CFP OGOM Conference 2025: Sea changes

Sea changes: The fairytale Gothic of mermaids, selkies, and enchanted hybrids of ocean and river

Arthur Rackham, Illustration for A Midsummer Night's Dream (Heinemann, 1908)
Arthur Rackham, Illustration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Heinemann, 1908)

Venue: The British Library, London, UK (and online) Date: 5–6 September 2025

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
                                             Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

(The Tempest, I. 2. 400–07)

Etruscan Siren 7thC BC from Necropolis of Strozzacapponi, Perugia
Etruscan Siren 7thC BC from Necropolis of Strozzacapponi, Perugia

Fabulous, enchanted beings, hybridly human and other, populate the expanses of water of myth and folklore, whether oceans, rivers, and lakes or their boundaries. Such locations swarm with merfolk, nereids and other water nymphs, nixies, merrows, selkies, finfolk, kelpies, rusalkas. We want also, however, to give attention to and arouse discussion around their non-European counterparts: Mami Wata (West Africa), yawkyawk (Australia), iara (Brazil), ningyo (Japan), mondao (Zimbabwe), siyokoy (Philippines) and many more. All these beings are often alluring, frequently dangerous.

In the West, oceanic beings take the form of merfolk, haunting our seas and luring humans into the depths. Rivers and lakes swim with nymphs, nixies, kelpies, and more. In regions such as the Shetlands and Orkneys selkies – hybrids between seal and human – are found on the shorelines.

The fluidity of water itself mirrors the tendency for such beings to be themselves shifting and protean; their hybridity through metamorphosis is dynamic. It suggests the quality of those who are both terrestrial and aquatic, those conscious beings embodied in a fluid medium, the substance from wherein life itself originates.

Hybridity and genre

René Magritte, The Collective Invention (1934)
René Magritte, The Collective Invention (1934)

The hybrid form of the mermaid, both piscine and mammalian, corresponds to the liminal quality of where these beings are most frequently encountered – the ambivalent border between land and sea of the shoreline. Selkies, metamorphosing between seal and human, are in the traditional tales perhaps even more associated with the shore.

The hybridity of these creatures is easily accommodated by the hybridity of genres that contemporary narratives employ. For example, in Melanie Golding’s The Replacement (2023), selkie folklore encounters the procedural detective genre in an unsettlingly ambiguous way. The commingling of Gothic horror, folklore, and analytical crime thriller subverts the rationalist mode of the latter by generating the mode of the Fantastic. Here, the vulnerability of motherhood, outsider communities, and mental illness come into focus. More generic cross-fertilisation comes with the presence of mermaids in Gothic-tinged Neo-Victorian novels such as Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (2018), and Jess Kidd’s merrow fantasy, Things in Jars (2020).

There are mermaids in science fiction, which are often monstrous (thus involving horror and thriller genres): Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep (2017), for example, results in the scenario of humanity pitted against the aquatic as Otherness, but also revealing a nature wounded by instrumental reason in this climate change thriller, and an ambiguity about the centrality of the human. A recurring theme concerning communication plays against the absoluteness of the Other, too. The collapse of a love affair between two women, one a deep-sea explorer, is figured poignantly as SF with overtones of Cosmic Horror in Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (2022).

Dangerous seduction

John William Waterhouse, The Siren (1900)
John William Waterhouse, The Siren (1900)

The allure of the mermaid is most often dangerous. It is disruptive of social norms and even the natural coherence of the self and the boundaries between human and animal. This danger may be concealed in comic mode as in H. G. Well’s The Sea-Lady (1902) or the films with the enchanting Glynis Johns, Miranda (1948) and its sequel Mad About Men (1954).  But this may also hold more inviting, enchanting prospects, including the pleasures and pitfalls of romantic fantasy, as from La Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811) to the forlorn heroine of Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837), then present-day paranormal romance. This latter genre frequently reworks Andersen’s tale. Related examples are the more gently innocuous Splash (1984), a Romcom with hints, like many of these works, of utopian freedom, and other romantic variants such as The Shape of Water (2017) (loosely based, like paranormal romance, on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1740). More sinister variants emerge such as Clemence Dane’s The Moon is Feminine (1938), even to overt horror like The Lure (2015). In a more sensational vein, there are many low-budget horror films where the mermaid is simply monstrous, as Mamula [Nymph] (2014).

In the early twentieth century, the darker, Gothic aspect appears in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan narratives. The mermaids represent death and oblivion. In the scene on Marooner’s Rock (a place where sailors were tied up and drowned), Wendy is dragged by her feet into the water by mermaids. For the first time Peter is afraid, a drum is beating within him, and it is saying ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’.

The dangerously seductive sexuality of the mermaid is frequently associated with music – they sing with irresistible glamour, dance, or play the harp. In Thomas Moore’s ‘The origin of the harp’ from Irish Melodies (1845), the tragic sea maiden, singing under the sea for her lost lover, is transformed into a harp; there are associations with Irish Nationalism here. The harp as siren or mermaid is also explored in Henry Jones Thaddeus’s painting The Origin of the Harp of Elfin (1890). The harp is prominent in Scandinavian lore as the instrument of the Danish river spirit, the Neck (Nökke). He sits on the water and plays his golden harp, the harmony of which operates on all of nature.

