Vampire Name Generator

The vampire entered English through government paperwork

Most monsters arrive in a language through a story. The vampire arrived through a form.

In 1718 the Habsburg empire took a large piece of Serbia from the Ottomans and turned it into a military frontier. Soldiers and administrators from Vienna found themselves governing villages whose beliefs about the dead were not their own. Reports started coming back.

In 1725 a man named Petar Blagojević died and was buried, and within weeks his neighbours held him responsible for a string of deaths. Officials opened the grave rather than allow a riot. A few years later the same thing happened in a village called Medveđa, and this time Vienna sent an army surgeon.

Johann Flückinger opened seventeen graves, examined the bodies with a scalpel, and wrote it all down. His report is called Visum et Repertum, which means simply Seen and Discovered. He signed it. So did the officers with him.

The document went to the Emperor, then to the printers, and then across Europe. Reprinted everywhere. And on the thirteenth of March, 1732, a London newspaper carried the story, and with it a Serbian word nobody in England had needed before.

Vampyre.

Consider what that meant to a reader in the age of reason. Not a peasant's tale. Not a ghost story. A signed medical report, produced by imperial officers under oath, confirming the undead.

The first vampires were not pale

Everything you picture is younger than the word.

The vampire of the Serbian villages was not gaunt, not aristocratic, and certainly not pale. It was bloated. The face was ruddy or dark. There was blood at the mouth. The nails and hair looked wrong.

Every one of those is what a body actually does in the ground, and the villagers were reporting it accurately. They simply read the evidence the other way round. A corpse that has not gone to bones looks like a corpse that has been eating.

The elegant nobleman is a literary invention. He arrives properly in 1819, in a short story by John Polidori, who had read the Habsburg reports and turned the swollen village revenant into a seductive lord. Everything since has descended from that decision.

So the pale vampire is about two hundred years old. The bloated one is much older, and it was somebody's neighbour.

The northern dead who walk out of the mound

Now go north, and back, and you find the same fear in a different climate.

The Old Norse draugr is a corpse that does not stay buried. It lives in its own burial mound, guards whatever was buried with it, and has strength beyond anything it had in life. It is heavy, it is physical, and it is not a spirit. It is a dead man who gets up.

There is no seduction in it and no elegance. The draugr belongs to a world of grave-goods and cold ground, where the dead were buried with their possessions and the possessions were worth stealing.

The names in this generator come from that world. They are Norse. Gudlaug. Thorkel. Kettilbjorn. Svanhild. These are the names of people who kept cattle, quarrelled with neighbours, and were buried in a mound with the things they owned.

Which is exactly the point. Nobody is born a draugr. Somebody has to die first, and be the sort of person who does not accept it.

If your undead needs a name, this is a better place to look than the Carpathians. A Norse name arrives with a farm attached, and a farm is a thing to come back for. The same folklore gave us the troll, and it is no accident that the two share a landscape.

Naming something that used to be somebody

Here is the thing every vampire name gets wrong, and it comes straight out of the history above.

A vampire is not a species. It is a person who died. The name should have been chosen by a mother, in a house, for a baby who was going to grow up and be a farmer.

Which is why the most frightening vampire names are ordinary. Thorkel is a name. It is not a threat. It becomes a threat only after you know what happened to Thorkel.

Three things worth doing.

Give the name a life before the death. If it sounds like a name a living person carried, the horror is that a living person carried it.

Resist the gothic vocabulary. The moment a vampire is called something with blood or night or shadow in it, the reader relaxes, because now it is a costume and not a neighbour.

Let the surname do the dating. A vampire is old. If the name belongs to a naming system nobody uses any more, you have told the reader how long this has been going on without writing a single line of backstory.

The original vampires were people the village already knew. That is why anybody was frightened.

How this list was researched

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, and one is drawn at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about vampires

Where does the word vampire come from?

From Serbian, by way of German and French. It entered English in a London newspaper report of March 1732, covering an Austrian military investigation into a Serbian village. That is an unusually precise birthday for a monster.

Why are these names Norse rather than Romanian?

Because the walking dead are much older and much more widespread than the Balkan vampire. The Norse draugr is a corpse that rises from its own burial mound, and the sagas are full of them. These names belong to that tradition, and they carry a life with them, which is what a vampire name needs most.

Were vampires always pale?

No. In the folklore they were swollen and dark or ruddy, with blood at the mouth, because that is what a buried body looks like. The pale aristocratic vampire was invented in fiction in 1819 and has been eating the folklore ever since.

Were the reports real?

The documents are real, the officials were real, and the people named in them lived and died. What the surgeons were actually looking at was ordinary decomposition, which does not follow the tidy schedule most people assume. They described what they saw with great care and drew the only conclusion available to them.

What is the difference between a draugr and a vampire?

Weight, mostly. A draugr is physical, immensely strong, and stays close to the mound it was buried in, guarding what is buried with it. The vampire travels, and it wants something from the living. One is a corpse with property. The other is a corpse with an appetite.

References

1. The birth of the vampyre: Dracula and mythology in Early Modern Europe. OUPblog, Oxford University Press. https://blog.oup.com/2015/04/dracula-vampire-mythology-early-modern-europe/
2. Arnold Paole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Paole
3. Vampire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire