Nosferatu (legendary figure)
Nosferatu is the legendary name of an alleged special species of vampires in Romania . Such a being does not exist in the actual Romanian vampire belief.
Origin of the term
The term was first used by the Scottish travel writer Emily Gerard in her book The Land beyond the Forest. Facts and Fancies from Transsylvania (Edinburgh and New York 1888) mentioned and translated as undead . She had already reported in a magazine three years earlier about the folk beliefs of the people of Transylvania . Your descriptions were used by Bram Stoker for his novel Dracula (1897) as a source of information. In the 16th chapter of the novel the name of Abraham Van Helsing is used. Finally, in the 18th chapter, the abilities and weaknesses of Nosferatu are described. Due to the film adaptation of the novel under the title Nosferatu by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1922), the term became well known, although it hardly plays a role in the film. Since the vampire boom of the 1990s, the alleged vampire type Nosferatu has appeared in various vampire manuals and vampire lexicons and seems to have been enriched with all kinds of imaginative properties by some authors. Amazingly, the specialist authors (in chronological order: Summers , Senn, Perkowski and Kreuter) do not know this variant of the vampire because it does not appear in Romanian folk mythology. The term cannot be found in Romanian etymological dictionaries either.
Emily Gerard was married to an officer of the imperial and royal cavalry of Polish origin who was stationed in Temesvar . Because she was interested in the country and its people, she made frequent trips to neighboring Transylvania , also known as Transylvania . In view of her inadequate knowledge of Romanian (part of the local population) and Hungarian (imperial and imperial monarchy), she used an interpreter who probably did not translate the statements of the Romanians questioned about their popular beliefs verbatim. It can be assumed that the author addressed the educated Romanians, that is, the Greek Orthodox clergy. From them she learned about the belief in a demonic being, whose name she noted as Nosferatu and which she associated with the vampire belief as she interpreted it, namely as a special type of bloodsucker . It is unclear where Emily Gerard got the individual components of her description of the Nosferatu. It seems that she fused various fragments that she had collected into a vampire picture that corresponded to Romanian beliefs only to a very limited extent. She wanted to write a bestseller, not a folkloric treatise, and to that end she was forced to cater to contemporary reader tastes. In travel reports about peoples who were far removed from civilization from a European point of view - both on the fringes of Europe and overseas - the audience expected the description of bizarre or terrifying customs and beliefs, and Emily Gerard's description of a ludicrous vampire belief corresponded to the picture that the British wanted to make of the "land behind the woods".
Origin of the term
The word component No-, which was reminiscent of Latin prefixes, led Emily Gerard to assume that the translation should be 'Un-Toter'. However, as in Latin, the correct Romanian prefix is Ne- .
- On the one hand, one can assume that Nosferatu is the demon Nosophoros , ' plague-bringer ' of Greek folk mythology. Gordon Melton assumes that the term was spread by the Orthodox Church in Romania and was converted into nesufur'atu , as knowledge of the Greek language was widespread among clergymen .
- Linguistically more probable is the explanation that the term Nosferatu came about through a misunderstanding due to a lack of Romanian language skills on the part of Emily Gerard. In the Romanian of Transylvania at that time , Nesuferitu was a paraphrase for the devil (literally 'the one who cannot be endured / unbearable / avoidable'), composed of the prefix Ne- 'not' and suferit (infinitive: a suferi ' to endure', 'to stand out '). In the modern Romanian language, the term is still in use, even if it no longer has to be associated with Satan, but can only stand for a cursed person.
The Nosferatu in other cultures
The only thing the Nosferatu has in common with the vampire of the Romanian popular belief (Romanian: strigoi ) is that of spreading epidemics, because in contrast to the image of the vampire spread outside the Balkans, its damaging activities are not limited to sucking blood and creating new vampires. Other properties that are ascribed to Nosferatu did not arise from Romanian popular belief, but from the imagination of European and American authors, who essentially contributed to the general image of Nosferatu in Western culture.
The image of Nosferatu shown in most media was significantly influenced by the film role models Max Schreck in Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu - Phantom of the Night and is found mainly in role-playing games , especially in the now discontinued Vampire: The Masquerade or Vampires from the Old World from the White Wolf company , but also the follow-up publication Vampire: The Requiem , use. In other publications it is said: “The Nosferatu also differs externally in many ways from the 'normal' vampire. In contrast to the vampire, who is elegantly dressed and eloquent, the Nosferatu walks dressed in rags, is bald, hunchbacked, ugly and can hardly speak. It is also noticeable that as 'bite teeth' it does not have enlarged canine teeth, but rather sharpened incisors above and below (rodent-like). Accordingly, its symbolic animal is not the wolf or the black dog , but the rat, which is associated with its quality as a plague. ”However, this characterization - including the description of the“ true ”vampire - does not exist in this form in Southeastern European popular belief.
literature
- Peter Mario Kreuter: The vampire belief in Southeast Europe. Studies on genesis, meaning and function. Romania and the Balkans , Weidler, Berlin 2001, ISBN 978-3-89693-709-4 (dissertation University of Bonn 2001, 218 pages).
- J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclodepia of the Undead , Detroit - London 1999, pp. 496-497.
- Jan Perkowski, The Romanian Folkloric Vampire, in The Vampire: A Casebook , edited by A. Dundes. Madison, Wisconsin, USA 1988, pp. 35-46.
- Harry Senn, Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania , New York 1982.
- Montague Summers , The Vampire in Lore and Legend , Toronto 2001 (first under the title The Vampire in Europe , London 1929).
Individual evidence
- ↑ The passages relating to Nosferatu from Mrs. Gerard's 1885 article are reprinted by Leonard Wolf (editor), Dracula. The Connoisseur's Guide, New York 1997, pp. 21-22.
- ↑ On the Greek root word νοσόφορος or νοσήφορος cf. Franz Passow: Concise Dictionary of the Greek Language , Leipzig 1852, Volume II.1, p. 363 (2nd column, 1st line).
- ↑ NESUFERIT - Definiția din DEX . In: Archeus.ro - Resurse lingvistice pentru limba română