Go to theallusionist.org/draculae1 to listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, stuff myself with garlic to keep language away.
At time of recording, it’s May 2026, and May is Dracula month, because the novel Dracula starts in early May – it begins in the form of journal entries and the first is dated 3rd May. When does it end? Some 160,000 words later, by which I had aged quite considerably.
This is the first part of a short series about a Draculan mystery, and if you don’t know Dracula, no problem; if you don’t care about Dracula, no problem. Just come with me upon a quest.
On with the show.
A literary mystery about the novel Dracula came to me via a meme, just as Dracula came to Whitby in a box of soil in a ship. The meme said something like, “Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic, and it took over 100 years for anyone to point out he just made a fanfic rewrite of what he wanted the story to be.”
It’s hard to point to the origins of this observation; the meme resurfaces every year or two, but it only reached me mid-2025, amid the usual torrent of Instagram dachshunds and foods that look like other foods that my husband sends me while scrolling in the bathroom. But about this meme, he said: “Have you seen this? Might be interesting for the Allusionist, doo-bi-de-doo.”
The meme sent me on a journey, like Dracula running back to Transylvania with another box of soil, only I didn’t really go anywhere and I didn’t have to carry any soil. I did get to talk with people who have travelled the world and spent years of their lives on their Dracula journeys, and you’ll hear from them in this series.
But first, we need to familiarise ourselves with Dracula. Have you read Dracula? I couldn’t remember whether I actually had, or whether I had just seen the 1992 film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola and enough parodies to make me think myself familiar with the original.
But now I definitely have read Dracula, by the Irish writer Bram Stoker, published in 1897, and here’s a recap:
Dracula (original flavour)
The young English lawyer Jonathan Harker is sent by his boss Mr Hawkins to the Transylvania region of Romania in southeastern Europe, because an aristocrat named Count Dracula needs help buying houses in England. On Jonathan’s journey to Dracula’s big remote castle, the locals tell him, “Bad vibes, don’t go!” and give him a cross to wear, which he doesn’t believe in but wears anyway.
Count Dracula is buying the huge old house in England because it has a chapel and he doesn’t want his aristocratic bones to mix with those of commoners. And he wants Jonathan’s help to improve his spoken English, because although he’s fluent already, he wants to sound exactly like an Englishman, so that when he’s in England he won’t lose his county privilege by being an obvious foreigner.
Jonathan thinks: this guy’s weird – very strong cold handshake, hates mirrors, lives in this huge castle alone and is very rich and an aristocrat but has no servants, lays the dinner table himself, makes the beds himself, and his own room has hardly any furniture in it except a load of gold coins that are more than 300 years old, and he sleeps in a box of earth in the basement. Aristocrats are eccentric though, eh?
Dracula tells Jonathan not to wander around the castle for…reasons, so of course Jonathan does, and three sexy ladies who can walk through walls and have very pointy teeth try to seduce him, but he’s rescued by Dracula, and he is very scared of them thereafter.
Very quickly, Jonathan realises he’s being kept prisoner in the castle. Dracula steals Jonathan’s travel clothes and wears them when he leaves for England, taking fifty boxes of soil to sleep on, travelling on a ship where the crew members complain about terrible vibes then all disappear or die.
The ship fetches up in Whitby on the northeast coast of England, where Jonathan’s fiancee Mina Murray happens to be on holiday with her friend Lucy Westenra who is beautiful and charming. Three men have just proposed to Lucy on the same day: a rich Texan cowboy type named Quincey Morris, Dr John Seward who runs a mental hospital, and Arthur Holmwood, an aristocrat whose proposal Lucy accepts. To get over the rejection, Dr Seward becomes obsessed with studying his patient Renfield, who eats flies to absorb their life force, and is a Count Dracula superfan.
Lucy starts ailing, fang marks appear on her neck, Dr Seward summons his old professor Van Helsing to cure her, nobody understands why he covers her in garlic flowers because only Van Helsing understands vampires and he’s really not very communicative about it. Arthur, Dr Seward, Quincey and Van Helsing give Lucy transfusions of their blood; she dies anyway; everyone’s like “Wow this corpse is SO hot,” but because she’s now a vampire eating children, they have to stake her and cut her head off.
