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The odd one out

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In the year and a half I’ve had the privilege to be your blog mod (how time flies!), a few of you have asked me where I come from, since I live in England but I’m not British or a native English speaker.

The land beyond *these* forests, to be precise.

Transylvania, Ultrasylvania, or Überwald (if you’re of the Pratchett persuasion). Siebenbürgen, the 7 Citadels, if you’re fancy. The Land beyond the Forest.

Nestled in the Romanian Carpathians, it’s an old and odd place. There are seashells on top of mountains and prehistoric bear skeletons in the caves. And you can’t turn a corner without tripping on a legend.

I can hear all of you thinking “Dracula!” right now and I have to rip that bandage in one: that’s actually the one we can’t lay claim to. The putative inspiration of Bram Stoker, Vlad the IInd Draculea, never ruled in Transylvania, was not one of its counts, the Dracula Castle so many tourists flock to has nothing to do with him (at most, historians think he may have been imprisoned there for a couple of days on his way to Budapest). He was born in Transylvania, I’ll grant you, but he left pretty soon.

There’s one vampire theory I like much better. Look at those forests again.

“How do they get mistaken for corpses?”
“They have thick skin. They don’t blush, their core body temperature is lower than ours, and you saw how pale their lips are. They also tend to put themselves into stasis in coffin-like modules when they know they’re going to be stuck on our planet and they’ll have to wait for a long time to be picked up. Sometimes they bury these modules because they don’t want to be accidentally found.”

Andrews, Ilona. Clean Sweep, Innkeeper Chronicles 1. NYLA Publishing, 2013. Kindle edition, page 111

If I were a space vampire of the Holy Cosmic Anocracy, stuck on a far away planet for a long time, I know that’s where I would bury my coffin-like stasis module. Mountain peak after mountain peak, covered in snow for most of the year, with forests corners so dense that no human sets foot in them for decades. What could go wrong?

It’s not like the locals could find my stasis pod and start legends which would spiral out of control until they inspired a best-selling Gothic novel that could turn into a planet-wide known franchise. That’s just silly.

The Pied Piper:

“And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people who ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why, they don’t understand.”

Browning, Robert. The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Dramatic Lyrics, 1842

We all know the story. The town of Hamelin in Germany was plagued by rats. A piper, dressed in patched clothing, lures the rats into the river with his song, and they all drown.
Despite the piper’s success, the town officials renege on the payment owed, so he starts playing again. And this time his song mesmerises 130 of the town’s children who follow him out of town into a cave, after which they are never seen again. There’s an inscription on the gate of the German city “In the year 1556, 272 years after the magician stole 130 children from the city, this gate was founded”.

Some versions of the story end here, but others say the children emerged at the end of the same night, through a magic cave portal, right in Transylvania. Here, they fortified some of the settlements in the manner familiar to them. The 7 citadels that gave the province one of its names. More importantly, Cornelius and his beasties would feel right at home!

“Our real last name isn’t Harrison. It’s Hamelin.”
A low sound like the noise of a waterfall came from behind us, insistent and oddly disturbing.
“We’re not named for the place where we were born. We’re named for the place where years before Osiris serum was discovered our ancestor became infamous for his magic.”

Andrews, Ilona. White Hot, Hidden Legacy volume 2. Avon HarperCollins, 2015. Kindle edition, page 383

One historical theory is that the Pied Piper was actually an imperial recruiter and the “children of the town” were the young generation which emigrated to Eastern Europe to guard the frontiers of the empire, in exchange for land. This process gave Transylvania its beloved German community, which still remembers the exodus. The portal story is, of course, much cooler.
And that’s not the only portal we have.

The Scholomance:

“I may as well here mention the Scholomance, or school supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, and where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the devil in person. […] A small lake, immeasurably deep, lying high up among the mountains to the south of Hermanstadt, is supposed to be the cauldron where is brewed the thunder, and in fair weather the dragon sleeps beneath the waters.”

Gerard, E. Emily, Transylvanian Superstitions. The Nineteenth Century (Vol. 18), London, July-December 1885, pp. 130-150, accessed on Project Guttenberg

Transylvanian myth describes an underground school of black magic, founded by the devil himself, where initiates can learn his magic and how to ride dragons (the closest translation for the Romanian Zmeu kaiju the scholars came up with). The entrance to the school is through a portal that opens every 10 years under Lake Hermanstadt, and only 10 students are admitted at a time, 9 who graduate as full Solomonari (weather controlling wizards) after years spent in the darkness of the mountains. The 10th student is never allowed to leave and becomes the Devil’s PA, brewing thunder with his master.

Hermanstadt, another one of the 7 citadels, and my home town. I’m not saying I grew up on the set of Beauty and the Beast, but I’m not not saying it either.

I know what you’re going to ask, and the answer is yes. I did swim in the bottomless lake, god knows I’ve had to talk to some absolute animals, and I’ve ridden a few Zmei in my day ::wiggles eyebrows::. My PA skills, however, weren’t up to par.

Am I always happy with the way Western creators have dealt with the culture of Eastern Europe, and my homeland in particular? You’d think after all of the depictions of Transylvanian brutish villagers in Dracula movies, I would be immune. Sometimes, the local myths are copy/pasted and straight up transported to Western countries, with no mention of their place of origin, and then everyone congratulates themselves on their brilliant original idea. Other times, even when credit and context is given, descriptions are based on hearsay and stereotypes and paint us all as Neanderthal-browed thieves barely capable of intelligent speech. Eh.

It’s been worse. It could be better. It helps that when we feel sad about it, we can just portal to magic school.

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Comments

  1. Now I am going to have to hunt up Romanian folk tales. And travelogues. Thank you for the lovely story, dear Mod R.

  4. Wow. So cool you come from a place with such a rich folklore tradition. Sucks that people still carry such stupid stereotypes of the people in and from your homeland. Thank you for sharing this with us.

  5. What beautiful culture and history. I’m sorry so many folks have done it such a poor showing.

  7. Scholomance has been a favorite for a long time.
    Back when I was dissertating, the Eastern European werewolf (and closely related vampire) beliefs were always interesting to look at.
    (Half my ancestors are Polish, though I’ve never been and know virtually none of the language)

  8. Wow! You could be a writer in your own right!
    How beautifull you describe this all, woven together with excerps from other writers….
    (And is it really already one and a half year? How time flies, and you a fix part of this universum ????)

  9. Thank you for the insight into your homeland. I’m always up to read stories about folk lore/history, so I found this very interesting 🙂

      • Romanian reunion party 😀

        I really hope IA books get translated soon, I drove my mom crazy telling her about them and she has no way of reading them!

        • Salut din Iași!
          Never would have imagined when reading your posts that you are Romanian????

        • Well, if you want another job – go for it. Translate a book yourself. You obviously have the background to translate it correctly. You know the stories, the gestalt, and the languages.

        • Cine aduce ţuica?

          This is fun, I didn’t know you were Romanian. I was actually just in Sibiu a few weeks ago. I love that city! I convinced my Norwegian fiancé to agree that we will retire to Sibiu after we are done with living in Oslo.

        • Salut din Timișoara! ❤️❤️✨
          I’ve visited Sibiu a few years back, and, Mod R, you have a lovely hometown!

      • Ah ha! But we could steal you! 😀 Keep your eyes peeled for a special aussie trick – where we claim people from other countries, most successfully with New Zealanders (Sam Neill, Russell Crowe, Lorde, Crowded House). It’s a possibility if you’re here for more than 5 min – and not a bad fate!

        Thank you for your wonderfully descriptive post, I want to learn more now, especially since I really didn’t know there are wilderness forests in Europe, how cool!

  17. A lovely post, Mod R!

    The first I really became aware of the Carpathian mountains and region was through Christine Feehan’s Dark series, which follows an immortal, vampire-like race. After which I looked up information about the actual region.

    • And I first heard of it through the work of Karen Chance… her Vampire Lord Mircea Basarab…

      • Another Karen Chance fan! Totally love Karen, whom I discovered through an early anthology before her first Cassie novel came out. Team Pritkin! ;0) (Still trying to figure out, to no avail, what clever way Karen will use to resolve the neck marks [and thereby the relationship] Mircea left on our fave Pythia.)

        • Maybe she will be able to remove them herself? It will be interesting to see. But Basarab was from Wallachia which isn’t quite where Mod R is from according to the few maps I could find, although, its closer than many guesses that say “carpathian mountains”.. that’s a HUGE mountain range and covers a lot of territory…countries too…

          • Valahia is the Romanian province to the south of Transylvania 🙂 .

            It means the “land of the Vlahi” which is the exonym for Romanians in proto-Germanic and Slavic languages.

  18. Thanks for this – you are great moderator!

    I feel like you spark conversations that have made this blog my favourite place to visit on the internet.

  19. Very cool! Thank you for the pics and history Mod ????
    That sounds like a gorgeous place to grow up ????

  20. I was in this region, because both my husband and my family is from there. We went on a heritage tour in 2017. The cities and towns in the Carpathian mountains were both beautiful and interesting, depending where we were.

  21. I now have my next – post work in Romania – vacation destination. Looks so beautiful. I had intended to visit Transylvania anyway but had not gotten the chance. The picture of your home has sealed it now.

    Thanks Mod R!

    • Hope you get to do some mountain hikes, they’re the best part! Wild nature at its wildest 🙂

      • I will be sure to schedule some in. My husband loves schedules but also loves to wander/hike about whenever we are able to get vacations in. After next year’s field season this will be destination. I have spoken!

        🙂

      • Do you have any suggestions for learning Romanian, I need to be able to better communicate with my Romanian colleagues.

        • I am probably not the best person to ask, sorry. I kind of learned it at home ???? . And in the 13 years I’ve been together with my English-born husband all I’ve managed to teach him how to say in Romanian is “blue frog”.

    • Let’s not put Mod R on the spot. They are good novels, and the most important thing is that you enjoy them.

  23. Mod R, you are a gem in the House Andrews treasure chest. Thank you for sharing this with us.

  24. It sounds wonderful, beautiful and amazing. I understand the frustration with outside people “interpreting” things. I lived 25 years in Alaska and still have many friends and family there. All I can say is books and stories set there can drive me nuts, most especially since most authors have only spent a small amount of time there, if they bothered to visit at all.

  28. That was seriously interesting, thanks for sharing! That castle photo definitely makes me want to go there in person. I think it just got added to bucket list.

    • If you’re into castles and fortified citadels, Transylvania’s got them 🙂

      The one in the picture is Bran castle, a medieval one. This is the royal castle, Peles, in a Neo-Renaissance style

      • wow! That’s gorgeous. I have to admit, I love the medieval castles the best, tho. And walled cities!

  29. From my trip to your home in the 1980’s. The Carpathian Alps – unbelievably beautiful to the this 20-something’s eyes who have never seen anything like them. The couple sitting on the ground in the “sound of music” pose is my husband and me during the fifth year of our marriage. (I did go to Bran’s [real name?] Castle – my first castle!- and saw the Romanian Crown jewels there, I think.)

  30. Wow – great stories and background 🙂 No wonder you’ve been able to do such a wonderful job helping out House Andrews – you lived in part of their story forests!!

  31. What did you think of the depiction of the people, area and myths in “In Much Fall of Blood” by Lackey/Flint and Freer? Is there any basis in local myth or is it invented out of whole cloth?

      • If you ever get the chance the “Heirs of Alexandria” is a really good series. In this book the mountains are full of Dragons, fae, and werewolves ????.

        • The books were fun and I enjoyed them some years ago. I should probably reread them at some point.
          There are several, but not all take place exactly in the same place. (Two different books are labelled “book 2” for some reason.)

  33. Love you Mod R!! This was an amazing post. Finding out I’m part Hungarian a number of years ago really helped explain a certain love and affinity for Eastern European legends and folk lore ????

  34. I love the echoes of HA in the Browning poem/lyrics (yes I know it was written the other way around, but as Mod R so gracefully pointed out – maybe our vampires really are sleeping near her home town!)

