Is there an Irish vampire tradition? There is certainly a vampire literary tradition in Ireland, begun by Sheridan Le Fanu with Carmilla in 1872 and brought to perfection in Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. Both le Fanu and Stoker drew primarily on Central and Eastern European folklore in their depiction of the vampire. There is nothing distinctively Irish about their versions of the undead, though some academics have argued that Stoker’s Dracula consciously draws parallels between the parasitic nature of the vampire and its baneful influence on the population of Wallachia and the parasitic control of Ireland by a foreign ascendancy, which is certainly a reasonable viewpoint.
As I’ve explained in several articles, in more recent years, there has been a revisionist version of vampire tradition which claims that vampirism is a feature of Irish traditional folklore. For example, here is a paragraph from one of the worst offenders, a trashy book called The Un-Dead by Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, first published in 1997:
The first question to consider, therefore, is: Was there a vampire tradition in Ireland? The short answer is that there are such traditions in most ancient cultures and Ireland is no exception. And, in fact, it can be argued that Bram Stoker, though a city man from Dublin, was well placed to hear stories of the deamhan-fhola or blood-sucking demons which peopled the shadowy places of the rural Ireland. Whatever he may initially have picked up from his mother, there is surely no doubt that over convivial dinners with the Wildes on dark winter evenings, Sir William and Lady Wilde recounted to Bram tales of the neamh-mhairbh or the Un-Dead that permeate Irish legends and folklore.
This is, unfortunately, typical of the shit found in this particular book. The first question we need to ask ourselves is, are there really vampire traditions in most ancient cultures? To me, the singular feature of a vampire is that they are physically resurrected from the dead and that they sustain themselves by drinking blood, which is what we find in the literary versions of vampirism. These stories seem to derive (like the word vampire) from Eastern Europe, but the specific trait of returning from the dead and drinking blood is not particularly common. In fact, it seems to me that the vampire story owes more to natural history and the known habits of the vampire bat in South America than to anyone’s folklore.
Haining and Tremayne speculate about how the young Stoker may have been influenced by tales told by Lady Wilde and Sir William Wilde, both of them folklorists of note. But their works, to the best of my knowledge, contain no references to the blood-drinking dead, and Haining and Tremayne don’t offer us any examples of such stories. The passage quoted also mentions the deamhan fola (plural, deamhain fola) and the neamh-mhairbh, terms which, as I’ve explained, are not ancient in Irish. It is unlikely that either of them goes back further than the 1930s. And again, where is the evidence of even ONE story about blood-drinking dead people in the Irish tradition? How can you say that they permeate Irish legends and folklore if you cannot point to even ONE example?
Before someone dashes off a message to complain, let me just say that blood-drinking was a thing in Irish culture and tradition. When someone died violently, it was not unusual to find references to a relative, usually female, drinking their blood. This probably doesn’t mean what it says. Perhaps they smeared their face and mouth with the dead person’s blood as a symbol of extreme grief. At least one ancient character, Mis, supposedly went mad after drinking her father’s blood on the battlefield. And the famous Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire alludes to the tradition. But this is something completely different from the vampire tradition. It’s about live people expressing grief for the dead, not dead people returning.
There are occasional (very occasional) stories where supernatural beings bleed a living person and mix their blood with meal to make a kind of black pudding. The enfeebled victim can be restored to health by placing a little of the black pudding in their mouth. I have heard tales that people in times of famine used to bleed (ródach a dhéanamh ar) cows and make black pudding in order to get some protein without actually killing the animal, so that could have been a familiar concept to poor Irish subsistence farmers. However, this is a long way from vampirism as we know it. The smouldering sexuality of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee has little in common with the art of black-pudding making.
The truth is, there is no evidence of vampirism in Irish folklore. None whatsoever! It is entirely a modern construct invented by people like Peter Haining and Bob Curran.
cassidyslangscam 