Nosferatu

What it is

Nosferatu is a word that arrived in world culture as a supposedly old Romanian name for a vampire: a dead body believed to leave its grave and feed on the blood of the living. Most readers met it twice over, first in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula of 1897, then in the German expressionist film of 1922 that took the word for its title. In the novel, a character warns that anyone killed by one of these beings rises as one in turn, so the horror spreads the way rings spread when a stone hits water. The word itself is a puzzle: it shows up in no standard form in the recorded Romanian language, and scholars have not agreed whether it is Greek, Slavic, Latin or a mangled version of some other Romanian term.

Where it comes from

The earliest known appearance in print is in a German essay by Wilhelm Schmidt, published in an Austro-Hungarian magazine in 1865 and enlarged into a book the following year. Schmidt wrote about Transylvanian customs and names the legendary Scholomance. Emily Gerard then brought the word to British readers in her 1885 essay 'Transylvanian Superstitions' and her travelogue, The Land Beyond the Forest, and Stoker named her as his source. Gerard moved in the same Austro-Hungarian literary world and read German, so she could plausibly have met Schmidt's piece. Peter Haining credited an 1861 book by Heinrich von Wlislocki, but Wlislocki was born in 1856, which ruins the date; David J. Skal judges Wlislocki's 1896 'nosferat' to be borrowed from Gerard.

How it is done

Gerard records the shape of the belief as she heard it. Two kinds of vampire were spoken of, living and dead: a living one was thought to be born to two parents both illegitimate, while anyone killed by a nosferatu was expected to rise as one after burial. The counter-measures were graveside affairs. A suspect's grave could be opened and a stake driven through the corpse, or a pistol fired into the coffin. Obstinate cases called for more: the head cut off and put back with the mouth packed with garlic, or the heart taken out and burned, its ashes scattered on the grave. Schmidt notes that these defenses were still credited in his own day.

Tools and materials

The objects in the accounts are few and grim. A wooden stake, driven through a suspected corpse, was one remedy; a pistol shot fired into the coffin another. Garlic, packed into the mouth of a severed head, belongs to the harshest prescription Gerard records, and fire completes it, since the heart could be dug out and burned and its ashes strewn over the grave. Schmidt adds that the creature might take almost any shape, from dog and cat down to toad, frog, louse, flea and bedbug. Wlislocki's nosferat is defined less by shape than by choice of victims, the old for blood, the young for its night visits.

What it is for

As recorded, the belief explained misfortune. Deaths that came one after another were read as the work of a corpse feeding on the living, and each new death seemed to confirm it, since everyone killed was thought to join the preying dead. Schmidt says the creature torments newly engaged couples in the shape of an incubus or succubus, under the Romanian name zburatorul, and Wlislocki blames it for children born outside marriage, who then become moroi, for impotence and for infertility. The graveside rites were meant to end the haunting for good by exorcising the spirit, so that the chain of deaths would stop. Conviction rested, Schmidt writes, on personal experience or firmly trusted hearsay.

Who does it

No specialist appears in these accounts. The belief belonged to villagers at large: Gerard states that every Romanian peasant held it as firmly as heaven or hell, and Schmidt says there could hardly be a village unable to produce a first-hand story or at least a trusted second-hand one. Who led the graveside work is not recorded. What the printed record does preserve is the labour of collectors: two German-writing students of Transylvanian custom, Schmidt and Wlislocki, and Gerard, a British author and speaker whose essay carried the word to Stoker.

Peoples and places

The word is tied to Romania, and above all to Transylvania, the land beyond the forest as its Latin-based name has it. Gerard, Schmidt and Wlislocki all lived in the region at some point and gathered the belief there, and Wlislocki, a prolific writer on the region's speech and custom, was counted an authority on both. Schmidt, though, calls the vampire the strangest creature the Slavic national imagination produced, and sets the nosferatu beside Slavic kin: the Old Slavonic and Bohemian blkodlak, the Vukodlak, the Polish mora and the Russian kikimora. Wlislocki adds the moroi, the children fathered by the creature. The word itself has never been shown to belong to standard Romanian in any historical period; what circulated in print came from Transylvanian collectors and from Stoker's novel.

What people believe

Behind the word lies a world in which the boundary between corpse and walker is thin. The dead do not simply end: a person killed by a vampire rises in turn to feed on kin and neighbours, widening the circle of the hungry, an image Stoker renders as ripples from a thrown stone. There are living vampires too, marked from birth as children of two illegitimate parents. The creature is a shapeshifter, taking the form of a dog, a toad, an insect or other shapes, and it has a sexual face as well, visiting the newly betrothed by night. Only exorcism, by stake, shot, blade or fire, is said to lay it to rest.

When it is done

The belief attaches to deaths and to weddings rather than to any season. A burial could turn into an inquiry: when deaths followed one another, the grave of the suspected corpse might be opened and its occupant treated as the customs prescribed. The creature itself was thought busiest around marriage, tormenting the newly engaged and newlywed, and Wlislocki ties it to unions that produce children outside wedlock. No festival or fixed date appears in the record; the calendar of the nosferatu is counted in funerals and marriages.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Commentators treat the word as an open case. David J. Skal finds the popular Greek derivation baseless in lexicography, and the linguistic objections weigh heavily: Romanian is a Romance language, Greek loans are few, and nosophoros, disease-bearing, is itself rare, known from a second-century medical writer, Marcellus Sidetes, and an anthology variant which the standard Greek lexicon subsumes. A supposed Slavonic stepping-stone form is attested nowhere. A 'not breathing' derivation fares no better. One serious proposal reads the printed form as a garbled or dialectal rendering of a real Romanian adjective: necurat, unclean, nesuferit, insufferable, or nefârtat, enemy, since Romanian spelling was still unsettled in the nineteenth century. Haining's early citation has been traced to a confused reading of Ernest Jones's On the Nightmare of 1931.

Compare and confuse

The nosferatu is the Romanian-named branch of the wider European vampire family. Schmidt sets it beside the Slavic blkodlak and vukodlak, the Polish mora and the Russian kikimora, and pairs its night visits with the Romanian zburatorul, a spirit that pursues brides-to-be. Wlislocki's nosferat is the same creature under a slightly different spelling, and its supposed children become moroi. Stoker's coinage 'undead' now often stands in for the whole class.

Today

Whatever its folk past, the word's modern life is literary. Dracula carried it to a worldwide audience in 1897; Stoker apparently took it to mean 'not dead' in Romanian and may have built his word 'undead' as an English match, a reading Leonard Wolf later repeated. The 1922 German expressionist film, an unauthorised screen version of Stoker's plot, made the name its title and steeped its monster in the imagery of sickness, a theme that may reflect, or have encouraged, the Greek disease-bearing etymology. Fiction rather than village speech keeps the word in circulation.

Questions people ask about Nosferatu

Good reading and sources

• Nosferatu (word) on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data