reference in William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, a book he borr­owed from Whitby public library while on holiday there. Using this name was a stroke of genius. Now so familiar as to be virtually generic, in 1897 its deceptively mellifluous syllables must have sounded alluringly foreign and fraught with unimaginable meaning. In fact it’s a diminutive, almost a nickname."



...





"Tales of the atrocities he would subsequently inflict, however, look like exaggerations, part of a German propaganda campaign to show him as irrational, violent and treacherous. Wilkinson’s book doesn’t mention them, or use the term “Impaler”. Stoker could have researched further and found (possibly in the British Museum) the German pamphlets that tell the whole shocking story, or he might have heard about it from Arminius Vambery, a Hungarian historian he is known to have met. However, there’s no evidence in the notes or the novel that he knew of Vlad’s darker side. What he takes from history are the name and a very brief account of Dracula’s pre-death military career. He’s not telling the story of Vlad Tepes, but to the determined literary detective, the conn­ection must go deeper. Since the history of Vlad III was popularised for a Western audience in the 1973 book In Search Of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally, the portrait of the Wallachian (not Transylvanian) prince, with his Hapsburg jaw, long dark hair and moustache and distinctive red hat has joined the reference points for the vampire of Stoker’s novel, giving him another dimension of apparent reality."





Despite the fact that this book doesn`t even mention another potential source of inspiration for "Dracula"(the Nizet brothers novels!!!), the article you can find in the database might be interesting for you and almost correct in it`s conclusions.



Read more here:



https://www.vampirerave.com/db/entry.php?id=23382





For the book of Emily Gerard about TRansilvania go here:

Vampire or Vampyre?
21:37 Aug 14 2010
Times Read: 939

I would rather stay with the term vampire as the unique accepted modern form of the word.



First we know that this word was imported through German and then French intermediary in the English language.

There is no doubt about that.It is not an ancient Anglo-Saxon, Roman or Celtic word.It appeared for the firs time in English literature and then in the English speaking world as a neologism in the Romantic Dark era (XVII-th - XIX-th century).



Before this even if we meet some spectral creatures with the appearance of the vampire in the "gothic" English literature they are not called with the term"vampire" or anything close to that.This is the reason why my submission of this poem to the database was rejected at first because it doesn`t had this word.

Later the VR procurators accepted it when it was submitted by another member but this is another story.





So where the word is coming from?

It`s coming from the German Vampir who first appeared in the German literature (and during XVIIIth century was at a very large circulation in the German Romanticism - Burger, Goethe, Hoffmann) as "Der Vampir" with an "i" in the poem with the same name of Heinrich August Ossenfelder published in 1748.



Here is the text in German:



http://web.uvic.ca/geru/487/ossenfelder.html



There is also a translation in Eng on our VR database.





Yes indeed: the poem was written by Ossenfelder right after the terrible vampire wave of fear that spread from Transilvania and Serbia in all the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In fact Ossenfelder present it at a adaptation of a folklore song or poem or even of a true story.

We also know that Ossenfelder wrote the poem earlier and wrote it in Vienna or in Hungaria during his trip in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.



After all the term is not of German origin either.And is possible that it could be of Balkanic origin.

Some say it was an ancient aryan term (or indo-european to not hurt the deelings of anyone ), some say it has a Slavic origin.



What is sure is the fact that Ossenfelder took it from someone who was Hungarian or Serbian(slav) or Romanian speaking person.



either one of these language writes it with an "i" for a simple motive: these people in their history had only two sets of letters they could write in: Latin language(for the Hungarian chancellory) or chirilic for slavs and for Romanians too since Romanians were written at that data with chirilic characters.



In both the term Vampire is written with and "i" (Latin does not have the Greek character "y" and in chirilic the letter "i" is written with a reverted "N").



WE also know that Byron as Coleridge were frequenting the nobility literary evenings of that time where reading aloud for all the audience from the German "ghosts" stories was one of the main attractions.



It`s obviously that Byron took the term inspired by one of this public lectures.



He was written it differently the the German authors because one of these motives:





- to place it closely to the Greek civillisation (Y is a Greek letter and we know that Byron was an admirer of Greece - he even died protecting one of the little town of Greece)

- to make it sound more Saxon and to give him an ancient mystic aura;

- to reproduce also the length of the "ee" and the accent in the word because the word was imported from another language;

- simply to make it more exotic,we know that the Romantic period writers were very attracted by exotic things and had the tendency to make the things appear in a foreign aura of a sort;

- to create in the reader`s mind an image related to the world "pyre".



The argument stands even if the true author of the poem was the close friend, lover and confident of Byron: dr. Polidori.



No author in the XIxth century from what I know(this can be studied further - I might be wrong) used the word in the form of "vampyre"(in fact I think in the XIXth century nobody followed this kind of speling in ANY literature) so it was a Byron kind of writing it.



The argument of an older spelling as "vampyre" falls, so I guess I presented enough proves that there are neither two words, or two acceptions of the term neither the form of "vampyre" can be correct.











So in my opinion the form "vampire" should be the only one used in modern now-days speaking English language.

I hope all of you will agree with me or present stronger arguments.













Dragonrouge