During this year’s COTN virtual meeting (October 2024), I will introduce three papers that will be available for all participants free of charge. Two of them have never been published before. The free publication of all three paper marks the upcoming 125th anniversary of Makt Myrkranna (January 13, 1900 – 2025).

“Makt Myrkranna – Its Publication & Reception History in Iceland, 1900-2014” was completed in September 2014 and shared with Dacre Stoker and John E. Browning, my co-authors for Powers of Darkness (New York: Overlook, 2017). It documents the publication history of the Icelandic serialization and the 1901 book edition, the story’s local reception, and the influence it had on Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Laureate (1902-1998), especially on his novel Under the Glacier (1968). In July 2024, I reformatted the paper to prepare it for presentation and publication at this conference. The content has remained unchanged.

“Makt Myrkranna and Mörkrets Makter – The Earliest Dracula Adaptations” was written for a book volume that should present papers from the Fourth World Dracula Congress, held in Dublin in October 2016. The concept of the book was changed several times; a number of these papers were finally published in the Bulletin of the Transylvania University of Brașov (2021). By that time, my original contribution was not up to date anymore; I reworked the text and format in July 2024, also for official publication during this conference. It provides a concise, updated overview of the debate around the Nordic variants, and a bibliography.

“The Berghorn Supremacy – Fouls and Offsides in the Debate about the Nordic Versions of Dracula,” last but not least,, was written in October 2023 for the Journal of Vampire Studies, but as I had a second article for this Journal in the pipeline, it was published independently on May 26, 2024 (World Dracula Day) through this website. The paper discusses and refutes Rickard Berghorn’s critique of my research on the Icelandic and Swedish Dracula variants.

All three papers are available for download as illustrated PDF files on the conference website and here below, so that participants can study them beforehand and prepare their questions for the conference. 

I reconstructed the site of Stoker's "Lake Hermanstadt," based on Gerard’s “Jäeser See,” as early as 2013, and mentioned this in the Christmas 2013 issue of Letter of Castle Dracula. This mention was very concise, as I planned to include a detailed section about the Scholomance in my planned Dracula Travel Guide. As the publication of this guide book was postponed again and again, I finally decided to present my findings about the Scholomance at the COTN International Dracula Congress in November 2022, and did additional research on contemporary publications about Iezerul Mare, the Scholomance school, and the mysterious lake were the weather was believed to be made. I completed the various parts of this academic paper in September 2022, as documented by the dates written underneath them. For the actual conference presentation on November 18, 2022, however, I prepared a separate .pdf file with bullet points, large-format illustrations and maps. I kept the present paper on my hard disk, with the intention to release it “soon,” or to use it to update and expand the Scholomance section of the still planned Dracula Travel Guide.

The day before the COTN International Dracula Conference of October 25 - November 1, 2024, starting with my keynote presentation this very afternoon, I decided to finally release the essay and add it to the bundle of papers I would present as “conference give-aways.”