The story in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1987) has been told and retold many times, with innumerable adaptations and reimaginings. But what is perhaps the earliest of these only came to light recently: The 1901 Icelandic “translation” of Dracula is no translation at all, but a completely different story! It shares the basic premise and indeed many scenes with the monumental classic of the vampire genre, but Makt Myrkranna—as the Icelandic translation was called, which translates to “Powers of Darkness”—features brand new characters, unfamiliar scenes, and even an entirely different motivation and modus operandi for the infamous Count.
But is Makt Myrkranna an enterprising translator’s attempt to exert his own creative license over Stoker’s story, or is it merely based on an earlier draft of Dracula than the one that eventually made it to print? Literary scholar Hans Corneel de Roos puzzled over this question when he first discovered the unique nature of the Icelandic text in 2014. And now you can explore this question for yourself with the first ever English translation of the Icelandic version of Dracula, complete with scholarly annotations and other supplementary materials. Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula, translated from the Icelandic and annotated by de Roos, came out in 2017. The publishers were actually kind enough to send me a copy back when it first came out, but—relatively new to blogging at the time and intimidated by the intensive scholarly approach and the sheer size of the hardcover—I put it on the back burner and never quite got around to reading it. (Apologies!) But now, as part of my resolution to read more of the books festering away on my shelves, I finally picked it up again—and I wish I hadn’t waited! Powers of Darkness is a truly interesting story both in its own right and in regard to its tangled history with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I would recommend it to hardcore Dracula scholars and casual Gothic literature enthusiasts alike.
Powers of Darkness opens with a foreword by Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s most prominent living descendent, which gives some background on the current state of Dracula scholarship and builds up to the theory presented throughout the rest of this text: namely, that the Icelandic text Makt Myrkranna was intentionally based on an earlier draft of Bram Stoker’s story. Next comes a lengthy introduction by editor and translator Hans Corneel de Roos. Illustrated with photographs, newspaper clippings, and scans of manuscript pages, this introduction gives biographical information on the original Icelandic translator Valdimar Ásmundsson, lays out the main differences between Dracula and Makt Markranna, and provides evidence that most of those elements unique to the Icelandic version can be attributed to Stoker rather than to Ásmundsson. Then, we have a dozen pages dedicated to laying out the floorplan of Dracula’s castle, derived from descriptions in this version of the text and complete with detailed illustrations and renderings. While charmingly nerdy, this architectural digression was, in my opinion, not entirely necessary, especially after so many other pages of supplementary material. I recommend that if you do read this section on the floor plan, you do so after reading the story—it will make much more sense that way, anyway. Finally, we get to the text itself:
At the start of the text is the “author’s preface,” which was written by Bram Stoker and translated into Icelandic for the original serialized printing of Makt Myrkranna in 1900. In this preface, Stoker invokes the found document trope by suggesting that the characters in the following story are real people who passed these accounts documenting their experiences onto him. Stoker also alludes to some of the story elements that are unique to this text, which supports the theory that this version comes from one of his own drafts. The story itself starts off much the same as the English Dracula, though you’ll notice right off that the characters have slightly different names. Part I, subtitled “The Castle in the Carpathians,” is told entirely through the journal entries of Thomas Harker, a solicitor who travels to Transylvania to meet his client Count Dracula. In this version of the story, however, Harker’s stay in Dracula’s castle takes up the majority of the text. Over the course of many weeks, Harker is subjected to philosophical speeches from the count that suggest political ambitions in London as well as repeated seduction attempts by a mysterious female vampire who appears to be a cousin of some sort to Dracula. One night, while exploring the castle, Harker witnesses the count presiding over an occult ritual with a band of followers that ends in human sacrifice and blood-drinking. Horrified, Harker bends his thoughts toward escape, but is not successful until after the count leaves for England. With Part II (un-subtitled), the story declines steeply in quality. The narration completely drops the epistolary style so central to Dracula and is instead written in third person in very short, direct chapters that feel like hardly more than an outline. Lucia Western’s death is just a brief episode and the count never targets Harker’s fiancée Wilma. Instead, much of the second half of the story is centered on the band of foreign aristocrats that gather around Baron Székely (Count Dracula’s London alias). Dr. Seward, whose asylum is across the street from Dracula’s new home, falls under the hypnotic spell of one of these aristocrats (the same vampire woman who tormented Harker?) and is driven mad. The ending involves a rather quick and anticlimactic death for the count at the hands of Van Helsing and leaves more than a few questions unanswered. The text of both the preface and the story is heavily annotated with footnotes elucidating nuances or allusions in the Icelandic language, clarifying translation choices, noting which passages differ or correspond to particular moments in Dracula, and commenting on inconsistencies. At the end of the book is an afterword by John Edgar Browning, which drives home the differences between the English and Icelandic versions of the story, particularly in their depictions of Count Dracula.
My first impression (apart from the sense that Ásmundsson either gave up or didn’t have a complete draft to work off of for Part II), is that this version of Dracula is a bit more classically Gothic than the English text. By this, I mean that this text contains more recognizable tropes made familiar by earlier works in the Gothic canon. For example, Dracula’s castle comes complete with the essential Creepy Housekeeper—in this case a deaf and mute woman who travels through the secret passageways of the castle to bring Harker his food. There’s a moment reminiscent of Carmilla when Harker discovers that the young woman in Dracula’s castle looks suspiciously like the large portrait of one of the Dracula family ancestors. This scene in the portrait gallery illustrates other Gothic themes, such as an emphasis on family lineage, hints of incest, and a suggestion of atavism—some of Dracula’s ancestors (and later, we find out, current members of the cult he leads) are animalistic, primitive-looking people, as if further back on the evolutionary ladder. Lastly, in Part II of the story, Harker discovers that he has a doppelganger that has been out philandering and committing crimes using his identity, much like the demonic double does in James Hoggs’ The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
My favorite part of this new version of Dracula’s story, though, is the nameless female vampire who practically steals the spotlight from him. Dracula presents this relative of his to Harker as a madwoman who has a weird obsession with the portrait she resembles and tends to wander the halls if left unsupervised. This woman is also at the center of local legend as your typical “White Lady” grieving spirit, tying this vampire tale to the ghost story genre that was having its heyday around this time. In my opinion, she really functions as the primary villain of this story, as she is the only one actively preying on characters like Harker and Dr. Seward—meanwhile, we never even see Count Dracula sink his fangs into anyone’s neck in this version. Given such potential, however, the story’s treatment of this character is disappointing. Her true identity is never quite explained, she’s not particularly fleshed out, and her fate at the end of the novel is left unknown….
Whether you love Dracula or literary scholarship, Powers of Darkness is a fascinating text with plenty to chew on from multiple angles. You can buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, please comment below. Are you convinced by the theory that Makt Myrkranna is based on an earlier draft? What did you think of the differences from the original Dracula? I’d love to hear your thoughts!