Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History and Myth
By Wayne Bartlett and Flavia Idriceanu
Sutton Publishing
214 pages
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
While Bram Stoker's Count Dracula is the image of the vampire that immediately comes to mind in the public's imagination, Wayne Bartlett and Flavia Idricieanu's Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History in Myth seeks to trace the myriad variations and incarnations of vampires throughout time and across the globe.
Count Dracula's home was Transylvania (the appropriately gothic 'the land beyond the forest'), but Bram Stoker's home, Ireland, may have provided some of the inspiration. In Ireland, like elsewhere in Europe, vampire-flavoured tales flourished, including ones about a chieftain who wouldn't stay in his grave, as well as tales of the beautiful female seductive-type of vampire. While it is not surprising to hear of vampire lore in Romania, Hungary and other Central European countries, the authors also find accounts of vampires in England, France, Austria, Iraq, Greece, Russia, Mexico, Australia, Java, Japan, the Philippines, India, Brazil, and Africa.
Vampires were not limited to one period in time, either – a version called the ekimmu
is found in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology; the Ancient Greeks and Romans had versions in lamiae, striges and mormos. The Babylonian labartu, a female demon, feasted on blood, and especially liked children. The mormos also ate children or drank their blood, and were shape-shifters. The authors state the lamiae seduced unsuspecting young men – they were "beautiful, voluptuous, young women (an unmistakeable forerunner of the 'vamps' of more recent times) – though an unfortunate habit of removing their eyes must have done something to lessen their attractiveness."
The real-life accounts of vampires are just as strange as the myths. A French newspaper in 1694 reported: "The vampires appeared after lunch and stayed until midnight, sucking the blood of people and cattle in great abundance. They sucked through the mouth, the nose, but mainly through the ears. They say that the vampires had a sort of hunger that made them chew even their shrouds in the grave." During the vampire "epidemics" and outbreaks of the 1600s and 1700s, the bodies of suspected vampires were exhumed as the populace sought to fight back in an effort to eliminate the menace. They then cut off the heads of these corpses, drove stakes through their hearts, or cut the bodies open and/or burned them. The sadistic, literally blood-thirsty crimes of Countess Elisabeth Bathory, who was believed to be involved in the torture and murder of hundreds of young girls, goes beyond many myths in terms of savagery, strangeness and ghoulishness.
The myth of the vampire overlapped with those other feared creatures – the witch, the werewolf, and the devil. Goethe, Keats, Byron, Gogol, Poe have written about vampires and they are still a popular subject in contemporary popular fiction (Stephen King, Anne Rice and others). The Legends of Blood offers and interesting introduction to this strange, seemingly timeless, creature – a creation that has lived on so long because it is derived from a multitude of fears – a fear of disease, death, the dead, women, foreigners, the night, taboos, the woods, the Other and the unknown.