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Dr Rebecca Haynes beside the Anonymous Chronicler in Budapest |
Lunch? Sink your teeth into vampire history
History professor to give talk on blood-sucking folklore around the world for lecture series
BRAM Stoker and legions of Hollywood film directors would have you believe vampires are pale, model types with plum English accents.
But according to a history professor at University College London, undead blood-suckers were originally portrayed in stories as “fat bloated peasants” who, on occasion, have been known to help out with the farming.
“The skinny, well-spoken aristocratic vampire has come out of the whole Dracula milieu,” said Dr Rebecca Haynes, senior lecturer in Romanian history. “Your folklore vampire would tend to be bloated and fat, basically a peasant who drank the blood of the living,”
Dr Haynes will dispense tips on how to spot a vampire – and how to deal with pesky ones – when she talks on her hobby subject of Tales of Vampires and the Undead in a free lunch-hour lecture at the university’s Darwin Lecture Theatre next month.
Vampires will rub shoulders with dinosaurs, Gandhi, Dr Johnson and the Swedish author Selma Lagerlof in the twice-weekly series.
The biology of ageing, the dark side of the universe and “the right to obscene thoughts” are some of the topics to be discussed between October 13 and December 10.
Potential vampires in folklore consist of anyone who doesn’t like garlic, people born out of wedlock and anyone who has broken religious taboos.
For those in doubt, the surefire way to detect the grave of a vampire is to lead a white horse over a cemetery and note which graves it will not walk on.
Dr Haynes said: “People are drawn to the macabre and frightening, and the never-ending cycle of what happens to us after we die.
“Folklorists collected evidence from villagers in eastern Europe as recently as the 1970s that suggests in more remote villages people still believe in the vampire.”
Some Transylvanian villagers reportedly still smear garlic on their windows on certain nights of the year to prevent vampires from entering.
Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, has come to be regarded as the heartland of the vampire, but Dr Haynes is keen to spread the
net wider and debunk some of the popular beliefs.
“Serbia and Greece have just as rich a folklore of vampirism,” she said.
“And there are some categories of vampires, particularly Greek vampires, that could actually be quite helpful. They would come back and help their friends with the ploughing. They weren’t necessarily seen as malevolent.”
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