The Lorelei is one famous incarnation of these sinister songstresses. In Kafka’s paradoxical tale, it is the silence of the Sirens that is dangerous. (The Sirens – who were originally birdlike – become identified with mermaids in the early Christian era; the overwhelming glamour of their song is notorious.) The piscine may also overlap with the serpentine as in the legend of Melusine; we are interested not just in mermaids and selkies but less-known creatures, especially the more monstrous such as kelpies, merrows and Jenny Greenteeth.

Avatars and adaptation

Edmund Dulac, The Little Mermaid, in Fairy Tales Told for Children (1837)
Edmund Dulac, The Little Mermaid, in Fairy Tales Told for Children (1837)

Mermaids and their kin are depicted in many ways, from medieval romance and the ballad to Romantic poetry (as in Thomas Moore) and beyond. They flourished in the Victorian period, too, with painting and the poetry of George Darley, Thomas Hood, Tennyson and Arnold. Thus, we are keen to hear from scholars of these periods, which produced some key mermaid narratives.

For example, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ (1891) is a complex working out of the conflicts of the spirit and the flesh, earth and heaven. The fisherman lives happily with the mermaid until his rejected soul returns. Corrupted without heart or conscience, it claims the fisherman’s life in a manner similar to Dorian Gray, written in the same year.

Adaptations, of folklore and of such archetypal tales as ‘The Little Mermaid’ are of especial interest. These might include sympathetic revisions of the monstrous Sea Witch from ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Sarah Henning, Sea Witch (2018)), along with the many reworkings and expansions of that tale itself, often as paranormal romance, usually with a contemporary feminist slant (for example, the YA novel Fathomless (2013) by Jackson Pearce, Christina Henry’s The Mermaid (2018) and Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks (2018)). We would note the rich tradition of folkloric adaptation in Eastern European filmmaking, especially in animation (in particular, with ‘The Little Mermaid’); a gorgeous animated example is the Russian Rusalochka [The Little Mermaid] (1968).

Mermaids in art

Arnold Böcklin, Mermaids at Play (1886)
Arnold Böcklin, Mermaids at Play (1886)

The mermaid is an enduring and widespread image in paintings from the classical period to the present. Mermaids appear in the work of Ancient Greek vase painters and medieval miniaturists, and in the paintings of Rubens and Raphael, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites (notably Burne-Jones and Waterhouse). They fascinated the symbolists (Moreau, Bocklin, Klimt) and surrealists (Magritte and Delvaux) alike and lurk in the enchanting book illustrations of Rackham’s Undine (1909) and Peter Pan (1906), Dulac’s The Little Mermaid (1911) and Heath-Robinson’s ‘Sultan and the Mer-Kid’ from Bill the Minder (1912).

In the nineteenth century, paintings (mainly by men) of sirens and mermaids were depicted as sexually alluring and predatory in contrast to the ‘ondines’, who were the cultured pearls of modern passive femininity (as shown in the paintings of Pierre Dupuis). Mermaids at Play is a series of orgiastic marine fantasies painted by Arnold Bocklin in the 1880s.

Edvard Munch, The Lady from the Sea (1896)
Edvard Munch, The Lady from the Sea (1896)

Mermaids in late Victorian art are murderous, preying on adventurers, fishermen, sailors and poets. Waterhouse showed a doomed sailor drowning under the haughty gaze of his seductress in The Siren (1900) whilst Edvard Munch’s The Lady from the Sea (1896) crawls threateningly towards us. The siren in Gustave Moreau’s The Poet and the Siren (1895) pushes the boy poet, who clamours for mercy, into the primal mud from which she emanates. In Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1885) a mermaid with hypnotic eyes and a vampire’s mouth is carrying her male prey downwards into oblivion.

Freudian thought exposed the fish-tailed seductress as the personification of hidden desires of the sexually subconscious; the legacy of this is shown in the twentieth century, when the mermaid abandoned her marine habitat to re-emerge in the irrational dream settings of the surrealist imagination. Magritte’s stranded inverted mermaid, The Collective Invention (1934) humorously undermines the perverse eroticism of her original.

The global mermaid

Mama Wata poster
Mama Wata poster

Not all of these beings originate in Europe and our colloquy will be much enriched by fishing off further shores. We seek to include explorations of global sea people in folklore and contemporary reworkings, such as Japanese ningyo, Mami Wata and Afro-Caribbean mermaids (Natasha Bowen, Skin of the Sea (2021) and Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story (2020)). Many of these facilitate a postcolonial reading of the mermaid and kindred beings.

Ningyo by Tishan Hsu (born 1951)
Ningyo by Tishan Hsu (born 1951)

Ningyō, 人魚 [human fish], have been part of Japanese myth since the year 619 ce (when they appeared in Nihonshoki in Osaka). Whilst the term Ningyō is often translated as mermaid, this is misleading as the Japanese term is not gendered and Ningyō are more varied in shape and often monstrous in appearance. When caught, these piscine-humanoid beings are treated as sacred objects, thought to bring good fortune and immortality. Ningyō fakes or grotesque caricatures appeared from the 1860s onwards. In his 1876 account, Nichols Belfield Denny recounts seeing the circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum’s celebrated purchase (allegedly from Japanese sailors) which became known as the Fiji Mermaid.

Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ was translated into Japanese in the 1910s. Its popularity contributed to what Philip Hayward has termed the ‘mermaidisation of the Ningyō’ (evolving into western-like mermaids). In the twentieth century, Kurahashi Yumiko’s parodic rewriting of ‘The Little Mermaid’, translated as ‘A Mermaid’s Tears’, has led to comparisons with Angela Carter.

This global approach includes recent novels reworking ‘The Little Mermaid’ from a non-Western perspective, such as Rosa Guy, My Love, My Love: Or The Peasant Girl (1985), made into a Broadway musical. Thus, other media are of interest too – Dvorák’s opera Rusalka, drawing on Slavic folklore, stands out.

Selkies

Statue of Selkie, Mikladalur, Faroe Islands
Statue of Selkie, Mikladalur, Faroe Islands

Selkie narratives tend to be more purely romantic and frequently tragic as are the original tales and ballads themselves. One early transformation of selkie folklore into novel is The Secret of Ron-Mor-Skerry by Rosalin K. Fry, filmed as The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), which draws on the selkie to explore feral children and animal parent narratives. Selkie novels often address feminist concerns as in Margo Lanagan’s Margo, The Brides of Rollrock Island (2013).

Both selkies and mermaids have been enlisted to dramatise the fluidity of the self, particularly with regard to sexuality and gender. Examples are Betsy Cornwell’s excellent YA selkie novel, Tides (2014) and Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea (2020). They have been taken up as a metaphor for transgender teens: ‘the secret me is a boy; he takes his girliness off like a sealskin’ (Rachael Plummer, ‘Selkie’ (2019)).

Many of these narratives place the love element foremost, allowing a space for female-centred erotic and gay romance; these forms flourish especially in the recent explosion of self-publishing and on-line texts.

These creatures facilitate the interaction between humanity and nature (both inner and outer). In their Gothic aspect and engagement with darkness, they may adumbrate a re-enchantment of the disenchanted world (following Weber and Adorno); reconciliation with Otherness; and new relationships with the natural world. We are looking for presentations that look at narratives of merfolk and their kin in the light of their Gothic aspects and that highlight their connection with folklore, dwelling on the enchantment of their strange fluidity. We invite contributors to create a dialogue amidst these sea changes into something rich and strange.

Keynote speakers

Prof. Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University; on mermaid ambiguity in new creative fiction

Dr Monique Roffey Trinidadian Novelist, Manchester Metropolitan University; as author of The Mermaid of Black Conch on Caribbean mermaids

Dr Sam George Associate Professor, University of Hertfordshire, Co-Convenor of the OGOM Project; on Japanese Ningyo: human-fish hybrids and the rise of the fake museum mermaid

Dr Katie Garner, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of St Andrews; on ‘Forging the Mermaid’ – Scottish mermaid project

Topics may include but are not restricted to

Aquatic beings and dis/re-enchantment

Liquid bodies and fluid sexuality

Scottish folklore and its aquatic inhabitants

Tragedy, comedy, and RomCom

The natural world and environmental issues

Global and postcolonial merfolk

Questions of ethics

Musicality and the Siren’s song

Film, TV, and new media

Adaptation of folklore and fiction

YA and children’s literature

Paranormal Romance

The Gothic and the monstrous in the depths

Hybrid bodies and genres

Kelpies and water-bulls, merrows and other less-known creatures of the depths

Relationships with the Other

Borders and shorelines

Animality/culture

The merfolk of medieval Romance

Retellings of ‘The Little Mermaid’

Disneyfication of ‘The Little Mermaid’ and its controversies

Retellings of selkie stories

Blue Humanities and aquatic bodies

Destiny, agency, and biological determinism

Eastern European folklore, fiction, and film

Mami Wata and her kin

Aquatic dissolving of the self

Merfolk and selkie ballads

The mermaid in Victorian poetry and painting

Fake mermaids/sacred objects from the sea

Submission

In 1948, Ann Blyth was filming Mr Peabody and the Mermaid and Glenn Strange was filming Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein at nearby studios. They posed for this touching and humorous photograph in their costumes – a horror and fantasy classic!
In 1948, Ann Blyth was filming Mr Peabody and the Mermaid and Glenn Strange was filming Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein at nearby studios. They posed for this touching and humorous photograph in their costumes – a horror and fantasy classic!

Abstracts (200–300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for panels, together with a short biography (150 words), should be submitted by 7 February 2025 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to ogomproject@gmail.com

Please prefix the document title with your surname. The abstract should be in the following format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) 5–10 keywords (6) Abstract.

Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters.

Please state whether you would prefer to present online or in person. Presenters will be notified of acceptance after the deadline has passed in 2025.

There will be an opportunity to submit your paper for our OGOM publications.

Follow us on X via @OGOMProject. 

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Literature Research Seminar Wed 13th 1.30

I am chairing the Literature Research Seminar at the University of Hertfordshire this year and our next session is continuing our theme of animal studies, following my presentation rat narratives and Pied Piper re-tellings in October. We meet once a month on Wednesday lunchtime online. On Wed 13 November we welcome Dr Rowland Hughes for ‘Making Meat: Masculinity and Metamorphosis in Frederick Manfred’s Lord Grizzly (1954)’.