    I wonder if there’s an Inn near Hamelin and another near your home town – with a quick detour to Baha-char they could’ve made the jump with the knowledge we have already…. and where better for the Ad Hal to go train than under a lake where they only emerge every 10 years!

  35. Oh wow, Mod R.! What a fascinating history and beautiful place. Thank you for sharing with us!

  36. What an enthralling post! Mod R, your command of the English language puts most native speakers to shame. Thank you for the lesson on your homeland.

    Many years ago my father hosted a group of Romanians seeking to partner with various US companies and it sparked an interest in me, but it wasn’t as easy back in the early 1970s to find information on Eastern Europe, so I’m doubly grateful.

  37. Brava, Mod R!
    Thank you for the lovely pictures and poetic explanations of what we are seeing.

    The real backgrounds of folklore are usually more fun than the fiction derived from them. Thanks for those, too.

  38. I worked with a guy from Transylvania. He actually worked with our company division in Italy, but there were some issues with a work permit and he’d gotten a US green card when he was a student here, so he worked nights with the division in Italy. When they closed our site down, he moved to St. Louis to work with Italy from there.
    No, we often saw him during the day. Yes, we often went with him to lunch in the sunlight. We never saw him drink blood or talk with a funny lisp. The only “odd” thing he drank… when he went back to see his parents in Transylvania, he brought back a couple bottles of his father’s moonshine (which was an excellent plum brandy) and on Friday afternoon’s he’d share a “little sip” if you were so inclined. Some Fridays his supply got very depleted. (Our boss didn’t officially know about the brandy… but he occasionally had a little sip of Cornell’s “water”.)

    • Once you’ve been “baptised” with tuica (pronounced tzuicah), you’re one of us 😀

  39. Thank you for sharing!! We actually are moving to Romania in 14 days, so this was perfectly timed for me 😉

  43. Europe is not a great place for road trips. For starters, gas is at least four times as expensive as in the US*. But there are two that I badly want to do, and the seven citadels is one trip I’m dying to take by car for the gorgeous landscape around us as well as the history**. It is one of two long trips we are planning if our cat sitter proves reliable on short trips (the other is the Greek isles, my husband’s pick).
    _____
    *my second visit to Vienna was the first time I saw a gas station. I was living in Washington DC at the time. I did the math on the sign, converting € to $ and turned to my husband.

    Me: I don’t understand why everyone is saying gas is so expensive in Europe. That’s about $4 a gallon, same as home.
    My husband: honey, that’s per LITER.
    Me: …
    Me: …
    Me: oh.

    ** the other dream is to drive the Mediterranean Coast from Venice+ to Barcelona. Unfortunately there are no highways and the world over knows how scenic this drive is. I’m told it’s like sitting in rush hour traffic for 800 miles. Personally, that just means more hanging out the window taking pictures, but for my husband it’s an almost nightmare.
    +Padua or Verona probably. No cars allowed in Venice, so it’s a figurative starting point.

    • It’s actually an awesome place for road trips, though it might seem expensive to Americans. Obviously the number of countries, cultures, landscapes and history squashed onto one continent alone is amazing but you can also drive over into Asia and take a ferry to Africa. Three for one!

      • That’s part of how my husband convinced me to move to Europe with him vs. him moving to the US. Yes, the system is so much easier — none of this proving to INS that your marriage is real — but I was still concerned about my inability with foreign languages. He said “if we get bored, we’ll take a quick trip to Greece or something” and it hit me exactly what living in the middle of Europe would mean.

        But. Road trips are still ridiculously expensive compared to going to a city for several days. Road trips don’t just depend on gas — filling an average sedan’s tank can cost 90€ — but they need flexibility and the motels all over the US, where you can just walk in and get a cheap room for the night just don’t exist here. I see it as taking advantage when you walk into an hotel or motel and the room price is tripled because you didn’t book in advance and your next chance for a place to stay is is 100 miles/160km away. My husband thinks that’s normal. So they have to be a lot more carefully planned.

