So far in this series, we’ve looked at some of Northern European folklore’s intelligent, social beings (elves and goblins) and some monsters (krakens and wurms/worms). Today, we’ll focus on a group of beings that fall somewhere in between.
The modern conception of vampires is far from the truth. Not even in vampirism’s home turf of Southern and Eastern Europe were these creatures anything like Dracula or what one reads about in Anne Rice. In authentic folklore, they were far, far worse. For whatever reason, Great Britain is lacking in vampire stories, and to get a broad view of the beings, we must look to Scandinavia.
The term vampire has no real place in Scandinavian folklore since vampires were not viewed as a distinct species but as a kind of ghost. The best known tale of Nordic vampirism is that of Asmund and Asvith, told in Icelandic sagas and by the Danish historian, Saxo Gramamticus, around the beginning of the 1200s. The story, with some minor variations, goes as follows: When Asvith died, his companion, Asmund, fulfilled their oath of friendship by letting himself be buried alive inside Asvith’s barrow. Alongside the treasure, horse, hawk, and dog placed in the burial mound to accompany Asvith into the next world, food was provided for Asmund’s sustenance. Unfortunately, on their first night in the mound, Asvith awakened from death, and killed and ate the hawk and the dog. On the next night, he slew and consumed the horse. Predictably, on the third night, his hunger lead him to attack his friend. After the loss of an ear or two, Asmund managed to win the fight by slicing off the ghost’s head. Eventually, he escaped from the tomb.
This is, of course, an unusually dramatic tale, and more recent pieces of folklore rarely concern known personages. Still, it’s representative of tradition. One suspects that, if Asmund hadn’t been around, Asvith’s ghost probably would have left the mound in search of other food. The most precise English word we have for this kind of malignant spirit is ghoul, and the Ghouls of Magic (which, tellingly, tend to be Zombies) tend to be true to folk belief.
British ghosts are only infrequently as ravenous as those of Scandinavia and are usually the rather less concrete spirits to be found in popular movies. It has, however, been theorized that the old tradition of impaling British suicides with stakes is linked with belief in ghouls. To find a large pool of vampiric tradition in the British Isles, one has to turn back to the realm of the elves, discussed in the first article of this series.
The most purely vampiric beings (though not the only ones) amongst the elves are the baobhan sith of the Scottish Highlands. Sith is pronounced “shee”, and indeed, baobahn sith is etymologically identical to the Irish Celtic bean si (or banshee), literally, “fairy woman.” Here is a story of the baobhan sith as the eminent English folklorist, Katherine Briggs, retells it:
“Four young men were on a hunting trip and spent the night in an empty shieling, a hut built to give shelter for the sheep in the grazing season. They began to dance, one supplying mouth-music. One of the dancers wished that they had partners. Almost at once, four women came in. Three danced, the fourth stood by the music-maker. But as he hummed, he saw drops of blood falling from the dancers, and he fled out of the shieling, pursued by his demon partner. He took refuge among the horses and she could not get to him, probably because of the iron [a metal protective against fairies] with which they were shod. But she circled round him all night and only disappeared when the sun rose. He went back into the shieling and found the bloodless bodies of the dancers lying there. Their partners had sucked them dry.”
These baobhan sith are true succubi, and when compared with the folklore surrounding the nightmare, they go a long way toward explaining the current conception of vampires. Although nightmare today means nothing more than “a bad dream”, its origin is much more sinister. Mare comes from mara, a Celtic word for “demon.” Even in Danish, the word for a common nightmare is mareridt, that is, “mare ridden”. The traditional nightmare is perhaps the world’s most widespread folkloric phenomena although it must be noted that different cultures have had different methods of accounting for it. Simply put, a nightmare is, in its strictest sense, the sensation of waking up at night and finding oneself unable to breathe or move because a strange being is sitting on one’s chest. In Northern European folk belief, this creature was usually a young man or woman who, quite innocently and unwittingly, became an oppressive spirit by night and plagued a neighbor of the opposite sex. Sometimes, this neighbor was a person secretly beloved by the spirit. It needs to be emphasized that nightmare-ship was almost always unintentional, and there are numerous stories about the spirits being trapped and freed from their curse by friends of oppressed sleepers. Sometimes, the formerly nightmare-ing individual and its victim even got married. As a sign of this phenomenon’s frequency, Canadian research in the 1970s revealed that about 15% of university students had experienced a nightmare of this sort. It is tempting to use the world-wide nightmare tradition to explain belief in temporary alien abductions, particularly those of a sexual kind.
Getting back, however, to the baobhan sith: As mentioned, this is etymologically the same as a banshee. In character, however, the beings are quite different. Folkloric banshees and related creatures going by different names are not dangerous in themselves. They are, rather, a type of death omen, often connected with individual, prominent families. Shortly before a member of a certain family would die, the banshee would be seen or heard lamenting for the doomed person. Other banshees would whorishly wail for the deaths of just any old Joe, and ancient Nordic-British texts portray gruesome, banshee-like women foretelling great slaughters in war; these may well have been the predecessors of Scandinavia’s high-mythological valkyries. My own research in Denmark has shown how easily tradition transforms “friendly” (that is, merely informative and not harmful) death omens into the cause of death itself, so it’s hardly surprising that the popular idea of a banshee is that of Ravnica’s Keening Banshee.
The original banshee in Magic, The Dark’s Banshee, is actually suggestive of a completely different realm of Northern European folkloric. That story though will have to wait until tomorrow…
Skål!
Adam Grydehøj
frunco1@hotmail