Please join us online on 13 November at 1.30 on Zoom https://herts-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/96470422523 Meeting ID: 964 7042 2523. Hope to see you there. I didn’t manage to save the ‘chat’ last time so I might have missed some email addresses. Please email me directly on s.george@herts.ac.uk if you would like to join the mailing list for this seminar series.

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Sam George: Bram Stoker’s Vampire online 27th November

Whilst it is still the spooky season I thought I’d let you know that I will be taking part in Lunchtime Bites for an AHRC-funded project called Dracula Returns to Derby (led by Prof. Matthew Cheeseman of Derby University). It was in Derby that Hamilton Deane’s theatrical version of Dracula was first performed, and indeed Bela Lugosi played the role of the Count on 11 occasions during a theatrical run in the 1950s. I have written about the vampire theatre in OGOM’s new book The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and Its Progeny (MUP, 2024).

My talk ‘Bram Stoker’s Vampire’ will take place online on the 27th November at 12.30. It is FREE but you need to book to attend via this link. Here is a brief synopsis:

Bram Stoker spent seven years researching his novel Dracula. In this talk, Dr Sam George draws on the research notes that Stoker made on the vampire figure and probes into some of his more folkloric sources. She explores the many attributes of the Count as vampire and explains why Dracula casts no shadow and has no reflection in a mirror.

This event is part of Dracula Returns to Derby, an AHRC-funded research project led by the University of Derby in partnership with Derby Museums, Derby Theatre, Bournemouth University and Sheffield Hallam University. A series of public workshops and events connect the city with the world’s most famous vampire.

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Sam George: BBC interview on vampires, disease, and immortality

Sam has been interviewed for BBC News alongside the horror writer and actor Mark Gatiss and Interview with the Vampire writer Rolin Jones. She talks about the immortality of the vampire and how it has always been associated with disease and contagion. Polidori’s 1819 creation in The Vampyre has links with tuberculosis (as shown by Marcus Sedgwick’s chapter in our recently published book, The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny. She notes the links, too, between plague-bearing rats and F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu – a topic further explored in her recent seminar talk, ‘Rat Kings and the Rat as Vampiric Totem Animal: Mythical Interactions Between The Pied Piper, Dracula and Nosferatu.

Sam’s interview is here.

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Finding Vampires

The identity of a vampire may be known to its victims but if the identity is not known certain procedures can be followed to locate the right grave, according to folklore:

SATURDAY In Southern Europe the search is traditionally carried out on a Saturday because this is the only day of the week that vampires are obliged to lie in their tombs! Professional vampire hunters or DHAMPIRS are often used.

LOCATING A VAMPIRE GRAVE The best way to find a vampire’s grave, according to folk belief is to use a WHITE HORSE and lead it around the graveyard. HORSES are thought to be sensitive to spirits and the supernatural; thus the horse will refuse to step over the grave of a VAMPIRE.

LOCATING A VAMPIRE GRAVE Ideally, a virgin boy should ride the horse in the graveyard or burial plot. The purity of both the boy and the horse will recoil in horror in the presence of the evil undead revenant.

TELL-TALE GRAVES Tell-tale signs that a vampire resides within, according to folklore, are graves that are SUNKEN and graves that have CROOKED CROSSES or TOMBSTONES. All of these suggest that a vampire is dwelling underneath; the unsettled grave shows signs of undead disturbance.

HOLES In Greek lore, a vampire grave has a hole about the size of two cupped hands, located in the area of the head or chest. Those brave enough to look into the hole may see the fiend’s gleaming eyes looking back.

BLUE LIGHT A vampire grave may give itself away by the presence of eerie blueish light or flame. In European folklore, the blue glow is often associated with the vampire’s lost soul; many believe the vampire has no soul, hence he has no reflection or shadow.

On Halloween weekend I will be climbing up the steep flank of Bride Stones Moor to a Graveyard known as Cross Stone: the eeriest place I have ever encountered. Here are a couple of my photos from last year below. Happy Vampire hunting wherever you are!  

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Review: Lowry Charles Wimberley, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads

Front cover of Lowry Charles Wimberley, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads

This book is a fascinating read in its own right but it is also an invaluable source for my research into fairy literature that I have been pursuing along with Sam as part of the OGOM Project. This is a continuation of work that inspired our ‘Ill met by moonlight’ conference in 2021, which led in turn to our forthcoming edited collection, Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture: ‘Ill met by moonlight’).

Contents list

The contents list alone is inspiring!

Wimberley explores the vast corpus of ballads and their variants, identifying the folkloric elements manifest there or more covertly suggested. All the themes that fascinate us at OGOM are here: fairies and elves, mermaids, witches, and ghosts; enchanted food, music, and dance; fairy gifts; the fairy kiss; fairy and demon lovers; changelings; the Otherworld; human/animal metamorphoses; sacred groves.

The dangerous seductions of fairy food, music, and dance are dwelt on in detail; these motifs, for me, are a fruitful starting point for explorations of enchantment and utopianism, ideas which I am writing about in my chapter ‘Fairy carnival: Music, dance and food in the re-enchantment of modernity from Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist to dark fairy romance’, which will appear in the above mentioned book.

