Werewolf

• 1. Introduction

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  A werewolf, in folklore, is a person who can turn into a wolf, or into a creature that is part wolf and part human. Its other name, lycanthrope, comes from Ancient Greek words meaning wolf-human. Ask anyone to describe one today and the answer usually includes a full moon, a silver bullet and a curse passed on by a bite. Those details belong mostly to modern fiction, especially film. The older record is stranger. It runs from Greek altars to courts in what is now Switzerland, and from Viking warriors in wolf pelts to a village in Livonia where an old man swore that werewolves served God. It raises a handful of questions. Who first wrote down stories of men becoming wolves, and why did a monster end up in medieval law codes? What made courts across Europe put accused werewolves on trial? How did people think the change happened, and how did they try to reverse it? And how did a creature once judged in court become a figure of film, comics and anime?

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• 2. Wolf-Man Words

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  The Old English wer(e)wulf is the direct ancestor of the modern English word. It has close cousins across northern Europe, including Middle Dutch weerwolf, Middle High German werwolf and West Frisian waer-ûl(e). Linguists trace them back to a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form meaning man-wolf. An alternative reconstruction, wazi-wulfaz, would mean wolf-clothed. That reading matches words far from the Germanic world: Old Norse úlfheðnar, meaning wolf-skinned, Old Irish luchthonn, meaning wolf-skin, and the Sanskrit Vṛkājina, also wolf-skin. If it is right, the original idea was less a man who is a wolf than a man who wears one. Old French offers a curious doubling. The phrase leus warous, which became modern loup-garou, literally means wolf-werewolf. Old Norse vargúlfr is attested only as a translation of the Old French garwaf in Marie's lay of Bisclavret. It swapped the word for man for vargr, which means both wolf and outlaw. The modern Danish, Norwegian and Swedish form is varulv. The Slavic languages tell a different story. Serbian vukòdlak and Czech vlkodlak both point to a Proto-Slavic noun meaning wolf-haired. Greek Vrykolakas and Romanian Vîrcolac were borrowed from Slavic, and in the Balkans they name vampire-like creatures rather than wolf-men. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin used the word vurdalak, meaning ghoul or revenant, in his work Pesni, published in 1835. Scholars still debate where he found that distinctive form. Celtic speakers had their own term. A Proto-Celtic noun meaning man-dog can be rebuilt from Celtiberian uiroku, Old Irish ferchu and the medieval personal names Guurci in Old Welsh and Gurki in Old Breton. The Old Brittonic place-name Viroconium meant the place of man-dogs, that is, werewolves. Celtic cultures often called wolves dogs as a figure of speech. The word lycanthropy has the oldest paper trail. It comes from the Greek lukanthrōpía, and ancient writers used it only for a clinical condition in which a patient imagined himself to be a wolf. Only later did writers start using lycanthrope as a plain synonym for werewolf.

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• 3. Arcadian Wolves

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  Herodotus, in his Histories, passed on what Scythians, and Greeks settled in Scythia, told him about the Neuri. This tribe lived northeast of Scythia, and every year, he was told, all its members turned into wolves for several days before changing back. Herodotus said he was not convinced, but the locals swore the story was true. Pomponius Mela later repeated it. Arcadia supplied the richest wolf stories. The Greek geographer Pausanias tells of King Lycaon, who became a wolf because he sacrificed a child on the altar of Zeus Lycaeus. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Zeus visits Lycaon disguised as a commoner. Lycaon wants to test whether his guest is truly a god, so he kills a Molossian hostage and serves the entrails. Disgusted, Zeus turns him into a wolf. In the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, the god instead blasts Lycaon and his sons with thunderbolts. Pausanias also names Damarchus of Parrhasia, who became a wolf after tasting the entrails of a child sacrificed to Zeus Lycaeus. Ten years later he regained human shape and went on to win at the Olympic Games. Pliny the Elder tells the same tale, quoting a writer named Agriopas, but calls the man Demaenetus. According to Pausanias, this was no single event. Men had been turned into wolves at sacrifices to Zeus Lycaeus ever since Lycaon. A man who avoided human flesh while a wolf would be restored after nine years. One who did not would stay a wolf forever. Pliny, quoting Euanthes, describes a yearly ritual in Arcadia. A man was picked by lot from the clan of Anthus and led to a marsh. There he hung his clothes on an oak, swam across and became a wolf, joining a pack for nine years. If he stayed away from human flesh, he swam back and regained his shape, with nine years added to his appearance. Ovid, too, writes of men who roamed the Arcadian woods as wolves. Athens had its own wolf. Lykos was a hero in wolf form whose shrine stood by the jury court, and the first jurors were named after him. Virgil's Eclogues describe a man named Moeris, who turned himself into a wolf with herbs and poisons gathered in his native Pontus. The Satyricon, written around AD 60 by Petronius, puts a more vivid account in the mouth of a character named Niceros, who tells it at a banquet. He recalls: "When I look for my buddy I see he'd stripped and piled his clothes by the roadside... He pees in a circle round his clothes and then, just like that, turns into a wolf!... after he turned into a wolf he started howling and then ran off into the woods." Early Christian writers took the subject seriously. Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God, wrote: "It is very generally believed that by certain witches' spells men may be turned into wolves..." The Capitulatum Episcopi, attributed to the Synod of Ancyra in the 4th century, became the early Church's doctrinal text on magic, witches and transformations. It declared that anyone who believes a creature can be changed into another form, except by God himself, "is beyond doubt an infidel." The early Roman Christian writers often called a werewolf a versipellis, which means turnskin.

