The Folklore of Discworld

bitten. Admittedly, one may suspect that the genes of the late Count Notfaroutoe were pretty reluctant to be activated in the unlikely DNA of his only remaining relative, his nephew Arthur Winkings, who was a coming man in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business. And Arthur was even more reluctant to receive them, as we learn in Reaper Man . But that’s how it goes – if you inherit the title and the estates, you get the coffin and the batwings too. Genetics, or a bite. Take your choice.
    On the Earth, this is true in the literary and cinematic mythology, but in European folklore there are plenty of other reasons why the dead become vampires. They may have lived an evil life, committed suicide, or practised black magic; they may have been conceived in sacrilege, their parents having had sex on a holy day; they may have been born with teeth, or a tail, or two hearts, 7 or a caul. In Romania, anyone with red hair and blue eyes is regarded as a potential vampire. In many parts of Europe, a corpse will become a revenant if it is left unburied, or buried secretly without proper rites. If it is laid out at home, it should be in a lighted room, and there should always be somebody keeping watch; no dog or cat should be allowed to jump on to or over it. Break any of these rules, and you will soon have a vampire in the village.
    And when you do, what do you do about it? As the Quite Reverend Oats, self-appointed Omnian missionary to Lancre, explained to Nanny Ogg,
    ‘It depends exactly where they’re from, I remember. Uberwald is a very big place. Er, cutting off the head and staking them in the heart is generally efficacious … in Splintz they die if you put a coin in their mouth and cut their head off … in Klotz they die if you stick a lemon in their mouth – after you cut their head off. I believe that in Glitz you have to fill their mouth with salt, hammer a carrot into both ears, and then cut off their head … And in the valley of the Ah they believe it’s best to cut off the head and boil it in vinegar … But in Kashncari they say you should cut off their toes and drive a nail through their neck.’
    ‘And cut their head off?’
    ‘Apparently you don’t have to.’ [ Carpe Jugulum ]
    Decapitation was the folk method in parts of Europe too, especially among Germans and western Slavs, with the addition that the severed head must be placed between the legs of the corpse, behind its buttocks, or below its feet – so that it couldn’t find it and put it back on. The southern Slavs preferred staking the corpse; Greeks cremated it, often cutting the heart out first; Russians would throw it into a lake or river. Danes staked revenants; medieval Icelanders beheaded and/or burned them.
    There was no need to stick to one method at a time. In Germany, one woman who ‘walked’ was dug up, decapitated, and then reburied at a crossroads with her mouth full of poppy seeds. Another corpse was taken to a border between two districts, cut open, staked through the heart, and beheaded; a stone was put in the mouth, and both body and head were left lying there, for animals to eat.
    Of course, it was best if you could stop the corpse from leaving its grave at all, by giving it something to do which would keep itthere. For example, Oats told Nanny Ogg, you can defeat vampires by stealing their sock:
    ‘They’re pathologically meticulous, you see. Some of the gypsy tribes in Borogravia say that if you steal their sock and hide it somewhere they’ll spend the rest of eternity looking for it. They can’t abide things to be out of place or missing … They say in some villages that you can even slow them down by throwing poppyseed at them. Then they’ll have a terrible urge to count every seed. Vampires are very anal-retentive, you see?’
    Paul Barber, a notable American authority on vampires, has similarly stressed their ‘limited, rigid, and compulsive nature’. This makes it easier to stop them from coming home after burial. For instance, they have to re-enter the house in the same way they left it, so if you lift the coffin out through a window or a hole in the wall, instead of using the door, and then shut the window or refill the hole, they’ll never find the way back. If you bury them face down, when they try to dig themselves out they’ll just go down deeper and deeper. If you put seeds or sand in a vampire’s mouth or coffin, or on the path to the graveyard, this activates his compulsions: ‘he must collect