Vampires of the North: Norse Myth and the Undead in Victorian Britain
Imagine a Viking ghost – a hulking medieval corpse that walks after death – being described with the same term as Dracula. In 1897, the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang did exactly that when he introduced the tale of Grettir and Glámr as “the famous Iceland legend of Grettir and Glam the Vampire”. Glámr (or Glam) is an undead villain from the 13th-century Grettis saga, a Norse revenant (known in Icelandic as a draugr) that terrorizes a farm until the hero Grettir wrestles him down. To Victorian readers, calling this saga-fiend a “vampire” was startling – Norse mythology and vampire lore don’t naturally mingle in our minds. Yet in 19th-century Britain, Norse myths and vampire legends converged in surprising ways, blending scholarly fascination with popular Gothic imagination. This post explores how Victorians reframed eerie figures from Norse sagas – like Glam – through the lens of the era’s vampire craze, and why this unlikely cultural interplay still intrigues us today.
Romantic Roots: Gothic Revival Meets Norse Mythology
The stage for this Norse–vampire crossover was set in the Romantic age. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a revival of interest in medieval Northern lore alongside a blossoming English taste for Gothic horror. Translators and poets rediscovered Old Norse myths and Icelandic sagas, making them available in English for the first time. At the same time, Europe was gripped by eerie new tales of the undead. In 1773 the German poet G. A. Bürger published the macabre ballad “Lenore,” about a ghostly rider who carries off his love by night – a derivative of old folk motifs that became one of the most influential pre-vampire poems in literature. “Lenore” was quickly translated into English (first in 1790) and thrilled British readers with its image of a love-dead revenant under the moonlight. Writers of the Romantic period, such as Sir Walter Scott and Matthew “Monk” Lewis, helped popularize such spectral themes. Scott, an avid antiquarian, not only translated Norse ballads and even abridged an Icelandic saga in 1814, but wove Norse legends into his own works (for example, drawing on saga accounts of hauntings when writing his novel The Pirate in 1821). Lewis – famed author of the horror novel The Monk (1796) – published a collection called Tales of Wonder (1801) that featured Gothic poems and ballad retellings, including one based on the Old Norse Hervor legend (in which a warrior-maiden summons her dead father from the grave). By infusing a Viking-age ghost story with the thrilling mood of a Gothic nightmare, Lewis was “expanding on his reading of Norse tales to achieve an effect of dread” for contemporary audiences.
Victorian Gothic fiction itself owed much to these Romantic cross-currents. The English vampire as a literary figure was born in this milieu: Dr. John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) was written during the famous 1816 gathering with Lord Byron and Mary Shelley – a circle that Matthew Lewis joined shortly after their ghost-story contest, forging a link between vampire literature and Norse-inspired enthusiasts. Such overlaps of creative personnel reflected a broader blending of influences. The early 19th-century imagination freely mixed Eastern European vampire motifs with Northern European folklore. For example, in 1818 the historian Francis Palgrave reviewed a collection of Scandinavian tales and, noting the corporeal nature of some Icelandic ghosts, explicitly called them “vampires” rather than ordinary spirits. This may be the first English scholarly reference to an Icelandic revenant as a “vampire.” Palgrave even compared certain adventures from the Eyrbyggja saga (which features a notorious walking corpse) to other vampire-like ghost stories. In short, by the Victorian era’s dawn, the idea that a Norse undead could be viewed through a vampire lens was already seeded in British culture. Romantic-era artists and writers had embraced both Norse mythology and Gothic horror – from William Blake sketching the Norse gods and incorporating bat-like demons in his art, to Henry Fuseli’s nightmare paintings of ghoulish creatures – creating an environment where the Viking draugr and the Transylvanian vampire began to feel like distant cousins in the same haunted family.