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• 4. Wolves in Law and Verse

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  King Cnut the Great, in his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, asked that "...the madly audacious werewolf does not too widely devastate, nor bite too many of the spiritual flock." The wolf here is a danger to the congregation, and it sits inside a law code. Liutprand of Cremona, meanwhile, reports a rumor that Bajan, a son of Simeon I of Bulgaria, could use magic to turn himself into a wolf. Clergy who read Augustine sometimes wrote about werewolves themselves. Gerald of Wales described the Werewolves of Ossory in his Topographica Hibernica. Gervase of Tilbury, who lived from 1150 to 1228, discussed them in his Otia Imperialia. Both books were written for royal audiences. Gervase says that belief in such changes, which he extends to women turning into cats and snakes, was common across Europe. He uses the Latin phrase "que ita dinoscuntur," meaning "it is known." Writing in Germany, he adds that the change cannot be easily dismissed, since "in England we have often seen men change into wolves." He tells of a werewolf named Chaucevaire, and he reports that the French called such beings gerulfi. The Church also fought the idea. Conrad of Hirsau, in the 11th century, forbade reading stories in which a person's reasoning is clouded after a transformation, and he singled out the tales of Ovid. In the 12th century, Pseudo-Augustine repeated Augustine's argument in the Liber de Spiritu et Anima. No one but God, he said, can change a body into the limbs of an animal. Marie de France gave the werewolf its most famous medieval portrait in Bisclavret, a Breton lai composed around 1200. Its hero is a nobleman who, for reasons never explained, must become a wolf every week. His treacherous wife steals the clothes he needs to regain human form. He escapes the king's wolf hunt by begging for mercy and thereafter accompanies the king. At court he is gentle until his wife and her new husband appear. His furious attack on the couple is judged justified, and the truth comes out. Marie also notes that belief in werewolves lived on in Brittany and Normandy, where she uses the Norman word garwulf. Two anonymous lais, Melion and Biclarel, share the theme of a werewolf-knight betrayed by his wife. In Scandinavia, the Viking Age kept wolf-men alive in a martial form. Harald I of Norway is known to have had a body of ulfhedinn, warriors clothed in wolfskin, mentioned in the Vatnsdæla saga, Hrafnsmál and Völsunga saga. They resembled the berserkir but wore wolf hides rather than bear hides. They were reputed to channel the spirits of the animals they wore, to resist pain and to fight viciously. Both groups are closely linked to the god Odin. Comparative mythologists see an even older layer. They reconstruct lycanthropy as part of the initiation of the kóryos, a Proto-Indo-European warrior class that may have included a cult of dogs and wolves tied to young unmarried men. McCone's 1987 work is the standard overview. The Scandinavian tales may have travelled to Kievan Rus' and inspired Slavic werewolf stories. The Tale of Igor's Campaign describes the 11th-century Belarusian prince Vseslav of Polotsk this way: "Vseslav the Prince judged men. As prince, he ruled towns, but at night he prowled in the guise of a wolf. From Kiev, prowling, he reached, before the cocks crew, Tmutorokan." The poem adds that bells rang for matins at St. Sophia in Polotsk, yet he heard the ringing in Kiev. Olaus Magnus, in his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus of 1555, describes a yearly gathering of werewolves near the Lithuania-Courland border. Lithuanian nobles and werewolves from nearby lands tried to leap over the ruins of a castle wall. Those who cleared it were counted strong, and the weaker ones were whipped. By the early modern period these medieval strands had split into two. In the west, the Germanic werewolf merged with witchcraft and became a werewolf-sorcerer, found in France, German-speaking Europe and the Baltics.

