The Vampire Stalks Sweden:

Viktor Rydberg's Vampyren (1848) and the Birth of the Scandinavian Gothic

R.S. Taylor

The vampire has undergone countless iterations since its introduction into Western

literature, from Lord Ruthven to Dracula to the Cullens—each receiving tweaks and alterations

depending on the era and location of his creation. But one tradition that has received little

attention is that of the Scandinavian vampire of the 19th century. Its omission from both

academic and popular eye can be attributed variously to limited and obscure texts, as well as a

lack of available translations. Though merely a blip in the wider scheme of the Gothic genre, the

introduction of the vampire into the Nordic corpus via a Swedish serial novel in 1848 coincided

with a major unification movement in Scandinavia which, among other things, inspired a serious

search for national identity and a common past. Victor Rydberg’s Vampyren (The Vampyre)

appears at first glance to be a Nordic adaptation of John Polidori’s The Vampyre, replicating both

the title and the name Lord Ruthven. The character of the vampire, however, quickly departs

almost entirely from Polidori’s aristocrat as Rydberg adapts his villain to reflect Swedish, rather

than British, fears and conflicts of the day. Vampyren’s emergence at the height of the Pan-

Scandinavian movement confronts the identity crisis faced by the Nordic countries upon

unearthing the rich northern tradition of medieval sagas and folktales, only to find that their

pagan themes and messages directly opposed the Christian present of the mid-19th century. This

paper will argue that Rydberg’s Ruthven is a product of this societal struggle for identity, and

that Polidori’s British vampire is appropriated to stand in as a violent symbol of the heathen

Nordic past.
 I

The vampire emerged into Western European literature in 1819 upon the release of the

novella The Vampyre by John William Polidori. His reincarnation as a British lord forever

changed the monster as we know it, and in moving from the rural East to central London,

Ruthven surpasses his famed role as a harsh characterization of Lord Byron to become a vehicle

for British fears at the start of the 19th century. Among these was the dramatic restructuring of

the social ladder—Ruthven, “more remarkable for his singularities, than for his rank,” engages

the drawing rooms of London, symbolizing the rise of the middle class and the subsequent

breakdown of the aristocracy. 1 His unnatural presence further spurs acts of depravity by those

around him. Women throw themselves at him to their own destruction, and the locals in each

town Ruthven visits, once on the continent, gamble themselves into poverty with the vampire. 2

Ruthven himself has little depth, because he is more an enabler than a character, reflecting the

vices of others solely through his nefarious company. As Erik Butler has observed, “He is all

surface and therefore provides a screen on which the desires of others take form.” 3

Polidori’s short story surpassed the British Isles, making its rounds through Europe as far

as Scandinavia where, in 1824, it was translated into Swedish. Continental and insular Gothic

and adventure literature had been seeping into Sweden since the beginning of the century, and,

much to the dismay of the country’s literary critics, had inspired a generation of Swedish authors

to pen similarly exciting tales. For the most part French literature was held to blame, with critics

targeting the likes of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries

of Paris, but German and British tales of horror and Gothic romance had preceded these works in

both translation and popularity with the Swedish public, with E.T.A. Hoffman, Ann Radcliffe,

and Matthew Lewis leading the charge. 4 Swedish scholar Yvonne Leffler has pointed out that the

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divide between the deeper writings desired by critics and the thrilling, action-packed novels

popular with the man on the street grew more pronounced until, in the 1840s, a short-lived trend

of serially-issued adventure and horror fiction materialized in journals and magazines across

Sweden. 5 Among these was a novel titled Vampyren, released in Jönköpingsbladet between

March and July of 1848. It was the first published work by a young Viktor Rydberg, who at the

time was a 21-year-old working to attend university, but who would later become one of

Sweden’s most celebrated authors and scholars of the 19th century.

II

As Rydberg was writing his novel, the national landscape of Scandinavia was undergoing

a dramatic reassessment. Starting in the 1830s, a movement had arisen which would later take

the name Pan-Scandinavianism. Begun by students and carried by such luminaries as Hans

Christian Andersen, the concept promoted the unification of Norway, Denmark and Sweden into

a single nation. Although the proposed political union ultimately fell through, the cultural side of

the movement flourished for several decades, reaching its peak in the 1840s and 50s.

One effect of Pan-Scandinavianism was an increasing interest in unearthing a distinct

Nordic past, inspired by similar movements in neighboring states such as Germany. This

undertaking was aided by findings outside of Scandinavia in other northern societies, such as the

“discovery” of the Ossian text in 1760 by James MacPherson. Although supposedly Celtic in

origin, the work was immensely popular in Scandinavia, and a Swedish translation was

completed in 1800. 6 Many of the great authors of ancient times, led by Homer and Virgil, were

of classical origin, and Ossian offered a northern alternative to which the Scandinavians could

more closely relate.

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 The Scandinavian cultures, however, also have a fertile tradition of their own. The rich

corpus of Old Norse literature, consisting of myths and sagas, poetry and legends, had begun to

reemerge as the pursuit for a national history widened its net. Further tales, ballads, practices and

more survived on a local level through the Scandinavian folk tradition. Recording of the oral

tradition began first in Sweden during the early part of the 17th century. The interest piqued by

this initial wave was followed in subsequent centuries, culminating in what Stith Thompson has

called “a very decided revival of interest in Swedish folklore in the 1830’s and toward the middle

of the nineteenth century.” 7 This time the revival was accompanied by similar movements in

Norway and Denmark.

At the same time, the excavation into the Nordic past came with risks. Although initially

late to the conversion, by the 19th century Scandinavia was staunchly Christian. The sagas,

myths, legends and folk tradition which the quest for a national past was now uncovering,

however, were of another era—a heathen one. It didn’t take long for the pre-Christian past to

acquire an ominous aura in the pious present, and as the old ways began to seep into literature

and art, its biggest stars found themselves transformed—Odin and his gods became agents of the

devil; trolls, giants and other monsters emerged from their caves to stalk the forests and

mountains. Into this climate Vampyren was born.

III

The novel pursues, for the most part, a version of the good brother-bad brother plot.

Henry Masham, peaceful, virtuous and Scottish, embarks on his Grand Tour of the continent,

while his cousin William, unbeknownst to Henry, repeatedly tries to sabotage his relative’s

success and happiness. Not long into the story, however, a second plot emerges—while in Italy,

Henry befriends a fellow Scot by the name of Lord Ruthven, a mysterious young aristocrat

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harboring a dark secret which provides the title for the novel. 8 Chivalrous and angelically

handsome, Ruthven is in Italy to woo his native fiancée Valeria, but it soon becomes clear that,

despite his honest love for her, there is an ulterior motive guiding his thoughts.

That Ruthven is granted a Scottish heritage rather than Scandinavian is not quite as

unexpected as it may appear. A relationship between Scotland and Sweden had been established

in the previous century, first militarily, then economically, and was further strengthened by the

sense of unity inspired by the Ossian text and its implication of northern, rather than classical,

roots. Because the vampire is not Scandinavian in origin, Rydberg sidesteps the question of the

sudden appearance of an unknown creature into Nordic tradition by relocating him to a

Scandinavia-by-proxy. Fellow Swede and Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf would later play

on this same trope in her Gothic novel Lord Arne’s Silver.

Rydberg’s Ruthven is right from the start a more fleshed out figure than his one-

dimensionally sinister British counterpart. He enters the novel in a scene of action, stepping in to

aid Henry against an attempted assassination, followed swiftly by his introduction as “Alfred

Ruthven.” The subtraction of inaction and addition of a first name immediately subvert

comparison to Polidori and set the stage for a redefinition of Lord Ruthven as a complete hero-

villain rather than one half of a double.

Over the course of the novel it is revealed that some months earlier Ruthven had awoken

from a poison-induced death-like state in a coffin prepped for burial. His fervent belief in the

vampire myth told in his native Scotland has ever since dictated his actions. The novel’s narrator

defines the creature thus:

The Vampyre is a criminal, who, after his death, avoids the torments of hell, but only under contract with

the fallen archangel. Possessing the same body that housed his vile soul before his demise, and retaining his

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 human emotions, he must submit to death within a set time an innocent girl, whom his seductive,

irresistible nature has deceived; otherwise he suffers double the torments of hell. The dreadfulness of his lot

increases, moreover, in that he must love and care for his offerings to the fullest extent of his passions. 9

Although he has been called a madman by Leffler, Ruthven’s situation in fact makes him a more

suitable conflicted villain. 10 If he had been informed by an outside force that he was a vampire,

and threatened directly with the fires of Hell, he would not be fully answerable for his actions

throughout the novel. But since he makes this decision himself, however mistaken it may be, he

brings about his own moral destruction. This evokes more horror on the reader’s part, but

inspires an equal amount of horror in Ruthven himself when he discovers that he is in fact still

human, and therefore solely responsible for all he has done.

