by Hans De Roos
“Without doubt, for the largest part it is worthless rubbish and sometimes even worse than worthless, completely devoid of poetry and beauty and far removed from any psychological truth.”
“Fjallkonan” presented various kinds of garbage, including a long story, “Powers of Darkness.” That story would have been better left unwritten, and I cannot see that such nonsense has enriched our literature.25
Valdimar, on the other hand, promoting the liberalization of trade relations with England,26 hoped to connect his readers with the newest literary trends from the U.K. and attract more subscribers to his newspaper. Publishing Makt Myrkranna was part of Valdimar’s strategy to offer more quality content to his readers, at the same time raising the subscription price from 3 to 4 Crowns.27
After Valdimar’s early death at age 50, in April 1902, Bríet took over the management of Fjallkonan. The first edition of Makt Myrkranna, originally planned as a bonus present for new subscribers, was sold off; copies of this book are extremely hard to get today, as most of them are in the hands of universities or public libraries.28
Two copies of the first book edition, 1901 (collection of the author)
Despite the lack of positive reviews, Makt Myrkranna seems to have penetrated the Icelandic cultural consciousness. When Tod Browning’s Dracula was shown in Reykjavík in 1932, a newspaper announced the movie as “based on the fiction story of ‘Makt Myrkranna’ which has been published in an Icelandic translation that will be familiar to many people.” Similarly, Vísir of 18 December wrote under the title Dracula: “Nýja Bió has recently shown a movie with this name, which is based on the story ‘Makt Myrkranna,’” a comment suggesting that the story of the bloodthirsty Transylvanian count was originally invented in Iceland and that the Americans had copied it. Over the decades, “Makt Myrkranna” has become in Iceland the standard nomenclature for all sorts of Dracula films, showing that Valdimar’s book was much better known than can be judged from Benedikt’s single review. Maybe due to the general recognition of the title, Hogni Publishers launched a second edition in 1950.
In 1975, Halldór Laxness, the Icelandic Nobel Prize winner for Literature who was fascinated by the Dracula myth, urged:
And do not forget Makt Myrkranna (Bram Stoker) with the famous un-dead Count Dracula in the Carpathians, which was not less popular than today, and one of the best pens of the country was engaged to translate the novel: Valdimar Ásmundsson (ed. 1901).29
But: was Valdimar Ásmundsson really only the translator of the story? Until Ásgeir Jónsson, the editor of the third Icelandic edition, in 2011 addressed the deviations from the text of Dracula, only two scattered lines in the Icelandic press indicated that anyone had noted a difference between English and the Icelandic plot lines at all.30
For those who know Dracula, Makt Myrkranna awaits with some major surprises. The most obvious one is that the account of Harker’s trip to Transylvania has been expanded from approx. 22,700 words in Dracula to approx. 37,200 words in Makt Myrkranna—a 63% increase in length. The rest of the story, on the other hand, has been cut down from 137,860 words to only 9,100—a 93% reduction. This massive shift of proportions alone forbids calling Makt Myrkranna an “abridged translation” of Dracula. The Transylvanian part has not been shortened at all, while the rest of the story has shrunk to a mere coda. We can only speculate about the “why.” Maybe Valdimar was working from a proto-version of Dracula that Stoker never worked out to the end. Maybe he lost his patience with Stoker’s lengthy story, which had been filling his magazine for over a year, and thus decided to speed up the final part. We know that in the 1980s, the 1897 typescript for Dracula was found in a barn in Pennsylvania, with the first 100 pages missing;31 it has been speculated that these contained a more elaborate start of the novel, eventually worked out as the short story Dracula’s Guest, published by Bram’s widow in 1914. There may have existed other, still earlier, drafts for Dracula, based on the notes Stoker made from March 1890 on.