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• 5. Courts and Explanations

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  The Valais and Vaud regions of what is now Switzerland saw some of the earliest witch trials, in the early 15th century, and werewolf accusations appeared among them. The trials spread across Europe in the 16th century, peaked in the 17th and faded by the 18th. Werewolf charges were only a small fraction of all witchcraft cases. Early accusations of turning into a wolf were often mixed with charges of riding wolves or charming them. The case of Peter Stumpp, executed in 1589, set off a sharp rise in interest and persecution, mainly in French-speaking and German-speaking Europe. Stumpp was a German farmer, an alleged serial killer and cannibal, known as the Werewolf of Bedburg. Sixteenth-century France produced many reports of werewolf attacks and trials. In some cases the evidence showed murder and cannibalism, with no link to wolves at all. Gilles Garnier, at Dole in 1573, was convicted of being a werewolf. The French wrote treatises on the subject between 1595 and 1615. Werewolves were sighted in Anjou in 1598. In 1602, Henry Boguet wrote a lengthy chapter on them, and in 1603 a teenage werewolf was sentenced to life imprisonment in Bordeaux. The Swiss Vaud region convicted werewolves in 1602 and 1624. Then, in 1653, a local pastor argued in a treatise that lycanthropy was purely an illusion. The only later record from the Vaud dates to 1670, when a boy said he and his mother could turn into wolves. Nobody took him seriously. James I of England, who prosecuted witchcraft in the early 17th century, viewed those who claimed to be "warwoolfes" as victims of delusion caused by "a natural superabundance of melancholic." After 1650, belief faded in French-speaking Europe. Diderot's reference work blamed reports of lycanthropy on a "disorder of the brain." The Beast of Gévaudan shows how the label had changed. From 1764 to 1767 it terrorized the former province of Gévaudan, now Lozère, in south-central France, and killed upwards of 80 men, women and children. Nobody called it a werewolf. The Holy Roman Empire kept its interest longer. At least nine works on lycanthropy were printed in Germany between 1649 and 1679. In the Austrian and Bavarian Alps, belief lasted well into the 18th century, and wolf-charmers were persecuted long after 1650. The final cases came in the early 18th century in Carinthia and Styria. As late as 1853, in Galicia in northwestern Spain, Manuel Blanco Romasanta was condemned for a string of murders. He pleaded that he was not guilty because he was a lobishome, a werewolf. Why wolves? Wolf attacks remained an occasional but widespread feature of European life until the 20th century. Some scholars argue that the most feared predator was bound to become the shape of folklore's evil shapeshifters. They point to regions without wolves, which fill the same niche with other animals: werehyenas in Africa, weretigers in India, and werepumas and werejaguars in southern South America. Sabine Baring-Gould, in The Book of Werewolves, floated another idea, that werewolf legends may have been a way to explain serial killings. In 1963, Dr Lee Illis of Guy's Hospital in London published a paper titled On Porphyria and the Aetiology of Werewolves. He argued that sufferers of congenital porphyria, with their sensitivity to light, reddish teeth and psychosis, could have been taken for werewolves. Woodward objected that mythical werewolves almost always looked like true wolves, and their human forms rarely showed signs of porphyria. Others proposed hypertrichosis, a hereditary condition that causes excess hair growth. Woodward rejected it too, since the disease is too rare to explain cases on the medieval scale. Lycanthropy also turns up as the content of a delusion. One reported woman, during acute psychosis, complained of becoming four different species of animal. Woodward preferred rabies. He saw striking likenesses between its symptoms and some legends, and he focused on the idea that a werewolf's bite makes a new werewolf. Yet that idea is absent from the original myths and legends, and it appears only in relatively recent belief.

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• 6. Signs, Spells and Cures

