I heard about this book entirely by accident! Among the other side effects I have experienced from grad school has been a strong resistance to reading non-fiction, and this book cracked that resistance a little bit. Of course, I love horror topics in general, but this book instantly struck me for being about my favorite kind of history: what did people believe? The book does not try to summarize the qualities of vampires across time and place, but is interested in the ways that vampirism was imagined to work, all of the other fears and insecurities that were captured with it, and the pursuit of its extinction. It is not just folklore but the context of such stories.

His introduction features a taste of the kind of context I’m talking about:

In March 1732, English men and women sat down to their morning papers and read of lurid events in Serbia. Suspicious villagers had dug up several corpses, and had found them undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they had mutilated them in various ways and had then burned them (p. 376).

In fact, such episodes were not rare in the Carpathians and Balkans. What made this case different was that the Habsburg military and authorities had investigated it, and had produced a report. That brought the Serbian vampires to the attention of the Austrian and German press, and thus to newspapers in Paris and London.

Released on the world, the story had an impact that would transform sensational popular literature over the next two centuries. Those first readers must have been most struck by its sheer exotic weirdness: a bizarre transaction across the boundary between life and death, in a wild zone of Europe about which they knew nothing. Surely it could never have happened in civilized England?

The instance with which Blair opens the book perfectly exemplifies the ways that vampires were just one of many fronts on which the British at this time starkly differentiated their “civilized” society from “backward” societies. Stories of vampires did not land upon their ears (or eyes) as simply folktales from another part of the world but as an example of the superstitious and illogical societies of Eastern Europe in general. Of course, England had its share of vampires in centuries past, and the book will get to that.

As a historian myself (PhD, Duke University, 2019), I cannot dig into a book like this, which attempts a global scale, without considering the scholar’s personal and political standpoint. John Blair is a highly respected Oxford professor of Medieval history and archaeology, but in some ways that places him precisely in the place of the people with whom he opens his introduction. His stated goal for the book is to fill what seems to him a gap: that of a genuinely critical analysis of the “family of predatory supernatural entities” that is globally widespread but in English language literature has often suffered from being too summary. In the scholarly portions of his introduction, Blair admits that he details European vampires the most because of his own historical and linguistic work and its limitations. Nevertheless, what he proposes and (and I am curious to see in action) is a real attempt at establishing consistent definitions even in addressing supernatural creatures across wildly different cultures. Other considerations that I am excited to see in this book include an analysis of gender as part of the vampire lore and vampire hunts (as has so often been detailed in studies of European witch hunts, for example), As myself a white scholar of the US, based in the US, I cannot consider myself a perfect judge of non-white and non-“Western” histories, but I will certainly be reading with a critical eye.

Blair’s central argument is that “vampire epidemics” have reared their heads in moments of great trauma and upheaval, whether intellectual or real, and have paradoxically served as a kind of pressure relief valve for anxieties that arose around marginalized groups in particular. As he says, “Killing the dead is better than killing the living.”

Part I: Approaches

Chapter 1: Who Were the Dangerous Dead?

We can’t jump immediately into the history of “vampires.” The term itself is grounded in a specific historical context and our contemporary lore derives almost entirely from a specific book – of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula – which itself borrowed and changed existing folklore for the purposes of its fiction. The very notion that vampirism can be passed down, like a disease, was Stoker’s fabrication.

Blair, therefore, tackles two tasks immediately: when we go looking for “vampires” globally, what counts as a vampire for our purposes, and what do we call the category? I love his phrase “dangerous dead” to describe the forces he is examining, and his description of the relationship to death practices in general:

“Most cultures have viewed the interval between death and final disposal as an anxious time, requiring alertness and elaborately formalized rituals to ensure a peaceful transition to the world of the dead. Usually, all goes well: the soul or life-force departs or diffuses, and the individual rests in peace. Trouble happens in the minority of cases where that process is frustrated or impeded. In a high proportion of cases, the undead are not created by the addition of something new but by a failure to complete.” (10).

It is true that we (in the US, at least) live in a society where it is rare to see dead bodies, and I wonder whether that makes them more or less strange to us. In my family, on both sides, the Wake is a standard part of funeral practices. We attend them in funeral parlors now; they’re no longer held in our dining rooms, but the Wake is an old tradition with many purposes that certainly include making sure that the spirit departs safely. It is still a good opportunity to say a final goodbye, even as I have stood in funeral homes and thought the body before me bore so little resemblance to the loved one who used to inhabit it. A face that used to be animated, smiling, laughing, singing, and even scolding, now lies slack and greyish. I can see how, in such an environment, the dead body becomes uncanny and a potential site of danger.

Blair uses the “dangerous dead,” “restless dead,” “undead,” “revenant,” and occasionally “walking dead” as alternatives to “vampire” (which he restricts to using after its introduction in English in the 1730s, pg. 14). I particularly like the denominations based on danger because of the way it directly frames the relationship between dead and living.

I’m a huge sucker (no pun intended) for etymology, so Blair’s whole discussion of terminology throughout history is fascinating. The best academic guess for the word that entered Western European languages as wampyr is a reconstructed Proto-Turkic noun (which is to say, a word that scholars hypothesize to have existed based on linguistic evidence), *ōpur, “that which sucks, that which swallows.” The Romanian strigoi, which I have often seen framed as the “real” vampire legend, is tied to similar creatures from Albania and the Istrian Peninsula and descends actually from the Roman strix, which was a typically female bird demon that entered homes at night to attack babies.

Blair lists a number of other examples, predominantly European (the relationship of the Greek vrykolakas, a malevolent walking corpse, to the Slavic and Baltic vukodlak, which probably more accurately means werewolf, and another Romanian term, moroi, which borrows from the Germanic “night-mare” demon), but draws an interesting parallel between these cases: that words for the dangerous dead have derived from words or legends about demons; and therefore, believe in demonic (or similar) forces is older and more durable, while the dangerous dead are a less consistent, outflung arm.

The problem of sources

I really appreciate Blair’s discussion of source material. As he explains, corpse-killing is not universal but it does materialize over a significant portion of the world throughout history. However, summarizing this practice on a global scale is hindered by totally inconsistent source material, especially the historian’s favorite: written material. We can point to written records thousands of years old in societies such as Mesopotamia, China, and similar, but many societies used predominantly, if not entirely, oral recordkeeping (even in cases where we can likely track a strong lineage of a specific story, e.g. Beowulf). As a result, for much of his research, Blair must draw on evidence that is folkloric and comparatively recent: outcomes that will only suggest the depth of historical practices.

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Why there are distinctions between thinking and unthinking undead? How do such beliefs emerge at all, and why do they recede? Blair will address these questions in the next chapter: “Fearing Dead Friends, Killing Dead Enemies!”

As for me, I’m delighted so far. I am looking forward to the deep details of forthcoming case studies, but also enjoying the rich theoretical depth of trying to track down what, exactly, we mean when we look for the “dangerous dead.”

On the other hand, I’m worried that this is going to take a lot more time than I had anticipated! I thought up this read-along as a fun spooky season special, doubling as a means of getting myself to actually sit down and read this book critically instead of just skimming the chapters that appealed to me most. However, I am on page 24…out of 439 pages (not counting endnotes and bibliography). This might take a while. Nevertheless, I hope you found my thoughts and summaries interesting, and hopefully you’ll look forward to our next segment, when I’m going to try to finish the “approaches” portion of the book so we can dig into more detail in the post after.

Thanks for reading!