Meanwhile, Jonathan has escaped the castle, the book ignores how, but he has shown up in a convent hospital; he and Mina get married, everyone turns their attention to destroying Count Dracula who appears variously as dog, bat, a whole crowd of rats, evil dust, and mist, and is now draining Mina’s life force, they’ve got to stop him! They destroy all but one of his boxes of sleeping-earth, but he flees the country, heading back to Transylvania, where they find him and kill him, thus saving Mina! but Quincey dies. but he wasn’t really a consequential character anyway aside from the blood transfusion.
As I mentioned, Dracula was first published in May 1897, written by Bram Stoker, then aged 49½ and as well as writing, he worked as a theatre manager.
Bram Stoker had published a few novels and novellas already, which hadn’t really done very well commercially, but Dracula was reasonably successful when it was released. He made no money from Dracula during his lifetime, and reviews were mixed - it was considered scary, sometimes too scary to be literary; it had a yellow cover, which was a colour usually for the covers of erotic books, scandalous for Dracula. But Dracula was successful enough to stay in print and be serialised in some newspapers abroad and translated into multiple languages.
In 1900-1901 Dracula was published in Icelandic, translated by newspaper editor Valdimar Ásmundsson, serialised in his newspaper Fyallkonan and then published as a book, with the title Makt Myrkranna, which means ‘Powers of Darkness’.
It didn’t do too well at the time. It was only reviewed once, five years later, where the reviewer said it was garbage and nonsense; Valdimar had died in 1902 so he didn’t get to see the book become popular from the 1930s on, when the film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi spawned a trend for vampire material, and Makt Myrkranna became the name for that kind of material in Iceland.
Decades pass, to 2014, when a Dutch scholar named Hans de Roos noticed something about Makt Myrkranna: it is not a direct translation of Dracula. Some of the characters have different names; some are missing completely, there are a few new ones;
Oh, and another big difference: Dracula is 160,000 words. Makt Myrkranna is only 47,000 words. Lovely runtime, but to me it demands the question:
HOW DID IT TAKE PEOPLE MORE THAN 100 YEARS TO NOTICE IT’S A DIFFERENT BOOK? What translation is less than a third the size of the original??
Having made that discovery, Hans de Roos worked with a team to translate Valdimar Ásmundsson’s version of Dracula, Powers of Darkness, into English.
Here’s a synopsis of Makt Myrkranna, Powers of Darkness, the Icelandic version of Dracula.
Makt Myrkranna
Thomas Harker – he’s called Thomas now – is a young lawyer sent by his boss Mr Hawkins to Transylvania to help Count Dracula buy property in England. Whereas Jonathan Harker was a sweet basic who on the trip collected recipes to give to his fiancee back home, Thomas Harker is far more of a jerk, prone to criticising the locals in ROMANIA for not speaking English like they do in England, and their clothes are funny and their food is so peppery! And they’re all ignorant and superstitious whereas he is rational and smart and English.
Thomas makes it to Dracula’s castle, where his wash basin is very small but it is made of gold. At the castle, Dracula says a lot of snobby stuff about peasants and is obsessed with power and ruling, and how “the weak” only exist to satisfy the strong, ie him; he is also very excited about London crimes, especially as they are enabled by the London fog which Thomas describes as “smothering the town like a vampire sucking the blood and bone marrow of its citizens” – which is actually the only time vampires are mentioned in the whole novel, and the vampires here don’t even really suck blood, it’s more like they sap their victims’ will to live, like when someone talks to me for ages about how much they love their air fryer.
Anyway: still in the castle, Dracula tells such bawdy anecdotes, and his collection of paintings is so sexual, that Thomas can’t even write about them in his diary - but he himself is being seduced by one incredibly hot ghostly lady - not three ladies in this version, just one. He can’t handle this one, he definitely couldn’t handle three. She’s Dracula’s cousin, he spends a lot of time rhapsodising about her bosom, and Thomas is the most aroused he has ever been in his life, and is saved only by that cross the locals gave him on his way to the castle and he said was a silly little toy.
It takes Thomas quite a while to realise he is being kept prisoner, but eventually he disobeys Dracula’s order not to explore the castle for reasons and makes it downstairs, where he is attacked by a hairy human-shaped beast with bad breath and is only saved by that cross again, and in the basement he also stumbles upon Dracula leading a crowd of people in culty death rituals.
Dracula steals Thomas’s travelling clothes and documents, and a Thomas lookalike wears them in public to make it look like Thomas did leave the castle and caroused around town drinking, having sex, and murdering girls. Dracula sails with his boxes of earth to Whitby, while the real Thomas has to figure out how to escape the castle.
