Interesting facts about Dracula

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Bram Stoker's Dracula - more Irish than Transylvanian?

It has inspired more than 1,000 movies and after the bible it's the biggest selling book of all time. But does Bram Stoker's gothic novel Dracula owe more of its inspiration to Ireland than to Transylvania?
Was Count Dracula really a bloodsucking Irish landlord who preyed on his19th century tenants? And were the undead and the gaunt haunted figures that fill the pages of Stoker's famous book straight out of Ireland's Great Famine?

These are the claims of director of the Bram Stoker's Dracula Organisation Dennis McIntyre, who says that very few people know that Stoker was in fact an Irishman.

"A lot of people are under the impression that Bram Stoker was an American, an Englishman, or a Romanian, but he wasn't. He was very much an Irishman," McIntyre said in an interview with Ireland's RTE Radio 1.

First published in 1897, the book has never been out of print and has been translated into over 50 different languages. But while the story of Dracula is known by every generation throughout the world, many moviegoers and readers are unaware of its origins.

It's widely believed that Bram Stoker's Dracula tells the story of the 15th century bloodthirsty Romanian Prince Vlad Dracula III, better known as Vlad the Impaler.

The Transylvanian prince earned this name because of his reputation for impaling his enemies and watching them slowly and painfully die.
But according to Dennis McIntyre there the similarities end, and with the exception of the setting the story is a very Irish one.

He points out that the name Dracula comes from the Irish word "Droch Ola", which means "bad blood". Stoker's mother was from the West of Ireland and she told Bram about a cholera epidemic in 1832 when she witnessed large graves and people being pushed into them with wooden poles while they were still alive.

"They were literally buried alive. Did he get the idea of the undead being one of these?" McIntyre asked. If you committed suicide in Stoker's time it was actually believed that you became a vampire unless you got the stake through the heart treatment, he added.

There was a suicide burial plot in Clontarf, Dublin, where Stoker lived. As a boy the author used to spend hours playing in that graveyard and St. Michan's Church, where the Stoker family had a burial vault. "By some atmospheric freak, in this church bodies are preserved by a natural mummification or they were in the past," said McIntyre.

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine. This was one of the most catastrophic events in Irish history, with hundreds of thousands of people dying from starvation and disease or emigrating in 'coffin ships' to America.

The famine may have inspired the visual characteristics of Count Dracula and also his infamous obsession with bloodsucking, McIntyre believes. "So metaphorically speaking we think that Count Dracula might be the landlord up at the big castle sucking the blood of the peasants."

Stoker's Dracula is also full of Irish symbols - storms, fog, rats, gypsies, castle, abbey, etc.

Stoker was educated in Trinity College Dublin, spend 10 years working as a civil servant in Dublin Castle and lived his first 31 years in Dublin before moving to England. But he has been the forgotten man of Irish literature, McIntyre believes.

"In Ireland we rightfully sing the praises of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Shaw, O'Casey, Swift, Goldsmith, Synge, Behan and Kavanagh - but where is Bram Stoker?"

His Dublin based organization was set up as a global focal point for the study of Stoker, and to gain for author the international recognition his work and achievements s deserve.

"Sadly and shamefully the author is totally neglected in his own birthplace, by his own people," the organization's website claims.

 

Well, if it's any comfort I'm writing an essay on Dracula for an Irish literature course atm.

I'll spread the word.

 

Interesting stuff. Never occurred to me that the book might be inspired by Irish lore. And I have to admit I've always thought Stocker was either English or American

 

Stoker's _Dracula_ was required reading for me in college, and to be honest, I wasn't that impressed with it. It had a few pretty good moments but for the most part, it was just a bit flat.

In that class the instructor gave us two perspectives: The homosexual - Draucla and his male victims - and the feminist perspective, which was - surprise - Dracula and his female victims. I just adpoted my own perspective, which as that it was a grade B horror story.

 

It might be Grade B for this time period, but just look at influential it is!

BTW 'Lair of the White Worm' is Stokers best book

 

I may be thinking of something else but weren't the suicides included in those whose head was removed and buried at a crossroads ?

 

Suicides used to be buried at a crossroads here, so maybe over there, as well.

 

yep - crossroads were considered as especially unhallowed ground across wide swathes of Europe on account of their more ancient graeco-roman associations with what were, with the advent of christianity, latterly considered as evil spirits and heretical gods; given that suicide was seen as a crime against god across much of christian europe, it was therefore seen as natural that those who killed themselves should be buried in the unhallowed ground at crossroads