When Did Vampires Enter the English Language?

Dan's "Vampire (L’amour de l’étymologie IX)" blog entry for Librari[d]an, would have you believe this:

The word was first used in English in 1734: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.”

Dan is clearly citing an extract from the anonymously-written The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, being the grand tour of Germany in the year 1734.

This work was not published until 1744, in which it was included in an anthology called the Harleian Miscellany. You can view in the 1810 edition of the Harleian Miscellany here.

The quotation Dan provides, is an English translation of an extract from Johann Heinrich Zopf's Dissertatio de Vampyris Serviensibus (1733).

However, two years prior to Travels, the term had already appeared in English.

The March 11, 1732 issue of The London Journal carried a story about the infamous - and alleged - vampire, "Arnold Paul":

Upon a current Report, that in the Village of Medreyga certain Dead Bodies (called here Vampyres) had killed several Persons by sucking out all their Blood[...]

Jean Marigny's Vampires: The World of the Undead (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 48, also cites The London Journal article as responsible for the word's introduction into the English language.

Thoughts on the Lazzaretto Nuovo "Vampire"

In March of this year, media coverage was given to the unearthing of an alleged vampire, buried in a 1576 plague pit in Lazzaretto Nuovo.

It was briefly discussed by Niels in Magia Posthuma, who, in turn, mentioned another post by Carl Pyrdum in "Other Bloggers".

Carl Pyrdum is the blogger behind Got Medieval. He discusses the "vampire" case here. You can read my thoughts on his post, via the comment I left to his blog entry.

No More Bud

Beloved Aussie actor, Charles "Bud" Tingwell (1923-2009) passed away this morning due to complications arising from prostate cancer. He was 86.

To those wondering why I'm mentioning that on this blog, it should be noted that he had a pivotal role in the 1966 film, Dracula: Prince of Darkness.

Spoiler alert: Don't read the next bit if you haven't seen the flick yet.

He played Alan Kent, the bloke who gets strung up by Dracula's manservant, Klove (Philip Latham) and his throat slit over Dracula's ashes, in a ritual designed to bring the undead fiend back to "life".

This was the first of Dracula's "resurrection" scenes in the Hammer Dracula series, thus making Bud Tingwell the first sacrificial goat and benchmark by which to figure out new and inventive ways to continue the franchise.

Echoes of this practice are seen in American slasher franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Whether or you think this is a good or bad thing, is entirely up to you!

Amazonian Reviews

I gave some brief coverage to my presence on Amazon in "A Note on Amateurs" after  TFO (still hiding behind a variety of usernames) "outed" me.

So, I thought I'd share the reviews I've written for that site. Yes, even the ones that make use of "tnuocalucard".

Let's start with books (non-fiction):

• "Not all it's cracked up to be..." (June 3, 2002) for Leonard R. N. Ashley's The Complete Book of Vampires (1998).
  
• "Great Book!" (July 5, 2002) for the Kim Newman-edited The BFI Companion to Horror (1996).
  
• "An okay read, but could have been better..." (July 10, 2002) for J. Gordon Melton's Vampire Gallery: A Who's Who of the Undead (1998).
  
• "One of the few vampire books written by an actual believer" (October 11, 2002) for Montague Summers' The Vampire in Europe (1929).
  
• "A Wannabe Lestat?" (September 9, 2005) for Katherine Ramsland's The Science of Vampires (2002).
  
• "The First Non-Fiction Book on Vampire Hunters" (November 29, 2006) for Bruce A. McClelland's Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead (2006).
  
• "Highly Recommended" (6 Oct 2007) for Elizabeth Miller's Dracula: Sense & Nonsense (2000).
  

And now, the fictional variety:

• "sitting on the fence for this one..." (July 5, 2002) for Brian Lumley's Necroscope (1984).
  
• "good stories, but expected more" (July 5, 2002) for the Joe R. Lansdale and Pat Lobrutto-edited Razored Saddles (1989).
  
• "An ok read...I guess" (July 7, 2002) for Peter Tremayne's Dracula Unborn (1977).
  
• "Similar in VEIN to Tremayne's "Dracula Unborn"" (July 28, 2002) for Peter Tremayne's The Revenge of Dracula (1978).
  
• "They're baaaacckk!" (December 23, 2005) for F. Paul Wilson's Midnight Mass (2004).
  
• "Zombie in the Old West" (January 3, 2006) for Joe R. Lansdale's Dead in the West (2005).
  

Lastly, let's look at movies:

• "A "pop/corn" vampire flick" (July 7, 2002) for Count Yorga, Vampire (1970).
  
• "Even Von Goosewing is Better" (October 5, 2005) for Van Helsing (2004).

So much for TFO's "detective work"! I had to pretty much stalk myself.

Mortensen's Vampire Gets Covered

I previously discussed William Mortensen's illustration, "The Vampire", in "Staked Vampire Picture Source Revealed".

Here are a couple of books that use the iconic image on their front covers:

Raymond H. Miller's Vampires (KidHaven Press, 2004)

Wayne Bartlett & Flavia Idriceanu's Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History and Myth (Sutton Publishing, 2005)

Rzączynski Gains Fame Through Quotation

Magia Posthuma's most recent post, "De cruentationibus cadaverum", deals with Gabrielis [Gabriel] Rzączynski's 1721 work, Historia naturalis curiosa Regni Poloniae. It is often cited as an early text on vampires.

However, Jan L. Perkowski notes the following in The Darkling: A Slavic Treatise on Vampirism (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 113:

Father Gabriel Rzączynski (1664/5-1737) was a Polish Jesuit priest who wrote the first national history of Poland, Historia Naturalis Curiosa Regni Poloniae, (Sandomir, 1721). The text, which is in Latin, is on page 365, Section II of the Historia, but it is a quotation from the manuscript of another Jesuit, Father Gengell's Eversio Atheismi.

For the record, Georgio Gengell's work, Eversio Atheismi seu pro Deo contra Atheos libri duo, was published in 1716.

Make Them Stop!

Man, am I sick and tired of remakes.

The sheer amount they seem to be producing these days, is quite frankly disgusting.

I know I've written about it before, but it really gets my goat to read about them being churned out at the rate they are. Can't they let sleeping dogs lie? Is the modern movie-going audience seriously that fickle, that they can't bear to watch a movie older than, say, 20 years old?

Check out Upcoming Horror Films' list of remakes in progress. See how many of your favourites you can spot, dug up from their "graves", dusted off and regurgitated by Hollywood hacks.

To keep in tune with this blog's subject matter, here's a brief sample of vampire movies currently undergoing the remake treatment:

• Isle of the Dead (1945)
  
• The Monster Squad (1987)
  
• Near Dark (1987)
• Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In] (2008)
  

I don't have a nostalgic view of cinematic history. Remakes are nothing new. I'm well aware of that. But, seriously, I feel like we're being bombarded with them at every turn.

I'd love to know if anyone has actually studied their output against those of previous generations. Surely we're making history here - of a more artistically-dubious kind.