Ruthven’s plight harkens back to John Locke’s tabula rasa, one of several philosophical

concepts that contributed to the genesis of the original British Gothic. His “transformation” into

a vampire is inspired by the tales of his childhood likely told by a Scottish nurse, just as the

legend is related to us. This is an instance of education leaving its fingerprints on the blank slate

of the human psyche—Ruthven’s knowledge of the vampire’s ritual murder, as told to him in his

most formative years, has lain dormant in his character until a sudden outside impetus awakens

his memory. Thus the two halves of Rydberg’s hero-villain are born. Raised in the tradition of

his family, Ruthven has developed a good side worthy of the responsibilities for which he is

being trained. This side is rational, with complete control over primal urges, and a clear motive

for everything he does. The dark side is a monster, and has no control over its desires—it is

atavistic and has no thought for consequence, acting only on impulse. The vampire is not a state

imposed on him by the fateful poisoning, but one that has lurked in him since the seeds were

sown in his fertile mind many years before. And if Ruthven was unaware of those seeds, we as

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readers are left wondering—what dwells in our subconscious, and, more importantly, when will

it emerge?

IV

Despite the wide range of beasts and beings at Rydberg’s fingertips in old Scandinavia

(among them a tradition of the undead), the vampire, as mentioned above, is not a Nordic native

but rather an import, and Rydberg fittingly does not give him a direct Scandinavian provenance:

the legend of Ruthven’s childhood is Scottish, like the Ossian text—foreign but still recognizably

associated with the Nordic world. However, unlike Polidori’s Ruthven, the vampire of Rydberg’s

novel, granted a northern heritage within the narrative, is presented not as something new

making its first appearance in the heart of Western civilization but rather, by implication, a

known creature stepping out from the long tradition of folk tales—much as the legends of old

Scandinavia were reemerging into 19th century modernity.

At the same time, as frightening as the heathen past was to the contemporary Christian

world, it could not be painted as a one-dimensional antagonist because of its ties to Scandinavian

identity and budding nationalism. While Polidori set up his Ruthven to be abhorred, Rydberg’s

Ruthven must come across as a more conflicted character in order to more accurately represent

the conflict present in Swedish society in the 1840s. He represents the struggle between the

Christian present and the heathen past as he himself wrestles with his own identity—is he living

or dead? Man or monster? Modern aristocrat or echo of a time long gone?

The liminality of Ruthven’s character is further emphasized by the very locations in

which he finds himself. The Nordic pre-Christian tradition was heavily associated with the

wilderness by the mid-19th century. Leffler has demonstrated that,

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 like most gothic characters, the protagonists in these Scandinavian novels lose control of their repressed

desires and are taken over by their dark sides. But in the Scandinavian novel the dark side is, in contrast to

the European novel, both connected to and triggered by the landscape and therefore part of a dark pagan

past. The barbaric is part of man and man cannot resist the powers of nature residing within him. 11

The blurred boundaries between man and nature have a long tradition in Scandinavia.

Shapeshifting is common in medieval literature and folklore, including, but not limited to,

werewolves, werebears and half-man-half-animal hybrids. Those possessing bestial assets are

more often than not elevated to a degree of greatness due to a resulting enhancement of strength,

martial prowess and other bonuses. Additionally, time spent as animals and in the wilderness

often features as a time of learning and growth, and the lessons brought back influence and

augment the lives of those who enter the natural world. Although the close ties between man and

nature were preserved over the centuries, by the 19th century the wilderness that was once a

teacher and an ally becomes an evil force.

Rydberg uses this association of nature with the past to further the image of Ruthven as

both man and vampire. Both of Ruthven’s hunting grounds are half in, half out of civilization. In

Italy, the Montecelli villa is located outside of Rome, next to a lake and surrounded by cypress

groves. Yet Ruthven does not attack Valeria either in the house or in the wild. Instead he takes

her to a forest chapel, hidden in the trees but still holding its own, protected from the wilderness

by thick stone walls. In Scotland, the Brighton castle is remote; neighbors are few and visitors

fewer, and it is surrounded by forests. But again Ruthven doesn’t make his move on Ida in the

woods; instead he chooses an abandoned seaside villa. The building itself is descending into

wilderness: “The garden in which [the villa] lay was now greatly disordered and unkempt; it

seemed apparent that it had been entrusted to ruin rather than to tidying hands.” 12 Nature here is

reclaiming what was, at best, borrowed by the land’s inhabitants, but the mark of civilization is

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still present—Ruthven is monstrous, but not to the extent that he is excluded from the world of

men. He still has one foot in civilization and one foot in the wilderness, bridging the uneasy gap

between present and past.

Ultimately, however, the vampire does not survive his transmission to Sweden. Ruthven

is, after all, not a real vampire but a man who believes himself to be so. In giving the

supernatural monster a rational explanation, Rydberg denies, for the time being, his entry into the

Scandinavian corpus. But why?

While the darkness that lies within Ruthven is born of his native northern folklore, his

sole victim, Valeria, is Italian. Although Ruthven is revealed to hold genuine love for her—even

our final glimpse of him is his kneeling figure praying at Valeria’s grave—I would argue that

there is an underlying, unconscious desire for her destruction lurking beneath their apparently

ideal relationship. Valeria is one of only two characters in the novel to be described in relation to

ancient Rome: “The tall figure, slender and proud, turned Henry’s thoughts to the ancient Roman

women during the days of the heathen republic.” 13 In this passage Valeria stands as a

representative of the classical pagan past, and her marriage to Ruthven would thus unite the

Germanic North with the classical South at a time when the former strove so hard to free itself

from the latter’s grand shadow. This is a paradox which must not be allowed, and Ruthven’s

subconscious, confused as it is, takes action to prevent it. Employing the Scottish monster, he

destroys the object of his love. Thus the crime committed by Ruthven is not so much his

transformation into a vampire, nor is it the murder, but his romance of, and reverence for, Rome.

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 If Ruthven’s subconscious initially drives him to use this power for “good,” however, he

nearly undoes his work in his second attempted murder of Ida, a fellow Scot. Here the divide is

not between two heathen origins, but between the pagan past of the folk vampire and the

Christian present of the Scottish gentlewoman. With the discovery of a convenient letter,

however, Ruthven is awoken from his vampiric belief and does not complete the murder. The

vampire is allowed to run rampant in Italy, but when his baleful gaze turns to Scotland—or, as

we should read it, Scandinavia—he is stopped in his tracks. There is no denying the reemergence

of the heathen past for the purpose of individualizing the Nordic identity, but in the world of

Vampyren its leash runs out once its fingers stroke the home front.

VI

In the novel’s epilogue, Ruthven, human once more, is left to pick up the pieces of his

life. He dedicates himself to driving an unruly band of Italian robbers out of Scotland and

eventually returns to Rome to hunt them down until they are tortured and hanged. The more

victims he claims from the classical past, the more he aids his countrymen as they assert

themselves on the historical stage. At the same time, Ruthven cannot be sure when and if the

strains of Nordic paganism that dwell within him will reemerge to attack his own nation. He

never returns to Scotland, vanishing from the lives of his friends and isolating himself to prevent

further casualties of the ticking time bomb of what he now knows to be his subconscious.

Rydberg is considered a national Romantic—he went on to become a renowned scholar

of the myths and sagas of the North and used them to contribute to the project of a Scandinavian

identity. Given the nature of Ruthven’s character in Vampyren, however, I would suggest that

Rydberg’s exploration of the often volatile relationship between past and past, and past and

present, began in his first novel. While it is impossible to discern how much of Vampyren’s

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ideological themes were consciously imbued into the work, the character of Ruthven

nevertheless captures the complex facets of Scandinavia’s struggle for identity in the 1840s—the

erudite Scandinavian attempt to replace the classical tradition with a Nordic one, and the

reemergence of the medieval and folk traditions into the contemporary Christian culture.

The vampire has always stood between two worlds—living and dead, East and West,

nature and civilization. He is neither one nor the other. Rydberg’s Vampyren, though not a true

vampire narrative, nevertheless balances Ruthven on the brink of similar dichotomies. These

smaller breakdowns mirror the larger overarching paradox—that in standing in all these grey

areas, Ruthven is neither ancient nor modern, but something in between—something new—an

uneasy truce between past and present which could blow at any moment. Although the rewriting

of Lord Ruthven into a Nordic context alters the character himself beyond recognition, the

liminality of the vampire remains his most salient feature, earmarking Vampyren, despite its

deviations, as a recognizably Gothic text. The vampire may not have survived the North in his

full form, but his attempt added to the small but vital chorus heralding a new genre, one which

we can call with confidence the Scandinavian Gothic.

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Works Cited

Butler, Erik. Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe,
1732-1933. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.

Leffler, Yvonne. "Aspects of the Fantastic and the Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian
Literature." Anales N.E. (2008): 49-66.

—. I skräckens lustgård: Skräckromantik i svenska 1800-talsromaner. Gothenburg: Gothenburg

University, 1991.

Okun, Henry. "Ossian in Painting." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 327-356.

Polidori, John William. The Vampyre, and Other Writings. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2005
(1819).

Rydberg, Viktor. Vampyren. Uppsala: J.A. Lindblads Förlag, 1957 (1848).

Thomson, Stith. "Folklore Trends in Scandinavia." The Journal of American Folklore 74, no. 294 (1961):
313-320

1
John William Polidori, The Vampyre, and Other Writings. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2005: 3.
2
The association of the vampire with commerce stems from the above-mentioned phase of the use of the word
“vampire” in political and capitalist satire. The theme remains linked the vampire myth throughout the genre, thanks
in great part to its employment by Polidori and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
3
Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-
1933. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010: 89.
4
Swedish translations of these texts are as follow: The Three Musketeers, 1846-9; The Mysteries of Paris, 1844;
Hoffman’s work, from 1821 on; five of Radcliffe’s novels (The Romance of the Forest, Julia, The Italian, The
Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne), 1800-1826; The Monk, 1800-04.
5
Yvonne Leffler, I skräckens lustgård: Skräckromantik i svenska 1800-talsromaner. Gothenburg: Gothenburg
University, 1991: 102.
6
A Danish translation was completed in 1790. For more on the influence and reception of the Ossian text in the
Scandinavian arts, see Henry Okun, "Ossian in Painting," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30
(1967): 327-356.
7
Stith Thompson, “Folklore Trends in Scandinavia,” The Journal of American Folklore 74, no. 294 (1961): 313-
320, 313.
8
This Ruthven is an aristocrat, unlike Polidori’s Ruthven. Ryberg himself, however, came from a very poor family.
The implications of his writing a novella about aristocracy are broader than the scope of this paper, but may have
been inspired by the continental literature to which he was exposed, as many of the European novels mentioned
here, besides The Vampyre, prominently feature nobility.

12
9
“Vampyren är en brottsling, som efter döden väl slipper det omedelbara helvetets kval men mot det beting
med den fallne överängeln att han, iklädd samma kropp som före döden varit hans nedriga själs hydda och
samma mänskliga lidelser, skall inom en viss tid överlämna åt döden en oskyldig flicka, som hans
förföriska oemotståndliga väsende har bedragit, i annat fall vänta honom helveteskvalen fördubblade. Det
förfärliga uti hans lott ökas därutav, att han med hela ytterligheten av sina passioner älskar och ömkar just
sina offer.” Viktor Rydberg, Vampyren. Uppsala: J.A. Lindblads Förlag, 1957: 56. All translations from the
Swedish are mine.
10
Yvonne Leffler, “Aspects of the Fantastic and the Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Literature,” Anales
N.E. (2008): 49-66, 53.
11
Ibid. 61.
12
“Den trädgård i vilken hon var belägen var nu i hög grad oordnad och oansad; det syntes tydligt att den var
anförtrodd åt förstörande i stället för ordnande händer.” Ibid. 75.
13
“Den höga, smidiga, stolta växten återförde Henrys tankar till de forna romarinnorna under den hedniska
republikens dagar...” Ibid. 28.

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