Powers of Darkness

by Hans De Roos

  Bram was a close friend of Thomas Hall Caine, Manx author and Icelandic enthusiast. Dracula (1897) was dedicated “To my dear friend Hommy-Beg”, Caine’s nickname (Little Tommy) in the vernacular of the Isle of Man. Caine’s popular novel The Bondman (1890), partially set in Iceland, was completed and published in serial installments before Caine spent two months in Iceland in 1889. He would return fourteen years later to study the details he was to describe later in The Prodigal Son (1904). Another contemporary in direct contact with Bram Stoker and Hall Caine who also traveled to Iceland, H. Rider Haggard, was a prolific writer of adventure fiction including the Viking epic Eric Brighteyes (1890).

  An associate of Hall Caine, well-known writer/artist /designer William Morris, traveled to Iceland twice in the early 1870s. Morris taught himself Icelandic, as did others fascinated by its linguistic purity, and collaborated with Eiríkr Magnússon in translating many of Iceland’s tales into English, including The Saga Library (1891). The work of Hans de Roos and his team of native speakers harkens back to Magnússon’s description of Morris’s care in proper translation, “he would on no account slur over them by giving in the translation only what they meant instead of what they said.”3 Publications of Morris’s Icelandic to English translations were regularly reviewed—with literary critics generally quite complimentary of Morris’s skill as a translator. According to Caine biographer Vivien Allen, “Morris was important to him, not least in introducing him to Icelandic sagas.”

  Because for years Bram traveled extensively in the British Isles and America with Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre company, he likely had few opportunities for personal adventure travel. But anecdotal evidence and circumstantial connections lead me to believe he could not have been immune to the influences of the Icelandophiles who surrounded him.

  I feel safe in saying Bram was not only aware of the differences between Dracula and the Icelandic edition, Makt Myrkranna—I believe he orchestrated them. The deviations from the 1897 Constable edition cannot result from translation errors or even from a liberal interpretation of the original alone: the changes are too significant. The Icelandic preface and the modified plot are interconnected in a way that points towards Bram writing both. In my opinion, Makt Myrkranna is another version or draft of Dracula, written by Bram sometime during the 1890s. I don’t believe it was originally written for the Icelandic market, but I can well imagine that Bram used the translation process as an opportunity to make Makt Myrkranna unique and more relevant to Icelandic interests. “Powers of Darkness”—a different title for a different book. Not “Dracula,” or “Drakula.”

  It is a pity that for whatever reason Makt Myrkranna comes across as raw—an unfinished project. It seems as though Bram (or Valdimar, or both) drew out Part I—the details of Harker’s travel to and ordeals in Dracula’s Castle—but never fleshed out the story in Part II. Part II reads like an outline of the characters’ movements and conversations on stage, left undeveloped as the author(s) hastily brought it all to a conclusion. Bram’s outline in the Rosenbach Notes for Dracula shows the story’s balanced division into four “Books”: “Transylvania to London,” “Tragedy,” “Discovery,” and “Punishment,” each with seven chapters. Why was Makt Myrkranna published in what seems to me to be an unfinished state? Sadly, we may never know. But, the revelation that Makt Myrkranna is not Dracula warrants a fresh look at other early translations of Bram’s work.

  The future may well hold further significant discoveries relating to Dracula, but I believe De Roos’s efforts will stand as a milestone in the never-ending succession of curious and well-directed inquiry on the subject. Admittedly, his discovery of the unique character of the Icelandic edition of Dracula creates more questions than can possibly be answered at this point. But regardless of its history, the story as such—now accessible to English-speaking readers for the first time—has a great literary appeal of its own. Let us enjoy the fruit of Hans’s labor, revel in the challenges it presents, and allow this work to inspire and illuminate further endeavors. The depth of mystery surrounding Stoker’s Gothic thriller increases through every age, and the resurrection of Makt Myrkranna illustrates another example of Dracula’s immortality.

