for gmcdavid : Dracula has Celtic roots?

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Belfast Writer Who Dug Up Dracula's Irish Roots

From the Belfast Telegraph. Speculation, or sound research?

This ought to make the Goth-Celts happy...

Comments

[gmcdavid]

I am skeptical. This looks like folk etymology. fola is the plural of fuil "blood". Why it should be lenited (have the h is not clear--except that in modern Irish the combination fh is silent. This is convenient for Mr. Hillen's idea, but I can't see any other support. Lenition is very common for Irish nouns, but I would like to see some additional explanation for why it should occur here. droch does mean bad, So droch fola is "bad bloods". The same roots go back to Old Irish, but checking my Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture the roots do not go that far back, A Welsh dictionary shows drwg for "bad", so the root goes back at least to early insular Celtic. However the same dictionary does not have any words for "blood" that look like fola, suggesting that fuil/fola is an innovation from when the Gaelic and Brythonic branches of the Celtic languages separated, long after any possible passage through Transylvania

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It seems to me the romanticizing of "Celtic" and the popularity of all things "Celtic" might play a part in why this is being forwarded as a valid theory. However, according to at least one comment with the article, this isn't a new idea, either.

Thanks for your insight!