The Icelandic Dracula You’ve Never Heard Of

If any of you are looking for a spooky book club idea, gather round, let me tell you a story:

“There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.”
— Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Iceland, at the turn of the twentieth century.
Valdimar Ásmundsson, husband of Bríet Bjarnhéðinsdóttir, an early Icelandic advocate for women's liberation, begins serialising in his magazine what he claims to be a translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
It is not, exactly, a translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Titled Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness), this Icelandic version was widely read at home but little known abroad until 1986, when scholars noticed that it contained a preface signed by Stoker himself. Only in 2011 did Ásgeir Jónsson, editor of the third Icelandic edition, seriously address how different the text really was: not merely a variant translation but an almost new work, with altered characters, a re-shaped plot, and a sharper, more overtly erotic tone.

The nature of Stoker’s collaboration with Ásmundsson is still uncertain. The preface to Powers of Darkness, signed with Stoker’s initials, suggests he was at least aware of the project, perhaps even approving of some of its changes. But was this simply Ásmundsson’s imaginative reworking, or could he have been using an early draft of Dracula, one with sections that could never published in Britain due to state censorship?

For readers who know Dracula, Powers of Darkness offers some genuine surprises. The opening journey to Transylvania is greatly expanded, while the later sections of the story are cut down. It’s possible Ásmundsson had access to an early or unfinished version of Stoker’s text, or perhaps he simply decided to quicken the pace of a serial that had run for over a year in his magazine. In the 1980s, a typescript of Dracula turned up in a barn in Pennsylvania, missing its first hundred pages. Scholars have speculated that these pages contained a longer opening, later reworked into the short story “Dracula’s Guest,” published posthumously by Stoker’s widow in 1914. Could Ásmundsson have seen material from this lost beginning?

In Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Harker’s only company at Castle Dracula is the Count himself, apart from a fleeting encounter with three predatory women. In Powers of Darkness, the young lawyer, here named Thomas, finds the castle inhabited by a mysterious old housekeeper and a beautiful blonde vampire who soon becomes central to the story. Their meetings grow increasingly intimate, and Thomas proves a more enthusiastic participant than Stoker’s cautious Englishman.

Ásmundsson’s Count also differs: he shows Thomas a gallery of ancestral portraits and expounds on a chilling social-Darwinist philosophy. He is a more masculine figure than Stoker’s Dracula, less the feminine spectral aristocrat, more the soldier, dressed in martial attire. The novel introduces a sub-plot of intrigue and revenge, apparently inspired by the life of Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s wife. During his explorations, Thomas discovers a murdered peasant girl and a hidden temple where he witnesses an archaic sacrificial ritual led by the Count himself. No longer a solitary aristocrat, this Dracula commands a mob of ape-like followers and orchestrates an international conspiracy to overthrow Western democracy.

Powers of Darkness also reshapes Dracula into a different kind of love story. Dracula has long invited a queer reading. Stoker, a closeted gay man in late-Victorian Britain, wrote within a culture of repression, using the Gothic as a safe space to explore otherness and forbidden desire. The novel’s fear and fascination with the foreign, the inversion of gender roles, and the charged dynamic between men all enable a queer reading. Stoker’s vampire is more than a symbol of fear, he is a figure of liberation. Free from shame, disease, and the boundaries of conventional morality, Dracula lives without guilt or consequence, embodying a kind of sexual freedom impossible in Stoker’s world. The Gothic, in this sense, becomes a way for the othered writer to explore identity through shadows and suggestion. In the Icelandic version, however, Thomas longs to be reunited with his blonde vampire lover-girl, and the women vampires emerge as autonomous, even revolutionary figures; Thomas’s attraction to the blonde vampire turns the story into something closer to a romance. The women’s resistance to the Count’s tyranny reframes desire as rebellion rather than vampiric corruption. Where Stoker’s text encodes queer longing beneath the pressures of repression, Ásmundsson’s makes passion more explicit and even redemptive. Ásmundsson, by reimagining that desire in heterosexual form, can afford to be more open, even revolutionary, without defying moral codes outright, though it quietly challenges them through its portrayal of active, desiring women. Both versions, in their different ways, are about transgression, crossing the boundaries of gender, class, nation, and the body itself. Perhaps that’s why Dracula and, especially in Iceland, Powers of Darkness still endures: it gives form to what cannot be said, and offers, in its darkness, a space for freedom.

So if your book club wants something suitably atmospheric for October, try Powers of Darkness , which has been translated (back?) Into English alongside Dracula. Read them together, and you’ll see not just how stories change in history and translation, but how desire itself moves through them, restless, subversive, and still alive after more than a century.

Elio Andreu is a British/Spanish editor and archivist. He is passionate about history, queer culture and experimental literature