Re: fiction vs science...
BabyJ
of people there who can/might add more information to this thread.
Plus, it's more ontopic for alt.vampyres than it is for alt.culture.
vampires.
Mark Scott wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:41:33 -0700, BabyJ wrote:
> > When Mark Scott wrote:
> >>>The vampire legend came about , as a good
> >>>many other things, due to lack of understanding and group paranoia
> >>>in the dark ages. A medical condition known as porphyria, whereby
> >>>an increase in the levels of porphyrin in the blood of afflicted
> >>>individuals gave rise toa myth about these people. They did avoid
> >>>direct sunlight as the porphyrins in the body made the skin very
> >>>photosensitive and mild blistering occured. They did ingest blood
> >>>which was a way of counteracting the porphyria but they did not
> >>>need it to survive :)
>
> Andrew Heenan replied:
> >> Do you think that accounts for all the legends? Most of the legends
> >> do seem to have originated in Central Europe...
> >
> > The legends of the modern vampire prototype (i.e., Dracula) do seem
> > to have originated in Central Europe, although there are various
> > theories about that. One is that the gypsies brought their version
> > of the vampire, which they called the "mulo," with them when they
> > migrated westward from northern India. A second theory is that the
> > expanding Christian church, compounded with a lack of knowledge
> > about bodily decomposition post-burial, gave rise to questions
> > about why some bodies decomposed while others could be found
> > bloated, with blood on the lips, and hair and fingernails that
> > seemed to be growing.
>
> This is actually quite interesting. Glad i replied...
>
> >> is there a greater prevalence of porphyria there?
> >
> > There are a number of porphyrias, about a half dozen. They are mostly
> > genetic (although there are toxic agents than can cause porphyria),
> > so it's possible that there might have been outbreaks in various
> > places where intermarriage was a common practice. These incidents
> > would probably be very rare (as they are today) and hardly
> > widespread enough to give rise to worldwide legends about vampires.
> >
> >
> > ^BJ^
>
> Do you not think that through istory it would not have taken a
> lot for news to travel to all parts of the world? The genetic
> disorders involved, while rare, could have been quite prevalent
> in certain small isolated villages, due as you said to inbreeding.
> This type of thing has been seen throughout history where certain
> towns have seen higher rates of genetic abnormalities due to no
> outside influence on marriages. This could account for the
> legends we hear about such as the stereotypical village outside
> of draculas castle in transylvania etc. If this is the case then
> maybe explorers or whatever could have heard tales of this kind
> and brought back the legend to their own country and used this to
> explain cetain strange occurences and propagated the myth? Just
> a theory I suppose but it is plausible.
Anything is possible. Travelers brought back a lot more than just
tea, spices, and syphilis. Travelers also carried WITH them the
beliefs from their own homelands which they no doubt continued to
practice in their new homes. For example, many of the African
beliefs about vampires are mirrored in the beliefs of the inhabitants
of the Caribbean islands due to the importation of Africans. Time and
local customs have changed and/or added to the myths but not enough
that the roots are no longer apparent.
It's seductive to think that, if you could go back far enough in
time, you could pinpoint the time and place where the first vampire
legend emerged and then trace it as it spread across the planet.
However, I don't think it worked that way. I'm more of the opinion
that belief in vampirelike beings sprang up independently in many
cultures as people tried to find explanations for things that they
didn't understand, like crib death, disease, dreams, and the
deterioration of the human body.
For example, crib death was often blamed on witches, spirits, and
birds that sucked the blood/lifeforce from infants as they slept.
Similarly, wasting diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer were
explained as someone--a witch or vampire--who was slowly sucking
the life from the afflicted. Dreams about the dearly departed may
have been interpreted as actual visitations. Consider that early
religion was based on animism, and it's not a far jump to the idea
that some spirits are benign while others are harmful.
Here's another example. In some cultures, it was the practice to
dig up a dead body 3-7 years after burial in order to wash the bones
and rebury them. Imagine two families digging up the bones of their
family members, both of whom died on the same day, and finding that
one body had decomposed to the bone while the other body still
looked whole. In some places, the whole corpse might be thought of
as a saint; in others, a vampire.
> You have to remember that people would hav ebeen looking for
> supernatural explainations for things they didn't understand
> rather than a medical explanation.
Most definitely! It's only been the last 150 years that science
has predominated. Before that, religion and superstition held sway.
Thanks for the interesting discussion.
^BJ^
Travis Casey
> I'm crossposting this to alt.vampyres because there are a number
> of people there who can/might add more information to this thread.
> Plus, it's more ontopic for alt.vampyres than it is for alt.culture.
> vampires.
>
> Mark Scott wrote:
>> On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:41:33 -0700, BabyJ wrote:
>> > When Mark Scott wrote:
>> >>>The vampire legend came about , as a good
>> >>>many other things, due to lack of understanding and group paranoia
>> >>>in the dark ages. A medical condition known as porphyria, whereby
>> >>>an increase in the levels of porphyrin in the blood of afflicted
>> >>>individuals gave rise toa myth about these people. They did avoid
>> >>>direct sunlight as the porphyrins in the body made the skin very
>> >>>photosensitive and mild blistering occured. They did ingest blood
>> >>>which was a way of counteracting the porphyria but they did not
>
>> >>>need it to survive :)
Vampire legends vary greatly. In many of them, vampires do *not* avoid
direct sunlight. Further, in those where vampires don't go out in the sun,
they're simply nocturnal -- the idea that vampires are actually *harmed* by
sunlight is a modern invention.
When the idea that vampire legends might be explained by porphyria was first
raised -- back in the late '60s, by Dr. David Dolphin -- Dr. Dolphin
hypothesized that porphyriacs might have been able to benefit by drinking
blood, and that they might feel a compulsion to drink it. However, Dr.
Dolphin was not an expert in porphyria, and it turns out that neither of
these ideas has any truth. Ingesting blood does absolutely nothing to
'counteract' porphyria.
Dr. Dolphin also thought that the physical symptoms of some porphyrias --
which can include pale skin, misshappen cartilage (and thus, pointed ears
and the like), and red teeth -- could make them physically resemble vampire
legends. Unfortunately, the ideas that vampires have pale skin and pointed
ears are also modern inventions, and not part of authentic vampire legend.
Legendary vampires are grave-dwellers. In many legends, the vampire remains
physically in the grave, and its spirit goes out to hunt. In every
authentic account of a 'vampire plague' which has come down to us, the
townspeople go out and find the vampire dead and buried -- they never find
a living, breathing, moving thing which is the vampire. Only a corpse.
This too, speaks against the idea of porphyria as the source of vampire
legends, since while porphyriacs may resemble the modern fictional idea of
a vampire, they most certainly do not resemble corpses, and a crippling
disease like porphyria most certainly is not conducive to living in a
grave!
Dr. Dolphin himself has abandoned the idea. Unfortunately, it seems to have
achieved some sort of undeath of its own, with it being bandied about --
especially around Halloween every year -- by those who have come across it
and *haven't* come across the facts against it.
>> Do you not think that through istory it would not have taken a
>> lot for news to travel to all parts of the world? The genetic
>> disorders involved, while rare, could have been quite prevalent
>> in certain small isolated villages, due as you said to inbreeding.
Prior to modern times, porphyriacs suffering the more severe forms -- the
sort of forms that would make one resemble a fictional vampire -- rarely
survived to puberty, much less to adulthood. Thus, if it were the case
that inbreeding leading to porphyria gave rise to the legends, we'd expect
that vampires in legend would typically be children -- which they are not.
>> This type of thing has been seen throughout history where certain
>> towns have seen higher rates of genetic abnormalities due to no
>> outside influence on marriages. This could account for the
>> legends we hear about such as the stereotypical village outside
>> of draculas castle in transylvania etc.
This again is a stereotype of fiction, not of actual vampire legends.
--
ZZzz |\ _,,,---,,_ Travis S. Casey <efi...@earthlink.net>
/,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ No one agrees with me. Not even me.
|,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'-'
'---''(_/--' `-'\_)
William R. Thompson
> When the idea that vampire legends might be explained by porphyria was first
> raised -- back in the late '60s, by Dr. David Dolphin -- Dr. Dolphin
> hypothesized that porphyriacs might have been able to benefit by drinking
> blood, and that they might feel a compulsion to drink it. However, Dr.
> Dolphin was not an expert in porphyria, and it turns out that neither of
> these ideas has any truth. Ingesting blood does absolutely nothing to
> 'counteract' porphyria.
And ingesting enough fresh human blood--about 50 ccs, if memory serves--
will cause nausea and vomiting. The thought that Count Dracula might
upchuck after feeding doesn't do much for the vampiric image. It's
hard to absorb iron from blood after you've barfed it out.
> while porphyriacs may resemble the modern fictional idea of
> a vampire, they most certainly do not resemble corpses, and a crippling
> disease like porphyria most certainly is not conducive to living in a
> grave!
Much less skulking about at night and overpowering a victim (no matter
how soundly someone sleeps, a bite to the neck is going to wake them
up. It's *really* unlikely that the victim wouldn't put up a fight
then).
> Dr. Dolphin himself has abandoned the idea. Unfortunately, it seems to have
> achieved some sort of undeath of its own, with it being bandied about --
> especially around Halloween every year -- by those who have come across it
> and *haven't* come across the facts against it.
It turned up on an episode of "The X-Files," although it was dismissed
as an explanation for vampirism--it was more a display of the show's
incompetent research.
Porphyria has also been tapped as an explanation for lycanthropy; some
of the symptoms include profuse hair growth, receding gums (which make
the teeth appear longer, before they fall out), eroded facial features
and psychological disturbances. It was suggested that some porphyriacs
looked and acted like werewolves as their disease progressed; this is
the preferred explanation of morons.
As another flaw in the porphyeia explanation, I don't think there are
any documented cases of a porphyriac attacking anyone for blood.
--Bill Thompson
Elizabeth Miller
theories. Porphyria as an explanation for vampirism? As I state in
_Dracula: Sense & Nonsense_: "outrageous". It would be laughable were it
not for the fact that the publicity given to such theories have brought
undue stress to many victims of porphyria (a few of whom have corresponded
with me). Dolphin, as has been pointed out, derives his "proof" not from
folklore but from fiction and movies. And some people call that
"scholarship"!
Elizabeth
emi...@mun.ca
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/ ["Dracula's homepage"]
---------------------------------------------------------
"Razbunarea mea de abia incepe! Va dainui prin veacuri si
timpul e de partea mea."
(DRACULA, Romanian edition, 1993)
---------------------------------------------------------
William R. Thompson
> Thanks to Bill and Travis for exposing those ridiculous David Dolphin
> theories. Porphyria as an explanation for vampirism? As I state in
> _Dracula: Sense & Nonsense_: "outrageous". It would be laughable were it
> not for the fact that the publicity given to such theories have brought
> undue stress to many victims of porphyria (a few of whom have corresponded
> with me). Dolphin, as has been pointed out, derives his "proof" not from
> folklore but from fiction and movies. And some people call that
> "scholarship"!
Unfortunately Dolphin isn't the only irresponsible fraud who indulges
in this sort of reckless behavior; the world is filled with liars who
push conspiracy theories, creation "science," "revisionist histories"
about the Holocaust and slavery . . .
On the subject of Dolphin and porphyria, there's
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a990507.html
which has a good debunking of Dolphin's rubbish. As Cecil Adams
says here, when he explains why Dolphin initially fooled him,
"Hey, the guy was making a speech to a scientific society! It was
reported in the New York Times! As a result I was taken in by an
explanation that was superficially plausible but on examination
turned out to be complete crap."
What's surprising about Dolphin is that he didn't bother to do any
serious research on vampirism before he opened his fool mouth. If
nothing else, a careful researcher will check the facts first. At the
very least he should have said "Hey, maybe I can find *more* facts
to support my theory if I go to the library's non-fiction section!"
Instead he didn't even bother to apply the smell test to his "facts."
--Bill Thompson
Elizabeth Miller
> > Does anyone know where a copy of Dolphin's presentation wherein he
> > tied porphyria to vampirism might be found? Several years ago, I
> > did a literature search on it but came up empty handed.
Norine Dresser writes extensively about this in her book _American
Vampires_. She quotes a number of times from Dolphin's paper which, she
states, was read to her over the phone by an AP science writer who had
been at Dolphin's presentation and wanted her reaction as a folklorist. I
do not think the paper was ever published. She said she was interviewed in
May 1985 (Dolphin presented the paper on May 30) so it must have been that
day or the next. The AP reporter was Lee Siegel. Maybe someone can track
down the story s/he wrote - it may have more quotations.
Elizabeth
BabyJ
> I'll still note that while Dolphin suggested that porphyriacs
> in past ages might have drunk blood to try to alleviate the
> symptoms, there is no evidence that this would help, and there
> are no reports of porphyriacs feeling an urge to drink blood.
We had a porphyriac here a few years ago. Anybody remember Holly
Danvers? IIRC, she said that she drinks small amounts of blood,
but I don't remember why...whether it was because she believed it
lessened the symptoms of her porphyria (she had the worst case
porphyria--congenital erythropoietic porphyria), because she also
was anemic, or because she just liked the stuff...but I don't
remember her saying that she felt compelled to drink blood.