Moritz Von Schwind, Fairy Dance in the Alder Grove (1844)

There is an extended section on the ballad ‘Tam Lin’ and the miraculous transformations the hero undergoes before he is released from the Queen of Faerie. This is one of the finest of the ballads and an important example of the Demon Lover theme which informs dark fairy romance through to contemporary paranormal romance (and is another of OGOM’s research areas).

Illustration by John D. Batten for Tamlane in More English Fairy Tales
Illustration by John D. Batten for ‘Tamlane’ in More English Fairy Tales

The important chapter on fairies has a significant section on their stature – a topic that is frequently raised in discussions of these creatures. The conclusion is that the authentic fairy is rarely diminutive, appearing so only when exercising their shape-shifting abilities.

Wimberley even discusses a link between mermaids and werewolves, recalling past and future OGOM conferences:

Connection between mermaids and werewolves in the ballads

The book is full of detail, tracing a vast amount of folkloric images and plot motifs through the ballads, meticulously examining their variants and the relationship between each other, and, now and then, with continental ballads such as those from Scandinavia. Wimberley also draws out (showing a very partial sympathy with the pagan!) how the earlier pagan elements often become overlain and sometimes softened by Christian belief.

Wimberley’s thesis, however, is dominated by a very reductive universalism that aims to uncover common sources in the religious mentality of ‘primitive’ peoples from around the world. It rests on an ethnology which would be much disputed by contemporary scholars (it was published in 1928). That aside, this is a rich resource for those who want to explore the magical, eerie, often very dark aspects of the Otherworld, Faerie, and other supernatural features of the traditional ballad.

Lowry Charles Wimberley, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (1928; New York: Dover Publications, 1965)

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Halloween Online Talks and Seminars, October 2024

Sam George is presenting a Halloween talk on her research into the mythical origins of the Pied Piper, Dracula and Nosferatu, as part of the Literature Research Seminar at the University of Hertfordshire. All are welcome.

Abstract: This talk will explore the Pied Piper myth and its resonance in Dracula. It then traces how these narratives come together in Nosferatu, concluding via an analysis of the legacy of these overlapping myths in fiction. It teases out the connections between this small group of interrelated texts, focusing on the things that unite them: the folkloric representation of rats as souls of the dead, the rat kings or rat masters that control them, the uncanny migrant journeys these figures undertake, notions of national identity, and the unyielding sense of outsiderness, a motif that originates in the Pied Piper fairytale and is carried through via Dracula to vampire film in the beginning of the twentieth century.   

Rat Kings and the Rat as Vampiric Totem Animal: Mythical Interactions Between The Pied Piper, Dracula and Nosferatu.
Literature Research Seminar, Online, Wed 30 October, 1.30-2.30,
Zoom Meeting Link: https://herts-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95155874645
Meeting ID: 951 5587 4645

Sam will also be taking part in Lunchtime Bites for an AHRC-funded project called Dracula Returns to Derby (led by Prof. Matthew Cheeseman of Derby University). It was in Derby that Hamilton Deane’s theatrical version of Dracula was first performed, and indeed Bela Lugosi played the role of the Count on 11 occasions during a theatrical run in the 1950s. Sam’s talk ‘Bram Stoker’s Vampire’ will be on the 27th November at 12.30. It is FREE but you need to book via this link. Sam has written about the vampire theatre in OGOM’s new book The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and Its Progeny (MUP, 2024) OUT THIS OCTOBER

Daisy Butcher is an invited speaker at CNCSI ‘Nature and Horror in the Nineteenth Century’ online workshop on Halloween, Thursday 31st October. 
Her talk: Tree Mothers, Hollow Women and Flower Maidens: The representation of plant-women in George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and Jane G. Austin’s “Prince Rudolf’s Flower” (1859) is at 2.00pm – 2.45pm.
Register here to attend free via Zoom. 

We hope you can join us. If you are looking for something to read for Halloween, look no further than MUP Gothic Halloween Reading List featuring OGOM publications and much, much more with 24% off until 8th November.

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GOTHIC HERTS – new Gothic Reading Group starting this October

Gothic Herts is the home of a new reading group based at the University of Hertfordshire. It comprises undergraduate, postgraduate and research students and is dedicated to all things Gothic:

We read Gothic-related material such as journal articles, poetry and books, and meet online each month to discuss these. We also use this web platform to continue our discussions and share our ideas with the wider world.

The group is run by two of OGOM’s doctoral students, Jane Gill and Rebecca Greef. The first session is on 22nd October and the text is up on the site. This promises to be a useful and fun forum for all Gothic enthusiasts. We strongly recommend that you go along and discuss all things gothicky in an informative, supportive and fun environment!!

If you are interested in finding out more, please email the organisers on gothicherts@outlook.com and browse the Gothic Herts website

Session One: What is Gothic? – 22nd October – 18:30. The group will be discussing Fred Botting’s ‘Negative Aesthetics’ and what it tells us about the Gothic.

Join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 786 9404 4866
Passcode: 6E2mrf

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Out today! (1 October 2024) OGOM Project’s new book, The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny

The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny, ed. by Dr Sam George and Dr Bill Hughes

Out now from Manchester University Press.