The Scholar and the Saga Vampire: Sabine Baring-Gould’s Creation
By the mid-19th century, Victorian scholars and folklorists took the Norse–vampire connection to new heights. A pivotal figure was Sabine Baring-Gould, an English Anglican priest, antiquarian, and prolific writer. In 1862–3, Baring-Gould traveled through Iceland – a land still steeped in saga legends – and what he learned there would fundamentally shape this curious convergence of myths. In 1863 he published Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas, a travelogue interwoven with saga excerpts from the places he visited. Among these was the remote valley said to be the burial site of Glámr, the very undead giant that Andrew Lang decades later dubbed a “vampire.” In Baring-Gould’s 1863 retelling of Grettis saga, he became the first Briton to explicitly label Glámr a “vampire.” As scholar Martin Theiller notes, this moment was “a turning point for the association of vampires with Norse revenants”, coming 34 years before Andrew Lang’s more famous reference.
What led Baring-Gould to make such a leap in 1863? Part of the answer lies in his unique blend of scientific folklore study and Gothic imagination. Baring-Gould was well-versed in the emerging field of comparative mythology – he owned a “remarkably well-stocked” library including works by Jacob Grimm, the great German philologist of Norse and Teutonic myth. At the same time, he had a lifelong love of ghost stories and macabre literature. In fact, Baring-Gould later tried his hand at vampire fiction, writing a short story about a female vampire titled “Margery of Quether” (published in 1891), and he included a tale of an undead Icelandic sorcerer in his Book of Ghosts (1904). This dual mindset — scholar by day, Gothic storyteller by night — explains how he “remythologized” the saga monster Glámr for Victorian readers. He enhanced the saga’s revenant with vivid vampire traits that never appeared in the original Icelandic text. For example, when Glámr’s corpse is found and reanimates, Baring-Gould adds ghastly details: the monster’s “wolf-grey hair and beard” and nails had “grown in the tomb,” while his nose had “fallen off” during decomposition. These morbid touches — hair and nail growth after death, bits of the face decaying — are classic signs from Eastern European vampire folklore, not from medieval Icelandic lore. Baring-Gould even gave Glámr “long, pointed, white teeth,” essentially fangs, which are “identifiable features associated with vampires” in the popular imagination. No other Victorian translator of the saga went so far; later English versions by William Morris and others stuck to the original, omitting such embellishments. Baring-Gould’s creative translation shows that “only a person with a certain knowledge of, or interest in, vampirism could have offered such a representation of Glámr at that time.” In other words, he knowingly merged Icelandic legend with the gothic vampire archetype – effectively turning a medieval Icelandic draugr into a vampire 34 years before Dracula.
It’s no coincidence that when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in the 1890s, he took notice of Baring-Gould’s expertise. In Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula actually boasts of his ancestry from an “Ugric tribe” that “bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them”, linking his vampiric bloodline to the old Norse berserkers. This nod suggests Stoker imagined a continuum between the undead horrors of Eastern Europe and the warrior-ghost traditions of the North. Indeed, in an 1897 interview after Dracula’s publication, Stoker explicitly listed Iceland among the countries rich in vampire legends (alongside Transylvania, Germany, and others). He even cited “Mr. Gould” (Sabine Baring-Gould) as one of his sources, noting that the reverend “has promised a book on vampires”. (Baring-Gould never did publish that vampire study, but the very promise attests to his reputation in that folklore niche.) Stoker’s interest confirms that Victorian scholars and creative writers were in dialogue. Baring-Gould’s saga-vampire had not only anticipated the language Andrew Lang would later use, but it fed into the era’s broader vampire zeitgeist. In Baring-Gould we see the quintessential Victorian folklorist who bridges philology and phantasmagoria – someone who could footnote a saga with learned comparisons one moment and spin chilling tales the next. His work shows that the Norse and vampire strands were truly intertwined: by the 1860s, a learned reader of sagas could naturally borrow the vampire’s cloak to dress a Scandinavian ghost, enhancing its terror for an audience that devoured Gothic nightmares.
A Victorian Lady and the Undead: Elisabeth Oswald’s Icelandic Vampires
If Baring-Gould brought a scholar’s imagination to Norse vampires, Elisabeth Jane Oswald brought an adventurous layperson’s enthusiasm. Oswald was a Victorian novelist and Norse mythology enthusiast who, like Baring-Gould, traveled to Iceland – but her approach and contributions were uniquely her own. In 1882 she published By Fell and Fjord: Or, Scenes and Studies in Iceland, a travel memoir recounting her journey across Icelandic landscapes and sagas. Oswald’s book is remarkable on several levels. For one, as modern scholar Andrew Wawn notes, it was “a book of heroines rather than heroes,” unusually attentive to women’s roles in Icelandic society (medieval and modern). But Oswald also delved into Iceland’s supernatural lore, and it’s here that she expanded the Norse revenant through explicit vampire motifs.
