Re: Vampire [was: Pagan, heathen ...]

From: ehlsmith
Message: 25506
Date: 2003-09-04

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
......
> "Nosferatu" is Bram Stoker's invention, perhaps a garbled version
of a
> genuine Romanian word (e.g. <nesuferitul> 'the unbearable'?).
Again, our
> Romanian friends are better qualified to judge.

Dear Piotr and list,

According to <http://silentmoviemonsters.tripod.com/nosferatu.html> :

"Contrary to popular opinion, the word "nosferatu" does not
mean "vampire", "undead", or anything else like that. The term
originally came from the old Slavonic word "*nosufur-atu", which
itself was derived from the Greek "nosophoros". "Nosophoros", in the
original Greek, stands for "plague carrier". This derviation makes
sense when one considers that amongst western European nations,
vampires were regarded as the carriers of many diseases, such as
sexually transmitted diseases, TB, etc.

The confusion began when Emily Gerard used the term to mean vampire
in her book The Land Beyond the Forest (1885). From there, Bram
Stoker used it in Dracula, abiet less prominately. Leonard Wolf
finally compounded Gerard's mistakes in his The Annotated Dracula,
where he said that "nosferatu" meant "not dead".

Do you think the supposed derivation given above may be plausible?
The specificity cited regarding its literary history does seem to
show that it was not Stoker's invention.

Ned Smith