This collection of essays begins with a Forward, ‘Poldori Revisited’, by the pioneer of academic vampire studies, Sir Christopher Frayling, with his meditations on Polidori’s portrait.

Then follows a comprehensive Introduction (Chapter 1) by Sam George and Bill Hughes on the legacy of the man who wrote the first vampire tale in English, The Vampyre (1819). George and Hughes cover the genesis and publication of the tale and the controversies surrounding it; the avatars of Polidori’s radical revisioning of the vampire as aristocratic seducer (and of Polidori himself as he appears in various fictions); and an analytical survey of the critical work on The Vampyre.

Each of the following chapters present different perspectives on Polidori’s fascinating and influential text and its legacy in the first edited collection to approach the subject:

Ch. 2. Sam George, ‘Phantasmagoria: Polidori’s The Vampyre from theatricals to vampire slaying kits’

George gives an account of the stage adaptations of Polidori’s story which, with the Romantic vampire, have a shared origin in phantasmagoria, from the German ghost stories that inspired Byron’s vampire fragment at the Villa Diodati, to the spectacular summoning of revenants on stage in Paris. Stage props and effects are crucial to the changing representations of the vampire.

Ch. 3. Fabio Camilletti, A séance in Bristol Gardens: Reassessing The Vampyre

Via the séances of the Rossetti brothers (Polidori’s nephews), Camilletti explores the composition of The Vampyre, its publication history and the legacy of Polidori among the Rossettis. He argues that Polidori saw links between Englishness and the inhuman, raising concerns with free will and determinism, recalling the discussions at the Villa Diodati.

Ch. 4. Harriet Fletcher, The vampiric fan: Gothicising Byron’s literary celebrity in Polidori’s The Vampyre

Fletcher develops ‘a Gothic celebrity reading’ of The Vampyre from Gothic studies, celebrity studies and fan studies, showing how Lord Byron, the first modern celebrity, is cast as Ruthven, with Aubrey as fan and Byromaniac, using vampirism to critique mass celebrity consumerism. Byron and the rise of industrial print culture are central to the emergence of mass culture.

Ch. 5. Bill Hughes, Rebellion, treachery, and glamour: Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, Polidori and the progress of the Romantic vampire

Hughes looks at Lady Caroline Lamb’s casting of Byron, the lover who spurned her, as the vampiric Ruthven (Glenarvon), the model for Polidori’s aristocratic Ruthven and for vampiric lovers in Gothic and paranormal romances. The context is the rebellion against British colonialism in Ireland, where Glenarvon’s political persuasiveness is linked to his sexual glamour. Byronism is an infection, like vampirism; but Lamb’s ambiguous text also shows sympathy for radicalism.

Ch. 6. Marcus Sedgwick, Sexual contagions: Romantic vampirism and tuberculosis; or, ‘I should like to die of a consumption’

Marcus Sedgwick (1968–2022) explores the interconnection between Romantic, often sexualised, views of tuberculosis and the radical new image of the sexually predatory vampire with its characteristic pallor, that Polidori (himself a medical doctor) inaugurated. These characteristics, incorporating symptoms known to Polidori from his medical background, became part of the radical shift in the image of the vampire.

Ch. 7. Nick Groom, The Vampyre, Aubrey, and Frankenstein

Groom draws out unsuspected connections between The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, born together as they were at the Villa Diodati in 1816. Both works show a mutual influence and a basis in the conversations at the Villa, and Groom discovers complex affinities between Victor Frankenstein and Aubrey, the deluded companion of Polidori’s vampire.

Ch. 8. Sam George and Bill Hughes, From lord to slave: Revolt and parasitism in Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre

George and Hughes turn to D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre, a neglected work which features the first Black vampire and which directly responded to Polidori’s tale and to the ferment of the Haitian Revolution with its abolition of slavery. They argue that it has a radical force which extends, through its hybrid form, to a satire on vampiric capitalism in general.

Ch. 9. Ivan Phillips, ‘But if thine eye be evil’: Tropes of vision in the rise of the modern vampire

Phillips traces Polidori’s concern with eyes and visual imagery, through The Vampyre and his novel Ernestus Berchtold, in the evolution of the modern vampire. Using Freud’s theory of the Uncanny, he analyses how the vampire of modernity, beginning with Polidori, destabilises notions of identity and experience.

Ch. 10. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, ‘Knowledge is a fatal thing’, or from fatal whispers to vampire songs: Breaking Polidori’s oath in The Vampire Chronicles and Byzantium

Ní Fhlainn shows how Polidori initiates the theme of terrible secrets and confessions that are present in postmodern vampire narratives, particularly in Anne Rice’s novels and the vampire films of Neil Jordan, Interview with the Vampire and Byzantium, where immortality destroys feminine values.

Ch. 11. Kaja Franck, ‘The deadly hue of his face’: The genesis of the vampiric gentleman and his deadly beauty; Or, how Lord Ruthven became Edward Cullen

Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, able to pass in polite society, anticipates the sparkling vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. However, these are focalised through the voice of Edward Cullen’s lover, Bella Swan, and are portrayed as wholesome, serving an audience attracted to otherness and reflecting consumerist values.

