Possibly the first “modern” vampire story written is from circa 1800, a tale called Wake Not The Dead (it has been attributed to Johann Ludwig Tieck, but it is not among his known works – it is best left as Anonymous and based upon a folk-tale). The vampire is a reanimated corpse of the protagonist’s first wife, Brunhilde. Walter has remarried but continues to want his first wife to such an extent that he seeks the help of a necromancer to revive her corpse. So ecstatic is he at Brunhilde’s return that he leaves his current wife Swanhilde and abandons himself to sensual pleasures with this corpse-bride. However, she is dead to all real feeling, and requires blood in order to live. She feeds secretly in the night upon her victims, even to the point of killing Walter’s two children by her drinking of their blood. Even this does not affect Walter’s mad erotic obsession, and not until he himself wakes in the night to find her drinking the blood from a wound she inflicted on his chest does he seek to stop her. He comes to a sadly deserved end when, having killed Brunhilde’s corpse and failed to win back Swanhilde, he finds himself enthralled by yet another woman whose beauty reminds him of Brunhilde. He takes her as his bride, and perishes on their wedding night when the bride turns into a serpent and crushes him to death.⁵⁴

The Vampire in English poetry

Robert Southey’s poem of 1801, Thalaba the Destroyer, is a substantial work in which a vampire, Oneiza, must be thrust through with a lance. Receiving this strike, she is freed from her vampiric corpse, and appears before her father and husband in all the beauty of her spirit. “And o’er the chamber of the tomb / There spread a lurid gleam, / Like the reflection of a sulphur fire; / And in that hideous light / Oneiza stood before them. It was She, / Her very lineaments, and such as death / Had changed them, livid cheeks, and lips of blue; / But in her eyes there dwelt / Brightness more terrible / Than all the loathsomeness of death… ‘Strike her!’ cried Thalaba, / And, palsied of all power, Gazed fixedly upon the dreadful form… When Moath, firm of heart, / Perform’d the bidding; through the vampire corpse / He thrust his lance; it fell, / And howling with the wound, / Its fiendish tenant fled. / A sapphire light fell upon them, / And garmented with glory, in their sight / Oneiza’s Spirit stood.”⁵⁵

The vampire is a minor character in this poem, and death does not kill her, but rather frees her body from demonic possession.

The poem The Giaour by Lord Byron was written in 1813 and, like all his poems, was hugely popular. Here one sees already how Byron identified himself with the romanticised vampire image – the Giaour (infidel) is cursed to be a vampire by a dying Moslem Hassan. Hassan’s anger with the Giaour is understandable – the young Venetian had stolen the affections of his female slave Leila, his harem favourite. The Giaour’s fury is also understandable – Leila, whom he had loved intensely, was tied up in a sack and drowned for infidelity by Hassan.