  INTRODUCTION

  MAKT MYRKRANNA: THE FORGOTTEN BOOK

  by Hans C. de Roos

  1. BRAM STOKER AND VALDIMAR ÁSMUNDSSON

  FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, THE LANGUAGE BARRIER between Iceland and the rest of the world has prevented readers from enjoying the unique work presented here—an early and significant variation on Bram Stoker’s world famous Dracula, rather more than just a translation into Icelandic by one of the country’s foremost literary talents, Valdimar Ásmundsson. Partly due to the rarity of the book, it has remained hidden to even the most versed scholars. Valdimar’s1 life and work are virtually unknown outside of Iceland. And even in his home country, no one ever studied how Stoker’s vampire story, only a few years after its first publication, made its way to the Far North.

  Jóhann Valdimar Ásmundsson was born in 1852 and grew up with his parents in Þistilfjörður2—a remote bay in the very northeast of Iceland. He was largely self-educated and taught himself English, German and French, aside from Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and some Latin and Greek. Bram Stoker, by contrast, had the privilege of studying at Trinity College in Dublin from 1864-1870, but after receiving a B.A. with honors in mathematics, he had to enter work life as a civil servant at Dublin Castle, where his father worked as well: three of Bram’s brothers studied at the Royal College of Surgeons, and Bram’s income was needed to support the family. Despite these different backgrounds, both Valdimar and Bram started out as journalists in the 1870s. Valdimar wrote his first articles for Norðanfara, a newspaper in Akureyri in the north of Iceland, published by Björn Jónsson, who would become publisher/editor of Ísafold,3 while Bram volunteered to write theatre reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail, co-owned by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the author of Carmilla. After writing a rapturous review of Henry Irving’s performance as Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1876, Bram met with the actor—a meeting that would change his life and career. In 1878 Irving invited him to come to London and become the manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which the actor intended to lease. Some years later, Valdimar also moved south: in winter 1882 he became a teacher at Flensborg School in Hafnarfjörður—one of the oldest schools in Iceland still in existence today.4 During these early years he created a very popular and widely used grammar book, Ritreglur, just like Stoker, during his years at Dublin Castle, had written The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879), a detailed professional handbook that also would become a standard in its field. And just like Bram, Valdimar finally moved to the “big city,” to Reykjavík—although London had quite different dimensions than the Icelandic capital.

  In the 1880s, London, the political and cultural center of the global British Empire, already had a population of 4 million, with another million inhabiting its outskirts. Reykjavík, by contrast, had only 3,000 to 4,000 residents; its center was tiny, with only one main street, so that the paths of the local officials, teachers and other intellectuals must have crossed every other day. But just like Bram Stoker started meeting people of the highest London circles, who came to admire the Shakespeare plays revived by Irving, the most celebrated actor of his time, so Valdimar set up shop in the local center of power. In February 1884, he founded the newspaper Fjallkonan (“Lady of the Mountains”), referring to a mythical figure symbolizing the Icelandic nation.5 Fjallkonan focused on political and cultural news, summarized the foreign press, reviewed books and published obituaries, boat schedules, and advertisements. It became one of Iceland’s leading newspapers, with around 2,000 subscribers. It positioned itself as the champion of farmers and traders, supporting Iceland’s independence, free trade, better education, and technical progress.6

  Center of Reykjavík in 1915 (detail)—map by Ólafur Thorsteinsson. Black star: Old office of Fjallkonan at Veltusund 3. White star: Thi
ngholtsstræti 18. Nr. 1: Government House. Nr. 2: Dómkirkja. Nr. 3: Latin School. Nr. 4: Alþingishús + National Library 1881-1908. Nr. 5: Reykjavík Pharmacy. Nr. 6: Good Templar House (promoting abstinence from alcohol and cursing). Nr. 7: Police Office. Nr. 8: Iðnó Theatre, built in 1897. Nr. 9: Children’s School, after 1898 (formerly in Posthússtræti). Nr. 10: K.F.U.M. = Kristilegt félag ungra manna = Y.M.C.A. Nr. 11: Gutenbergprentsmiðja. Nr. 12: Félagsprentsmiðja (where Fjallkonan was printed in the 1890’s). Nr. 13: Nathan & Ólsen (store). Nr. 14: Post Office. Nr. 15: Ísafoldarprentsmiðja. Nr. 16: Albert Thorvaldsen Statue. Nr. 17: Hotel Reykjavík (burnt down in April 1915). Nr. 18: Sáfnahús (National Library and Museum, after 1908). Nr. 19: National Bank, rebuilt after the fire of 1915. Nr. 20: Gamla Bíó (cinema, 1906-1925, before moving to Ingólfsstræti 2a). Nr. 21: Bárubúð or Báruhús: Meeting House.

