Werewolf Mythology

The shape of the legend

Strip away the details and nearly every werewolf story has the same frame. A person crosses, by some means, from the human world into the world of the wolf. For a time they run with a wolf's body. Then, usually, they return, and something marks the crossing: a wound that shows on both bodies, a memory, a stain of guilt, or a secret that must be kept.

What the frame is filled with varies enormously. The werewolf has been a cursed king, a starving outlaw, a sorcerer, a penitent, a loyal knight, a warrior in a wolfskin coat, a neighbor under suspicion, and a self-declared servant of heaven. The single snarling monster of recent fiction is the youngest member of a very large family.

The word and its cousins

Werewolf is Old English. Wer meant a man, as it does in the old legal term for a man's worth, and wulf is wolf. The learned word lycanthropy is the same idea in Greek: lykos, wolf, and anthropos, human being.

Almost every European language has its own name. The French say loup-garou, the Scandinavian languages varulv, the Portuguese lobisomem, the Spanish hombre lobo. In the Slavic lands the word is vukodlak or a near relation, meaning wolf-pelt, and there the werewolf shades into the vampire. In Latin he was a versipellis, a turn-skin.

A very short history

The page on ancient and medieval origins tells this story properly. In outline:

1. The ancient world A Mesopotamian epic more than three thousand years old tells of a goddess who turned a shepherd into a wolf. The Greeks told of Lycaon, a king made wolf for his impiety, and of rites on a mountain in Arcadia. Roman writers repeat traveler's tales of whole peoples who became wolves once a year.
2. The northern world Norse sagas speak of heroes who put on enchanted wolfskins, of wolf-coated warriors, and of men who grew strange at dusk.
3. The Middle Ages Courtly romance gives us the gentle werewolf: a nobleman trapped in wolf shape by treachery, who keeps his reason and his honor. Scholars of the time mostly held that true transformation was impossible.
4. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries In a harsher age, the werewolf was drawn into the same fear that produced the witch trials. People were accused, tried and punished as werewolves in several parts of Europe.
5. The modern age As wolves themselves vanished from much of Europe, the werewolf moved into novels and then onto the screen, where it acquired most of the features now thought of as traditional.

How people were said to become wolves

In the older folklore a werewolf is seldom made by a bite. The usual means are these:

• A skin or a belt. By far the commonest. The person puts on a wolf's pelt, or a girdle made of one, and takes it off to become human again.
• A salve. An ointment rubbed on the body, often said to have been given by the devil.
• A curse. Laid by a god, a saint, a witch or an injured parent, for a set term of years or for life.
• Birth. In some regions a child born at a certain season, or a seventh son, was fated to it.
• An act. Drinking water from a wolf's footprint, eating a wolf's flesh, or sleeping outdoors under a particular moon.

The page on signs and cures goes through these beliefs and the remedies set against them.

Monster and neighbor

It would be a mistake to think the old werewolf was always evil. Alongside the man-eaters stand werewolves who are victims, like the knight Bisclavret, and werewolves who are something close to guardians. The most remarkable of these appears in a court record from the Baltic in 1692. An old man told his judges, quite calmly, that he was a werewolf, and that werewolves were the hounds of God. Three nights a year, he said, they went down into hell to fight the witches and bring back the grain the witches had stolen, so that the harvest would not fail. The court did not know what to make of him.

The werewolf, in other words, has always been a way of thinking about the edge of the human: about hunger, exile, rage and loyalty, and about what in us might be older than our manners.

What the modern age added

Three things that most people now consider essential to the werewolf are recent.

• The full moon as the fixed and unavoidable trigger. Older sources mention the moon only here and there. See the full moon.
• The bite as the means by which the condition is passed on, which turns a curse into something like a contagion.
• The silver bullet as the one sure remedy. Silver has a scattered presence in earlier lore, but its special power over werewolves was settled by twentieth-century fiction and film.

The upright, half-human wolf-man is also largely a creation of the screen. The werewolf of folklore was, to look at, simply a wolf, perhaps a large one, perhaps one with no tail.

Werewolves and therians

The modern therian community began among people who loved werewolf stories, and the word "were" was its first name for itself. That shared root causes confusion, so it should be said clearly: werewolves are figures of legend, and therians are real people who identify as animals in a non-physical sense. No therian transforms. The essay Folklore Is Not Identity considers what the two subjects do and do not have in common.