Finally, a good article on Dracula and Bran Castle.

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Toronto Star has an article, Dracula’s castle? Don’t count on it, that really gives a good account on Drac and Bran Castle

So why is Bran Castle, a lovely, 13th-century palace near Brasov in Transylvania, known far and wide as “Dracula’s Castle?” Blame a mish-mash of expediency, misconception, and a yearning to connect in some way with the most notorious character in English fiction.

The conventional wisdom goes like this: Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, basing his vampire Count on real-life, 15th-century Romanian nobleman Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), who was infamous for skewering his enemies on stakes. Tepes lived in Bran Castle, which is a dead-ringer for Dracula’s mountain lair as described in the novel. So, the Stoker-Tepes-Bran connection is obvious. Right?

Except that it’s also nonsense, says Dr. Elizabeth Miller, a world-renowned expert on all things Dracula.

“Bram Stoker never even heard of Bran Castle, and Dracula owes nothing to Vlad’s atrocities,” says Miller, a retired professor at Newfoundland’s Memorial University and president of the Canadian chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula (www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/trans_soc_dracula.html), a society dedicated to the serious study of Dracula in fact and fiction.