What I do remember her saying was that she was best able to keep
her symptoms under control by staying out of the sun. Consequently,
her parents (who were quite wealthy) built her a house in which
all the windows were paned in stained glass in order to keep out
the sun. She used to have a website--Holly's Haven--in which she
talked about her condition, but I notice that it's no longer up.
I hope she hasn't succumbed to her disease.
>> Does anyone know where a copy of Dolphin's presentation wherein
>> he tied porphyria to vampirism might be found? Several years
>> ago, I did a literature search on it but came up empty handed.
>
> Nope... haven't been able to find it myself either. :-(
> I came across an abstract once, but I don't remember where now.
It might be that there is no written article. Dolphin presented
his theory at a meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1985, so it might have been a verbal
presentation. Maybe we'd have better luck looking up the Time
magazine article that followed it and was probably the source of
the media hoopla that followed.
Another disease that's been linked with vampires is rabies. That
explanation was put forth by Juan Gomez-Alonso in a 1998 article
published in "Neurology" magazine. I do have a copy of that article,
but I've not kept up on any research that might have followed in
order to corroborate or refute his theory. At least Gomez-Alonso
was not so bold as to say that the vampire legend might have
stemmed from rabies. He only noted that reports of vampires in
and around the Balkans abounded during the early 1700s at about
the same time that a major epidemic of rabies was reported in
Hungary and then pointed out the similarities between the symptoms
of rabies and the description of vampirism as it was known in
that region.
Hmmm. Looking at the references given by Gomez-Alonso at the end
of his article, I see a reference for Dolphin D. Werewolves and
vampires [dissertation]. Los Angeles, CA: American Academy for
the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS); 1985, and another article
which looks like an editorial rebuttal of the theory [Cox AM.
Porphyria and vampirism: another myth in the making. Postgrad
Med J 1995;71:643-644. Dolphin's paper might be traceable if he
filed it as a dissertation, although Gomez-Alonso does mention
within his own article that Dolphin's theory was "unpublished."
I also note a reference for an article published by Gomez-Alonso
in a Spanish journal [Gomez-Alonso J. Los vampiros a la luz de
la Medicina. Vigo, Spain: Neuropress, 1995:38, 186, 149-159,
53-61], some three years before the 1998 article I mentioned
above.
These might be worth the look-see, although I cannot read Spanish.
^BJ^
Baby Jinx
> Thanks to Bill and Travis for exposing those ridiculous David
> Dolphin theories. Porphyria as an explanation for vampirism?
> As I state in _Dracula: Sense & Nonsense_: "outrageous". It
> would be laughable were it not for the fact that the publicity
> given to such theories have brought undue stress to many victims
> of porphyria (a few of whom have corresponded with me). Dolphin,
> as has been pointed out, derives his "proof" not from folklore
> but from fiction and movies. And some people call that
> "scholarship"!
That's not surprising when you consider what many students consider
"research"...hop on the internet, ask a few questions, visit a few
websites, download what you find, cut-and-paste it into some
semblance of a report, then put your name on it. I think it's
shameful that students are getting away with this kind of
scholarship.
It appears that Dolphin, albeit an expert on porphyria, did not
apply the same scholarship to his study of vampires. He linked
the symptoms of porphyria to the Dracula version of the vampire
without realizing that vampirism has a loooong history, back
thousands of years. All that stuff about vampires/porphyriacs
being pale and unable to tolerate sunlight, having pointed ears
and fanglike teeth...this is all part of the modernday vampire
stereotype and has very little to do with vampires prior to
Stoker's _Dracula_.
If Dolphin had put just a little more effort into researching
vampire mythology before he put his foot in his mouth, he might
have abandoned his theory long before he made a pariah of
himself to the vampirologists. Unfortunately, Dolphin is well-
respected as a researcher of the porphyrins, so his theory
continues to circulate amongst those who think he must be right
because he's a scientist.
^BJ^
Mark Scott
> Thanks to Bill and Travis for exposing those ridiculous David Dolphin
> theories. Porphyria as an explanation for vampirism? As I state in
> _Dracula: Sense & Nonsense_: "outrageous". It would be laughable were it
> not for the fact that the publicity given to such theories have brought
> undue stress to many victims of porphyria (a few of whom have corresponded
> with me). Dolphin, as has been pointed out, derives his "proof" not from
> folklore but from fiction and movies. And some people call that
> "scholarship"!
Ok,
We have established that porphyria isn't the explanaton. This all started
out as a simple quetsion of where the modern day'hollywood' vampire myth
started out from, so if anyone has any better explanations then I would
like to hear them. There is a similarity in porphyria victims to the
'dracula' descriptions and so maybe he just took the next leap and tried
to tie the two together. If Dolphin has since retracted his stement then
as far as I am concerned that is fine. But what, if any, explanation of
the tales do you guys have?? There are many myths and legends around
about sucjh creatures who would bleed the soul, or feed on your mindetc
etc which all could lead to vampire superstitions.
Mark
William R. Thompson
> There is a similarity in porphyria victims to the
> 'dracula' descriptions and so maybe he just took the next leap and tried
> to tie the two together.
(sigh) No, there is no such similarity. That has been a major point
in this thread. Dolphin was arrogant; that's the explanation for his
mistake in linking vampirism and porphyria. He couldn't bother to
check the facts.
> But what, if any, explanation of the tales do you guys have??
Which tales? The fictional version of vampirism? "Dracula" is a
great adventure sory, with a lot of repressed Victorian sexuality.
Drac creeps around at night because that's creepier than having
him work at day--besides, your typical seducer works at night,
and Dracula was a symbolic Don Juan.
The German movie "Nosferatu" is the first to have the vampire
destroyed by sunlight. My opinion is that this was created to
allow Nina to destroy Count Orlock. Have a *woman* do something
active in the destruction of a villain? In 1923 cinema? The
movie set up its rules so that Nina could destroy the vampire just
by lying in bed and letting him have his way with her--"good girls"
never did anything aggressive.
"Nosferatu" had fangs, but it wasn't until the Fifties that the
movie vampire showed fangs again; Lugosi, Carradine, Chaney et alia
showed normal human teeth on the screen. The Hammer films were the
first to make a big splash with blood and fangs; Hammer went in for
shock value (and, with color film, the red gore could be more
effective than in black-and-white).
Where did the vampire legends get started? My guess, emphasis on
"guess," is that millenia ago people noticed that, if a person or
animal bleeds enough, they die. That makes an obvious connection
between blood and life. From there it's a short leap to imagine
that a person who appears to be losing vitality is the victim of
a creature which drains life/blood from them. Vampires legends
could easily spring up all over the place.
These legends are so diifferent that they're obviously not talking
about one type of vampire. Some are ghosts; some are animated
corpses; some are demons who were never human; some are Tories.
--Bill Thompson
BabyJ
> We have established that porphyria isn't the explanaton. This all
> started out as a simple quetsion of where the modern day'hollywood'
Actually, the question arose on alt.culture.vampires as a rather
silly post in which xandman tried to say that Stoker began the
vampire myth based on Vlad Tepes and that Vlad Tepes had a skin
condition, which made him sensitive to the sun. I tried to point out
that xandman's theory was rubbish for several reasons: (1) Stoker
most certainly did not base Dracula on Vlad Tepes (from Stoker's
writing notes, it appears that the only thing Stoker knew about
Vlad Dracula was his name), (2) there is no evidence that Vlad
Dracula had any sort of skin disease that made it so that he
couldn't tolerate sunlight, (3) belief in vampires and vampirelike
beings has been around as long ago as 3000 BC as well as in almost
every culture around the world, and (4) the two skin conditions
(porphyria and xeroderma pigmentosum) most often compared to
vampires are so rare that it is unlikely they could have given
rise to such a widespread belief in vampires...from Africa to Asia
to Europe to the Americas, both North and South.
> ... so if anyone has any better explanations then I would like
> to hear them. There is a similarity in porphyria victims to the
> 'dracula' descriptions and so maybe he just took the next leap
> and tried to tie the two together. If Dolphin has since
> retracted his stement then as far as I am concerned that is fine.
> But what, if any, explanation of the tales do you guys have??
Which tales? The answer depends upon how far back you want to go.
As best as I can tell, the "modern day Hollywood" version of the
vampire myth stemmed from Bram Stoker's Dracula, although Hollywood
has made changes even in that version, e.g., added the sunlight
thing to the story. In Stoker's novel, Dracula was able to be up
and about at anytime, day or night, although he found that being
in the sun made him uncomfortable enough that he chose to wear a
wide-brimmed hat whenever he went out during the day. I believe
that there was also a limitation on his ability to change forms
such that he couldn't change form during the daylight hours.
Whatever form he was in at dawn was the form he had to keep until
that evening.
The question now becomes one of: If Hollywood got its version of
the vampire from Stoker's story, where did Stoker get his ideas?
For that, we can look to Stoker's writing notes. Fortunately, he
kept loads of them, and they are on display at the Rosenbach Museum
in Philadelphia. Elizabeth Miller has spent time researching them
for the books she has written, so I'll let her do the honor of
describing what they say. I do believe, however, that ‘porphyria'
was never mentioned in his notes, so it is unlikely that Stoker
modeled his vampire on descriptions of porphyriacs.
More than anything, Stoker was a writer and had ties to the stage,
so his most likely source of inspiration was from fiction and plays
that were already known to him. J. Sheridan Le Fanu's short story
"Carmilla" is one example. The vampire Carmilla was very much like
Stoker's vampire in that she was able to be out and about during
the daylight hours, although she found it necessary to shade herself.
She took no human food, fed nightly on blood, and was able to
shapeshift (her favorite animal form was that of a cat).
Another vampire that was well-known during Stoker's lifetime was
Lord Ruthven. Lord Ruthven stemmed from John Polidori's 1819 short
story "The Vampyre". From that, a stageplay was made that took the
European theater by storm. It was popular on stages from Paris to
Germany to London. It is said that Polidori based his description
of Lord Ruthven partly on a fragment of a vampire tale written
three years earlier by his companion Lord Byron but mostly on Lord
Byron himself after Polidori and Byron had a falling out. Lord
Ruthven wasn't entirely Polidori's creation, as Lord Ruthven had
already made his first appearance as the fiendishly cold-hearted,
but very much human, lover in Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon. Lamb
patterned Lord Ruthven after Lord Byron, as Lamb herself was one
of Byron's discarded lovers.
A third vampire tale that was quite popular during the mid-1800s was
_Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood_, a series of penny
dreadfuls that were sold on streetcorners all over London. Of the
three aforementioned vampires--Carmilla, Lord Ruthven, and Varney--
I think Stoker's Dracula comes closest to resembling Varney. Whether
or not Stoker patterned Dracula after any of these three I do not
know for sure. I only know that they were very popular in Europe
during the time that Stoker was alive and might have provided him
with the inspiration for Dracula.
BTW, all three of these stories—"Carmilla," "The Vampyre", and
_Varney the Vampire_ are in the public domain and can be found on
the Internet. A good place to start would be the alt.vampyres
homepage at ://altvampyres.com. I believe that Lucadra has copies
of both "Carmilla" and "The Vampyre" there. Websites which feature
Varney the Vampire are listed in the Alt.Vampyres VAMPIRE
LITERATURE Faq, which I will post shortly on alt.vampyres, along
with the Alt.Vampyres DRACULA Faq.
> There are many myths and legends around about sucjh creatures
> who would bleed the soul, or feed on your mind etc which all
> could lead to vampire superstitions.
Now you're beginning to see the broader picture. The Hollywood
version of the vampire is merely the tail end of a loooong history
of vampire myths that extend back at least as early as there exist
written records. Cuneiform writing, i.e., writing that is based
on word sounds as opposed to pictures, was invented by the Sumerians,
and the Sumerians already had stories of vampirelike beings that
came to sleeping people in order to steal their semen or lifeforce,
which they used to create more of their kind. It is often theorized
that such stories were used to explain the phenomenon known as
"nocturnal emission," and that vampires of this type were known in
many cultures under many names, e.g., incubus, succubus, mare,
liderc, lilith, etc.
Similarly, a second type of vampire that has existed since time
immemorial was the vampire who came to sleeping people to drink
their blood/lifeforce, causing their victims to eventually weaken
and die. Such vampires were used to explain deaths such as crib
death, tuberculosis, cancer, and other diseases for which there
was no known explanation. What they did know was that death could
come about accidentally, and accidental deaths usually involved
bleeding. When death occurred without any sign of bleeding, people
concluded that someone must be secretly bleeding people while they
slept. Probably from this, stories grew up about various types of
demons, vampires, and witches who preyed on the blood/lifeforce
of the living. Again, these types of vampires were known in many
cultures under many names.
You have to remember that early man was animistic, believing that
everything had a soul and that souls and spirits could roam about
and affect the living. Some of these spirits were helpful, like
when Brer Wolf or Brer Bear imparted special powers and courage to
warriors. Others were malignant and, rather than helping people,
they stole people's energy, blood, and lifeforce. Now work forward
from there. This is where you should be looking for the origins of
vampires, not at Vlad Tepes, porphyriacs, or Dracula.
^BJ^
[ACV re-added because it was on ACV that this thread originated,
and there may still be people there who wish to see where it is
headed]
Andrew Heenan
> > I'm crossposting this to alt.vampyres because there are
> > a number of people there who can/might add more
> > information to this thread. Plus, it's more ontopic for
> > alt.vampyres than it is for alt.culture.vampires
In a few words, how do they divide? TIA
"Travis Casey" wrote ...
> Dr. Dolphin also thought that the physical symptoms of
> some porphyrias -- which can include pale skin,
> misshappen cartilage (and thus, pointed ears ....
Important to remember that Dr. David Dolphin, Ph.D., is a professor of
chemistry - so he's no more an 'expert' in these matters than I am (ie not
much!).
His theories are interesting, and may provide a partial explanation of some
myths. But no more than that.
A goole search - "Dr. David Dolphin" porphyria - finds plenty of discussion,
but it's all second hand, no direct quotes.
--
Best wishes,
Andrew
http://www.vampyreverse.com
Elizabeth Miller
On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, BabyJ wrote:
> Mark Scott wrote:
> > We have established that porphyria isn't the explanaton. This all
> > started out as a simple quetsion of where the modern day'hollywood'
> > vampire myth started out from...
>
> Actually, the question arose on alt.culture.vampires as a rather
> silly post in which xandman tried to say that Stoker began the
> vampire myth based on Vlad Tepes and that Vlad Tepes had a skin
> condition, which made him sensitive to the sun..
"Silly" is hardly the word for it. Outrageous, maybe? Poppycock?
Balderdash? Or just plain nonsense. I didn't see the original post - good
thing as I probably would have gone into cardiac arrest! :) It's bad
enough to put up with the Vlad stuff - but Vlad with porphyria? That's
just too much...
> The question now becomes one of: If Hollywood got its version of
> the vampire from Stoker's story, where did Stoker get his ideas?
> For that, we can look to Stoker's writing notes. Fortunately, he
> kept loads of them, and they are on display at the Rosenbach Museum
> in Philadelphia. Elizabeth Miller has spent time researching them
> for the books she has written, so I'll let her do the honor of
> describing what they say. I do believe, however, that ‘porphyria'
> was never mentioned in his notes, so it is unlikely that Stoker
> modeled his vampire on descriptions of porphyriacs.
I just completed editing a book which comprises several pages of lengthy
quotations from all of Stoker's known sources of information about vampires.
Far too lengthy to go into here. The book, by the way, is entitled _Bram
Stoker's Dracula: A Documentary Volumne and will be published next
month in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series (aimed primarily at
libraries).
I can assure you there is nothing in Stoker's Notes nor in his sources
about porphyria. Nor does the name "Vlad" appear. Just a vague reference
to a voivode named Dracula. Nothing about impalements either. No
portraits of Vlad, no accounts of his atrocities, nothing about his
blood-drinking. Yet books have been written about Vlad as Stoker's
inspiration for _Dracula_. A classic case of a mountain out of a
mole-hill at best - sloppy scholarship at worst.
Elizabeth
BabyJ
>>I'm crossposting this to alt.vampyres because there are a
>>number of people there who can/might add more information
>>to this thread. Plus, it's more ontopic for alt.vampyres
>>than it is for alt.culture.vampires
Andrew Heenan wondered?
> In a few words, how do they divide?
This is a statement of purpose from the alt.culture.vampires faq:
This group is for the discussion of vampires and vampirism as an
actual phenomenon and the medical, psychological, psychic, and
scientific/technical explanations for it. Mention or discussion of
fictional vampires or vampire RPG's are only acceptable as they relate
to the main topic, otherwise they are to be referred to a newsgroup
where they are appropriate. [://earthops.net/a-c-v/
The following is from the alt.vampyres faq:
Alt.vampyres is for the discussion of vampire lore in any culture,
ancient or modern. This group is also for the discussion of vampires in
fiction, such as novels, stories, poetry, comics, movies and television,
as well as for sharing of original poetry and fiction, whether it be
narrative or interactive. Finally, alt.vampyres is a place for the
discussion about the theoretical nature of the biology, psychology,
and sociology of the legendary vampire. [://altvampyres.com]
With regards to David Dolphin, Travis Casey wrote:
>> Dr. Dolphin also thought that the physical symptoms of some
>> porphyrias -- which can include pale skin, misshappen cartilage
>> (and thus, pointed ears ....
And Andrew Heenan replied:
> Important to remember that Dr. David Dolphin, Ph.D., is a professor
> of chemistry - so he's no more an 'expert' in these matters than
> I am (ie not much!).
You may not be an expert in matters of chemistry, but there are
persons here who are experts in the matters of vampirology.
I suggest that everyone following this thread take a look at Andrew
Heenan's website [www.vampyreverse.com]. We have here another
blatherene. He proposes that vampire blood is magnesium-based
(as opposed to iron-based) and then reasons out a whole lot of
causes for why vampires are sensitive to sunlight and need to
imbibe blood for the oxygen content.
The theory would be cool if it were presented as a theory, but the
website presents it as fact...which is why it qualifies as
blatherene garbage.
^BJ^
Josh Dull
people
are here.
Reading through the threads, I am curious about one thing.
What is the origins of the literate vampire? The vampire's in "Carmilla",
"The Vampire",
and "Varney the Vampyre" have very little in common with the folkloric
vampire. And
I am curious as to how this came about. I imagine, since vampire literature
seems to be
a sub-genre of Gothic literature (please correct me if I'm wrong) , that it
uses many of the
same conventions as Gothic literature. And the literate vampire is a
variation on the Gothic
villian archtype.
Of course this is wild speculation on my half. I really know nothing about
Gothic literature beyond
vampire stories.
By the way, what is the first fictional vampire story? The oldest I'm aware
of is "The Vampire" by
John Polidori. But that doesn't mean nothing precedes it.
Sorry for being so long winded and asking so much. I'll go back to lurking
now.
Josh
BabyJ
> What is the origins of the literate vampire? The vampire's in
> "Carmilla", "The Vampire", and "Varney the Vampyre" have very
> little in common with the folkloric vampire.
Good point. Vampires in mythology and vampires in literature DO
seem to have followed separate paths.
> And I am curious as to how this came about. I imagine, since
> vampire literature seems to be a sub-genre of Gothic literature
> (please correct me if I'm wrong)...
I've also heard it described as a subgenre of horror and/or science
fiction.
> ...that it uses many of the same conventions as Gothic literature.
> And the literate vampire is a variation on the Gothic villian
> archtype. Of course this is wild speculation on my half. I really
> know nothing about Gothic literature beyond vampire stories.
I'm not very knowledgeable about Gothic literature either, but I
would venture to bet that it wasn't Gothic lit that gave rise to
vampires in lit, since vampire lit can be found prior to the gothic
genre, which seems to have arisen in the 1800s. [But I'm only
guessing here. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the gothic
genre can correct me.] Or conversely, it's also possible that
vampire lit gave rise to the gothic genre, since vampires seem to
epitomize the nature of gothic lit, i.e., dark and mysterious
creatures in dark and mysterious places.
> By the way, what is the first fictional vampire story? The oldest
> I'm aware of is "The Vampire" by John Polidori. But that doesn't
> mean nothing precedes it.
I've seen people build a case for the idea that Polidori's short
story (1819) gave rise to the vampire as we know it in much of
the fiction and movies of today, but it certainly wasn't the first.
Here's a list of vampire fiction that precedes Stoker's Dracula.
c117-138? "Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum" by Phlegon of Tralles
123? "The Vampire" [chapter 5] from _The Golden Asse_ aka
_Metamorphosis_ by Lucius Apuleius aka Lucii Apulei
c200-245 "Life of Apollonius of Tyana" by Philostratus
1748 "Der Vampyr" Heinrich August Ossenfelder (verse)
1773 "Lenore" by Gottfried August Burger (verse)
1797 "The Bride of Corinth" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (verse)
1797 "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Samuel Taylor Coleridge (verse)
1797 "Thalaba the Destroyer" by Robert Southey (verse)
1798 "The Old Woman of Berkeley" by Robert Southey (verse)
1801 "Christabel" Samuel Taylor Coleridge (verse)
1810 "The Vampyre" by John Stagg (poem)
1813 "The Giaour" by Lord George Gordon Byron (verse)
1813 "Rokeby" Sir Walter Scott (verse)
@1815 "The Bride of the Grave" by Johann Ludwig Tieck
1816 "A Fragment" aka "The Burial" by Lord George Gordon Byron
1819 "The Vampyre" by John Polidori
1819 _Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires_ by Berard (said to be the
first vampire novel)
1819 "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats (verse)
1819 "The Cenci" Percy Bysshe Shelley (play)
1819 "The Eve of St. Agnes" John Keats (verse)
1820 "Wake Not the Dead" attributed to Johann Ludwig Tieck (may
be by Ernst Raupach)
1820 _Die Elixire des Teufels_ [The Devil's Elixirs] by E(rnst)
T(heodor) A(madeus) Wilhelm Hoffman
1820 "Lamia" by John Keats (verse)
1828 "The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress" by Elizabeth Grey
1830 "The Dead Lover" by Theophile Gautier
1833 "The Mortal Immortal" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1835 "Viy" by Nikolai Gogol
1845 _Varney the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood_ by James Malcolm
Rymer
1800s "A Visit to the Theatre" by Alexandre Dumas
1848 "The Pale Lady" by Alexandre Dumas & Paul Bocage
1849 "The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains" from _Les Mille et
un Fantomes_ by Alexandre Dumas
1859 "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien
1860 "The Mysterious Stranger", anonymous
1860 "The Cold Embrace" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
1860 "Metamorphosis of a Vampire" by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
1892 _Carpathian Castle_ aka _The Castle of the Carpathians_ by
Jules Verne
1965 "Le Vampire" by Alexandre Dumas (play)
1867 "The Last Lords of Gardonal" by William Gilbert
1870 _Vikram the Vampire_ ed/Richard Burton
1872 "Carmilla" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
1880 "The Fate of Madame Cabanel" by Eliza Lynn Linton
1881 "The Man-Eating Tree" by Phil Robinson
1884 "The Family of the Vourdalak" by Alexis Tolstoy
1886 "The Vampyre (Strigoiul)" by Vasile Alecsandri
1887 "Ken's Mystery" aka "The Grave of Ethelind Fionguala" by Julian
Hawthorne
1887 "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant
1887 "A Mystery of the Campagna" by Anne Crawford
1890 "The Tomb of Sarah" by Frederick George Loring
1890 "Let Loose" by Mary Cholmondeley
1894 "The Parasite" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1894 _A Kiss of Judas_ by X.L.
1894 "A True Story of a Vampire" aka "The Sad Story of a Vampire" by
Stanislaus Eric aka Count Eric Stenbock
1896 "Good Lady Ducayne" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
1897 _Dracula_ by Bram Stoker
This list is taken from the Alt.Vampyres VAMPIRE LITERATURE Faq
and another list that I have of pre-Dracula fiction, so it's not
to be thought of as inclusive. In addition, I've not read all of
them, so I cannot testify as to how they portray vampires or even
whether or not they actually contain vampires or beings resembling
vampires. One thing I do note, however, is that this list of
vampire literature prior to Stoker's Dracula, with only a few
exceptions, seems to be in the form of short stories or verses and
poems. What that says about the origins of vampire literature, I'm
not sure. Perhaps others might be willing to tell what they see.
BTW, most of these works are public domain, meaning that they are
likely to be available somewhere on the Internet. If you're
interested, do a websearch on the title and/or author. Chances are
good that you'll be able to download and read them. Some of them
are also available on the alt.vampyres homepage:
//altvampyres.com/talesf.html
I have a bunch of them stored on a disk somewhere. If enough people
are interested in obtaining copies, I can post them to alt.vampyres.
I think that somewhere I also have a list of nonfiction vampire
literature. I'll see if I can find and post it for the comparison.
^BJ^
Josh Dull
> I've seen people build a case for the idea that Polidori's short
> story (1819) gave rise to the vampire as we know it in much of
> the fiction and movies of today, but it certainly wasn't the first.
> Here's a list of vampire fiction that precedes Stoker's Dracula.
*snipped*
Yeah, I remembered reading the list of vampire fiction pre-Dracula
after I sent my message.
Boy did I feel sheepish that I asked a question that I already had the
answer
for.
I've read some of those stories, mostly those from "Cristabel" onward but
their's
still a lot I haven't gotten to yet. I had read "Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" way
back in high school but don't recall anything vampiric in it. Guess I'll
have to check
that out.
Most of those stories seem to come from ancient Rome and much later on,
Germany.
The vampire as we know it seems to have originated in England, but I
wouldn't
be surprised if the Roman and German stories had any influence on their
formation.
Only way to find out is to look into them.
Guess it's a good thing I enjoy reading and learning new things. I'm
actually excited about
this.
Josh
Elizabeth Miller
On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, William R. Thompson wrote:
> And what of that arch-fiend, Santa Claus? Has anyone ever seen him
> during the day? What of his immortality, his ability to fly, his
> equally mysterious bride, and his horde of servants, as deranged as
> any Renfield in their obsession to build toys? Not to mention the
> eerie way in which he can enter any household without the use of
> a door, merely by being invited in with cookies and milk? What of
> his power to command the reindeer and to vanish in the twinkling
> of an eye? Do his "gifts" allow him to feed on children in the same
> manner as the vampirized Lucy Westenra? Does he hide abducted children
> in his bag, as Dracula did when he brought a baby to his brides? His
> defenders claim that he is a force for good, but their obsession
> suggests
> that they are the victims of some evil hypnotic force. It should be
> noted that his cult is strongly opposed by the more fanatical
> Christians,
> who display a monomania similar to that of the infamous van Helsing.
> Most telling of all, why does he always dress in red?
:) :) Which goes to show - it is possible to make a case for just about
anything.
Elizabeth
BabyJ
in fiction and legend, I will move it to alt.vampyres from hereon.]
"Josh Dull" wrote:
> Most of those stories seem to come from ancient Rome and much later
> on, Germany. The vampire as we know it seems to have originated in
> England, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Roman and German
> stories had any influence on their formation. Only way to find out
> is to look into them.
Let's do that.
The pattern that you mention (of stories springing from ancient Rome
and then Germany) may simply be an artifact of the list. I noted the
absence of stories after the three turn-of-the-century accounts by
Phlegon, Lucius Apuleius, and Philostratus. The next entry on the
list is Ossenfelder's 1748 verse "Der Vampyr." Does that dearth mean
that nothing was written during those years or only that I've not
found any? You also have to keep in mind that the list is strongly
European-based, and Europe was pretty much controlled by the
Christian church (Catholic and Orthodox), which probably did not
smile kindly on persons writing about vampires. This doesn't mean,
however, that people weren't writing about vampirelike beings in
other parts of the world.
Anyway, with those limitations on the ability to generalize beyond
the list itself, let's take a look at what it might be telling us.
First, the three stories from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD.
In "On Marvels" (Greek, @140 AD), Phlegon tells the story of a young
man named Machates who encounters a girl named Philinnon while
lodging with her parents. However, Philinnon died six months earlier
but was somehow granted three nights of life so that she could visit
with Machates (but no mention is made of drinking his blood or, in
fact, doing anything evil upon him). It becomes Phlegon's duty to
hunt down Philinnon's body and burn it.
The Golden Asse (Roman, @120 AD) is Lucius Apuleius's account of the
travels of Aristomenes and his experiences along the way. In chapter
five, Aristomenes is sleeping with his friend Socrates after a hard
night of drinking, when two women enter their chamber. While
Aristomenes cowers under the bed, they slit Socrates' throat and
collect his blood (for what purpose it doesn't say). I've read
several translations of the story in which the women are described
as "witches," "vampires," or "vampire witches." However, I do not
know what Latin term was used in the original. I can only state with
certainty that it wasn't "vampire," as the term "vampire" didn't
make its first appearance until over 1,000 years later.
In "Life of Apollonius of Tyana" (Greek, @240 AD), Philostratus
tells how Apollonius's student Menippus falls in love with what
Apollonius suspects is a vampire (again, it is highly unlikely that
the term "vampire" was used). The woman is described as possessing
a serpent's body, which puts her in the class of Greek empusai
[vampires] known as the lamiai. The lamia is able to take the shape
of a beautiful woman in order to seduce a human male, drink his
blood, and feast on his flesh. In Philostratus's account, the
lamia/vampire also has the ability to alter her environment, making
a man think that she is surrounded by richness and fine objects,
all of which disappeared when Apollonius revealed her true form
to Menippus.
A fourth story which should be added to this time period is Ovid's
_Fasti_ (Roman, @17 AD). _Fasti_ is a poetic calendar in which Ovid
describes the Roman deities and festivals specific to each month.
Unfortunately, Ovid died before he got to August through December,
but in "Book VI June 1: The Kalends," Ovid describes birdlike beings
that fly at night looking for human children. They rip open the
child's body with their beaks and drink the blood. I've seen the
Latin text and, although I can't read it, I see that the term used
was "strigibus," referring to the Roman "strix" or "screech owl" and
which assimilated into many other romance language, e.g., strega
(Italian) and strigoi (Romanian).
So, what do we have so far? In early Greek and Roman tales, we see
beings that drink the blood of children (Roman striges) and young
men (Greek lamiai), witches that slit the throats of men to collect
blood, and revenants. Nothing like the Slavic vampires we will meet
in the second millennium, but all the components seem to be there...
revenants, blood-drinking, shapeshifting, mind control, and burning
the body.
Let's look at the next three entries on the vampire fiction list,
all poems from the late 1700s by German authors: "Der Vampyr"
(Ossenfelder), "Lenore" (Burger), and "The Bride of Corinth"
(Goethe). Since these are all in the public domain and I have copies,
I'll post them to alt.vampyres so that anyone interested can follow
along and maybe put in their .02.
^BJ^
Elizabeth Miller
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, BabyJ wrote:
> 1486 _Der Hexenhammer_ (later: _Malleus Maleficarum_) by James
> Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer (section on how to kill a vampire)
> 1702 "A Voyage to the Levant" by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
> 1746 "Treatise on the Vampires of Hungary and Surrounding Regions"
> by Dom Augustin Calmet
> 1865 _The Book of Werewolves_ by S. Baring-Gould, London (chapter
> on Elizabeth Bathory)
> 1885 "Transylvania Superstitions" by Emily de Laszowska Gerard in
> "The Nineteenth Century" 18, pp. 130-50
> 1888 _The Land Beyond the Forest_ by Emily de Laszowska Gerard
> 1886 "Psychopathia Sexualis" by Richard von Krafft-Ebing
> 1890 _The Golden Bough_ by Sir George Frazer
> 1892 "An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia
> with various Political Observations relative to them" by
> William Wilkinson
That last one certainly does not belong there as there is nothing in
Wilkinson's book about vampires. Furthermore, it was published in 1820,
not 1892. It is the book in which Stoker found the name "Dracula".
There were also detailed accounts of vampire legends in the prefaces to
Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer" and Polidori's "The Vampyre." Both are
heavily dependent on Calmet and, to a lesser extent, Tournefort.
Elizabeth
BabyJ
>> 1892 "An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia
>> with various Political Observations relative to them" by
>> William Wilkinson
> Wilkinson's book about vampires. Furthermore, it was published in
> 1820, not 1892. It is the book in which Stoker found the name
> "Dracula".
Thanks. I've made the correction to the date. I think it's because
of the reference to Dracula that Wilkinson's book finds itself on
so many lists of vampire references.
I admit that my list of nonfiction vampire books is woefully pitiful.
I'm updating it even as we speak. Same with the list of fiction books.
I add them as I find them. Wish I had Carter's book, so I don't have
to re-invent the wheel.
> There were also detailed accounts of vampire legends in the prefaces
> to Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer" and Polidori's "The Vampyre."
> Both are heavily dependent on Calmet and, to a lesser extent,
> Tournefort.
I've got all four of those, but I don't have the prefaces. Can you
post them (or email/send me copies and/or tell me where I can find
them?)
This is kind of fun. I feel like I'm doing another dissertation :)
^BJ^
BabyJ
> I've read some of those stories, mostly those from "Cristabel"
> onward but their's still a lot I haven't gotten to yet. I had
> read "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" way back in high school but
> don't recall anything vampiric in it. Guess I'll have to check
> that out.
I've just finished reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I
have to agree with you. I can find little in it that would
qualify it as a vampire poem. It's the story of an ancient mariner
telling a young man about to be married the tale of an adenture he
had at sea. Basically, while his ship is sailing in a storm, they
lose their bearings until an albatross guides them through it. In
repayment for the albatross being a bird of good omen, the ancient
mariner shoots it with his crossbow. The rest of the tale is about
the penance he is made to suffer, which includes meeting up with
some dead spirits. But they aren't vampires.
About the most vampiric thing I can find in the whole story is in
two stanzas where the mariner and crew are forced to slake their
thirst by drinking their own blood because there's "water, water
everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail ;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood !
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail ! a sail !
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call :
Gramercy ! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
So what's the verdict? Do you see this as a poem with enough vampire
content to place it on a list of vampire fiction? Opinions welcome.
^BJ^
Cathy Krusberg
BabyJ wrote:
>
> I've just finished reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I
> have to agree with you. I can find little in it that would
> qualify it as a vampire poem.
[snip]
> So what's the verdict? Do you see this as a poem with enough vampire
> content to place it on a list of vampire fiction? Opinions welcome.
James Twitchell devotes nearly 20 pages of _The Living Dead:
A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature_ to analysis
of _Rime_ as a vampire-themed poem. Twitchell considers
changes from earlier to later versions as key to understanding
some of the vampire content. Twitchell analyzes the poem in
his chapter titled "The Artist as Vampire" and parses it as
a double vampirizing: "as he [the Ancient Mariner] is telling
the story, he is sapping the energy of the Wedding Guest just
as Life-in-Death had earlier sapped his blood (ll. 205 ff). The
Wedding Guest's initial reluctance, his belief that the Ancient
Mariner is possessed, and the hypnotic trance are all typical
of the willing unwillingness of the vampire's victim."
Apparently earlier redactions of the poem had content that
was more explicity vampiric, at least in the relations of
the Ancient Mariner and Life-in-Death.
Comment above based on a rather quick skimming.
Cathy Krusberg
Internet: ckb...@ix.netcom.com
Elizabeth Miller
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, BabyJ wrote:
> I've got all four of those, but I don't have the prefaces. Can you
> post them (or email/send me copies and/or tell me where I can find
> them?)
Will find them and mail them to you as attachments. Send me a private
e-mail & let me know to which address I should send them and I'll scoot
them along.
Actually, I will have this stuff up on the web one of these days. I am
constructing a new site called The Dracula Research Centre which will
comprise various documents and articles for scholars and researchers. The
site is not finished - but you can see how it's coming along by going to
www.blooferland.com/drc
Once it is reasonably ready, I'll put a link to it from my current site,
Dracula's homepage.
Elizabeth
www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller [Dracula's homepage]
Elizabeth Miller
> I've just finished reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I
> have to agree with you. I can find little in it that would
>
> About the most vampiric thing I can find in the whole story is in
> two stanzas where the mariner and crew are forced to slake their
> thirst by drinking their own blood because there's "water, water
> everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
Shouldn't that be "Nor any drop to drink"? I don't have the text of the
poem on hand but I do know that line is frequently misquoted.
>
> With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
> We could nor laugh nor wail ;
> Through utter drought all dumb we stood !
> I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
> And cried, A sail ! a sail !
>
> With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
> Agape they heard me call :
> Gramercy ! they for joy did grin,
> And all at once their breath drew in,
> As they were drinking all.
>
> So what's the verdict? Do you see this as a poem with enough vampire
> content to place it on a list of vampire fiction? Opinions welcome.
If this qualifies as a "vampire poem" then Hamlet must qualify as a
"vampire play": "Now could I drink hot blood..." Likewise Julius Caesar: "
"from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood."
Elizabeth
White Spirit
wrote thus:
>> About the most vampiric thing I can find in the whole story is in
>> two stanzas where the mariner and crew are forced to slake their
>> thirst by drinking their own blood because there's "water, water
>> everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
> Shouldn't that be "Nor any drop to drink"? I don't have the text of the
> poem on hand but I do know that line is frequently misquoted.
'Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.'
--
You have new spam in /var/spool/mail
BabyJ
>> there's "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
> Shouldn't that be "Nor any drop to drink"? I don't have the text of
> the poem on hand but I do know that line is frequently misquoted.
You're absolutely right. I even had the poem in front of me when I
wrote that. My thoughts at the time were that there are so many
familiar phrases from "The Ancient Mariner" that I decided to use
the colloquial instead of the literary. I thought it would be cool
for people to see where that saying came from, even if it was
quoted incorrectly.
>> So what's the verdict? Do you see this as a poem with enough
>> vampire content to place it on a list of vampire fiction?
>> Opinions welcome.
> If this qualifies as a "vampire poem" then Hamlet must qualify as a
> "vampire play": "Now could I drink hot blood..." Likewise Julius
>> Caesar: "from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood."
If anything, these references show that blood-drinking has one
heck of a history.
^BJ^
BabyJ
contains vampires or has been said to be "vampiric" in nature:
If the list in the Vampire Lit faq is representative of the
"vampire" in early literary fiction, it would appear that,
although the Greeks and Romans didn't have vampires (as we know
them) nor did they have the word "vampire" or any of its cognates,
they were already incorporating several of the vampire's
characteristics into their story-telling. They had blood-drinkers
(e.g., lamiai and striges), they had revenants, and they had
witches who used blood.
Then came the Dark Ages, 1,000+ years in which there is little
evidence of the "vampire" in European literature, with perhaps
the exception of Grendel in the Old English tale of Beowulf.
[NOTE: I have not looked into Scandinavian literature, e.g., the
Finnish "Kalevala", so someone knowledgeable or interested in
this area might consider adding such information to the thread.]
Run the tape forward to 1700s Germany, and the vampire suddenly
resurfaces again--this time by name—in Heinrich August
Ossenfelder's [1748] "Der Vampir," a short poem of two stanzas
which depicts a vampire returning from the grave to claim his
beloved. The vampire, who seems to be the writer, says that he
will come to his "dear young maiden (Christine)" as she is
sleeping and her "life's blood drain away." Sounds to me like the
traditional vampire as we know it today.
Now the question becomes: from whence did "Der Vampir" suddenly
arise? To answer that, let's take a look at what was happening in
Europe at that time with regards to vampirism. The Inquisition
had already run its course, producing such nefarious works as
James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer's (1486) _Malleus Maleficarum_
(The Witches Hammer), which laid out all manner and means of
identifying and destroying witches and other heretics [see
//www.malleusmaleficarum.org for an online copy]. Vampires
weren't of much importance to the Inquisition though, probably
because the Church didn't believe that vampires existed.
Suddenly in the mid-1600s, dissertations such as "De Graecorum
hodie quorundam opinationibus (On certain modern opinions among
the Greeks)" (1645) by Fr Leo Allatius and "Relation de ce qui
s'est passé a Sant-Erini Isle" (1657) by Fr Francoise Richard
linked witchcraft to vrykolakas (Greek vampires) by their
suggestions that the devil could reanimate corpses. Suddenly,
vampires became a topic of academic concern. Thereafter,
followed a glut of dissertations regarding the possible nature
and existence of vampires.
For example:
*1679 "Dissertatio Historico-Philosophica de Masticatione
Mortuorum" aka "De Masticatione Mortuorum (On the Chewing Dead)"
by Philip Rohr told about corpses returning from the dead to eat
their shrouds and chew on bodies.
*1680 "De Daemonialitate, Et Incubis, et Succubis (Demonality,
Incubi, & Succubi)" by Ludovico Maria Sinistrari argued that
vampires are not human; rather, they are a species that
parallels humanity and has the same soul and opportunity for
God's salvation as do humans.
*1702 "Relation d'un Voyage du Levant (A Voyage to the Levant)"
by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort described the destruction of a
vroucalacas that he witnessed in the Greek Levant.
*1744 "Dissertazione sopra I Vampiri" by Giuseppe Davanzati
postulated that vampires are pure fantasy.
*1745 "Grosses volstandige Universal-Lexicon aller
Wissenschaften und Kunste" by Johann Heinrich Zedler surmised
that vampirism was a superstitious explanation for a variety
of diseases.
*1746 "Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges des Demons
et des Esprits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hungrie,
de Boheme, de Moravie, et de Silesie" by Dom Augustin Calmet
gave a kind of wishy-washy description of vampires, trying to
debunk their powers while not denying that they could exist.
And then there was the case of Arnold Paole (Paul) of Medvegia
in Serbia who claimed to have been attacked by a vampire. After
his death circa 1727, so many people reported seeing him that
his body was disinterred. It was noted that he didn't look dead.
In fact, it looked like his nails had continued to grow and his
body was filled with fresh blood. When he was staked, he even
groaned, so his head was cut off, his body was burned, and he
was declared a real vampire.
It was in that atmosphere that "Der Vampir" made its debut.
"Der Vampir" was followed in 1773 by a much longer verse from
Gottfried August Burger about a young man named William who
also returns from the grave to claim his beloved "Lenore." In
1797, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published "Die Braut von
Korinth (The Bride of Corinth)", another long poem about a young
girl returning from the grave to claim her beloved. Neither
"Lenore" nor "The Bride of Corinth" used the word "vampir," but
most reviewers of vampire fiction agree that the intent is
transparent enough to include these two stories on the list.
Right after "Die Braut von Korinth" was published, "The Bride of
the Grave" aka "Wake Not the Dead" (attributed to Johann Ludwig
Tieck), came out, although it wasn't translated to English until
1823. It tells the tale of a man named Walter who arranges with
a sorcerer to bring his dead wife Brunhilda back from the grave,
something for which he later pays dearly when she turns out to
be a blood-sucking vampire.
Are you beginning to see the pattern here? These early German
poems seem to stem from the revenant theme set in the 2nd
century AD by Phlegon of Thralles in the Greek tale of how
Machates encounters the dead Philinnon while lodging with her
parents. It appears that it's the revenant (more specifically,
the revenant as romantic) aspect of the vampire that is the
first characteristic to be carried into European fiction from
old Greek/Roman tales—with one exception—the element of blood-
drinking has been added to the theme, developing for the first
time into the vampire that we now think of in vampire fiction.
Following, and perhaps due to, the rise of the "vampir" in
German fiction, it appears that the vampire began popping up
in English fiction. There is:
1797 "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
1797 "Thalaba the Destroyer" by Robert Southey
1798 "The Old Woman of Berkeley" by Robert Southey
1801 "Christabel" Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1810 "The Vampyre" by John Stagg
1813 "The Giaour" by George Gordon, Lord Byron
1813 "Rokeby" by Sir Walter Scott
I have copies of all of these, so I will post them to alt.vampyres.
Feel free ANYONE to jump in with comments, additions, corrections,
etc.
^BJ^
BabyJ
>> I've just finished reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I
>> have to agree with you. I can find little in it that would
>> qualify it as a vampire poem. [snip] So what's the verdict?
>> Do you see this as a poem with enough vampire content to place
>> it on a list of vampire fiction? Opinions welcome.
Cathy Krusberg replied:
> James Twitchell devotes nearly 20 pages of _The Living Dead:
> A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature_ to analysis
> of _Rime_ as a vampire-themed poem. Twitchell considers
> changes from earlier to later versions as key to understanding
> some of the vampire content. Twitchell analyzes the poem in
> his chapter titled "The Artist as Vampire" and parses it as
> a double vampirizing: "as he [the Ancient Mariner] is telling
> the story, he is sapping the energy of the Wedding Guest just
> as Life-in-Death had earlier sapped his blood (ll. 205 ff). The
> Wedding Guest's initial reluctance, his belief that the Ancient
> Mariner is possessed, and the hypnotic trance are all typical
> of the willing unwillingness of the vampire's victim."
> Apparently earlier redactions of the poem had content that
> was more explicity vampiric, at least in the relations of
> the Ancient Mariner and Life-in-Death.
Here's a copy of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for anyone who
would like to read it and decide whether or not it contains
enough vampiric symbolism to merit the poem's placement on a list
of vampire fiction. Again, comments welcomed.
^BJ^
1797
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold
Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her
course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean ; and
of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent
Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
/An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a
wedding-feast, and detaineth one./
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin ;
The guests are met, the feast is set :
May'st hear the merry din.'
He holds him with his skinny hand,
`There was a ship,' quoth he.
`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
/The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old
seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale./
He holds him with his glittering eye--
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child :
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone :
He cannot choose but hear ;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
`The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
/The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good
wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line./
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he !
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon--'
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
/The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music ; but the Mariner
continueth his tale./
The bride hath paced into the,
Red as a rose is she ;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear ;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
/The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole./
`And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong :
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
The southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold :
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
/The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing
was to be seen./
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen :
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around :
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound !
/Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the
snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality./
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came ;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit ;
The helmsman steered us through !
/And lo ! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth
the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice./
And a good south wind sprung up behind ;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo !
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine ;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'
/The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of
good omen./
`God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--
Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
PART II
The Sun now rose upon the right :
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo !
/His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing
the bird of good luck./
And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe :
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch ! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow !
/But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus
make themselves accomplices in the crime./
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist :
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
/The fair breeze continues ; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean,
and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line./
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free ;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
/The ship hath been suddenly becalmed./
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be ;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea !
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
/And the Albatross begins to be avenged./
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot : O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night ;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
/A Spirit had followed them ; one of the invisible inhabitants
of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels ; concerning
whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic
Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are
very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or
more./
And some in dreams assuréd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so ;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root ;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
/The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the
whole guilt on the ancient Mariner : in sign whereof they hang
the dead sea-bird round his neck./
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
PART III
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time ! a weary time !
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
/The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off./
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist ;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist !
And still it neared and neared :
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.
/At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship ; and at a
dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst./
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail ;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood !
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail ! a sail !
/A flash of joy ;/
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call :
Gramercy ! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
/And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward
without wind or tide ?/
See ! see ! (I cried) she tacks no more !
Hither to work us weal ;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel !
The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done !
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun ;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
/It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship./
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace !)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.
/And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun./
Alas ! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears !
Are those /her/ sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres ?
/The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the
skeleton ship./
And those /her/ ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate ?
And is that Woman all her crew ?
Is that a DEATH ? and are there two ?
Is DEATH that woman's mate ?
[/first version of this stanza through the end of Part III/
/Like vessel, like crew !/
/Her/ lips were red, /her/ looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold :
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
/Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she
(the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner./
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice ;
`The game is done ! I've won ! I've won !'
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
/No twilight within the courts of the Sun./
The Sun's rim dips ; the stars rush out :
At one stride comes the dark ;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
/At the rising of the Moon,/
We listened and looked sideways up !
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip !
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steerman's face by his lamp gleamed white ;
From the sails the dew did drip--
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The hornéd Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
/One after another,/
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
/His shipmates drop down dead./
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
/But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner./
The souls did from their bodies fly,--
They fled to bliss or woe !
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow !
PART IV
/The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him ;/
`I fear thee, ancient Mariner !
I fear thy skinny hand !
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.
/(Coleridge's note on above stanza)/
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown.'--
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest !
This body dropt not down.
/But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and
proceedeth to relate his horrible penance./
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea !
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
/He despiseth the creatures of the calm,/
The many men, so beautiful !
And they all dead did lie :
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on ; and so did I.
/And envieth that/ they /should live, and so many lie dead./
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away ;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray ;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat ;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
/But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men./
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they :
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high ;
But oh ! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye !
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
/In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the
journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still
move onward ; and every where the blue sky belongs to them,
and is their appointed rest, and their native country and
their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as
lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent
joy at their arrival./
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide :
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside--
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread ;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charméd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
/By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the
great calm./
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes :
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire :
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam ; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
/Their beauty and their happiness./
/He blesseth them in his heart./
O happy living things ! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware :
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
/The spell begins to break./
The self-same moment I could pray ;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
PART V
Oh sleep ! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole !
To Mary Queen the praise be given !
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
/By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed
with rain./
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew ;
And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank ;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs :
I was so light--almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blesséd ghost.
/He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in
the sky and the element./
And soon I heard a roaring wind :
It did not come anear ;
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life !
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about !
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge ;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud ;
The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side :
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide.
/The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship
moves on ;/
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on !
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes ;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on ;
Yet never a breeze up-blew ;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do ;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee :
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought.
/But not by the souls of the men, nor by dæmons of earth or
middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent
down by the invocation of the guardian saint./
`I fear thee, ancient Mariner !'
Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest !
'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest :
For when it dawned--they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast ;
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun ;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the sky-lark sing ;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning !
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute ;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased ; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
[/Additional stanzas, dropped after the first edition/
Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breeze did breathe :
Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
Moved onward from beneath.
/The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship
as far as the Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but
still requireth vengeance./
Under the keel nine fathom deep,
From the land of mist and snow,
The spirit slid : and it was he
That made the ship to go.
The sails at noon left off their tune,
And the ship stood still also.
The Sun, right up above the mast,
Had fixed her to the ocean :
But in a minute she 'gan stir,
With a short uneasy motion--
Backwards and forwards half her length
With a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound :
It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound.
/The Polar Spirit's fellow-dæmons, the invisible inhabitants
of the element, take part in his wrong ; and two of them relate,
one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient
Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth
southward./
How long in that same fit I lay,
I have not to declare ;
But ere my living life returned,
I heard and in my soul discerned
Two voices in the air.
`Is it he ?' quoth one, `Is this the man ?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.'
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew :
Quoth he, `The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do.'
PART VI
/FIRST VOICE/
`But tell me, tell me ! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing--
What makes that ship drive on so fast ?
What is the ocean doing ?'
/SECOND VOICE/
`Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast ;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast--
If he may know which way to go ;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see ! how graciously
She looketh down on him.'
/The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic
power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human
life could endure./
/FIRST VOICE/
`But why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind ?'
/SECOND VOICE/
`The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly ! more high, more high !
Or we shall be belated :
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariner's trance is abated.'
/The supernatural motion is retarded ; the Mariner awakes, and
his penance begins anew./
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather :
'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high ;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel-dungeon fitter :
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away :
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
/The curse is finally expiated./
And now this spell was snapt : once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen--
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head ;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made :
Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring--
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too :
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--
On me alone it blew.
/And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country./
Oh ! dream of joy ! is this indeed
The light-house top I see ?
Is this the hill ? is this the kirk ?
Is this mine own countree ?
We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
And I with sobs did pray--
O let me be awake, my God !
Or let me sleep alway.
The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn !
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
[/Additional stanzas, dropped after the first edition/]
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock :
The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weathercock.
/The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,/
And the bay was white with silent light,
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.
/And appear in their own forms of light./
A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were :
I turned my eyes upon the deck--
Oh, Christ ! what saw I there !
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood !
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.
This seraph-band, each waved his hand :
It was a heavenly sight !
They stood as signals to the land,
Each one a lovely light ;
This seraph-band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart--
No voice ; but oh ! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.
But soon I heard the dash of oars,
I heard the Pilot's cheer ;
My head was turned perforce away
And I saw a boat appear.
[/Additional stanza, dropped after the first edition/]
The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,
I heard them coming fast :
Dear Lord in Heaven ! it was a joy
The dead men could not blast.
I saw a third--I heard his voice :
It is the Hermit good !
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
The Albatross's blood.
PART VII
/The Hermit of the Wood,/
This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears !
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--
He hath a cushion plump :
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak-stump.
The skiff-boat neared : I heard them talk,
`Why, this is strange, I trow !
Where are those lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now ?'
/Approacheth the ship with wonder./
`Strange, by my faith !' the Hermit said--
`And they answered not our cheer !
The planks looked warped ! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere !
I never saw aught like to them,
Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest-brook along ;
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf's young.'
`Dear Lord ! it hath a fiendish look--
(The Pilot made reply)
I am a-feared'--`Push on, push on !'
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred ;
The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.
/The ship suddenly sinketh./
Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread :
It reached the ship, it split the bay ;
The ship went down like lead.
/The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat./
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat ;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot's boat.
Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
The boat spun round and round ;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound.
I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit ;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars : the Pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
`Ha ! ha !' quoth he, `full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row.'
And now, all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land !
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.
/The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to
shrieve him ; and the penance of life falls on him./
`O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man !'
The Hermit crossed his brow.
`Say quick,' quoth he, `I bid thee say--
What manner of man art thou ?'
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale ;
And then it left me free.
/And ever and anon through out his future life an agony
constraineth him to travel from land to land ;/
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns :
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land ;
I have strange power of speech ;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door !
The wedding-guests are there :
But in the garden-bower the bride
And bride-maids singing are :
And hark the little vesper bell,
Which biddeth me to prayer !
O Wedding-Guest ! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea :
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company !--
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay !
/And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all
things that God made and loveth./
Farewell, farewell ! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest !
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone : and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn :
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
Josh Dull
Josh
Cathy Krusberg
BJ wrote:
>Then came the Dark Ages, 1,000+ years in which there is little
>evidence of the "vampire" in European literature, with perhaps
>the exception of Grendel in the Old English tale of Beowulf.
>[NOTE: I have not looked into Scandinavian literature, e.g., the
>Finnish "Kalevala", so someone knowledgeable or interested in
>this area might consider adding such information to the thread.]
IIRC, the Kalevala was actually hacked together in the 19th
century by essentially editing together a number of then-circulating
folktales. At the time there was something of a fad for folklore
studies -- the Brothers Grimm assembled their Kinder- und
Hausmarchen ("Grimm's Fairy Tales") in the same era.
More closely related to Beowulf are Icelandic sagas, which
also come from a Germanic culture and language. (Finnish is of a
different language family, geographical proximity notwithstanding.)
The family sagas and mythic-heroic sagas were recorded in the
13th and 14th centuries, but they had much earlier roots: the
mythic-heroic sagas probably date to about the 9th century,
and the family sagas were written about individuals who lived
in the 900s-1000s.
The problem here is in defining parameters for "vampiric." A
number of Icelandic sagas include corporeal revenants. Dudley
Wright relates an incident for which he cites Bartholin, _de
Cause contemptus mortis_, which is in fact from _Laxdaela
Saga_, with names changed to make them more Latinate. A man
named Harpye (Hrappr in the original) was buried under the
threshold of his house so he could keep an eye on things, and
subsequently he appeared in the area and attacked his neighbors,
killing some of them and frightening others away. Finally
Olaus Pa (Olafr Pa, "Olaf Peacock") drove a spear into him;
Harpye/Hrappr vanished, taking the spear with him. Subsequently
he was exhumed, and the spear was found with his body. The body
was burned, and the hauntings ceased. Summers mentions _Grettis
Saga_ in passing in _The Vampire in Europe_: "in ancient
Scandinavia the idea that the dead were alive in their burrows [sic]*
gave rise to the fear that they might become unhallowed monsters
of the Vampire breed as may very clearly be seen from the
_Grettis Saga_" (p. 78). I seem to recall that Summers more
specifically cited an event in _Grettis Saga_ in one of his
books, in which he quoted the description of an individual, Glamr,
as "orotinn" and "ofuinn" (not rotted; not decayed). I've been
unable to find this quotation, however.
*"Barrows" is probably intended here.
Summers allowed for a pretty wide variety of vampire-like
manifestations in his work. In the introduction to _The
Vampire: His Kith and Kin_, commenting on his survey of the
vampire in literature, he says, "Vampirism is so wide a term
that in some senses it might arguably be held to cover no small
range of ghost stories and witch sagas where the victims peak
and pine and waste away until they fall into an early grave."
Which brings us back to the topic of parameters. A number of
Icelandic sagas include anecdotes of corporeal revenants. These
range from hero stories with the protagonist duking it out
physically with the undead to more understated versions such as
that in _Laxdaela Saga_. An extreme variation on the theme
occurs in a saga that involves a woman's body being transported
across the country for burial: when her bearers aren't given
proper hospitality, she gets up and prepares food for them
herself. (I'm sorry to say I don't recall the source; it was
one of the family sagas.) Some of these revanants had traits
overlapping with those seen in folkloric vampires: the person
had been evil in life; harm to the body, or cremation of it,
laid the creature. But although some of the revenants wrought
destruction or were (IIRC) connected with disease, none of them
showed an inclination toward blood drinking or anything like it.
So whether the revenants of the sagas are vampiric depends on
how wide one casts the net deemed "vampire."
Cathy Krusberg
Internet: ckb...@ix.netcom.com
"The corporate world would come in its pants if it could properly
own the rights to Dracula." --London News Review Books Diary
BabyJ
spurred by Josh Dull's question about the origins of same:
Phlegon's romantic revenant seems to be the first characteristic of
the vampire that resurfaced in mid-1700s Germany, and it didn't take
long for that aspect of the vampire to smoothly sail into English
literary circles. By 1796, no less than five English translations
of "Lenore" were around, and the vampire began to pop up in English
writings, too. Was it in the same vein or did it take off in another
direction? Let's take a look.
The following stories have appeared on several lists of early
English fiction purported to be about or to feature vampires or
vampirism, so we'll examine these:
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [1797] by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Thalaba the Destroyer" [1797] by Robert Southey
"The Old Woman of Berkeley" [1798] by Robert Southey
"The Vampyre" [1810] by John Stagg
"Rokeby" [1813] by Sir Walter Scott
"The Giaour" [1813] by George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Christabel" [1816] by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is
a poem about an old seaman who spellbinds a wedding guest with
his story about how he killed an albatross and was then forced
to do penance. One of his scourges was the lack of drinking water,
forcing the old mariner and his crew to drink their own blood in
order to quench their thirst. He is then visited by Death-in-Life,
a female spectre with lips of red, locks of gold, and skin "as
white as leprosy," who proceeds to drink the life-blood of his
entire crew, leaving the mariner to sail alone. In the end, the
mariner is saved by the angels and by God's grace.
That same year, Robert Southey came out with "Thalaba the
Destroyer," a long poem (comprised of 12 "books") about Thalaba's
Oriental quest. Along the way, Thalaba marries Oneiza, who dies
shortly thereafter. In book VII, Thalaba and his father-in-law
Moath take refuge from a storm in the Chamber of the Tomb where
they are visited by a vampire in the form of his dead wife. Moath
vanquishes the vampire by thrusting his lance through her. This
tale is reputed to be the first in English literature to use the
term "vampire."
Southey followed himself the next year (1798) with "The Old Woman
of Berkeley" in which an Old Woman is dying and confesses her
deeds to her two children. She tells them how she has anointed
herself with children's fat, sucked the breath from sleeping
babies, and called up the dead. She begs her children to give her
an elaborate three-day funeral to protect her from her fate, but
the Devil breaks through and carries her away anyway.
With the exception of "Thalaba the Destroyer," Coleridge and
Southey's poems do not use the word "vampire." However, in 1810,
John Stagg came out with a poem that, without a doubt, is about
a vampire because, like Ossenfelder's "Der Vampir", the poem is
titled "The Vampyre". It is a story about a man named Herman who
is wasting away. He informs his wife Gertrude that his late
friend Sigismund has been coming back from the grave as a ghost
each night to feast on his blood. Lest Herman do the same to
Gertrude when he dies, he tells her to see that a javelin is
driven through his corpse to keep him from rising as a vampire.
1813 sees the publication of two more stories that often make it
onto lists of vampire fiction: (1) Sir Walter Scott's "Rokeby"
is a fictional tale set i7th century, and (2) Lord Byron's
"The Giaour" (according to Byron, "giaour" is an Arabic word,
beginning with a soft 組' and rhyming with "power", meaning
"outsider" or "infidel") tells the story of a Christian in Arabia.
In "Rokeby", two warring lords, Oswald Wycliffe and Philip of
Mortham, fight for the rights to the Rokeby inheritance. There is
a lot of subterfuge and underhandedness along with the allegory
that things like life, war, country, wealth, and fancy can suck
the lifeblood right out of one's veins, but there are no vampires
or even beings with vampiric tendencies, so I conclude that
"Rokeby" doesn't belong on a list of vampire fiction.
"The Giaour," however, may have the distinction of being the third
piece of English fiction that uses the term "vampire." The giaour
falls in love with slavegirl Leila, a concubine in Lord Hassan's
harem. In wrath over her unfaithfulness, Hassan has Leila stuffed
into a bag and tossed in the sea. The giaour avenges Leila's death
by killing Hassan and then hies himself to a monastery where he
spends the rest of his days nursing his guilt. Lines 755-789 tell
of the curse that is placed upon the giaour and his family, such
that they will all rise as vampires and drink each others' blood.
In 1816, Coleridge published "Christabel", an unfinished poem
that was actually written between 1797 and 1801. Christabel is a
young girl who, while praying in the woods, finds the lady
Geraldine, who claims to have been kidnapped and abandoned there.
Christabel takes Geraldine home and sneaks her into her bedchamber
where they sleep the night together (much has been made of this
as an example of lesbian sexuality, but it is unknown whether or
not Coleridge intended it as such). The next morning, Christabel
takes Geraldine to meet her father, Sir Leoline, and is taken
aback when she sees Geraldine obviously flirting with good old
dad and dad is eating it up. When Sir Leoline learns that
Geraldine's father is Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who was
once his best friend but with whom he had a falling out, he vows
to protect Geraldine while they arrange to get her safely home
and sends his bard to notify Lord Roland that his daughter is
safe. But something is troubling Christabel. She appears to be
under some sort of spell and asks her father to send Geraldine
away. Here the story ends.
To determine how Coleridge meant to finish the story of Christabel,
we can look only to notes made by James Gillman, Coleridge's
companion during the last years of his life. Gillman claims that
Coleridge meant to have it that the bard arrives at Lord Roland's
castle only to find it demolished. When he returns to Sir Leoline
with this news, Geraldine realizes that she can no longer
impersonate Lord Roland's daughter and changes her form into that
of Christabel's absent lover and tries to pursue courtship with
Christabel who finds that, for some reason, she dislikes the man
she once loved but gives in to her father and agrees to marry him
anyway. As the two approach the altar, the real lover returns.
Geraldine then disappears.
I find it impossible to tell from the poem or from Gillman's
notes whether the shape-shifting Geraldine was meant to be a
witch, a ghost, or a vampire or whether she was to be depicted
as feeding on Christabel and Sir Leoline's blood or merely on
love and emotions. I see Geraldine as a vampire only in the
allegorical sense. If only Coleridge, who was suffering from
rheumatism and an addiction to opium at the time, had finished
the poem!
So what of the vampire do we see in early 1800 English fiction?
From what we know about the lives of Coleridge, Southey, Stagg,
Scott, and Byron, they were all part of the same literary circle
in England, sharing an interest in a genre that is now referred
to as "romanticism". In fact, they all seemed to know each other.
Coleridge and Southey were brothers-in-law, Stagg studied at
Oxford, Scott's first venture into the field of poetry was a
translation of Burger's "Lenore", and Byron read their works and
even commented on several of them. If not related to each other,
as were Coleridge and Southey, they appear to have known of each
other personally, were knowledgeable about each others' works,
and were influenced by the German vampire as a romantic figure.
Just reading their poems (which I have posted), you can see a
great deal of similarity in their styles and characters, as well
as their romanticism. They certainly knew of the vampire, which,
by looking at their poems, were generally depicted as
blood-drinking revenant spectres/ghosts. Only "The Old Woman of
Berkeley" stands separate from this prototype, falling somewhere
between Lucius Apuleius's witch and Ovid's strige in that she is
alive and she drinks the blood of babies.
So we see a circle of romantic poets who are tossing between
them the vampire as a somewhat minor character, a ghost who
might intrude upon a protagonist's life in order to drink his
or her blood and provide drama and complication. We can see
the use of the stake, so far in the form of a lance or javelin,
as a means of confining and warding off a vampire. We also see
the depiction of the vampire as an evil character to be
countered by Good in the form of God and angels.
Suddenly, all hell breaks loose in 1819 when John Polidori,
physician and friend to Lord Byron, publishes "The Vampyre,"
a short story about a vampire named Lord Ruthven who subsequently
became the darling of fiction and stage all over Europe. More
on that to come.
^BJ^
BabyJ
From a literary circle of contemporary English writers that
included four poets (Coleridge, Southey, Stagg, and Byron)
who introduced the vampire into English lit as a blood-sucking
ghost, suddenly springs young John William Polidori, physician
and companion to Lord Byron during the summer of 1816.
Polidori's "The Vampyre," first published in "The New Monthly
Magazine" in April 1819, was erroneously attributed to Lord Byron,
who immediately denied being the author until Polidori stepped up
to claim it. "The Vampyre" featured the suave, aristocratic, and
handsome Lord Ruthven with his "dead grey eye" and "deadly hue
of…face, which never gained a warmer tint." Ruthven and his friend
Aubrey decide to travel Europe together, but at some point they
have a falling out, they part company, and Aubrey goes on to Greece
alone, where he falls in love with a peasant girl named Ianthe, who
firmly believes that vampires exist. One night, as Aubrey makes a
trip which causes him to pass through a section of a forest that
vampyres are known to frequent, Ianthe follows him for his safety
but is herself the victim of a vampyre.
Thereafter, Aubrey falls into a raging fever, and Lord Ruthven
comes to Athens to care for him. They make peace with each other
and resume traveling together. While traveling in the mountains,
Lord Ruthven is shot in the shoulder and, within days, he is dead.
Before he dies, however, Ruthven makes Aubrey promise to see that
his body is exposed to moonlight and to not breathe a word about
him to anyone for the next year and a day. When Aubrey comes to
bury Ruthven's body, it is gone, but he finds a sheath which
perfectly fits a dagger that was found near Ianthe's body. Aubrey
retraces his steps back to Rome, finding that everywhere Ruthven
went, he left behind death and sorrow. Aubrey knows in his heart
that Lord Ruthven is a vampyre.
Aubrey returns to London where his sister is about to make her
debut. At the coming-out party, Lord Ruthven shows up and reminds
Aubrey of his promise. When Aubrey learns that his sister is
bethrothed to Ruthven, he tries to stop the wedding, but it goes
on anyway 24 hours before the period of his promise is about to
end. Distressed at having to keep the secret, Aubrey suffers a
burst blood vessel. On his deathbed when the 24 hours is up, he
finally tells his sister's guardians what he knows about Lord
Ruthven. Aubrey dies, and his sister's guardians rush to protect
Miss Aubrey, but it is too late. "Lord Ruthven had disappeared,
and Aubrey's sister had glutted the thirst of a Vampyre!"
It's hard to believe the effect that "The Vampyre" had on
European society. It inspired no less than three plays, one
opera, and the first vampire novel.
1819 "Le Vampire" by Charles Nodier (play)
1820 _Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires_ by Cyprien Berard
(said to be the first vampire novel)
1820 "The Vampire or, The Bride of the Isles by James Planche
(play) [//www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff6/vampire.htm]
1828 "Der Vampyr" by Heinrich Marschner and Wilhelm Wohlbruck
(opera) [//opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/vampyr.html]
1851 "Le Vampire" by Alexandre Dumas (play)
[www.cadytech.com/dumas/stories/vampire.php]
Although it took Europe by storm, "The Vampyre" was actually based
on a fragment of a story written three years earlier (in June 1816)
by Lord Byron, who published it at the end of one of his poems
called "Mazeppa." Byron had invited his young friends Polidori,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin (later to become
Shelley's wife), and Mary Godwin's stepsister Clara Mary Jane
"Claire" Clairmont (who become Byron's mistress) to come stay with
him at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva (Switzerland). To pass
some time during a rainy spell, they challenged each other to tell
ghost stories. One of the stories to come out of this write-a-thon
was Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_. John Polidori's contribution was
apparently unremarkable, but Byron's tale sparked something in
Polidori.
The story that Byron wrote featured a vampire that he called
Augustus Darvell. Darvell and his young companion take off to
travel Europe together. As they make their way through Turkey,
Darvell seems to be becoming more and more enfeebled. They stop
at an abandoned cemetery where Darvell makes his companion swear
to perform a strange funerary ritual upon his death. Darvell
then dies, whereupon his companion buries him as per his request.
Here the story ends.
It is interesting to ponder where Byron would have taken his story
about the vampire Darvell had he finished it. Just from this
fragment, however, can be seen the origins of Polidori's vampyre.
In fact, not even the name that Polidori gave to his vampire, Lord
Ruthven, was original, for Lord Ruthven had already been created
several years earlier by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron's
discarded lovers, to portray the heartless, but non-vampire,
lover in her novel Glenarvon.
While all of Europe was enthralled by the new face of the vampire
as an aristocrat who could pass for human, there were others
writing about vampires in their more traditional vein, including:
1819 "The Cenci" Percy Bysshe Shelley (play)
1819 "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats (verse)
1819 "The Eve of St. Agnes" John Keats (verse)
1820 "Lamia" by John Keats (verse)
1820 "Aurelia" in _Die Elixire des Teufels_ [The Devil's Elixirs] by
E(rnst) T(heodor)A(madeus) Wilhelm Hoffman
BabyJ
literature.
So far, we see that the face of the vampire changed when John
Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" was published in 1819. No
longer was the vampire just a blood-sucking ghost, a blood-
drinking revenant, or a blood-thirsty lamia. The vampire Lord
Ruthven, who some say was patterned after Lord Byron, was a
human-looking revenant, well-educated, aristocratic, handsome,
and able to travel within human social circles without notice.
This is the vampire that forms the prototype most people think
of today when they hear the word "vampire."
However, not everyone was focused on the Ruthvenian/Byronic
vampire in 1819 and 1820, as there are other works of fiction
from those years that make their way into lists of vampire
fiction, including:
1819 "The Cenci" Percy Bysshe Shelley (play)
1819 "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats (verse)
1819 "The Eve of St. Agnes" John Keats (verse)
1820 "Lamia" by John Keats (verse)
1820 "Aurelia" in _Die Elixire des Teufels_ [The Devil's Elixirs] by
E(rnst) T(heodor)A(madeus) Wilhelm Hoffman
"The Cenci" features a man who is not a vampire in the blood-
drinking revenant sense. Rather, he could be seen as a psychic
vampire or, better yet, as an allegorical vampire, the type of
person who makes the newspapers every few weeks. Count Cenci
murdered his sons, abused his wife, and raped his daughter
Beatrice. When the family finally decided to do something
about it, they brought their case before the Pope in hopes
that he would intervene. Unfortunately, the Pope, in his wisdom,
chose to remain neutral and not get involved in family affairs
that would challenge the right of a man to rule as the head of
the family. With no other options, the family decides to kill
Cenci. When the Pope hears the evidence, he sentences Beatrice
et al to death. Justice is always served :) But I don't see
any vampires here.
John Keats was most prolific during this period and wrote three
lyrical poems that are often considered vampiric in content.
In "La Belle Dame sans Merci," a knight-at-arms tells how he met
and was charmed by a beautiful "faery's child" with long hair
and wild eyes who leaves her lovers, including the knight-at-arms,
death-pale, haggard, and with starving lips. Here we have the
vampire portrayed as the femme fatale or female "vamp", another
prototypic vampire whose image can be seen in the early Greek
story of Menippus and Lamia in Philostratus's "The Life of
Apollonius of Tyana."
In "Lamia", Keats actually retells the story of Menippus (renamed
Lycius) in lyrical form. In his retelling, Keats paints Lamia a
bit more sympathetically than did Philostratus. Lamia begs to be
given human form because of her love for Lycius, not necessarily
to destroy him. Unfortunately, her love still proves fatal in
the end.
"The Eve of St Agnes," tells the story of a young girl named
Madeline who follows the tradition of divining her husband-to-be
by following certain rituals on the eve of St Agnes [St Agnes
was a Christian martyr in the 4th century; her feast day is 21
January], such as not looking behind her as she prepares for
bed and sleeping on her back with her hands behind her head.
This will supposedly result in a dream whereby her husband-to-be
will come to her with a kiss and a prepared feast. When Madeline
falls asleep, Porphyro, who is "burning" "hot" for Madeline,
does just that. Madeline, perhaps thinking it the dream she
desired, ends up running away with Porphyro. I don't see any
vampiric elements in this story, do you?
Unfortunately, I haven't found a copy of _The Devil's Elixirs_,
so I am unfamiliar with the story and, thus, unable to tell
whether or not it contains vampires or vampirism. What I do
know is that it's a story about an 18th century Capuchin monk
named Brother Medardus who, after drinking wine that was
supposedly wrested from the Devil, travels to Rome and has a
series of delirious encounters along the way. The one that
is said to be vampiric in nature is his encounter with Aurelia.
I've also read that Hoffman's stories gave rise to Tschaikovsky's
"Nutcracker Suite", Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde,
Jung's archetypes, and several of Edgar Allan Poe's stories,
so Hoffman's writing might be worth a glance. If someone who
is reading this has read _The Devil's Elixirs_, perhaps s/he
might expound upon it?
To recap: In 1819/1820 English literature, the major addition to
vampire lit, other than Polidori's Lord Ruthven, seems to come
from John Keats, particularly in the form of the femme-fatale or
female "vamp". Does this indicate a divergence in the guise of
the vampire in English lit? To answer this, we can perhaps look
at the vampire literature of the next 15 years as listed in the
Vamp Lit faq.
1828 "The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress" by Elizabeth Grey
1830 "The Dead Lover" [aka La Morte Amoureuse, Clarimonde, or The
Beautiful Vampire] by Theophile Gautier
1833 "The Mortal Immortal" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1835 "Viy" by Nikolai Gogol
Hopefully, I can find online copies of these stories.
Elizabeth Miller
I think it is quite a stretch to consider "The Cenci" a vampire play.
Likewise Byron's "Manfred" - another one that often appears in lists of
vampire lit. These works have a couple of images that one might consider
vampiric but an image (or 2) doth not a vampire make. For example, "Jane
Eyre" alludes to a vampire - but it is hardly a vampire novel. Likewise,
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" contains the word "vampire". So is it a
vampire novel? Of course not. Nor is James Joyce's "Ulysses" (which has a
number of references to vampires).
To qualify as a vampire story, poem, play, or whatever, a work should
have a major vampire component, not a mere reference or two.
Elizabeth
emi...@mun.ca
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/ [Dracula's homepage]
http://www.blooferland.com/drc [Dracula Research Centre]
BabyJ
> I think it is quite a stretch to consider "The Cenci" a vampire play.
> Likewise Byron's "Manfred" - another one that often appears in lists of
> vampire lit. These works have a couple of images that one might consider
> vampiric but an image (or 2) doth not a vampire make. For example, "Jane
> Eyre" alludes to a vampire - but it is hardly a vampire novel. Likewise,
> Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" contains the word "vampire". So is it a
> vampire novel? Of course not. Nor is James Joyce's "Ulysses" (which has a
> number of references to vampires).
>
> To qualify as a vampire story, poem, play, or whatever, a work should
> have a major vampire component, not a mere reference or two.
I'm with you on that, which is why I've removed "The Cenci" and "Rokeby"
from my list of vampire fiction. I think people are trying too hard to
see vampires where there aren't any.
^BJ^
Elizabeth Miller
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, BabyJ wrote:
> I'm with you on that, which is why I've removed "The Cenci" and "Rokeby"
> from my list of vampire fiction. I think people are trying too hard to
> see vampires where there aren't any.
Part of the problem lies witrh scholars eager to validate their interest
in vampires. Marginalized (and even ridiculed) by colleagues, some have
found a sense of satisfaction in pointing out vampiric traits in
"mainstream" literature. That's fine, of course. But in a few cases
they've been a bit carried away.
Elizabeth
William R. Thompson
> Part of the problem lies with scholars eager to validate their interest
> in vampires. Marginalized (and even ridiculed) by colleagues, some have
> found a sense of satisfaction in pointing out vampiric traits in
> "mainstream" literature. That's fine, of course. But in a few cases
> they've been a bit carried away.
That happens with science fiction. Isaac Asimov, for example, once
claimed that the Iliad was a work of science fiction. His reason?
Somewhere in there, Hephaistos is attended by two living statues of
girls, which he made from gold; clearly robots, right?
--Bill Thompson
BabyJ
>1820 "Aurelia" in _Die Elixire des Teufels_ [The Devil's Elixirs]
> by E(rnst) T(heodor)A(madeus) Wilhelm Hoffman
>
> Unfortunately, I haven't found a copy of _The Devil's Elixirs_,
> so I am unfamiliar with the story and, thus, unable to tell
> whether or not it contains vampires or vampirism. What I do
> know is that it's a story about an 18th century Capuchin monk
> named Brother Medardus who, after drinking wine that was
> supposedly wrested from the Devil, travels to Rome and has a
> series of delirious encounters along the way. The one that
> is said to be vampiric in nature is his encounter with Aurelia.
> I've also read that Hoffman's stories gave rise to Tschaikovsky's
> "Nutcracker Suite", Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde,
> Jung's archetypes, and several of Edgar Allan Poe's stories,
> so Hoffman's writing might be worth a glance. If someone who
> is reading this has read _The Devil's Elixirs_, perhaps s/he
> might expound upon it?
I found a copy of Hoffman's "Aurelia" in Christopher Frayling's
_Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula_. Frayling says that it
came out of another of Hoffman's works, _Die Erzahlungen der
Serapionsbruder_ (The Serapion Brethren), rather than from _Die
Elixire des Teufels_. Anyway, the story starts with some guys
discussing the "modern" view of the vampire ("modern" for 1820,
that is) (i.e., an animated corpse which sucks the blood of the
living) compared to a description by M. Michael Ranft in his
(1734) "Treatise on the Chewing and Sucking of the Dead in
their Graves" in which he describes a vampire as "nothing other
than an accursed creature who lets himself be buried as being
dead, and then rises out of the grave and sucks people's blood
in their sleep."
One of the guys (Cyprian) goes on to tell the story of Aurelia,
which he claims is even more ghastly than stories about vampires.
After marrying Count Hyppolitus, Aurelia sinks into fits of
depression and anxiety, refusing to eat any food. When the
Count hears that Aurelia goes out each night after he falls
asleep, he contrives to follow her. Aurelia leads him to a
"burying-ground" where he sees Aurelia and several other
"frightful, spectral-looking creatures", all feasting on a corpse.
So, while there are some references made to vampires in "Aurelia",
the story of Aurelia itself is one of a ghoul, not a vampire.
^BJ^
Cathy Krusberg
> 1828 "The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress" by Elizabeth Grey
> Hopefully, I can find online copies of these stories.
I'd be surprised if this is available online (though one
never knows!) as it was rediscovered only a few years ago.
Only a relatively short part of the whole serial deals
with a vampire, and it is reproduced in _The Vampire
Omnibus_, ed. Peter Haining (my copy is published by
Chartwell Books, 1995). Copies of the publication in which
it was serialized are, according to Haining, all but
impossible to find, and he was fortunate to locate a
collector who had unearthed a bound run and who let him
publish an excerpt from that copy.
Cathy Krusberg
Internet: ckb...@ix.netcom.com
BabyJ
Based on my brief and, no doubt, biased survey of the fictional
vampire in late 18th and early 19th century European literature,
I'm going to conclude that the vampire as we know it today
probably sprang from the dead lover as characterized by Phlegon
of Thralles and revitalized as the romantic revenant in late 1700s
German Romanticism. Blood-drinking appears to have been added
thanks to the European vampire craze of the 1600s and 1700s. In
that persona, the blood-drinking revenant led to Lord Ruthven
and ultimately to Dracula.
We can also see, albeit to a lesser degree, that Philostratus's
lamia, reintroduced to English literature through the lyric
verses of John Keats, may be at the root of the fictional femme
fatale, the beautiful woman without mercy, the classic "vamp."
The Roman strige from Ovid's Fasti and the blood-drinking witch
from Lucius Apuleius's _The Golden Asse_, however, seem to be
absent from the vampire's rebirth in romantic fiction, instead
working their way through the centuries mostly in the realm of
folklore and history.
In the years following Polidori's seminal work, the vampire
began to pop up all over the place, making it almost impossible
to determine any paths of who affected what. Here is a sampler
of books, short stories, and verses that appeared between
Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) and Stoker's _Dracula_ (1897) and
are often seen on lists of fiction said to contain vampires. Some
of these are available on the Internet (do a google search on
title and author), some only in the original language (google
will translate although the translations often leave much to be
desired), and some have been republished (see amazon and other
ebook publishers). I leave it up to those interested to seek out
and read the stories on the list.
1819 "The Vampyre" by John Polidori
1820 _Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires_ by Cyprien Berard (said to
be the first vampire novel)
1820 "Le Vampire" a play by Pierre de la Fosse
1820 "Le Vampire" a play by Charles Nodier
1820 "The Vampyre, or the Bride of the Isles" a play by James
Robinson Planche
1821 "Le Vampire" a play by Eugene Scribe
1821 "The Vampyre: a Tragedy in Five Acts" a play by St John
Dorset aka Rev Hugo John Belfour
1821 "Smarra, ou les Demons de la Nuit" by Charles Nodier
1823 Han d'Islande by Victor Hugo
1826 "Der Vampyre und seine Braut" by C. Spindler [in Die
Zwillinge]
1826 "Le Vampire" an opera by Martin Joseph Mengals
1827 _La Guzla, ou Choix de Poesies Illyriques_ by Prosper
Merimee
1827 Der Vampyr by Friedericke Ellmenreich
1828 "The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress" by Elizabeth
Grey
1828 "Der Vampyr" an opera by Heinrich Marschner and Wilhelm
Wohlbruck
1828 La Vampire ou la Vierge de Hongrie (The Virgin of Hungary)
by Etienne Lamothe-Langon
1828 _Der Vampyr oder die Totenbraut_ by Theodor Hildebrand
1828 "Der Vampyr" (opera) by Caesar Max Heigel
1828 "Der Vampir (Vampirismus)" by Erich Theodor Amadeus Hoffman
(in _Serapionbruder_)
1831 "Lenore" by Edgar Allan Poe
1832 "Paola" by Jacques Boucher de Perthes in "Nouvelles"
1832 "The Vampire Bride" by Henry Liddell (in The Wizard of the
North)
1833 "The Mortal Immortal" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1835 "Viy" (aka Vij or Wij) by Nikolai Vasiliev Gogol
1836 "The Dead Lover" [aka La Morte Amoureuse, Clarimonde, or
The Beautiful Vampire] by Theophile Gautier
1838 "Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe
@1839 "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
1841 Oupires by Aleksei Konstantinovitch Tolstoi (or Tolstoy)
1845 "The Last of the Vampires" by Smyth Upton
1847 "The Family of Vourdalak" by Aleksei Konstantinovitch Tolstoi
(or Tolstoy)
1847 _Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood_ by James Malcolm
Rhymer
1848 "The Pale Lady" by Alexandre Dumas pere & Paul Bocage [aka
Une Journee a Fontenay-aux-Roses, The Vampire of the
Carpathian Mountains, or Horror at Fontenay [from _Les
Milles et un Fantoms_ (The Thousand and One Phantoms)
by Alexandre Dumas]
1851 "Le Vampire" a play by Alexandre Dumas pere
1852 "A Visit to the Theatre" by Alexandre Dumas pere [in _Mes
Memoires_ (My Memoirs)]
1856 _La Vampire_ [aka _The Vampire Countess_] by Paul Feval
1857 "The Vampire" by Charles Baudelaire
1857 "Morgano" a ballet by Paul Taglioni
1857 "Metamorphosis of a Vampire" by Charles Baudelaire
1859 "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien
1860 "The Mysterious Stranger", anonymous
1860 "The Cold Embrace" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
1860 _Les Chevaliers des Tenebres_ (aka The Knight Tenebre
or _Knightshade_) by Paul Feval
1861 "Il Vampiro" a ballet by Rotta
1866 _Spirite_ by Theophile Gautier
1867 "The Last Lords of Gardonal" by William Gilbert
1868 Ton Ami le Vampire by Isidore Ducasse aka Comte Lautreamont
[in _Chants de Maldoror_]
1868 _The Moonstone_ by Wilkie Collins
1869 "Lokis" by Prosper Merimee
1870 _Vikram the Vampire_ ed/Sir Richard F. Burton
1872 "Carmilla" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
1873 La Mort Vivante by Wilkie Collins
1875 _La Ville Vampire_ (Vampire City) by Paul Feval
1887 "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant
1887 "A Mystery of the Campagna" by Anne Crawford
1888 "Ken's Mystery" by Julian Hawthorne
1891 Les Contes du Vampire by A. Ferdinand Herold
1891 "The Parasite" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1892 "The Castle of the Carpathians" (aka Carpathian Castle)
by Jules Verne
1893 A Kiss of Judas by Julian Osgood Field (aka X.L.)
1896 "Good Lady Ducayne" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
1897 _Dracula_ by Bram Stoker
???? "Der Tote Gast" (The Dead Guest) by Heinrich Zschokke
NOTE: This updated list will replace the list of pre-Dracula
vampire fiction in the Vampire Literature FAQ. Any comments,
corrections or additions are welcome)
^BJ^
pebbe
> 1748 "Der Vampyr" Heinrich August Ossenfelder (verse)
> 1773 "Lenore" by Gottfried August Burger (verse)
> 1797 "The Bride of Corinth" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (verse)
> 1797 "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Samuel Taylor Coleridge (verse)
> 1797 "Thalaba the Destroyer" by Robert Southey (verse)
> 1798 "The Old Woman of Berkeley" by Robert Southey (verse)
> 1801 "Christabel" Samuel Taylor Coleridge (verse)
> 1810 "The Vampyre" by John Stagg (poem)
> 1813 "The Giaour" by Lord George Gordon Byron (verse)
> 1813 "Rokeby" Sir Walter Scott (verse)
Is there any modern vampire fiction in verse? Modern poets
writing about vampires? There seems to be a lot of stuff on goth
sites but I am looking for something that has more "literary"
quality.
Are there collections on the market with classic and/or modern
vampire poetry, or perhaps gothic/horror verse in general?
--
pebbe
BabyJ
> Is there any modern vampire fiction in verse? Modern poets
> writing about vampires? There seems to be a lot of stuff on goth
> sites but I am looking for something that has more "literary"
> quality.
That's a good question. I'm not as well read in vampire fiction as
I'd like to be, but my experience tells me that prose is the current
fashion...at least, with regards to what gets published. Over the
years, alt.vampyres has seen dozens and dozens of aspiring writers
of vampire poetry, several of which were truly memorable. Saundra
Mitchell, shroud, Brightshade, jewels, and Magienoire come
immediately to mind, but I know that there's just as many others on
the tip of my tongue. You might try a google search on them and see
what you turn up. IIRC, though, they mostly wrote in free verse as
opposed to rhyming in couplets, etc.
Of course, I am speaking of poetry in English. I'm not knowledgeable
about poetry in other languages.
> Are there collections on the market with classic and/or modern
> vampire poetry, or perhaps gothic/horror verse in general?
I have several modern anthologies of vampire-related writings but,
paging through them, I see no poems other than the works of Byron,
Stagg, Ossenfelder, etc. from centuries past.
Perhaps someone else knows the whereabouts of such works?
^BJ^
pebbe
> > Are there collections on the market with classic and/or modern
> > vampire poetry, or perhaps gothic/horror verse in general?
>
> I have several modern anthologies of vampire-related writings but,
> paging through them, I see no poems other than the works of Byron,
> Stagg, Ossenfelder, etc. from centuries past.
>
> Perhaps someone else knows the whereabouts of such works?
The collection "The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women"
ends with a poem: "Vampyr" by Jane Yolen.
Neil Gaiman's collection "Smoke and Mirrors" has several poems,
among them "Vampire Sestina".
It seems poetry is still allowed by some publishers, in small
doses.
--
pebbe
BabyJ
> The collection "The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women"
> ends with a poem: "Vampyr" by Jane Yolen.
I have that one. I must have passed it by when I was flipping
through the book, looking for poetry. After reading the poem,
I'm not very impressed with it. It seems too much like something
an angsty 15-year old would write. To me, it lacks the substance
and emotion that comes out of the older poems. Give me a Byron
or a Keats anyday.
^BJ^
pebbe
I was somewhat disappointed by this collection. I knew Stephen
Jones as the editor of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
series, collections with excellent stories. Him being the editor
of Vampire Stories by Women as well raised my expectations too
much. There are quite a few excellent stories, but too many that
are not very interesting.
--
pebbe
BabyJ
>>> the collection "The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women"
>>> ends with a poem: "Vampyr" by Jane Yolen.
I admitted:
>> I'm not very impressed with it. It seems too much like something
>> an angsty 15-year old would write. To me, it lacks the substance
>> and emotion that comes out of the older poems. Give me a Byron
>> or a Keats anyday.
And pebbe also admitted:
> I was somewhat disappointed by this collection. I knew Stephen
> Jones as the editor of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
> series, collections with excellent stories. Him being the editor
> of Vampire Stories by Women as well raised my expectations too
> much. There are quite a few excellent stories, but too many that
> are not very interesting.
I have some of his other vampire-related anthologies, i.e., _The
MB of Vampires_ and _The MB of Dracula_. My favorite is _The MB of
Vampires_. I have to admit that I haven't totally read _The MB of
Vampire Stories by Women_. Guess that I'll have to find the time
one of these days.
It would be nice if someone put out an anthology of modern vampire
poetry. It would give English majors a subject on which to write
in the vein of "How the Vampire Persona has Changed from Romantism
to Modernism in English Poetry."
^BJ^