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  European folklore claimed that a werewolf kept telltale marks even in human form. Its eyebrows met at the bridge of the nose, its fingernails curved, its ears sat low and it walked with a swinging stride. One test was to cut the flesh of the accused, on the pretense that fur would show inside the wound. A Russian superstition held that bristles under the tongue gave a werewolf away. In animal form, a werewolf most often looked like an ordinary wolf with a few differences. It lacked a tail, a trait also thought to mark witches in animal shape, and it was often larger, with human eyes and a human voice. Some Swedish accounts say it ran on three legs, stretching the fourth one backward to pass for a tail. When the change ended, accounts usually describe the werewolf as weak, drained and sunk in painful depression. Medieval Europe reviled one habit above all, the devouring of freshly buried corpses. The Annales Medico-psychologiques recorded it extensively in the 19th century. Folk belief was never uniform. The transformation could be temporary or permanent. The animal might be the human body itself, a double, a soul that left the sleeping body in a trance, or a messenger such as a familiar spirit. In that last case, any injury to the animal was believed to wound the human, a phenomenon called repercussion. There were many routes to becoming a werewolf. One of the simplest was to take off your clothes and put on a belt of wolfskin, a stand-in for a whole animal hide. Another was to rub the body with a magic salve. Olaus Magnus says Livonian werewolves were initiated by draining a cup of specially prepared beer and repeating a set formula. In Italy, France and Germany, a man or woman could turn into a werewolf by sleeping outdoors on a summer night, on a certain Wednesday or Friday, with the full moon shining on the face. Richard Verstegan, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence of 1628, describes werewolves as sorcerers who anoint their bodies with an ointment made at the devil's prompting and put on an enchanted girdle. To onlookers, and to their own minds, they seemed to have a wolf's shape and nature for as long as they wore the girdle. Some sources blamed divine judgment. Werewolf literature offers cases of God or saints cursing those who provoked them. People excommunicated by the Catholic Church were also said to become werewolves. Saints could change others as well as sorcerers. Thomas Aquinas wrote: "All angels, good and bad, have the power of transmutating our bodies." Saint Patrick was said to have turned the Welsh King Vereticus into a wolf, and Natalis supposedly cursed an Irish family so that each member was doomed to be a wolf for seven years. In Russia, men became werewolves by earning the Devil's wrath. A rare account breaks the link between werewolves and the Devil. In 1692, at Jürgensburg in Livonia, an 80-year-old man named Thiess testified under oath that he and other werewolves were the Hounds of God. They were warriors, he said, who went down into hell to fight witches and demons. Their battles kept the Devil's followers from carrying the grain of failed local harvests down to hell. The court sentenced Thiess to ten lashes for idolatry and superstitious belief. Cures were as varied as causes. Ancient Greeks and Romans relied on exhaustion, working the victim through long physical exertion in hopes of purging the malady, since many alleged werewolves seemed weak after their attacks. Medieval Europe knew three traditional methods: medicine, usually wolfsbane, surgery, or exorcism. Many of the medical cures proved fatal. Sicilian belief of Arabic origin held that striking the werewolf on the forehead or scalp with a knife would cure it. A related belief called for piercing the hands with nails. Gentler remedies existed. In Schleswig-Holstein, addressing the werewolf three times by its Christian name was enough, and a Danish belief held that scolding it would do. Conversion to Christianity was a common medieval cure, and devotion to St. Hubert was cited as both a cure for lycanthropy and a protection from it.

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• 7. Wolves Across Borders

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  Before the end of the 19th century, Greeks believed that the corpses of werewolves, if left intact, rose again as wolves or hyenas that prowled battlefields and drank the blood of dying soldiers. In rural parts of Germany, Poland and northern France, people who died in mortal sin were thought to return as blood-drinking wolves. At daylight they reverted to corpse form. The remedy was decapitation with a spade and exorcism by the parish priest, after which the head was thrown in a stream so its sins would drag it down. In Bulgaria, Serbia and Slovenia the werewolf and the vampire were tied together, and the same methods were sometimes used on both. Serbia uses one name, vulkodlak, for the pair. Hungarian folklore places werewolves in Transdanubia. The gift of changing into a wolf was said to come in infancy, through parental abuse or a curse. At the age of seven, the child would leave home at night to hunt and could then shift between person and wolf at will. An adult could also catch the curse by passing three times through an arch of birch with the help of a wild rose's spine. Hungarian werewolves were known for killing farm animals, especially sheep. The change usually came at the winter solstice, at Easter and under a full moon. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Hungarian courts tried werewolves alongside witches, and many records link the two. Vampires and werewolves were closely related figures in that tradition. Among the South Slavs, and the Kashubian people of present-day northern Poland, a child born with hair, a birthmark or a caul was believed to have shapeshifting power. Such a person could become any animal but was thought to prefer the wolf. Serbian vukodlaks gathered each winter, stripped off their wolfskins and hung them from trees. They then seized another vukodlak's skin and burned it, freeing its owner from the curse. Armenian lore tells of women condemned by deadly sins to seven years as wolves. In a typical account, a spirit carrying a wolfskin orders the woman to put it on. Soon she craves human flesh, and she devours her own children, then her relatives' children and finally strangers' children. She wanders only at night, and doors and locks spring open as she approaches. At morning she reverts to human shape and takes off the skin. The change is generally involuntary, though some versions let the women transform at will. Turkic folklore treats the werewolf with respect. Central Asian shamans, after long and demanding rites, could voluntarily turn into the Kurtadam, which literally means Wolfman. The wolf was the totemic ancestor of the Turkic peoples, so they honored a shaman in that form. Across the Atlantic, the Naskapis believed that giant wolves guard the caribou afterlife and kill careless hunters who stray too near. The Navajo feared witches in wolf's clothing called Mai-cob. Woodward credited such beliefs to Norse colonization of the Americas. After European colonization, settlers carried their own werewolf lore and absorbed their neighbors' stories. The loup-garou of Canada, the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan and upstate New York comes from French folklore shaped by Native American tales of the Wendigo. Mexico has the nagual. In Haiti, the jé-rouge, literally red eyes, is a werewolf spirit that possesses unwitting people and turns them each night into cannibalistic wolflike creatures. Jé-rouges try to trick mothers by waking them at night and asking permission to take a child. The disoriented mother may answer yes or no. Unlike European werewolves, they actively spread their condition to others, much as vampires do. Egyptian folklore knows the Al-Salawa, a werewolf-like creature that attacks livestock and small children. One tale describes a village man whose wife looked fully human. At night she became a Salawa and went to her sister in a nearby village, where the two dug up graves and ate the corpses. Her husband followed her one night and overheard her say a corpse was hard to pull out. Her sister told her to break its neck. He hurried home and pretended to sleep. When she returned, he asked for a cup of water. She said she feared filling the jug because it made noise when full. He mocked her, saying she had not been afraid when she broke the neck of the man in the grave. Her face darkened and her eyes flashed. She told him she would spare him only for the sake of their sons, Muhammad and Muhammadin, and left the boys in his care. In modern times, the source adds, some local Fellahin mistake the attacks of wolves for those of selawas.

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• 8. Silver and Screen

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  Werewolf of London, released in 1935, was the first feature film to show an anthropomorphic werewolf. Its monster was a dapper London scientist who kept much of his style and most of his human features after changing. The lead actor, Henry Hull, was unwilling to spend long hours in makeup with Jack Pierce. Universal Studios had no literary werewolf to adapt, unlike the case with vampires, so it drew on a Balkan tale of a plant associated with lycanthropy. The film mentions neither silver nor cannibalism. The 1941 film The Wolf Man gave the werewolf a more tragic face. Lon Chaney Jr. played Lawrence Talbot, and Pierce's makeup was more elaborate this time. The film pushed the werewolf into public consciousness, and it was the first to bring in the weakness to silver. The full moon came later. The first movie to show its effect on the transformation was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, and the moon became a standard part of the creature only in the 20th century. Silver itself had literary roots. It appears in 19th-century German tales and folklore collections. An 1840 German tale set around 1640 has the werewolves of Greifswald defeated with silver items. Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves includes a story in which a publican shoots a silver button over two shapeshifters, who at once turn into two ill-favoured old ladies. The claim that the Beast of Gévaudan was shot with a silver bullet seems to have been introduced by novelists retelling the story from 1935 onward. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula and his short story "Dracula's Guest" drew on older werewolf mythology. In the short story, military horsemen come to the hero's aid and chase off Dracula, who appears as a great wolf. They say only a "Sacred Bullet" can kill it, and the novel repeats the idea. In the novel, Count Dracula says the legends of werewolves began with his Szekely bloodline. He can shift into a wolf at will at night but not by day, except at noon. The Finnish author Aino Kallas published The Wolf's Bride: A Tale from Estonia in 1928. It follows Aalo, the wife of the forester Priidik, on the island of Hiiumaa in the 17th century. Aalo becomes a werewolf under the influence of a malevolent forest spirit, also called Diabolus Sylvarum. Later fiction softened the monster. David Naughton plays a comedic but tortured hero in An American Werewolf in London, and Jack Nicholson plays a more confident and charismatic one in the 1994 film Wolf. Werewolves turn heroic in the Underworld and Twilight series, in Blood Lad, in Dance in the Vampire Bund, in Rosario + Vampire and in other films, anime, manga and comics. Others are willful and malevolent, such as those in the novel The Howling and its sequels and film adaptations. The shape changed too. Early films such as The Wolf Man and Werewolf of London used a man-like figure, while many later films chose a larger, more powerful wolf. Silver is often the only thing that can hurt it, and in some stories the metal burns the skin on touch. Some fictional werewolves keep powers in human form, such as speed, strength and a healing factor, though usually weaker than in wolf shape. In other stories, medicine men or antidotes can cure the condition. One social pattern stands out across the genre. Werewolves are typically imagined as working-class monsters, low in socioeconomic status, though they can stand for many classes. In 19th-century horror literature they sometimes served to represent aristocratic decadence.

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