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BEFORE DRACULA
We tend to think that Bram Stoker's
Dracula, published in 1897, was the first vampire story. It wasn't!
World legends are filled with vampire-like creatures; they appear in
such sagas as Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Le Morte d'Arthur. We have
treatises and reports about vampires written in the early 1600s.
The first use of the word vampire, or vampyre, appeared in the English
papers in 1732 in a report of the story of Arnold Paole. What is
generally considered the first fictional work is a poem "The
Vampire" or "Der Vampir" by Heinrich August Ossenfelder,
published in 1748.
"Wake Not The Dead" by Johann Ludwig Tieck, written about
1800, may be the first modern vampire story, about a man who loves his
dead wife so much he has a necromancer return her to life, only to
discover she has become a vampire. It loses out to John Polidori's
"The Vampyre" as the first vampire story in English, because
it wasn't translated until 1823.
In 1816, there was a gathering at the Villa Diodati, near Geneva,
Switzerland. Among the guests were famous poets and writers, including
Lord Byron. At Lord Byron's suggestion, the guests made up ghost
stories. One of the guests was Mary Shelly, whose story became a
classic, FRANKENSTEIN. Lord Byron wrote a fragment of a story about a
man who makes his traveling companion swear to conceal his death and to
undertake certain actions. It was never finished. Dr. John Polidori, who
was a traveling companion of Lord Byron, took Lord Bryon's fragment of a
story and turned it into The Vampyre, which was published in "The
New Monthly Magazine" in April 1, 1819 and mistakenly attributed to
Lord Byron. Polidori created Lord Ruthven, who was intentionally modeled
after Lord Byron, a handsome and charismatic nobleman. In doing so, he
raised the character of the vampire from that of a night flying demon or
the peasant in moldy grave clothes to a foreign nobleman, a romantic
figure and a seducer of young women. Critics agree that Lord Ruthven is
the prototype for all that followed, including Bram Stoker's Dracula and
even Anne Rice's Lestat.
Would you like to read these stories?
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"Der Vampir" by Heinrich August Ossenfelder
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"Wake Not The Dead" by Johann Ludwig Tieck
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A fragment of story by Lord Byron
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"The Vampyre" by John Polidori
You can find them at James D. McDonald's Literature of the Fantastic on
SFF.net.
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/lit.htp
This article was first published by www.Suite101.com
March 13, 2004 |
