What is a “Nosferatu”?

What is a “Nosferatu”?

We recently talked about the meaning of the word vampire; Today we will give an account of one of the most interesting species of these creatures through the meaning of the word Nosferatu.

The origin of this race of vampires comes from Romanian legends, where the Nosferatu They are described as a particularly unpleasant species that haunts cemeteries. Their forms are not too different from Ghouls, basically walking corpses subject to a slow but constant process of decomposition.

In fact, and following the path of popular traditions, a Nosferatu is an entity that, after waking up to its new life (or non-life) as a creature of the night, begins to gnaw at its own organism even from the grave; as stated by Michaël Ranft in: De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis, whose title literally means: “of the chewing of the dead in their graves.”

Bram Stoker himself, in the novel: Dracula (Dracula), uses the word Nosferatu through one of the main characters: Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who states without hesitation that Count Dracula is, in fact, a Nosferatualthough its characteristics differ significantly from those that come from the legends.

The word Nosferatu, by the way, was not forged by Bram Stoker. Emily Gerard uses it for the first time in her work: The land beyond the forest (The Land Beyond the Forest) —a name that, in turn, is a literal translation of the Latin word: Transylvania—, to describe the vampires of Romanian folklore.

Curiously, there are no written traces of the word Nosferatu in the Romanian language, in fact, its construction is quite unlikely in this region. Some linguists from the beginning of the 20th century agree that Nosferatu It is a contraction of Greek: Nosophoros (νοσοφόρος), meaning “disease-bearer”; or, in less words: “infected.”

But there are no written records of the word either. Nosophoros in Greek texts, at least not in relation to vampires. Except for some defenders of the theory of a Greek origin for the Nosferatuwho thought they found the variant Nosephores In a libel by Marcellus of Side, written in the 2nd century AD, most dismissed this possibility as unlikely.

Over time, and due to the linguistic impossibility of explaining the word Nosferatu like a contraction of Nosophoros, the most lucid minds in philology began to question the auditory abilities of the person who generated that hypothesis. Gerard’s knowledge of the Romanian language was, at best, approximate, so an error in recording the term would not be unlikely.

Some library rodents shout that, in fact, Nosferatu fits more to the Romanian voice Necurateither Necuratulwhich means “impure”, or Nesuferit (Nesuferitul), whose meaning in Spanish is “unstoppable.” Both names are associated, at least in Romania, with necromancy, which conveniently brings them closer to a theory about the origins of vampirism as a result of dark practices.

Whatever the origin of the word Nosferatu, it is clear that, sometimes, the root of a word has little influence on the ramifications that grow in the collective spirit of people. Those who believe in vampires, lamias, empusas, or nosferatus, are those who have imbibed the myth as something possible, and even real, in their lands, and do not need philological analysis to explain that mixture of horror and reverence transmitted from generation to generation; since a much stronger symbol owns the concept that supports the word: something ancestral, distant, built on traditions whispered in the light of the fire, and that have little in common with our fantastic liturgy, made of slight chills in some library well lit.

Vampire legends. I Vampire stories.

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