        So. Is it a wonderful place for road trips in theory? Absolutely. In practice? Pricing it out recently, it would cost us three times a 4-night trip to Lisbon (flight and hotel) and 5 times a 4-night trip to London (we gave up that near-future trip because of the strikes. Lisbon it is).

    • I’ve been to a few Greek islands: Tinos, Mykonos, and Delos in the Cyclades; and Kos in the Dodecanese. They’re wonderful to visit, and many of them (including all the ones I visited) are totally navigable without a car; just figure out which ones will mean the most to you. I’d definitely go back to Tinos and Kos, and probably try a few I didn’t have time for on the original trip.

      • Oh we definitely plan no car. It will just be a longer trip because the ferries between the islands are often overnight trips. Well. We decided we preferred the evening to dawn rather than 12-14 hours of dawn to evening. So we have to book sea time into our trip.

      • And thank you for these, they’re going on the list. Everyone knows about Crete & Rhodes & Naxos. I asked a friend of mine whose wife is Greek for some recommendations, but she went into labor and has other priorities right now than helping plan our vacation ????.

        • Mykonos is super touristy, but I enjoyed it. Biggest drawback, I’m sorry to say, was the number of abysmally-behaved American college students. Once the hotel owner realized I wasn’t part of that group, he was much more polite. Delos has no overnight facilities, just tons of history (and a row of giant phallus statues); you reach it by boat from Mykonos. Tinos is lesser known but I liked it the best of those three. The owner of a small hotel, the Aphrodite, grabbed me off the dock. That was a piece of luck. The place was spotless and the family treated their guests as family.

          I flew to Kos to save travel time. There’s an Asklepeion there. 😀 Highly recommended. The whole island smelled like flowers. A B&B owner, whose husband was a policeman, grabbed me at the airport. She fixed me a lovely breakfast every morning. They’d never heard of butter apparently, but the honey was excellent.

          I was there the last two weeks of October, which is the very tail end of tourist season. Pro: Fewer people, better deals. Con: The locals are completely fried from dealing with tourists all season. If you’re polite, they will do absolutely anything in their power for you, but you can tell they’re still kind of exhausted. Side note: I do not understand why so many people feel entitled to treat other people so poorly.

  44. Also, when I saw the word Scholomance, I immediately thought of Naomi Novik’s latest and was reading thinking I’d missed where she’d set it, which made for a very confusing paragraph the first time through. Now I have to read up on the original.

    • Someone in the comments below left a link to a chat between NN and Christopher Paolini in which they talk a bit about it, with relation to the writing process. It’s a long interview with a lot of insights about writing, and the references to the Scholomance are short so it’s not the best place to go for the legend. Very interesting for multiple reasons though, if you have the interest and the time to invest.

    • Funny. Not knowing what the word was (place name) I went “scholomance” hum what’s a scholmancer do? Oh like a “technomancer”?? Then immediately on to Chrestomanci (Diana Wynn Jones)….word associations are wild when you don’t know what the word means, LOL.

  45. Mod R, you are “My Favorite” (moderator)! ???? Thank you for all of these delightful posts. I hope HA is having a wonderful time away, especially knowing they left the BDH in such capable hands!

  49. How old were you when you moved to England if you don’t mind me asking? If you moved there as an adult congrats on your amazing fluency of the English language! I’ve heard you speak during one of the zooms you all hosted so I know you speak English with a noticeable British accent. I’m always interested in the linguistic side of things because I am French-American, went to a bilingual school growing up (there are a lot of bilingual English-French schools in the US which a lot of people don’t realize) and speak French at a fluent native level despite never having lived in France (my dad is from there). All the French kids who arrived at school below the age of 12 picked up English pretty fast and some managed to get out of ESL in a few years. My dad speaks fluent English having been here for 40 years but he is still has a French accent (though not the stereotypical thick kind you are probs thinking of lol) since he arrived at the age of 25.

    I would have never known you were from Romania had you not told us! Thank you for all the info about myths too, so interesting to see how myths and lore can get things so geographically wrong.

    • I moved to the UK as an adult 🙂 , but I had studied English since kindergarten, so I was fluent already.

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