The second major difference between Dracula and Makt Myrkranna is that in Part II, the epistolary format—which often has been considered Dracula’s outstanding characteristic—has been abandoned. In Dracula, the story unfolds through a series of diaries, newspaper reports, and letters, usually penned by the novel’s main characters. But in the Icelandic version, we are guided through the story by an all-knowing narrator. This is a major deviation from Stoker’s initial concept, and also from the Icelandic preface, which states “otherwise I leave the manuscript unchanged”—which can only mean that the author merely wishes to introduce a manuscrit trouvé, written by the people playing a role in the story, without giving up the epistolary structure. Although for the understanding of the plot, this change of format does not matter much, it forces the reader to wonder whether Stoker stepped away from the diary format himself, or if Valdimar was responsible for this.
The plot of Makt Myrkranna also contains new elements, while large parts of the Whitby and London episodes have been omitted and the chase of the whole party across Europe, through Moldavia and Transylvania, has been cut out completely.
In Dracula, Harker’s only company during his visit to Castle Dracula is the Count himself, except for a short interlude with three provocative female vampires. In Makt Myrkranna, the young lawyer (here named Thomas) is welcomed to the castle by a mysterious old woman acting as the Count’s housekeeper. Soon after, a seductive blonde vampire girl starts to play a major role in Harker’s desperate existence; their repeated secret meetings become ever more intimate and the prudish Englishman proves to be more than just a passive victim. Moreover, the Count shows Harker a gallery with family portraits, granting insight to the Transylvanian’s social-Darwinist philosophy and providing a rich sub-plot of intrigue, passion, adultery, and revenge—seemingly inspired by the life of Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s wife. During his explorations of the castle in Makt Myrkranna, Harker discovers a murdered peasant girl and a secret passageway leading to a hidden temple, where he witnesses an archaic sacrificial ceremony headed by the Count himself. Instead of being a mere solitary relic of medieval war times, as was Stoker’s Count, Thomas Harker’s host not only commands a large crowd of ape-like devotees but also finances and masterminds an international diplomatic conspiracy, aiming to overthrow Western democratic institutions. In the London part of the story, the Count, acting under various pseudonyms, also entertains a large number of high-ranking guests in his lavishly furnished Carfax residence, where he is always surrounded by the most stunning and elegant young women.
Intriguingly, the end of the Icelandic story almost runs parallel to the later stage and movie versions. This also applies to the more elegant public appearance of the Count—vampire cape included. More research would be needed to understand how Makt Myrkranna could anticipate changes made by playwright Hamilton Deane and screenwriter John Balderston a quarter of a century later. Despite the shortened ending, the second part of Makt Myrkranna also introduces a series of new characters, including Lucy’s uncle Morton, Hawkins’s agent Tellet, and the police detective Barrington. Various foreign aristocrats, such as Prince Koromezzo, Countess Ida Varkony and Madame Saint Amand, also make an appearance, while Dracula’s Renfield character and Mina’s “blood-wedding” with the Count are eliminated.
But even more than the changed format, the added events, and the extra characters, the altered style of the novel seems the most significant innovation to me. In the Icelandic text we find no legal discourses nor lengthy sentimental dialogues; instead, it features a number of virtually denuded young girls, absent in Stoker’s Dracula and other texts.32 Moreover, there are several elements added from the Icelandic sagas, with which Valdimar was far more familiar than Stoker; I suspect that Valdimar included these references himself and some of them are so subtle that only someone familiar with Norse literature would recognize them. The overall change of style is so obvious, however, that we may safely assume that Valdimar must have shaped the Icelandic narrative to a high ex
tent, instead of merely translating.