Traveling through the same saga-haunted valleys that Baring-Gould had visited, Oswald likewise encountered tales of the wandering dead. In By Fell and Fjord, whenever she retells these episodes, she pointedly uses the word “vampire” for the restless corpses. And she doesn’t limit this term to Grettis saga’s Glam. Oswald speaks of multiple Icelandic undead as “vampires” – including figures like Hrapp (a villainous corpse from Laxdæla saga) and Sotí (from Hárðar saga). For example, describing a scene in Hárðar saga where two characters enter an burial mound, Oswald writes that when they shone a light inside, “the vampire slid downwards” out of sight. Her consistent use of the V-word suggests this was a deliberate interpretive choice, not a one-off borrowing from Baring-Gould. In fact, Oswald likely coined her own English term to capture the Icelandic concept of the living dead: she suggests calling them “walkers-again.” This phrase was directly inspired by the Icelandic word afturganga (literally “after-walker,” meaning one who walks again after death). Fluent in both Old and Modern Icelandic, Oswald knew the local terminology well. By proposing “walkers-again” as an English equivalent, alongside casually calling them vampires, she was translating Icelandic folklore for Victorian readers in a colorful, accessible way. It showed a kind of playful scholarship – coining a new compound English word to sit next to the exotic loan-word “vampire” in her text.
Oswald’s most striking contribution, however, was her insight that linked Norse undead to the wider epic tradition. After narrating Grettir’s fight with Glam – where (in her version) Grettir “is killed by a vampire and becomes a hideous vampire himself” before ultimately defeating the monster – Oswald draws a bold parallel. “Beowulf, the hero of the Anglo-Saxon poem, has a similar struggle with a vampire,” she notes, arguing that “certainly the author of the Grettir saga…had read the Saxon Beowulf, or possibly a lost Norse original.” In other words, Oswald asserts that Grendel, the man-eating ogre in Beowulf, is essentially the same type of creature as Glam – and both can be thought of as vampires. This was a remarkable claim for a Victorian traveler to make. The comparison of Grettir’s saga to Beowulf had only recently been put forward in academic circles. The Old English manuscript of Beowulf had been rediscovered and published in the early 19th century, and by the late 1800s it was entering mythological discussions in Britain. The great folklorist Jacob Grimm had compared Grendel to Norse mythic monsters and even described Grendel as drinking men’s blood “like vampires whose lips are moist with fresh blood”. And just a few years before Oswald’s trip, in 1878, Icelandic scholar Guðbrandur Vigfússon (at Oxford) had hypothesized that Grettir’s fight with Glam was essentially a later Icelandic version of the same legend behind Beowulf’s fight with Grendel. Vigfússon imagined an ancient Norse tale that branched into two: one branch becoming Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon England and the other becoming the Glam episode in Iceland. This theory gained some traction (it would even be endorsed by scholars into the early 20th century, before later being debunked). The key point is that Oswald was clearly up-to-date on contemporary scholarship. She was likely aware of Grimm’s writings and Vigfússon’s ideas (her own notes show she was well-read, and she traveled in Iceland with knowledge gained from local experts and recent publications). By naming both Grendel and Glam as vampires in the same breath, Oswald became “probably the first Norse expert to refer to both Grendel and Glámr as vampires in the same argument.” She took academic comparisons out of the ivory tower and into a lively travelogue for general readers. In doing so, she “articulated the question of vampirism within a particularly recent development in Beowulf and Norse scholarship” – effectively popularizing the idea that the monstrous lore of medieval England and medieval Scandinavia shared common, vampiric threads.
