Folkroots: Vampires in Folklore and Literature

by Theodora Goss

I dont like sparkly vampires.

Unless youve been hiding in the sewers of London, drinking the blood of rats and waiting until everyone aware of your existence dies off, youll know that Im referring to the vampires in Stephenie Meyers Twilight novels: Twilight, Eclipse, New Moon, and Breaking Dawn. In interviews, Meyers has said that she was not familiar with, and did not research, the folklore or literature of vampires before writing her novels, and she does indeed create vampire rules that have little resemblance to the rules established in canonical novels such as Dracula. It surprises me, when I teach those novels, how unfamiliar my students are with traditional vampires. Once, one of them said to me, after reading Sheridan Le Fanus Carmilla, Its nice to see a vampire that sucks blood.

However you feel about sparkly vampires, its worth exploring the vampire tradition, because vampires seem with us to stay; we have invited them in, and they have inhabited our culture, moving into small towns and suburbs from Bon Temps, Louisiana, to Sunnydale, California, and even selling Ray Ban sunglasses. There are a number of places you can go to experience modern vampires that dont sparkle: Anne Rices novels Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned, and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer have attained the status of cult classics, while Charlaine Harriss Southern Vampire Mysteries can be seen both on the bookstore shelves and in the television series True Blood. But their ancestors are the vampires of folklore and literature, who are a properly bloodthirsty lot.

I. The Vampire of Folklore

Tales about creatures resembling vampires have existed in various cultures, probably back to the beginning of human culture itself. Such creatures may be demons that suck blood or reanimated corpses. In the Sanskrit Baital-Pachisi, for example, King Vikram promises a magician that he will bring him a Baital, a spirit that animates dead bodies. He finds the Baital hanging from a tree like a bat. The Baital tells Vikram stories that end in riddles, and Vikram must guess the riddles or lose the Baital before he can present it to the magician. When Sir Richard Burton translated the Baital-Pachisi into English, he called it Vikram and the Vampire. However, by calling the Baital a vampire, Burton was connecting his story to what had already become a popular literary figure. Like any author, he was attempting to boost sales. The vampire as we know it comes primarily from Eastern European folklore, filtered through a long literary tradition. Burtons friend Bram Stoker may have been influenced by the story of the Baital in his creation of Count Dracula; however, Stoker was certainly more heavily influenced by Eastern European folklore.

Le Vampire by R. de Moraine

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word vampire is Slavonic in origin, occurring in the same form in Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian, with such variants as Bulgarian vapir, vepir, Ruthenian vepyr, vopyr, opyr, Russian upir, upyr, Polish upior, although the linguist Franz von Miklosich suggests that the word is ultimately derived from the Turkish uber, or witch.1 According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, belief in vampires was prevalent in Slavonic lands, as in Russia (especially White Russia and the Ukraine), Poland, and Servia, and among the Czechs of Bohemia and the other Slavonic races of Austria. Since the 9th edition was published in the late nineteenth century, it can give us an accurate representation of what was believed about vampires during the time period when the most important literary vampires, such as Carmilla and Count Dracula, were created. It defines a vampire as the soul of a dead man which quits the buried body by night to suck the blood of living persons, and mentions a number of vampire rules, some of which have made it into the modern vampire canon. Suicides become vampires, as do people who have been cursed by their parents or the church. Since vampires feast off the blood of the living, when they are found in their graves, they appear to be fresh and rosy, replete with blood. The vampire can be stopped by a stake through the heart, decapitation, or burning. However, pouring a mixture of boiling water and vinegar over the grave also works.2

Ive mentioned vampire rules because Eastern European folklore is filled with rules governing how vampires are created, how they feast on the living, and how they must be destroyed. In The Vampire in Roumania, Agnes Murgoci states that a vampire can be identified as follows: his or her family and livestock begin dying; a hole the size of a serpent is found near the grave, because vampires leave their graves by such holes; a white horse or gander refuses to walk over the grave; the corpse is red in the face, or has a foot retracted and forced into a corner of the coffin, or the mouth is filled with blood. Vampires can be stopped or destroyed in various ways. A stake can be driven through the heart, but in one district a needle is recommended while in another, a red-hot iron is preferred. Small stones, garlic, or millet can be put into the mouth. A nail can be put under the tongue. The coffin can be bound with canes of wild roses, or nine distaffs can be driven into the grave. Tow can be strewn on the grave and set on fire, to singe the vampire. Vampires are most active on St. Andrews Day and St. Georges Day, when garlic should be put on the windows and doors of the house, and all the cows should be rubbed with garlic. All lamps should be put out, all implements in the house should be turned upside down, and all of the inhabitants should turn their shirts inside out. Perhaps the most interesting suggestion is not to sleep at all on such nights, but to tell stories, for vampires cannot approach while stories are being told. Burtons Baital must not have heard of that rule!3

What are we to make of this variety? As Murgoci suggests, although there are common elements, each district had its own particular set of beliefs about vampires. Jan Louis Perkowski, a scholar of Slavic language and literature, examined nineteen stories about vampires from different geographical areas and concluded that although all of them referred to an undead creature returning to prey on the living, no one of them contained all of the story elements he identified. In some, a vampire is created when a cat walks over its grave; in at least one, the vampire causes excessive rain or hail. The vampire is dispatched in different ways in each of the stories: in one, it is burned and the ashes thrown to the winds; in another, it is reburied with millet. One vampire is stopped when a bottle of wine is buried near its grave, retrieved six weeks later, and drunk.4 Perkowski concludes that although the vampire rules differ from district to district, they all serve a single function: to magically deal with the very real problem of unexplained deaths, particularly due to contagious illness. He writes, On the psychological level, illness and death of unknown origin, or even just the fear of them, evoke a condition of panic through frustration. The situation is hopeless. You cannot comprehend it and there is nothing you can do to help. How does a family or village respond to such an illness? Nowadays, we would call the Centers for Disease Control. But before the advent of modern medicine, the solution was often magical. Perkowski continues:

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Folkroots: Vampires in Folklore and Literature