Valdimar must have enjoyed the story of Thomas being trapped in the castle and cared far less about the rest, because in his version of the story, the castle section is nearly twice as long as it is in the original Dracula, whereas the rest of the story is 93% less long! It’s very efficient, and while Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in the form of letters, diary entries and medical notes, switching between different characters’ perspectives, Makt Myrkranna drops that once we leave the castle, and a narrator just tells us what happened.
So in a mere handful of paragraphs:
Lucy – named Lucia Western here – gets engaged, meets the Count posing as one Baron Székely, spends a lot of time with him, dies; the character Renfield is not in it at all; Mina is now named Wilma, and goes to Europe to search for Thomas, with his boss Mr Hawkins plus two new characters: Barrington and Tellett, who are detectives, but there’s no time for them really, although they hint that they’ve stumbled upon a big conspiracy of very important people with the Count at the helm.
Wilma finds Thomas at a convent hospital, they marry, get back to England, do a bunch of investigating, she gets a lot more fun stuff to do in this version. The Count is way more OUTSIDE in this version, he’s social, he buys a big house called Carfax and throws a huge party with lots of fancy people there; and there’s a bewitching countess, who is maybe Dracula’s hot cousin from the castle.
Everyone figures out everything, they surprise the Count in his coffin at the house. Van Helsing stakes him, all the other fancy important people from the party disappear or die, so the conspiracy plan must be off. The gorgeous countess dies by suicide, but she has already made Dr Seward go insane and he dies. The end.
Now, this translation raised a fistful of questions. If Valdimar wasn’t getting these characters and these plot points from the original Dracula as published, where was he getting them from? Some of them had appeared in Bram Stoker’s notes and early drafts - but how would Valdimar have got hold of Bram Stoker’s drafts? There’s no evidence they were ever in contact. How would he have known about real life crimes in London, and other England details, when those things might never have been reported abroad and he never left Iceland?
And then, when Hans de Roos’s English translation of the Icelandic version was published in 2017, the Swedish writer Rickard Berghorn points out that oh yeah, the Icelandic one is based on a Swedish version of Dracula, Mörkrets makter meaning Powers of Darkness, which was serialised in a daily newspaper in 1899 and written by someone known only as A—e, and it is nearly 300,000 words long!
Here’s a synopsis of Mörkrets makter, the Powers of Darkness, the Swedish version of Dracula:
Mörkrets makter
Tom Harker — hi, I’m Tom, yeah Tom, no, only my mum calls me Thomas — is sent by his boss Hawkins – Hawkins can’t go to Transylvania himself right now because he has gout, so Tom has to help Count Draculitz – DracuLITZ, got it? – buy houses in England. Thomas mocks the locals, says racist and snobby stuff, gets sexually bewitched by the lady vamp, is very ashamed about it because Englishmen are supposed to be above such things as horniness.
Draculitz is bawdy and power-obsessed. Tom takes aaaages to realise he’s being kept prisoner - in this version the castle section is so long it’s like we’re trapped there with him in real time. Tom is attacked by the basement beast that kisses him on the mouth, which he hates, there’s the scary cult downstairs, Dracula leaves, how can Tom escape the castle and the sexy lady vamp alive?
We’re off to Whitby and REALLY spending a lot of time watching as Lucy gets worse, gets better, gets worse, gets four blood transfusions from the four men, gets better, gets worse, is she dead yet? Am I dead yet? Why is there so much offensive stuff in this about Romani people? Why is Wilma a total jerk in this version who is kinda jealous that everyone loves Lucy so refers to her as a stupid child several times a page? The Count is posing as Baron Székély and pretending he’s English, like Madonna during her Guy Ritchie phase. He doesn’t start vamping on Wilma because she’s not high class enough for him.
But in this book, the two detective characters that don’t exist in Bram Stoker’s version, and Valdimar didn’t do much with in the Icelandic version, do have a point: Tellett is in the story to track down the missing Thomas in Europe; Barrington Jones is here to investigate this big conspiracy, from a crimey political angle; Van Helsing is also investigating but from a moral and anti-vampire angle. The conspiracy involves lots of world leaders and powerful people with the Count at the centre seeking world domination - as he keeps on saying, the weak are there to support the strong, like Renfield feeds flies to birds then eats the birds to absorb all their powers. And Barrington Jones’s investment in it is: if the conspiracy succeeds, then Britain might not be big boss of the world any more! OH NOOO!