Ch. 12. Jillian Wingfield, Vampensteins from Villa Diodati: The assimilation of pseudo-science in twenty-first-century vampire fiction

Wingfield points to the occasion of The Vampyre’s creation at the Villa Diodati alongside the birth of Mary Shelley’s monster in the hands of Dr Frankenstein. The pseudoscience of the latter in conjunction with Polidori’s supernatural vampire persists in the twenty-first-century examples of ‘vampensteinian’ monsters found in Justin Cronin’s The Passage and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, where genetic modification, otherness, and racial prejudice are questioned.

Sam George, Afterword: St Pancras Old Church and the mystery of Polidori’s grave

George’s Afterword indulges in a spot of Gothic tourism and investigates John William Polidori’s links to St Pancras Old Church, the site of his burial, together with its associations with the group of visionary writers Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary and Percy Shelley.

Appendix: Annotated editions of The Vampyre and Byron’s ‘A Fragment’

* This volume also appends new, annotated editions of The Vampyre and of Lord Byron’s ‘A Fragment’ – the piece written at the Villa Diodati as part of the famous ghost story writing competition where Mary Godwin, later Shelley, wrote Frankenstein and which spurred Polidori to write his tale. These are a valuable resource for students and scholars.

More details of the book from MUP:

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526166388/

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Polidori’s Missing Grave: St Pancras Old Church

St Pancras Old Church has withstood the Industrial Revolution, Victorian improvements, wartime damage and an attack by Satanists in 1985.  In 1847 the church was derelict and virtually in ruins until Victorian architects Robert Lewis Roumieu (1814–1877) and Hugh Roumieu Gough (1843–1904) transformed the medieval building. They replaced the original West Tower with a large extension and added the Clock Tower to the south. It underwent further restorations of its ancient building in 1888, and 1925.

If you enter through the magnificent wrought iron gates, you will find yourself at the entrance to St Pancras Old Church. The high alter, carved panels and old pulpit are ascribed to a pupil of Grinling Gibbons (d.1721). The church appears mostly Victorian Neo-Norman in style. A remarkable memento mori, a reminder of death and the shortness of life can be seen on the Offley family monument which dates back to the 1660s and includes winged angel heads. The winged skull allows visitors to muse on the immortal soul’s flight following its release from the dying body. On leaving the church, if you follow the uncanny path made up of broken headstones, you will find the church’s undead motto, written by Jeremy Clarke, ‘I am here in a place beyond desire or fear’. The motto suggests the transcending of death through visions of new worlds (though this is mysterious and ambiguous). From this you can head into the unsettled Graveyard, John William Polidori’s final resting place.

The churchyard ceased to be used as a graveyard in 1854, by which time it had accommodated centuries of burials. Records indicate that between 1689 and 1854, 88,000 burials took place, over 32,00 in the final 23 years[i]. The picturesque and leafy setting is offset by beautiful gardens surrounding the church which were opened in 1877; the remains of two graveyards, St Pancras and an extension to the churchyard of St Giles in the Fields. Twice in the late 1800s the St Pancras Railway sought to acquire the land. Graves were subsequently disturbed and dismantled and the bodies exhumed. A great many unidentified human fragments were placed in a deep pit and covered over. The architect at this time was Arthur Blomfield (1829–1899) and his assistant was none other than the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), then a young man. Many of the disturbed gravestones were stacked under an ancient Ash tree, which has become known as ‘The Hardy Tree’; an uncanny fusion of abandoned gravestones and the roots of a living tree.

The Ash is associated in plant lore with death and resurrection. It has stood serene in divination and in folk medicine from the time of the Norse god Odin. The roots and branches of the Ash Yggdrasil, the mighty world tree of Scandinavian mythology, united heaven, earth and hell. From its wood, after the death of the old gods, a new race would arise.[1] The Ash tree in England has gothic credentials; folklore has it that a failed crop of Ash seeds or ‘keys’ portends a death within a year.[2] In Gothic circles it has become associated with witchcraft, hauntings and demonic curses, due to M.R. James’sghost story ‘The Ash Tree’(1904). [3]

The unsettled, darkly beautiful Ash tree at St Pancras, has fascinated artists and writers down the years. What is remarkable is that John William Polidori’s tomb is rumoured to be one of many unsettled graves under this uncanny tree. ‘Poor Polidori’ uncelebrated in life, and unmemorialised in death, lies somewhere here in an unmarked grave. His death at 25 is often treated as suicide, but the coroner’s verdict of death ‘by visitation of God’ allowed a churchyard burial to take place (suicides were still being buried at crossroads as late as 1823).[4] Musing on Murgoci’s study of the folkloric vampire, where dying unmarried, dying unforgiven by one’s parents, dying a suicide, or a murder victim, can lead to a person returning as a vampire, I can’t help but wonder if Polidori himself, in an act of revenge, his grave disturbed, could have returned a revenant to wander here? [5]  Speculation on Polidori’s afterlife dates back to William Michael Rossetti, who recorded his contact with Polidori’s spirit in his seance diary of 25 November 1865.[6]

The church’s theme of bloodsucking and mystery can be traced back to William Blake, another writer who has associations with this place. He placed the site of St Pancras Old Church at the centre of his mystical map of London. ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, a miniature painting by Blake, is an image of vampirism; the flea holds a cup for blood drinking and stares eagerly towards it. Surprisingly, it was produced in 1819 – 20 the very same year as Polidori’s Vampyre.