  In 1888, Valdimar married Bríet Bjarnhéðinsdóttir, one of Iceland’s first women’s rights activists and founder of Kvennablaðið, the first Icelandic women’s magazine. Internationally, voting rights and public education for women were among the most controversial political issues of the day; in Dublin, Bram’s mother Charlotte had been fighting for the same goals.

  In November 1890, Valdimar and Bríet bought a two-story stone house at Thingholtsstræti no. 18, somewhat farther away from the new House of Parliament (built 1881-82) but nearer to several printing companies. While Bram had his workplace in the London Strand and lived in the fashionable Chelsea area, Valdimar and Bríet were now settled in the “Fleet Street of Reykjavík.”7 Business was not the only reason for the relocation, though: in 1890, their daughter Laufey was born, followed by her little brother Héðinn in 1892. Bram Stoker and Florence Balcombe, who had married already in 1878 before moving to London, only had one child, Noel, born on the last day of 1879. Noel would be boarded at Summer Fields School and later at Winchester College in Oxford, while Laufey and Héðinn remained with their parents and attended the Children’s School, later the Latin School, just a few footsteps from their home.

  Although both Valdimar and Bram successfully climbed the social ladder, the men also had a certain modesty in common. In a letter to the American poet Walt Whitman, Bram wrote: “I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self-control and am naturally secretive to the world.”8 Irving’s stage partner Ellen Terry noted that in the voluminous Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Bram Stoker “described every one connected with the Lyceum except himself.”9 And some of Stoker’s biographers remarked that the author of Dracula seemed to be overshadowed by his own creation.10 Similarly, Valdimar is often only remembered as the husband of Bríet, or as the editor of Fjallkonan at the most; his private life remained in the background. In his obituary, Valdimar’s intimate friend Jón Ólafsson wrote:

  He was a very reticent and reserved man, and sometimes almost seemed shy. And many who only knew him superficially thought that he was no emotional person, because he showed only little of his feelings. But those who were closer to him knew that this shy and distanced man was most entertaining in the small circle of his friends, cheery, playful and funny, and that his cool appearance as a closed individual was just a mask concealing a warm and sensitive heart—sensitive to all kinds of suffering, sensitive in his friendships, but above all things sensitive against all injustice and oppression and baseness.11

  Valdimar Ásmundsson, Briét Bjarnhéðinsdóttir and their children Laufey (l) and Héðinn (r), around 1900

  Ólafsson also stressed that Valdimar had acquired all his knowledge on his own, from a true desire to learn and understand. According to Ásgeir Jónsson, to a certain extent he always remained “the farmer boy from the North,” a “self-made man,”12 and did not seamlessly fit in with the Icelandic scholars of his time. Still, Valdimar became a recognized specialist for old Icelandic manuscripts, and in their obituaries of him, Jón Ólafsson and Bríet agree that he was believed to have no peers among his contemporaries. For the publisher Sigurður Kristjánsson he prepared an illustrated edition of Icelandic sagas in 38 volumes;13 these low-priced books secured a still wider spread of these old tales and eliminated the need to copy them by hand, as had been the tradition for centuries. Moreover, Valdimar became an expert for property border issues for lands that had been settled hundreds of years earlier. Because many of these official rulings had sunk into oblivion, Valdimar’s knowledge of old manuscripts was crucial in reconstructing the earlier decisions from ancient documents.14 From 1887 on, he also received a modest grant from the Icelandic Parliament to reorganize the government archives. Finally, he was a Trustee of the Icelandic Archeological Society (Hið íslenzka fornleifafélag, founded 1879) and edited its yearbook in the 1890s, and co-founded the Icelandic Association of Journalists (Blaðamannafélag) in November 1897, together with Bríet, Björn Jónsson, Jón Ólafsson and others.

  Although his tasks in the Society and the Association probably were unpaid, the other activities brought him some extra income, just as trading with old books did later.15 In 1895, he explained to his readers that producing a weekly newspaper with costs of 60-70 Crowns16 per issue—fees for writing and editing, not included—plus around 600 Crowns yearly for postage, was certainly not making him and his family rich, especially as the income from advertisements was lower than it was for comparable newspapers in the UK.17 The price for the house had been 7,000 Crowns and, starting on 14 May 1901, ten yearly mortgage payments of 320 Crowns were due to the previous owner, Arnbjörn Ólafsson. After that, there still were the old debts on the house that Valdimar had taken over.18

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Bram Stoker’s financial situation was not very rosy either. Although he had an extremely busy job as Irving’s manager, in 1890 he entered a partnership in The International Library, an imprint of Heinemann & Balestier Ltd. The enterprise failed; Stoker lost his invested capital. His investment in 20 shares of Paige Compositor Manufacturing Co., a technology to which his friend Mark Twain had bought all rights,19 also turned out to be a financial disaster. In June 1896, Bram was forced to borrow £600 from his best friend, Hall Caine, and was only able to pay him back by signing over a life insurance policy.20 Some time later, the golden times of the Lyceum Theatre seemed to come to an end. In December 1896 Irving badly hurt his knee and could not perform for ten weeks; this killed the winter season. In February 1898, the Lyceum storage at Bear Lane in Southwark burned out; the fire destroyed countless stage sets and props that were needed for the theatre’s regular productions. “But the tide must turn some time—otherwise the force would be not a tide but a current,” Stoker noted in his Reminiscences of Henry Irving some years later.21 In 1899, Irving fell ill with pleurisy, and the same year, he transferred the lease of the theatre to a consortium headed by Joseph Comyns Carr—without consulting Stoker. By this time, Irving’s manager hoped that a literary career might offer a financial safety net.

  Earning money with novels seemed not at all unrealistic at that time. Stoker’s American friend Twain had made a fortune with writing, before he lost everything with the Paige bankruptcy in 1894 and had to start all over again.22Through an international lecture tour about his work, Twain was able to generate fresh income and pay off all his debts by 1898. Hall Caine was also successful, especially with The Bondman, a novel set in Iceland, which Stoker had managed to bring to Heinemann as its first publishing project in 1890.

  Preface to Makt Myrkranna in the first installment in Fjallkonan, 13 January 1900

  2. DRACULA AND MAKT MYRKRANNA

  From 1890 on, Bram Stoker worked on Dracula and when the book was finally published on 26 May 1897, it was well received by the international press.23 While Stoker prepared an American edition (1899), then an abridged edition (1901) of his novel, in Reykjavík Valdimar Ásmundsson worked on the Icelandic version, to be serialized in his newspaper Fjallkonan as “Makt Myrkranna, by Bram Stoker.” It was only with the book edition published in August 1901 that the credit “translated by Valdimar Ásmundsson”
was added.

  Dracula only turned into a real hit after the 1931 movie with Bela Lugosi was released by Universal Pictures. Until then, it generated only a modest income for Bram and his family. After Bram’s death, Florence was confronted with Nosferatu, Werner Murnau’s unauthorized movie version, and bitterly pursued lawsuits against its production company Prana Film until it went bankrupt.

  Despite his legal background, Stoker failed to send a copy of his work to the United States Copyright Office in time to have his rights duly registered;24 when Universal started to negotiate with Florence Stoker about a second Dracula movie, Dracula’s Daughter, the material turned out to be unprotected. Dracula fell into the public domain in the U.S. and every script writer, film producer or theatre manager was free to make money with Stoker’s characters—an ironic twist of history, given how little money Stoker himself saw.

  But perhaps Stoker’s very mistake helped Dracula reach global fame; the many unauthorized screen adaptations made Stoker’s vampire character known to an ever-growing international public. More than 200 movies featuring the undead Count have by now been produced. Today, the secondary literature about Stoker’s creation is extensive enough to fill a small library. The Icelandic version, by contrast, was reviewed only once in the Icelandic press, in 1906, by Benedikt Björnsson (1879-1941). Björnsson was of a younger generation than Valdimar and feared that the translation of “cheap” sensational fiction from abroad might replace Iceland’s own literary production, including his own: