Reykjavík Grapevine - May 2022, Page 27

the strongest. Many of his guests
and followers are high-ranking
diplomats. The Count’s role as the
leader of a clan of degenerated
family members who do the actual
biting and killing is not included
in Dracula either. Then there are
the massive modifications of the
novel’s structure. Harker’s adven-
tures at Castle Dracula take much
more space, while the other parts
are very condensed. The story ends
in London, when Van Helsing and
his men find the Count in his lair
and terminate him—very much
like in the later stage and movie
versions.
After your book Powers of Dark-
ness was published, scholars
found that Makt myrkranna was
based on a series of translations
that were published in Swed-
ish newspapers and was called
Mörkrets makter [which also
translates to Power Of Darkness].
Yes, that was a bit of a shock, but
also very exciting. From the very
start, I had been in touch with
Ásgeir Jónsson from Reykjavík, the
editor of the third Icelandic edition.
Ásgeir believed that the Icelandic
preface must have been trans-
lated from another language, as it
sounded a bit odd and contained
a newly invented Icelandic word
for “Secret Police” — Iceland
had no secret police around 1900.
Later I checked this with a group
of linguistic experts from Icelandic
universities and the Árni Magnús-
son Institute, and they confirmed
Ásgeir’s appraisal. For this reason,
I assumed that there must have
been an underlying English manu-
script. I spent more than a year
looking for a connection between
Stoker and Ásmundsson.
There were many possibilities,
but no definitive proof. Only after
the English translation of Powers
of Darkness had been released,
fantasy specialist Rickard Berg-
horn from Sweden contacted me
and pointed me to the Swedish
Mörkrets makter, which means
the same as Makt myrkranna. This
was a surprise, because around
the same time that I discovered
the Fjallkonan serial, my colleague
Simone Berni from Italy had visited
libraries in Malmö and Stockholm
to look for a Swedish Dracula vari-
ant — and found nothing. It turned
out that the Swedish version had
only been serialised in periodicals
but never printed in book form;
that is why Berni had not been
able to locate it. And the few Swed-
ish scholars familiar with
Mörkrets makter, for
their part, had never
cared to inform
i n t e r n a t i o n a l
s c h o l a r s o f
Gothic fiction
that Sweden
possessed its
own national
v a r i a n t o f
D r a c u l a .
W h e n t h e
n e w s w a s
out , Icelan-
d i c l i t e r a r y
scholar Gu!ni
Elísson claimed
that he had always
suspected that Makt
myrkranna had been
translated from another
Nordic language. But Elísson had
never published his theory, so I
never learned about it. In retro-
spect, it all makes sense, of course.
But if my translation from the
Icelandic had not triggered so
much international publicity, the
world might still not know that
Mörkrets makter even existed.
In March 2017, I discovered that
there were actually two different
Swedish variants: a long version,
with almost 270,000 words (much
longer than Stoker’s Dracula), and
a shorter variant, with only 106,000
words: shorter than Dracula, but
still twice as long as the Icelan-
dic version. From the narrative
structure and the chapter titles, I
concluded that Ásmundsson must
have used the shorter Swedish
variant, serialised in Aftonbladets
Halfvecko-Upplaga.
Have you compared the stories,
and what are the key differences
between them?
The plot and the characters are
basically the same in the Icelan-
dic and the two Swedish variants.
But the longest of the Swedish
texts, published in the newspaper
Dagen, continues in diary style
after the Transylvanian part, while
the shorter version of Mörkrets
makter switches to a conven-
tional narrative style, just like
Makt myrkranna. In the Icelandic
adaptation, the post-Transylva-
nian chapters are so compressed
that the narrative loses important
detail, e.g. about the relationship
between Dr. Seward and Countess
Ida Várkony. The erotic character
and the political implications of
the story can best be seen in the
Dagen text, but sometimes it is a bit
wordy. For the Icelandic publica-
tion, Ásmundsson replaced refer-
ences about continental culture,
especially about German roman-
tic operas, with hints to Icelandic
mediaeval literature, of which he
was a specialist.
Was Bram Stoker himself ever
involved in any of this?
That is the million-dollar question.
When I initially published about
Makt myrkranna in February 2014,
I was the first to present the possi-
bility that the Icelandic story might
be based on an earlier, unpub-
lished draft of Dracula. I relied on
Ásgeir’s assessment that the pref-
ace sounded like a translation from
another language, and I discovered
a number of parallels between
Stoker’s early notes for Dracula
and the Icelandic plot. But when
it became evident that Ásmunds-
son had adapted a Swedish, not an
English text, I started to seriously
doubt Stoker’s involvement. In
spring 2018 I discovered that parts
of the Swedish preface were plagia-
rised from the memoirs of a
Stockholm priest, Bern-
hard Wadström, which
had been released
t h r e e m o n t h s
before the start of
the Dagen seri-
alisation in June
1899. As Stoker
understood no
Swedish, it is
very improb-
able that he
had committed
this plagiarism
himself. Neither
do I believe that
he would have
authorised it. And if
the preface was fabri-
cated by the Swedish
newspaper people, then the
rest of the novel may have been
pirated as well.
You can find a longer version (not the
270.000 words, though) of this odd
tale on our homepage, grapevine.is
27The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 05— 2022

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