Oswald’s work illustrates the intertwining of scholarly discourse and popular literature in the Victorian fascination with Norse undead. Here was a woman traveler, not a formal academic, yet contributing original observations that built on the latest philological research. She even took the comparison further than her scholarly sources: Grimm and Vigfússon had compared plots and monsters, but Oswald applied the emotive label “vampire” to drive home the likeness for her readers. By translating not just language but cultural concepts (Northern afturganga into the zeitgeist of the vampire), Oswald expanded the definition of what a Norse revenant could be in the Victorian imagination. Her vampire saga narratives reinforced that the British public’s view of the undead was no longer confined to Transylvanian counts or Slavic peasants – it now comfortably included Viking corpses roaming the Icelandic hills.
Philology, Translation and Gothic Imagination Converge
Why did Norse vampires emerge in 19th-century Britain of all places? The examples of Baring-Gould and Oswald show how multiple currents of Victorian culture flowed together to make this convergence possible. One major factor was the rise of Romantic Nationalism and philological scholarship. Throughout the 1800s, there was intense interest in the roots of European folklore and mythology. Scholars like the Brothers Grimm in Germany and their British counterparts (such as George Dasent and Thomas Keightley) scoured old texts for connections between myths and legends across cultures. Jacob Grimm, in his monumental Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology), not only catalogued Germanic folk beliefs but freely drew comparisons to other traditions – even linking the Germanic Wild Hunt and draugr-like figures to vampire beliefs. By the time an English translation of Grimm’s work appeared in the 1880s, British intellectuals were well aware of such cross-cultural parallels. This academic backdrop made it “sensible [to Victorians] that the legends of undead creatures from Northern and Eastern Europe” might be related. For instance, when Grimm described Grendel as drinking blood like a vampire, it gave scholarly legitimacy to an idea that would filter into popular thought. Likewise, the vigorous Victorian study of Old Norse literature – with new translations of the Eddas, sagas, and Beowulf available in English – provided fertile material for creative reinterpretation. It is telling that the late Victorian period saw numerous saga translations (by figures like William Morris, Eiríkr Magnússon, and others) and simultaneously a boom in vampire fiction. Translation and travel went hand in hand: adventurous souls like Baring-Gould and Oswald could now read saga texts, visit the sites in person, and then translate those experiences back for armchair readers in Britain. They served as cultural brokers, bringing Icelandic ghost lore into English literature with a Gothic twist.
We also see how Romantic and Gothic art primed the public for this fusion. Early 19th-century poets and painters had blended dark supernatural imagery with Northern legend, as noted earlier. From “Sweet William’s Ghost” in Thomas Percy’s ballad collection to Robert Southey’s epics and Blake’s spooky Norse-inspired drawings, the British imagination was trained to accept that medieval North and gothic horror belonged on the same palette. By mid-century, the vampire had become a celebrity of Gothic literature – from Polidori’s Vampyre through penny dreadfuls like Varney the Vampire – and this fame rubbed off on how people conceived other cultures’ ghouls. If a saga ghost physically wrestled with its victims and savaged livestock, why not call it a “vampire,” the closest familiar term? As one Victorian commentator admitted, there “was no other word in the English language at that time that could have conveyed to a British audience the physicality” of a draugr like Glam. The vampire concept, in effect, became a bridge of understanding – a way to explain Norse revenants to readers who knew their Stoker and Polidori better than their Snorri or Sturluson. And conversely, Norse mythology lent the vampire trope a new exotic resonance. Bram Stoker tapping Viking lineage for Dracula’s family tree was one vivid example of how scholarly lore and popular fiction fed into each other. In 1897, Andrew Lang likely chose the word “vampire” for Glam partly “in light of [Dracula’s] immediate success, as any connection to Bram Stoker’s vampire may have attracted readers.” Victorian publishers knew a good cross-promotional hook when they saw one!
Why Norse Vampires Still Matter
On the surface, calling a Viking draugr a vampire might seem like a quaint Victorian eccentricity – a product of its time. But these 19th-century reinterpretations have left a lasting legacy in how we think about monsters and myths. They remind us that folklore is not static: it evolves as cultures interact. Victorian Britain was a melting pot of ideas – Classical myth, Norse saga, Gothic horror, Christian and pagan lore – and out of that stew came new creative syntheses. The Norse vampire is a perfect case of mythological cross-pollination, showing that even legends from different ages and places can hybridize to capture the imagination. This has continued into modern times. From fantasy novels to video games, we often see mashups of mythic traditions – undead Viking warriors in popular media owe as much to Dracula’s literary descendants as to the original medieval sagas. Every time a modern storyteller gives a Nordic draugr fangs or links a vampire’s origin to “ancient pagan rites,” they are, perhaps unknowingly, following a trail blazed by Victorian writers like Sabine Baring-Gould and Elisabeth Oswald.
