language in which it is said to bear rather the sense of 'vampire[1].' If this is true, the reason for the transition of meaning lies probably in the belief current among the Slavonic peoples in general that a man who has been a were-wolf in his lifetime becomes a vampire after death[2]. Yet in general there is no confusion of nomenclature. Although the depredations of the were-wolf and of the vampire are similar in character, the line of demarcation between the living and the dead is kept clear, and the great mass of the Slavonic peoples apply only to the living that word from which the Greek vrykolakas comes, and to the dead the word which we have borrowed in the form 'vampire[3].'
Now among the Greeks the latter word is almost unknown; in parts of Macedonia indeed where the Greek population lives in constant touch with Slavonic peoples, a form [Greek: bampyras] or [Greek: bompyras] has been adopted and is used as a synonym of vrykolakas in its ordinary Greek sense[4]; but in Greece proper and in the Greek islands the word 'vampire' is, so far as I can discover, absolutely non-existent, and it is vrykolakas which ordinarily denotes the resuscitated corpse. In discriminating therefore between the Slavonic and the Greek elements in the modern Greek superstition it is of some importance to determine in which sense the Greeks originally borrowed the word vrykolakas which at the present day they in general employ in a different sense from that which both etymology and general Slavonic usage accord to it. Was it originally borrowed in the sense of 'were-wolf' or in the sense of 'vampire'?
Among Slavonic peoples the only one said to have transferred the word vrykolakas from its original meaning to that of 'vampire' is the Serbian; and the Greeks therefore, in order to have borrowed the word in that sense, would have had to borrow direct from the Serbian language. But linguistic evidence renders that hypothesis untenable. All the many Greek dialectic forms of the word vrykolakas concur in showing a liquid ([Greek: r] or [Greek: l]) in the
- ↑ Bern. Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Neugriechen, p. 160 (with note 1).
- ↑ Ralston, Songs of the Russian people, p. 409.
- ↑ Whether this word is originally Slavonic appears to be uncertain, but it is at any rate found in all Slavonic languages and is proved by the forms which it has assumed to have been in use there for fully a thousand years. This note also I owe to my friend, Mr Minns.
- ↑ Abbott, Macedonian Folklore, p. 217.
