Vikram and the Vampire

Sir Richard Francis Burton adapted these Hindu tales from the Sanskrit Baital Pachisi and published them in 1870, giving English readers one of the oldest frameworks in world storytelling. King Vikram is bound to carry a corpse inhabited by a Baital, a mischievous vampire-spirit, back to a waiting sorcerer. On each journey the Baital tells a riddling story and ends by asking a question the king cannot help but answer, which frees the creature to fly back to its tree, and the whole labour begins again. The nested tales are clever, comic, and often morally pointed, and Burton’s running notes give the collection a distinctly Victorian flavour. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.