Hungarian roots

An interest in vampires can be hard to suppress, at least for some of us. In the foreword to a masters thesis on the Hungarian roots of Nosferatu, Csaba Ljendel traces his interest back to 1996 when as a freshman studying medicine in Vienna he got interested in illnesses that might be connected with the subject of vampires. After some time he stopped studying medicine and got a job in the Austrian police, which allowed him to later on go back to the university to study Hungarology - and vampires! This year he then submitted his thesis (Magisterarbeit), which can be found on the internet via the above link.

Found and seen

Behind these doors the reading room of the Danish Rigsarkiv is located, an archive where one can find e.g. documents relating to diplomatic and government affairs going back centuries. I was there earlier today, spending a few hours looking for, finding and perusing a couple of 18th Century documents referring to vampires, or either Wampyres or Vampyres to use the two ways of spelling the word that I encountered in the documents. Well, I found nothing fundamentally new, but the documents do add some extra facets to the history of vampires.

Vampire theses

A few people have written an academical thesis on vampires and related topics over the past years. In the above photo Stefan Grothe's Ph.D. thesis Der Einfluß der Seuchen auf die Entstehung des Vampirmythos im Spiegel der Leipziger Vampirdebatte 1725-1734 (The Influence of Epidemics on the Rise of the Vampire Myth as reflected in the Leipzig Vampire Debate of 1725-1734, 2001) is placed on top of Peter Mario Kreuter's Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa (The Vampire Belief in South East Europe, 2001). Some theses have been reworked into books: Bruce A. McClelland's Slayers and their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead (2006) and David Keyworth's Troublesome Corpses: Vampires & Revenants From Antiquity to the Present (2007). More will no doubt follow in the years to come.