Of all the imbecilic claims made about Irish vampires, none is as stupid or groundless as the claim that the name Dracula does not come from Romania but from Ireland.
The reality, of course, is that Dracula was a title given to Vlad Tepes or Vlad III. Part of the book takes place in Romania, Stoker researched the area and it is completely irrelevant that Stoker never went to Eastern Europe.
The claim that Dracula comes from Irish seems to have first surfaced around 1992. (The earliest reference I can find is in the Cambridge Evening News of July 25th, 1992). According to this ridiculous version of the Dracula story, the name comes from droch fola (Cambridge Evening News version), droch fhola, or droch fhoula or droch-fhola, which is supposed to be the Irish for bad blood. It isn’t, of course, as anyone who speaks Irish or looks up an Irish dictionary online will tell you. The Irish for bad blood is drochfhuil. Drochfhola is the genitive version so it means ‘of bad blood’ but genitives in Irish can’t stand on their own, so this is simply meaningless.
Drochfhuil is pronounced drohill or drokhill (with the kh representing Spanish j or the ch of Scottish loch). This is not at all close to the sound of Dracula. (In fact, if drochfhola meant anything, it would be pronounced drokholla, which doesn’t sound much like Dracula either.) This crap has been spread by all kinds of people, such as Bob Curran, Ireland of the Welcomes, and (Dia idir sinn agus an drochrud) Frank McNally from an Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times, one of Daniel Cassidy’s legion of cretinous supporters.
In his book 111 Places In Dublin That You Shouldn’t Miss, McNally says of Stoker ‘that the name of his most famous character is often said to be a contraction of the Irish words for “bad blood”, droch-fhola, or Dracula, for short.’ So … the three syllables of drochfhola are contracted into the three syllables of Dracula, are they, Frank? Do you even know what the word contracted means, Frank? Some journalist!
An even stupider claim is that the phrase ‘droch fhola’ [sic] meaning ‘bad blood’ is a phrase that was probably used by the Celtic tribes as they moved through Transylvania northwards ending up in Ireland, made by one Irish Dracula ‘expert’ called Hillen. So Celtic tribes thousands of years ago used modern Irish – or something kind of resembling it, anyway? Strange, because our fellow Celtic speakers in Wales would call bad blood ‘gwaed drwg’, which is nothing like drochfhola or drochfhuil.
Unfortunately, the bullshit doesn’t stop there. This claim has also been conflated with a dodgy story mentioned by Haining and Tremayne in the Undead. (Amazing how much of this bullshit seems to lead straight back to them!) They say that there was a story about a fairy fortress called Dún Dreach-Fola, (which means ‘fortress of visage of blood’ and is not the same as drochfhuil or drochfhola) which seems to have been sent to them in a letter from Cathal Ó Sándair in 1995 (See The Undead, page 71):
It was Ó Sándair, writing to the authors in April 1995, who also made the observation that Bram might have been guided to use the name of the historical Wallachian hero – Dracula – because it sounded the same as the Irish droch-fhola (pronounced drok’ola), bad blood; he might even have connected the name with a Kerry folk-tale about ‘Dún Dreach-Fhola’ (pronounced drak’ola), the castle of blood visage. The castle was said to be high up in a lonely pass among the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, a range in Co. Kerry, which contains Ireland’s highest mountain. Ó Sándair may well be right: Seán Ó Súilleabháin, the Kerry-born one time registrar and archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission, mentioned this same oral folk-tale in a lecture at UCD in 1961, prior to the publication of his book on Irish death customs, Caitheamh Aimsire ar Thórraimh, translated into English six years later as Irish Wake Amusements. He said it was told to him in the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks. The story concerns an ‘evil fairy fortress’ – Dún Dreach-Fhola, inhabited by neamh-mhairbh (Un-Dead), who sustained themselves on the blood of wayfarers. Unfortunately there is no reference to the story in Caithreamh [sic] Aimsire ar Thórraimh.
What can we say about this? Ó Sándair and Ó Súilleabháin were genuine people but I don’t buy any of this stuff about Dún Dreach-Fhola. If you look at the paragraph above, it is actually saying two different things. The first part of the paragraph says that there was an actual place in the mountains of Kerry called Dún Dreach-Fhola. The second part says that this was a folktale collected by Ó Súilleabháin in Kerry. Ó Súilleabháin was a careful folklorist. If he collected such a story, he would have preserved it in writing.
I am not saying that this claim is completely untrue. Perhaps someone, somewhere, sometime, will find some real evidence for it or for part of it. But this is certainly not evidence.
An article in the Dublin Review of Books (Blood Relations by Brian Earls, published in 2012) says this about Irish vampirism:
Vampires are not to be found in Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s A Handbook of Irish Folklore, published in 1942. The handbook, whose author was archivist to the Irish Folklore Commission, covered all of the major categories of Irish folklore and has been described as “an encyclopedia of Irish, and, indeed, of West-European tradition”. Following its publication it provided an indispensable guide for Irish field collectors. Its ability to direct collectors towards particular topics and areas of inquiry was based on the knowledge gained during a decade of intensive collection by the Folklore Commission and its predecessor, the Irish Folklore Institute. The absence of vampires from the handbook was not thus a casual omission but based rather on the expectation that, amid the otherwise bewildering array of Irish supernatural actors, they would not be encountered by collectors.
In other words, if there were such a story, it would have an immense importance, because it would be breaking new ground. However, there is no corroborating evidence for the existence of this story. No written account from any third source. Nothing. The only authority for it is (apparently) a letter from Ó Sándair in the possession of either Tremayne or the extremely dodgy Haining. It’s simply not evidence. And even if such a letter existed and gave such information, can we really be sure that Ó Sándair was not a practical joker or suffering from some kind of dementia? Other things about the story should make us suspicious. Why is the term neamh-mhairbh used in this story? This term was invented by Seán Ó Cuirrín for Dracula in 1933. Why would a native Irish speaker use it? Why is it dreach-fhola? Dreach is a masculine noun, so it should be dreach fola (visage of blood). (If it were a compound word, of course, the meaning of dreachfhuil would be face-blood rather than blood-face, which doesn’t mean a lot.) And why would anyone with any knowledge of Irish claim that drok’ola is an accurate transcription of the pronunciation of drochfhola?
In short, this is another claim that simply doesn’t stand up to any close scrutiny and should be ignored by anyone with any sense.
cassidyslangscam 