Moreover, examining this convergence sheds light on how scholarship and popular culture can inspire one another. The Victorians didn’t silo folklore research in academic journals – they brought it to broad audiences through ghost stories, novels, travelogues, and magazine articles. This democratization of myth is something we continue to value. Today, when we read a blog post drawing parallels between (say) zombies and voodoo spirits or between werewolf legends in different countries, we are partaking in the same spirit of comparative myth-making that Victorian readers enjoyed. The Norse vampire, born from the marriage of Romantic era scholarship and Gothic fiction, still “ceases to appear incongruous and becomes instead the sensible result of converging dynamics” of culture. It matters because it exemplifies how humans continually reinterpret old narratives to make sense of new fascinations.
At its heart, the Victorian fascination with Norse vampires was an exercise in empathy across time and space – a way for 19th-century Brits to connect their own fears of the undead with those of medieval Icelanders, finding common ground in the universal dread of things that go bump in the night. In our globalized world, such cross-cultural imagination is more relevant than ever. Vampires and Vikings may seem an unlikely duo, but their Victorian union reminds us that storytelling knows no borders. By understanding how and why these mythological reinterpretations happened, we not only gain insight into Victorian minds, but also into the enduring power of folklore to transform and be transformed. The next time you encounter a vampire in an unexpected place – say, a Norse-themed video game or a piece of historical fiction – remember that over a century ago, scholars and writers were already blending bloodsuckers with Viking sagas, spinning new yarns from old threads. The Norse vampire lives on as a testament to the creative synergy between academia and popular lore, and it still whispers to us that every old legend can find new life in a fresh context. That is why these mythic mashups still matter: they show the forever-living nature of stories – much like the vampires themselves, legends never truly die; they simply find new forms to walk again.
Sources
Baring-Gould, Sabine. (1863). Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas. London: Smith, Elder & Co. (Travel narrative including the story of Glámr; Baring-Gould’s translation adds vampire-like details to the saga).
Baring-Gould, Sabine. (1891). Margery of Quether, and Other Stories. London: Methuen. (An early vampire fiction by Baring-Gould, reflecting his interest in undead lore).
Grimm, Jacob. (1883). Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3 (trans. James Stallybrass). London: Bell & Sons. (Grimm’s comparative mythology study that linked figures like Grendel to vampire traditions).
Lang, Andrew. (1897). The Book of Dreams and Ghosts. London: Longmans, Green & Co. (Collection of supernatural stories; Lang introduces the Grettir and Glámr tale as “Glam the Vampire,” p. 245).
Oswald, E. J. (1882). By Fell and Fjord: Or, Scenes and Studies in Iceland. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. (Travel memoir weaving saga tales with commentary; Oswald refers to multiple saga revenants as “vampires” and proposes calling them “walkers-again”).
Stoker, Bram. (1897). Dracula. Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co. (Classic novel; notably gives Dracula a claim of Norse ancestry (p. 30). See also interview in British Weekly (1 July 1897) where Stoker discusses vampire lore in Iceland and acknowledges Baring-Gould’s expertise.)
Theiller, Martin. (2025). “Norse Vampires in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Folklore, 136(1): 21–38. (Academic article exploring Victorian comparisons of Icelandic draugr to vampires; primary source for the examples of Lang, Baring-Gould, Oswald, etc., and the cultural context behind them).
Vigfússon, Guðbrandur. (1878). Sturlunga Saga (Oxford Edition, Introduction). Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Vigfússon’s commentary proposing links between Grettis saga and Beowulf, which influenced Victorian discussions of Norse undead).
Wawn, Andrew. (2000). The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. (Study of how Victorian scholars and writers, including Oswald, engaged with Old Norse literature. Provides context on Oswald’s focus on women and modern Icelandic life).
Edvard Munch - Vampire (1895)
