Frost is passing on unscrutinized Wright's assertion – and there are other vampirological treatises that repeat the claim. There is no such poem as A vampyre of the fens. ‘Pure imagination’ is, of course, right, in that this poem is entirely imaginary.

This poem, he claims, marks the first appearance of a vampire in a work of pure imagination. According to Frost, A vampyre of the fens is an obscure (no kidding) Anglo-Saxon poem, written at the beginning of the eleventh century. Frost's classic of popular vampirology, The monster with a thousand faces, I found some. I needed more information about this mysterious text. Alas, A vampyre of the fens is found nowhere in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (the standard edition of the Old English verse corpus), and the usual works of reference are silent on the subject. A vampyre of the fens, with its ring of the slightly schlocky Gothick shocker, would have been an unexpectedly thrilling addition to the canon. 2 You can hardly imagine how excited I was to read this: one comes across new Anglo-Saxon poems so rarely, and rarer still are compositions with such juicy titles. In his 1914 book Vampires and vampirism, Dudley Wright wrote that ‘there is an Anglo-Saxon poem with the title A vampyre of the fens’.

Comparing this process to the historical draining of the fens from the sixteenth century onwards, the essay considers the poem’s complex explorations of the nature of ‘home’ and the violence of ecocide. Turning to the perspective of indigeneity within the poem, the essay then argues that intimacy of this sort fosters, and is fostered by, a sense of Grendel and his mother as tragic protagonists rather than demonic antagonists, forced into acts of resistance by Hrothgar’s imperialist aggression. Drawing on the author’s own experiences of living in or near the fens, this essay discusses how the poem’s first descriptions of Grendel conjure up a fenland that still rings true to East Anglians in the twenty-first century and how the fenland environment is essential to the poem’s ‘psychology of terror’. How do we become spatially intimate with Beowulf? Where do we feel closest to this poem? This essay locates the essential space of Beowulf not in Beowulf’s indistinct Scandinavian homeland, nor under the bright lights of the ‘historical’ Heorot at Lejre in Denmark, but in the fens of East Anglia.

The Lost Fens by Ian D. Rotherham