Ho-wdy, Ho-rror Ho-mies!

Are you ready for a history lesson? Then give let Christopher Lee bite… your apple! It’s positively putrid  class on the most sanguinary subject of them all, Dracula! Under Prince Lee’s tutelage, you shall learn the shocking secrets of Dracula’s past! (Imagine “Dracula Untold” but good.) Prepare your brains for…

Check it out, Ho-rror Ho-mies!

Reading again the biography of this man I suddenly found out how unusual and weird was his life: a really good warrior and commander, wise ruler, the defender of his motherland and faith, betrayed by his own brother and friend, dishonored by chroniclers, became a victim of propaganda and became well-known as a merciless tyrant. Well-known for cruel tortures but not for struggle for the independence of Valahia.

IMHO, Vlad III deserves much more attention. I just like this guy.

Is Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula meant to be Vlad the Impaler?

Since Dracula Daily has cleared the most relevant entry, this seems a reasonable time to admit just how nerd-ragingly invested I’ve become in the endless academic debate over this topic. WasBram Stoker’s Count Dracula at all based on Voivode Vlad III of Wallachia ‒ also known as Vlad Țepeș, Vlad Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, etc?

Short answer: Yes. Yes he is. It’s not nearly as big a deal as some folks make of it, and there’s space for other interpretations, but it’s absolutely there. Duh.

But knowing a non-trivial number of “real” Dracula-scholars will argue with me on that point, I guess I can’t really leave it there.

My own pointless over-investment in this one is largely the fault of a youtube video I happened upon in the middle of rereading the novel back in 2021 – a review of Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula film (one which, if you aren’t familiar, leans HARD into the Vlad-as-Dracula angle). The youtuber in question argues emphatically that Dracula isn’tVlad the Impaler, was never meant to be, and the whole idea is nonsense.

Huh, thought I, having yet no strong opinions on the topic. Nice to know! The video made it sound pretty straightforward.

Then I finished reading Dracula for myself, and came away thinking, uhhh, nope, Dracula is absolutely meant to be Voivode Vlad III. It’s not exactly subtle. Why would anyone argue otherwise?

To lay out the case as simply as possible, our key passage comes from an early speech by Dracula himself, boasting of “his family’s” history, in classic “here is a story about someone who totallywasn’t me”-vampire fashion. (You can find the whole novel on Gutenberg, if you’d like to see it in context.)

“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them!”

Stoker really doesn’t have a lot of good info on the historical Dracula to share here (he never even mentions the name Vlad), but the Voivode Dracula who crossed the river to invade the Ottoman Empire, and whose brother (Radu) chose the other side, is some pretty specific biographical information.

It’s Van Helsing who (much later on) spells out just what’s been implied:

“I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land.”

Van Helsing goes on at length to give Voivode Dracula a (fictional, but hardly worse than a lot of what was actually said about him) history of messing with dark magic, adding also, “and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too well.” So important is this identification of Dracula that Van Helsing takes time out from vampire hunting later to do yet more research on the historical figure, and spends no small word count theorising on what this history suggests Count may do next.

Dracularemains a huge, poorly edited mess of a novel, full of maddening internal contradictions, but the Dracula = Voivode Vlad connection is about as straightforward as anything.

So why is there so much academic disagreement on this topic? Why the hell is Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller so determined to assure the world Count Dracula’s similarities to the historical Dracula end at the name? (I mean… and the Voivode-ship of a country from which he could and famously didinvade Turkey by crossing the Danube, a brother who betrayed him to the Ottomans, important property in Transylvania, a bloodthirsty reputation for tenacity, cunning and cruelty…) Why does myAnnotated Dracula cite Miller on this point, completely uncritically, even after having just run through that whole speech quoted above? Why does Hans Corneel de Roos insist “Vlad the Impaler is the only person who cannot have been the Count.” * Why is Dacre Stoker (apparently a distant Stoker relative) so convinced that Bram had never even heard of Vlad the Impaler?

What am I missing here? Why the grand anti-Vlad conspiracy? Does the Count himself have a gun to your heads? Blink twice if there’s a vampire in the room!

Unfortunately, to answer that (or try to), we’re going to have to back up further for yet morecontext.

Questions about Count Dracula’s connections to his real, historical counterpart are complicated nowadays, because without Stoker’s book to boost his profile, you or I might never have heard of Vlad the Impaler at all. In fact, Dracula had been in print more than 70 years (and dominated the stage and screen for more than 50) before the gloriously lurid history of the realDracula came to mainstream attention in the English-speaking world – mostly thanks to a pair of researchers called Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, who published In Search of Dracula in 1972.

And you can’t say that wasn’t an angle worth a publishing deal. The historical Vlad – as McNally and Florescu certainly point out – had a bloodthirsty reputation well beyond anything Stoker’s Dracula could claim. This is a man who supposedly rid his country of beggars by inviting them all to a dinner, then setting the building on fire ‒ and we haven’t even gotto all the impaling yet!

But the enduring problem with In Search of Dracula is that it got a little carried away. Like any author, Stoker blends truth and fiction in his descriptions of the Count’s human history, and the idea there’s a real manuscript out there somewhere calling Vlad a vampire – that this was a something people really believedabout Vlad the Impaler in his own time – is one the McNally and Florescu may have been a little too keen to buy into. Keen enough to “find” evidence (alas, accounts of Vlad dipping bread in the blood of his victims seem to be a slight mistranslation), and lean hard on the idea that Stoker’s research into the real Vlad Dracula was theinspiration behind his famous novel!

This is an interpretation that’s only metastasised since the 70’s. Realistically, Ford Coppola’s 1992 Draculafilm has probably done more than McNally and Florescu ever could to bring the Vlad Dracula angle into the public eye, but from Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula to the 2014 Dracula Untold, to multiple ballet versions still being performed today, the Vlad angle has become its own subgenreof Dracula media. You’ll even see people claiming that the whole idea of staking vampires comes directlyfrom Vlad’s reputation for raising whole villages to die by impalement.

So it might surprise some people to realise that the novel itself never even mentions any impaling, let alone any of that romantic fluff about a tragic dead wife. What’s on page doesn’t especially support the idea that Stoker had access to nearly as much history as McNally and Florescu. Stoker’s original notes (which were also, ironically, discovered by McNally and Florescu in the 1970s) suggest that his plans for his vampire novel were well underway before he ever discovered the historical Dracula, or chose that as the name for his villain. In fact, most** of what Stoker does tell us about Voivode Dracula seems to come from just a single chapter of a single book, which mentions the name ‘Dracula’ only three times (and at least once in reference to Vlad’s father, whose name really should have been rendered Dracul).

And for all my gripes about the work of Miller, Dacre and friends, they aren’t wrong in pointing this out. McNally and Florescu’s conclusions from the 70’s certainly overreached, and to hear people talk about Stoker’s novel as if Ford Coppola’s version was 100% faithful is painful, to say the least.

The problem I have with this particular strain of ‘academia’ is that it’s arguably now overreached every bit as badly as McNally and Florescu ever did. Miller’s Dracula: Sense and Nonsense is largely a hit piece, targeted at anyone ever to publish anything about Dracula without triple-cited-peer-review, so vitriolic that even when she’s right (which AFAIK she mostly is) reading it gives me a lot of second-hand cringe.

“If Elizabeth deserves anything from this ground-breaking book,” enthuses the introduction, “it is that those who read it never again utter the names Vlad the Impaler and Count Dracula in the same breath.” And I mean, I get the frustration at seeing In Search of Dracula still quoted uncritically after all these years, but can we take it down maybehalf a notch? Surely the bloody history of the Count’s real-world namesake is at least interesting trivia, regardless of how much Stoker knew about it?

But small wonder we now have youtubers trying to dismiss the idea that Stoker had ever heardof Voivode Vlad as some stupid headcanon, as if Dracula was just a common Romanian name, and the novel contains nothing more identifying. Small wonder we have people claiming “Vlad is the one person Dracula CANNOT be!” Though I do have to wonder if these folks have actually readDracula. You know, all the way through.

At the end of the day, no, Vlad the Impaler was not theinspiration for Stoker’s Dracula. But he was obviously aninspiration, and having picked the name, Stoker committed to the bit as best he could.

Now, the lastthing I want to do here is add yet another layer of overstatement and oversimplification to this pile, and leave you with the impression that Vlad the Impaler is a bigger part of Stoker’s book than it is on page. Skim-read a couple key passages, and you can easily miss it altogether.

I’m not convinced the fictional Dracula-the-vampire even benefits from being directly tied to something as ugly and complicated as the real Vlad’s many war crimes and anti-Ottoman crusade.*** By all means, write up your theories about how the Count is actually just some distantly-related, Vlad-the-Impaler fanboy, only using the name for clout (much like Dacre Stoker, come to that) – nothing in the book will contradict you. Honestly, I’d probably prefer it if you did.

But don’t tell me McNally and Florescu didn’t have somekind of point, or that the Ford Coppola version is any lessvalid than the myriad other ways people have reinterpreted this glorious mess of a novel over the years – for all its campy tone and romantic nonsense, it does genuinely incorporate more of Stoker’s book than any other big-budget version. It’s hardly the definitive take on this book, but nor are any of those other films. Getting carried away with some minor detail that appears in a single paragraph of this book, and coming up with some wild theory that Quincey Morris was secretly a vampire all along or whatever else ‒ that’s half the fun.

