The Folklore of Discworld

in a blood-filled coffin, staked, and decapitated.
    And then, in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared, presenting the sinister but elegantly seductive Count, his female victims, and three erotic female vampires. Stoker stole the Count’s name from the real-life Vlad Dracul, also known as Vlad Tepes the Impaler, one of the great warrior-princes of Romanian history, who in his native country is respectfully remembered as a hero, and is never, never thought of as a vampire. Stoker also adopted many details from East European folklore. For over a hundred years now, the Dracula figure and its variants have been fixed in modern popular mythology – fangs, swirling black cloaks with red linings, brocaded waistcoats, a haughty manner, and an escort of bats, rats, and wolves.
    On Discworld, the Count de Magpyr is a magnificent example of the aristocratic vampire, sprung from an ancient family whose motto is Carpe Jugulum , ‘Go for the Jugular’. His son Vlad is very much the dandy; his daughter Lacrimosa is a thin girl in a white dress, with very long black hair and far too much eye make-up. Their home is a castle on a crag in Uberwald, complete with sinister ancestral portraits. One of these shows Aunt Carmilla, a far more savage figure than Le Fanu’s heroine of the same name; she used to bathe in the blood of up to two hundred virgins at a time, just as the real-life Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory was rumoured to do. It was a good cosmetic. There is also the portrait of the old Count de Magpyr (father of the present one, and remembered by some as ‘Old Red Eyes’):
    A bald head. Dark-rimmed, staring eyes. Two teeth like needles, two ears like batwings, fingernails that hadn’t been trimmed for years …
    That’s something known on this world too. That’s Nosferatu, perhaps the most terrifying vampire in the history of the cinema, as created in 1922.
    But the current Count de Magpyr is adapting to modern times. To the fury of his servant Igor, whose attitude can be described as more-gothic-than-thou, he and his family wear full evening dress in the evenings only, not all the time, as his father the old Count did; the rest of the time, it’s fancy waistcoats for the men and lacy skirts for the women. In the castle, squeaky door-hinges must now be oiled, guttering candles removed, spiders chased out of the dungeons. There must be no black plumes on the coach or its horses – coaches looking like hearses are not at all cool.
    The Count’s aim is to train his family, little by little, to overcome all the taboos which limit a vampire’s freedom, and which are only cultural conditioning – a conditioning which, strangely, seems to be much the same on the Discworld and the Earth. He believes that with a little effort and practice, modern vampires could and should learn to drink … wine, go out in sunlight, cross running water, eat garlic-flavoured canapés, bear the touch of holy water, and look at any sacred symbol without wincing. By and large, the plan seems to be succeeding. But they still can’t enter a house unless invited.
    As was noted above, quite a number of Discworld vampires hope to become integrated into society as a whole, and so have joined the Uberwald League of Temperance; members have forsworn the drinking of human blood – or, as they prefer to call it, ‘the b-word’. They carry their badge, a small twist of shiny black ribbon, and gather regularly in mutual support groups for a nice singsong with cocoa and a bun. One Black Ribboner is Otto Chriek, a brilliant iconographer on the staff of the Ankh-Morpork Times . He dresses as the cinematic stereotype requires, and speaks (when he wants to) with a thick Uberwald accent – deliberately so, to make people laugh. That way, no one fears him, or hates him. Since Otto personally has not overcome his hereditary allergy to strong light, he suffers intensely whenever he has to use a flash, sometimeseven crumbling to dust. He carries a card for such emergencies:
    DO NOT BE ALARMED . The former bearer of this card has suffered a minor accident. You vill need a drop of blood from any species, and a dustpan and brush. [ The Truth ]
    If some kind person dribbles a drop or two from, say, a piece of raw steak on to the dust, it mushrooms up into the air, becomes a mass of coloured flecks, and once again is Otto Chriek.
    From the information so far available, it looks as if all Discworld vampires become such either by their genetics, or by being