Many of the characters have several big long rants about how there are things science can’t explain yet but are real, or maybe spiritual beliefs will be proven scientific in the future. And like Makt Mykranna and Dracula itself, this text goes hard on hypnosis being both a) bunkum that people use to excuse their bad behaviour, and b) responsible for all this terrible stuff we can’t otherwise understand. We can have it all!
Meanwhile, at the Count’s house next door to his asylum, Dr Seward is being seductively vampired by this bewitching clairvoyant woman, and most evenings there are salons full of the powerful people in the conspiracy, including a famous violinist who befriends Dr Seward then goes on about how Britain has colonised the world with mediocrity and a narrow Christian world view - [cough] no lies detected - hence Britain’s time as a world power needs to end, because of, quote: “their ridiculous idea of equal rights for all” - which is where he loses me, both because of his objection to that principle, and because he thinks that was what Britain was pushing at any point.
The violinist helps all the people at the conspiracy salons take over Dr Seward’s asylum to breed a master race from the patients, who are people cast out by society because they don’t follow the rules or meet the social standards, but really society’s not competent to set those standards and rules. But the asylum burns down at the end, so the people trapped inside it probably all die; also, Dr Seward dies, Lucy dies, Arthur whom she’s been vamping dies, the sexy clairvoyant vamp dies, the Count dies when they track him down to a modern normie house in the London suburbs, I guess he really did just want to pass as an English guy.
But the thing that made my hair stand up on end is when Barrington Jones reveals that Draculitz is funding the media to manipulate public opinion, and that he and the conspirators “have created a new morality in place of the old. They have all the worst and basest instincts on their side, unscrupulous lust for profit, and an indifference to the rights of others, which really forms the bedrock of society.”
Forget whether whoever wrote this had been through Bram Stoker’s notes - had they time travelled to the mid-2020s?
This of course was being written in Europe as the 19th century turned into the 20th, there had been a lot of turn of the century dread which imbues the text, and the story is not only presaging the politics that in the next few decades would unfurl across Europe on a huge scale, but also recounting what was already there, fomenting, and it feels relevant to now, because that stuff never fully went away, just was a bit less prominent for a bit, wakes up every so often to drink some blood and when it is fed enough, goes on the rampage, and here we are.
In the Bram Stoker story, the big threat is that Count Dracula is vamping all the nice ladies, and then those ladies are eating children, and that’s not very respectable is it, and also there aren’t enough nice ladies alive for all the men to marry. Whereas in the Swedish story, the threat is to the entire world order.
And what better way to get a political message out there than hitch it to a serialised vampire gothic horror?
Now, these texts raise a lot of questions, such as:
What’s the identity of the author of the Swedish book? Were the Powers of Darkness versions pulling from Bram Stoker’s notes and unpublished drafts? If so, how did they get hold of them? Did Bram Stoker sanitise the content, taking out the stuff that was sexy, political and racist, because it would have been controversial and he might not have been able to publish, but the Scandinavians didn’t have that fear?
Coming up on the show are some people who have spent a lot of time and effort seeking answers, but I also have more questions:
Why are cover songs and remixes considered normal, film and tv remakes similarly unremarkable, but not books? And, fan fiction is often not a respected form of literature - but why is that? Taking what you like and doing something else with it is creative. It’s a collaborative act to go, “Cool story about a dude trapped in an evil guy’s castle, but how about we make it a bit more raunchy? And political? And taking the piss out of the British?”
Tune in next time and we’ll go deeper into this Draculation.
Regarding the Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation of Dracula, my erstwhile podcolleague Jenny Owen Youngs and I talked about it on my husband’s podcast Song By Song, a show which is about the music of Tom Waits but we covered that film because Tom Waits plays Renfield in it. So check that out on the Song By Song podfeed, and also Jenny appeared on the Allusionist talking about vampire stuff with her Buffering the Vampire Slayer cohost Kristin Russo, in the Bufflusionist episode.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
nutation, noun, 1: a periodic variation in the inclination of an axis of rotation, especially that causing the earth's precession to follow a wavy rather than a circular path. 2, botany: the circular swaying movement of the tip of a growing shoot.
Try using ‘nutation’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by singer and composer Martin Austwick, hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and Bandcamp.
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