Just let the rest of the fandom have their fun too.

*To give de Roos his fair shake, his actual theory seems to be that, later in the book, Van Helsing changes his mind, and decides that Dracula is actually not the historical voivode, but rather “that other of his race” who was merely inspiredby Vlad Dracula – something vaguely alluded to by Dracula himself in his speech about his family. Which is genuinely an interesting way to interpret the relevant passage, but not one that seems to understand the actual point VH is trying to make in that scene (which is more that Dracula inspired great tenacity in others, thus great tenacity can be expected from Dracula himself). Given how incoherent Van Helsing is at the best of times, there’s room for some interpretation, but to my mind, to suggest there’s any great revelation about Dracula’s identity going on here is reaching, to say the least.

** Mind you, there’s nothing in that one-known-source about Vlad’s incredible tenacity (this is a guy who gained and lost the Wallachian throne three times, twice holding it for only a month, and was willing even to ally with old enemies and still fighting to reclaim it right until his death), or the danger he posed even when apparently in retreat ‒ and Van Helsing hammers that point home hardtowards the end of the novel. There aren’t enough specifics to be sure Stoker didn’t just make a lucky guess, but on this one point, his characterisation of Dracula is right on the money. So I can’t help wondering if Stoker hadn’t picked up at leastsome of the broader strokes of Vlad’s life from other sources ‒ even if it was no more than a short conversation with some historian at a party or the like. There’s really no way to know.

*** But if you really must lean into the Vlad angle, commit!Write me a version with Ottoman vampires invading Wallachia, where the human-Vlad’s fixation on impaling even enemy civilians was a symptom of his paranoia that vampires spies were out for his blood! Where the Turks finally succeeded in turning defender-of-Christianity-Vlad into an unholy monster – only to live to regret it! Or turn the entire Wallachia/Ottoman conflict into a clash of opposing vampire armies – god knows there are angles there still waiting to be explored. (Just bloody well drop the suicidal-wife thing already – it’s been done to death, and she’s such a minor footnote in Vlad’s story, we don’t even know her name. There’s better material buried in his history, I promise you!)

A few more Vlads,

▪︎ Vladimir III Tzepesch the Impaler, voivode of Wallachia 1456-1462 and 1476 (died 1477).

Culture: German

Date: 2nd half of the 16th century

Medium: Canvas

New Dresden reveals !

The Librarians will appear by the end of Twelve Months.

Twelve Months will include Harry going on Twelve dates with Lara.

Mirror Mirror will be set a few years ahead in the alternate universe and things went to shit faster in that universe.

Drakul created the Black Court but his son Dracula made them famous. Drakul wanted a small, elite group but Dracula fucked it up by making himself a Black Court vampire and spawning vamps left and right. Drakul has been a number of smaller monsters in history - presumably both human and mystic.

Vadderung has soulfire which he got in exchange for sacrificing his Power and Immortality to stay active after the time of the Aesir ended. It’s what fuels the einherjar. Him and Ferrovax really dislike each other and Vadderung could have picked a fight that could killed Ferrovax.

Dragons dying are events like Tunguska. No word on whether Tunguska was Ebenezer going all out as the Blackstaff or the Dragon’s dying moment. Harry will need to worry about this when fighting his own Dragon.

Grimalkin is effectively the new Cat Sith.

It is possible Thomas might stay in Demonreach.

Nemesis can infect multiple hosts at once though not forty or fifty thousand. Nemesis cannot be detected by the powers of the universe as it comes from beyond the Universe. Nemesis cannot even be detected by Uriel. Nemesis cannot always imitate humanity perfectly even if it is the one Outsider who knows humans much better than all the rest.

Harry was not one of only a few starborn born during this cycle. There were forty or fifty thousand originally and only a few are left by now (Harry, Listen, possibly Elaine).

Lea will likely appear in Twelve Months and will likely be the one who gets Harry’s ass moving in her role as his faerie godmother.

Jim once said that Harry would immediately throw down with the Leanansidhe if he learned the details of the bargain between her and Margaret LeFay. This has seemingly changed as Harry has gone and grown up on him and probably won’t just rush off to pick a fight with Lea. We’ll learn the details before the end.

Balor’s Eye could potentially even kill Uriel assuming he was dumb enough to stand there and just take it. The thing is Bad news.

Uriel is a multiversal entity - one Uriel appearing in every universe. Presumably it’s the same for other Archangels.

The Mothers are much closer in power to entities like Uriel and others like various native gods, hindu deities and guys like Zeus. (Zeus was surprising but makes sense considering how powerful the guy was in his own mythology)

If alternate universe Mab learned Harry works for her in his home universe, she’d say, “you work for now as long as you’re here” (this is hilarious to me)

Mother Winter’s type of Knight would be guys like Vlad the Impaler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.