An extra bonus in this translation is the chapter that was published in Fjallkonan of 13 October 1900 but left out of the 1901 book printing and its second and third editions. This episode focuses on Harker’s emotional dependency on the nameless blonde vampire girl who occupies the castle’s top floor. We do not know why it was omitted later—or why it was even written in the first place: it has no equivalent in Dracula and more or less interrupts Harker’s account of the legal studies he has taken up in the Count’s library. More than any other chapter, however, it shows Harker’s feelings and his strong attachment to his fiancée, named Wilma here, while he is being drawn toward the indescribably gorgeous girl against his will. In this sense, Makt Myrkranna is a stronger love story than Dracula, where vows and prayers replace real intimacy. Although in Stoker’s original, Jonathan Harker is initially thrilled by the vampire ladies, after his first encounter with them he is only disgusted, and he sees the Count as his savior for interrupting their seductive advances. His counterpart Thomas in the Icelandic version, however, constantly longs to be reunited with the fair-skinned temptress and allows her to embrace and kiss him time and time again, and even sit on his lap; in these and in other scenes, the women in the story seem to be attractive to the point of being irresistible—there are no traces of the physical revulsion expressed in Dracula and in Stoker’s later novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1911). A strange complicity unites Thomas and the slender sylph in their joint resistance against the Icelandic Count, who appears as a punishing father figure separating the romantic couple. Physically, the King of Vampires seems to be no direct threat to Thomas—at least not a willing one.33 The acts of biting and drinking blood are undertaken by the ape-like minions, whose violence lacks the sophistication and discretion of their aristocratic overlord. We never surprise the Count with his teeth in someone else’s neck and after Lucia (Makt Myrkranna’s version of Lucy) dies (no bite marks having been noticed), he does not come after Wilma. The Count and his conspiracy seem not to aim at a bloody killing or two, but at overthrowing the democratic governments of Europe. The terror, in the Icelandic version, is less personal.
3. THE HINT AT THE RIPPER MURDERS
The preface to Makt Myrkranna, signed with Stoker’s initials “B.S.,” seems to confirm that the author of Dracula generally approved of this alternative edition and was familiar with at least some of the major new plot elements. The comment about remarkable foreigners playing a dazzling role in London’s aristocratic circles, for example, does not match the plot of Dracula, but exactly fits the—modified—Icelandic version: it points to the foreign guests involved in the Count’s political conspiracy, driving around town in eye-catching carriages, showing off their jewelry and enjoying amorous liaisons in the highest circles of power.
The part of the Makt Myrkranna preface that received the most attention from Dracula scholars is the remark about the Ripper murders. In Dalby’s translation:
But the events are incontrovertible, and so many people know of them that they cannot be denied. This series of crimes has not yet passed from the memory—a series of crimes which appear to have originated from the same source, and which at the same time created as much repugnance in people everywhere as the murders of Jack the Ripper, which came into the story a little later. Various people’s minds will go back to the remarkable group of foreigners who for many seasons together played a dazzling part in the life of the aristocracy here in London; and some will remember that one of them disappeared suddenly without apparent reason, leaving no trace.
These words have puzzled Dracula experts for decades, as Dracula never mentions the Ripper. In fact, it describes no coherent series of crimes that—as this preface suggests—might have caused widespread concern, as the Ripper Murders did. In Whitechapel of the late 1880s, women were warned not leave their homes alone after dark; vigilante troops patrolled the street, inspecting the narrow alleys, which were not gaslit, as today’s movies might have you believe, but simply dark and deserted. Newspapers competed to present the grisliest details, the latest drops of blood splattered on the walls of London’s East End, and launched ever-new speculations about the “butcher” terrorizing “women of the unfortunate class.”
In Dracula, we are confronted with the demise of the Demeter crew and with the deaths of Mr. Swales, Renfield, Lucy and her mother. But in the eyes of the police and the general public, these events all seem completely unrelated.34 Why, then, would Stoker have added this puzzling reference to the Makt Myrkranna preface?
Dalby’s translation suggests that the Ripper Murders appear in the novel “a little later,” that is, somewhere after the preface. As a result, many Dracula scholars have started to search for obscured references to the Ripper Murders in the text of Dracula. But Dalby’s translation is incorrect, and moreover, to understand what the Icelandic preface hints at, we should read the text of Makt Myrkranna, not that of Dracula.
Instead of “the murders of Jack the Ripper, which came into the story a little later,” the preface speaks of “the murders of Jack the Ripper, which happened a little later.” This means that “this series of crimes [that] has not yet passed from the memory” is a series of slayings that started before the Ripper Murders, and in their time (not “at the same time”—another error in the Dalby translation) also caused terror with the public, and in the imagination of the London population seemed to be connected with the Whitechapel homicides. Which crime series can be meant here?
In Makt Myrkranna, Harker’s Journal of 8 May describes how the Count discusses a London crime spree and refers in particular to “these crimes, these horrible murders, those slaughtered women, found in the Thames, drifting in sacks; this blood that runs—runs and flows—with no murderer to be found.” Beyond a reasonable doubt, this highly specific reference can only point to the unsolved “Thames Torso Murders” (1887-89), also known as the “Thames Mysteries” or “Embankment Murders”:
Evidence that a killer was at work first showed up in May of 1887, in the Thames River Valley village of Rainham, when workers pulled from the river a bundle containing the torso of a female. Throughout May and June, numerous parts from the same body showed up in various parts of London – until a complete body, minus head and upper chest, was reconstructed. (….)
The second victim of the Thames series was discovered in September of 1888, in the middle of the hunt for the Whitechapel Murderer. On September 11, an arm belonging to a female was discovered in the Thames off Pimlico. On September 28, another arm was found along the Lambeth-road and on October 2, the torso of a female, minus the head, was discovered.35
Bottom left: The first trunk of a young woman found in the Thames near Rainham, on 28 May 1887. Further body parts were found in the course of 1887. Right: On 2 October 1888, during construction of the Metropolitan Police’s new headquarters on the Victoria Embankment near Whitehall (Westminster), a worker found a parcel containing human remains. Newspapers suggested a connection to the Whitechapel Murders, but the police linked the crime with the Rainham Mystery.
These “Thames Mysteries” indeed triggered as much public unrest as the Ripper Murders were to cause one year later. And when female torsos were found at the construction site of Scotland Yard(!) in October 1888 and under a railway arch in Whitechapel in September 1889, some newspapers suggested that one and the same perpetrator could be responsible for both series of crimes. Although no more details of the Thames Torso Murders are given in the London part of Makt Myrkranna, it is not hard to imagine that the Count’s London vampire coven, abducting fresh victims for their satanic rituals, disposed of the dead bodies by dumping them into the river—especially if the Count’s Carfax house was located in London-Plaistow (as in Stoker’s original concept), not far away from Rainham, where the first Torso Murder victim was found. If nothing else, the fact that the murderer could not be found seems to comfort Valdimar’s Count, who apparently relishes the idea that in the darkness and fog of London’s
streets, his own crimes may go unsolved.
The “canonical” Ripper Murders took place from May–November 1888, but when on 10 September 1889 a female torso, wrapped in some sacking, the belly cut up, was found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel, about 1,000 meters from the Thames, it was speculated that the Ripper had returned, although the police categorized the crime as one of the Thames Mysteries. Some newspapers speculated that the Whitechapel Murders and the Thames Mysteries might have been committed by the same murderer, using different ways to dispose of his victims. This is the basis for the remark in the Icelandic preface about the discussed murders seemingly stemming from the same root as the Ripper Murders.
Last but not least, the preface’s mention of the secret police only makes sense in the context of the international political scandal that must have followed the uncovering of the Count’s machinations—a plot point unique to Makt Myrkranna and another indication that Stoker was aware of the planned innovations.36
4. THE NAMES OF THE NEW CHARACTERS
A further clue that seems to confirm that Bram Stoker actively participated in reshaping his vampire novel lies in the names of the newly added characters. Some names could easily have been created by Valdimar, inspired by wordplay or geography.37 The names of the police detective, Barrington, and Hawkins’s assistant, Tellet, however, seem a bit too particular to have been randomly invented by an Icelandic author. My guess would be that, like other names appearing in Dracula, these designations may have been borrowed from people Stoker knew.