When John William Polidori took part in the contest in 1816, the infamous ‘Year without a Summer’, he likely didn’t know that his short story ‘The Vampyre’, published in 1819, would form the baseline of how modern people think vampires should look. The titular vampire, one Lord Ruthven is described as pale, attractive, is a noble man able to easily win over people but is also a monster through and through. Today Polidori’s work is overshadowed by another vampiric nobleman who audiences would be introduced to at the end of the 19th Century in 1897, as well as the other story that was told at the contest, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
But if Polidori was the author who formed the baseline then what did vampires look like prior to the publishment of his work. This work aims to explore the changes that leads from the ‘original’ vampire to what modern audiences expect the undead creature to be.
While the term vampire is first recorded in 1688, no explanation of where the word comes from suggests it was in widespread use before this date (1). Since there is no date where vampires come into use, we must instead go back to the oldest recorded creature, that fits with at least some of the ideas associated with vampires, the vrykolakas.
A vrykolakas is a creature from Greek folklore and is described as being large, with a belly that swelled after feeding, possessing a ruddy colouration and possessing wolf like fangs. The vrykolakas were almost always disruptive, and had a particular taste for human livers, behaving more akin to a ghoul or cannibal then a vampire (2). Folklore suggests that the vrykolakas could only enter dwellings if a door was opened for them, and that inviting one into your home would result in the homeowner dying within days and raising from their grave as a new vrykolakas. The term vrykolakas is a Bulgar word, but stories of creatures matching its description were told for centuries prior to the codification of the term, with archaeological evidence of bodies with weights pinning their chests and skulls buried on Cyprus dating back to 4000 BCE (3), suggesting that the fear of the dead returning to harm the living is very much an ancient concept.
As an undead fanged corpse that requires invitation to enter a dwelling, the vrykolakas is a start, and its only natural that similar creatures in neighbouring cultures may be a good place to look next. In this case we turn our attention to the strigori of Romania. Like the vrykolakas the strigori were living corpses with the same ruddy complexion and thirst for life. Instead of eating livers, the strigori gains its vitality from draining the blood of its victims. The strigori is also a shapeshifter, commonly taking the forms of dogs, wolves, frogs, fleas and bedbugs, or alternatively just become invisible, allowing them to enter a dwelling undetected (4). The most common way to repel a strigori from entering your home is to hang braids of garlic around the premises (5) and should you need to prevent one from rising, it is recommended that a wooden stake is stabbed through the corpses heart.
Between the vrykolakas and the strigori a number of tropes associated with modern vampires are already at play but there are still things missing from the overall picture, as well as where the name comes from. It should be noted that, in Albania, a creature known as the dhampir is present, and it too has features akin to modern vampires. A dhampir was not considered undead, instead was the child of a union between undead creatures and humans. While largely human, the dhampir did possess superhuman senses and could regenerate from wounds that would kill a normal person (6). For the most part dhampir were hunters of the undead, nothing to be feared by mortal people, although they were often described as ‘dark’ and dirty looking.
A few things relating to vampires still need to be identified. The North Macedonian variant of the vrykolakas takes on aspects of the strigori, clear evidence of cultures trading ideas, and develops a compulsion to count poppy seeds, millet or even sand scattered around its grave (7). It's possible that this idea was imported to Europe from China, as the jiangshi, an undead creature from Chinese folklore, raised by magic also has susceptibility to compulsively count scattered objects, in this case rice, scattered around their graves. And as the Christian faith grew in Europe, the traditional deterrents to the undead such as garlic braids or sprigs of wild rose and hawthorn were joined by crucifixes and rosaries (8).
For the most part vampires and undead corpses were largely confined to eastern Europe until the 18th Century, where tales of the barbaric treatment of corpses, namely decapitation of bodies and exhumations of bodies to stake them, reached the western areas of Europe. With this mass hysteria regarding vampires not only present during the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ but increasing as other superstitions declined (9), the thought of vampires entered the minds of poets, writers, and artists across Europe.