Sadly, the tomb that has inspired the most gothic tourism at the church is not Polidori’s (which is forgotten); it belongs instead to Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published 1792, died on 10th September 1797, just ten days after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley, who went on to write Frankenstein. The poet Shelley was drawn to the teenage Mary due to her melancholy habit of reading on her mother’s grave. The graveyard was the scene of their courtship and Mary is rumoured to have succumbed to Shelley, an advocate of free love, in this very spot.

 The monument can still be seen but the remains of Mary’s parents, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, are no longer buried here, with the disruption of the railway the family removed them to Bournemouth.[7] The Gothic history of the church had only just begun, however; Dickens set his body snatching scene in A Tale Of Two Cities in this churchyard and even today there is a story involving John Tweed, the newly installed vicar at St Pancras Old Church, which is set in the graveyard and features the Hardy Tree, the site of Polidori’s grave.[8] In this fictional account set in 1901, Tweed writes to his wife Charlotte complaining that

 ‘Every thief, vagabond and ne’er-do-well in London seems to have wound up buried at St P. Which would be all well and good, except that the digging up of late seems to have unearthed more than just bones. Judging by the number of lost souls drifting about the place in one spirit form or another, I would offer that many of my guests are far from welcome in Heaven’.[9]

The Ash Tree is again the focus of Tweed’s letter of December,1859: 

‘More missing headstones. Increasingly certain of connection with my guests. Today I traced strange lines of disturbed earth across the graveyard. Each lead to the ash tree. Are they being dragged there? And then where? The Ash tree itself is looking increasingly unhealthy, possibly diseased. I don’t like to get too close to it.’

‘If I hadn’t seen such as I have seen these past months, I may not have trusted my eyes, but trust them I must. I shall record it in as plain a manner as I know how: By the light of the moon last night, I saw a gravestone, moving with some speed, and quite of its own accord, across the graveyard. It hurtled towards the ash tree, at the base of which it disappeared, as if plunging into the very bowels of the tree.’

 The Ash tree it seems had become a portal for the restless dead, a veritable hell mouth!! Tweed’s descendants are driven to bury a large bible within the roots of the disturbed tree in an attempt to stave off its demonic curse.

This same tree, the St Pancras Ash tree, The Hardy Tree, holds the secret to Polidori’s grave. In December 2022, just over two hundred years after his burial, it collapsed suddenly in a storm, the stacked gravestones remained entirely intact.[10] As for St Pancras Old Church, and its history, well it’s hard to out goth that!!

With thanks to Father James Elston. Photos: Sam George

This article is extracted from Sam George’s Afterword to The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and Its Progeny, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes, MUP, 2024

Sam is completing an AHRC funded project on ‘Gothic Tourism: John William Polidori and St Pancras Old Church’. She is developing a Polidori Tour. If you are interested in joining, please email s.george [@] herts.ac.uk for dates and info.


[1] The mighty Ash tree Yggdrasil is discussed widely in Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 23-31.

[2] It is reported that no Ash tree in England bore ‘keys’ in 1648, the year before the execution of Charles 1st. See Margaret Baker, The Folklore of Plants (Oxford: Shire, 1969), p. 19.

[3] ‘The Ash Tree’ appears in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904).

[4] See my research on the folklore of crossroads ‘Vampire at the Crossroads’  https://www.opengravesopenminds.com/ogom-research/vampire-at-the-crossroads/ [accessed 07/05/2023]. For Polidori’s death, see Henry R. Viets, ‘‘By the Visitation of God’: The Death of John William Polidori’, British Medical Journal (1961), 1773-75. D. L. Macdonald argues that the jurors had known Polidori at Ampleforth School and that the coroner acted out of sympathy for the family, Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 237. 

[5] Agnes Murgoci, ‘The Vampire in Roumania’ [sic] Folklore, 86, 320-49.

[6] See D. L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori, pp. 240-41.

[7] Mary Shelley was buried with the remains of Shelley’s heart in St Peter’s Churchyard, Bournemouth. The remains of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were moved to the same plot in 1851 when St Pancras Churchyard was broken up for the railroad. See Sam George, ‘Gothic Hearts: A Love Story’ https://www.opengravesopenminds.com/ogom-research/lost-hearts-a-gothic-love-story/ [accessed 07/05/23].

[8] Anon, ‘Exit Strategy for a Restless Dead: The Hell Tree of St Pancras’ https://portalsoflondon.com/2017/01/20/the-hell-tree-of-st-pancras/ [accessed 07/05/23]. All further references are to this source.

[9] Anon, ‘Exit Strategy for a Restless Dead: The Hell Tree of St Pancras’.

[10] See John Sutherland and Kevin Rawlinson, ‘The Historic Hardy Tree falls in London’ The Guardian, 27, December, 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/27/historic-hardy-tree-falls-in-london [accessed 07/05/2]3


[i] See A Walk in the Past (London:  St Pancras Old Church, n.date), p. 4

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