Bram Stoker was an Irish writer whose best-known work is Dracula. However, what it's very curious and not so well-known is that his inspiration for this novel didn't come from Romania (Stoker never visited the area), but from different parts of Great Britain.

The only inspiration he got from Romania was the name of the vampire, Dracula. This character is inspired in the Romanian emperor Vlad III. Like his father, he was a member of the Order of the Dragon whose purpose was to protect the area from the Ottoman Turks so that Christianity prevailed. The name Dracula means Son of Dracul, so he decided to use this name instead of Count Wampyre because the latter was too obvious.


Many British places were also an inspiration for him, e.g. Slains Castle, a Scottish castle known as the castle of the dead or the strange mausoleum in Hendon cemetery (London) where Lucy, the character that falls in love with Dracula, is buried. The name Dracula could have something to do with the Irish words droch-fhola (pronounced drok'ola), meaning bad blood.

She was known as number 14 and her mate was Old Blue. Even if it does sound like the first line of a bad country and western song, it was a match made in heaven, or at least in Yellowstone, which in wolf terms is much the same thing. Biologists like Douglas Smith who are deeply embedded in the project to restore wolves to Yellostone National Park in the nothern United States give wolves numbers or, very occasionally, names, to help keep track of them. Number 14 and Old Blue were two remarkable animals, even by the rarefied standards of the tribe of wild wolves. The average lifespan of a Yellowstone wolf is three to four years. Old Blue was almost 12 when he died, at which point Number 14 had to be at least eight years younger. She learned prodigiously from such a seen-it-all-before wolf as Old Blue, so that when he died, she was equipped for anything that the North American wilderness could throw at her. But first she did something astonishing.

In the last few months of his life, Old Blue and number 14 mated one last time. But when he died, number 14 took off, leaving behind her pups and yearling wolves, leaving the territory of the pack. Alpha female wolves don't take off when they have pups, don't abandon their families. It doesn't happen. But 14 took off alone into deep snow, indo a landscape that, according to Smith, was 'so inhospitable it contained not a single track of another animal'.

She was eventually found by a spotting plane, gave it a single cold stare, then simply continued travelling until all efforts at tracking her failed. She vanished.

She was gone for a week. Then quite suddenly she turned up again, rejoined her family and the rest of the track. Smith wrote: 'Though no-one wanted to say 14 travelled alone so far because she was mourning the loss of her mate, some of us privately wondered.'



p.d. Picture randomly chosen.

Source: 

 CRUMLEY, J (2010). The last wolf.