The corpse like vampire became the study of numerous poems and stories including The Vampire (1748) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Burgur, Die Braut von Corinth (1797) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and The Spectral Horseman (1810) by Percy Shelly. The continued appearance of this monster is clear evidence that the disgusting rotting vampire had captured the attention of those who read these works. As such, while Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ somewhat broke the mould and was incredibly popular, the idea of the noble, human looking vampire wasn’t widely adopted with the traditional vampire remaining the more favoured villain.
That said at least one vampire following Polidori’s model did surface in the form of Varney the Vampire, the subject of a penny dreadful, written by James Malcom Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest that ran between 1845 to 1847. If Varney was merely just a gentleman vampire, he would warrant no more than a mention, but Varney is the first vampire to be the protagonist, albeit a murderous monstrous one. In his stories, between feasting on the blood of his victims Varney despises his condition and the monster it has made him, to the point where Varney commits suicide at the end of the run by jumping into Mount Vesuvius. Varney also seems to represent the melting point of tropes; possessing sharp fangs for bloodletting, an association with bats, inhuman strength, and hypnosis, all of which are staples of future vampire stories (11).
Despite Lord Ruthven’s attractiveness and Varney’s tragic existence, the vampire still wasn’t a romantic figure. In 1872, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla was released which not only portrayed a vampire with a sympathetic side like Varney, but also a romantic one. In this story Camilla, the vampiric antagonist enters a mutual romantic relationship with her victim, the protagonist Laura. In this tale Camilla is harmed by religious chanting, has shapeshifting powers and maintains her vitality by drinking blood. Interestingly Le Fanu’s work depicts the relationship between Laura and Camilla as a mutual and inseparable connection, a departure of the typical negative view of same sex relationships at the time. Le Fanu also wrote Camilla in first person, something that would be adopted in another Irish authors works on vampire nobility.
If Lord Ruthven is the first modern vampire, Count Dracula is the vampire that cemented the view of what a vampire should be. In 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, establishing the titular Count as the quintessential vampire. Dracula's possession through the novel seems to resemble the evolution of the concept of vampires, starting out as a wizened old corpse, draining the vitality of his victims to become more human. While the appeal of vampires has waned on occasion since Dracula’s publishing, the vampire story always returns from the dead playing into the tropes picked from the mythology and folklores of eastern Europe, and then distilled through vampires such as Ruthven, Varney and Camilla before being popularised for modern audiences by Dracula.
References
1. Wilson, Katharina M. (October–December 1985). "The History of the Word 'Vampire'". Journal of the History of Ideas. 46 (4): 577–583
2. Demetracopoulou Lee, D. "Folklore of the Greeks in America" pages 294-310 from Folklore, Volume 47, No. 3, September 1936 page 303
3. Walking Dead and Vengeful Spirits". popular-archaeology.com.
4. Nouvelle Géographie universelle, tome I, Hachette, Paris, 19 volumes, 1876-1894
5. "Le Feu vivant: la parenté et ses rituels dans les Carpates". persee.fr
6. T. P. Vukanović. 1957-1959. "The Vampire." Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd ser. Part 1: 36(3-4): 125-133; Part 2: 37(1-2): 21-31; Part 3: 37(3-4): 111-118; Part 4: 39(1-2): 44-55.
7. Abbott, George (1903). Macedonian Folklore. Cambridge, University press. p. 219.
8. Burkhardt, Dagmar (1966). "Vampirglaube und Vampirsage auf dem Balkan". Beiträge zur Südosteuropa-Forschung: Anlässlich des I. Internationalen Balkanologenkongresses in Sofia 26. VIII.-1. IX. 1966 (in German). Munich: Rudolf Trofenik. p. 221
9. Cohen, Daniel (1989). The Encyclopedia of Monsters: Bigfoot, Chinese Wildman, Nessie, Sea Ape, Werewolf and many more …. London: Michael O'Mara Books Ltd
10. Lisa A. Nevárez (2013). The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead". p. 125. McFarland
11. Hellman, Roxanne (2011). Vampire Legends and Myths. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 217.
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