The Werewolf in Story

Epic, myth and a Roman tale

The werewolf's literary life begins almost as early as literature. In the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, a few lines recall a shepherd turned into a wolf by a goddess, chased off by his own herd boys and bitten by his own dogs. In Greek myth, as the Roman poet Ovid tells it in his long poem of transformations, King Lycaon serves human flesh to a god and becomes a wolf whose savage eyes are still his own. These early wolves are punishments, and their stories are warnings about the gods.

A Roman novel of the first century offers something new: a werewolf story told for the pleasure of a shiver. At a rich man's dinner, a guest recalls a moonlit walk among the tombs, a soldier who strips and becomes a wolf, and a wound that appears on the man the next morning, all the while insisting that every word is true. It is the first werewolf tale in which we can hear someone enjoying a good scare. The origins page tells all three stories in full.

Sagas of the north

The Norse sagas, written down in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from older traditions, use the wolf as a sign of fierce, uncanny strength. In one, the hero Sigmund and his son put on enchanted wolfskins and live as wolves until the skins can be taken off and burned. In another, a landowner called Evening-Wolf grows strange and dangerous at nightfall. The wolf-coated warriors who fight beside the berserkers stand on the same border between costume, battle-fury and true change. The sagas rarely explain; they report, and leave the listener uneasy. More of these figures appear under the bear and the berserker.

The sympathetic werewolf

The most surprising chapter comes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the werewolf entered courtly literature and became a hero. The finest example is the Breton lay of Bisclavret, put into French verse by a poet known as Marie de France. A baron who becomes a wolf three days a week is betrayed by his wife, who steals his clothes so that he cannot return. Trapped in wolf shape, he keeps his courtesy and his reason, wins the love of the king, and is at last restored. The library's own retelling, The Knight in the Wolf's Coat, follows the same path.

Other works play variations on the theme. Another short lay tells of a knight turned wolf by a magic ring and abandoned by a faithless wife. A long French romance from around 1200, later put into English verse, follows a prince turned wolf by his stepmother, who guards two young lovers in their flight. A Latin tale tells of a king struck into wolf shape by his unfaithful wife with a magic sapling. Again and again the pattern holds: a betrayal, a noble mind in an animal body, recognition by a just ruler, and restoration. These are stories about loyalty, and about how a creature that cannot speak for itself ought to be treated.

Pamphlets and the printing press

In the age of the werewolf trials, the printing press gave the werewolf a new and uglier life. Cheap pamphlets and broadsheets with crude woodcuts reported the most sensational cases as news: confessions of murder, a wolf belt, a terrible execution. They were sold in market squares and translated from one language into another, so that a case from the German lands could be read in English or Dutch within a year or so. As literature they are poor, but they fixed the werewolf as a monstrous criminal in the popular mind for a long time to come. The page on trials, physicians and skeptics looks at what lay behind them.

Collected from the fireside

In the nineteenth century, collectors across Europe set out to write down the tales and legends of country people before they were lost. Their collections, from the German lands, Scandinavia, the Baltic, the Slavic countries and France, preserved a great many short werewolf legends, told as true events that had befallen a neighbor or a grandfather. Certain plots recur. A man slips away from the haymaking; a wolf attacks his wife and tears her skirt; later she sees threads of the cloth caught between her husband's teeth. A wolf is wounded in the night, and next day a neighbor is found bandaged in the same place. A werewolf is freed when someone speaks his name.

The fairy tale was close by. In one oral version of the story of the little girl, her grandmother and the wolf, recorded in central France late in the century, the creature waiting in the grandmother's bed is called not a wolf but a werewolf.

Gothic tales and pulp pages

Writers of gothic fiction found the werewolf ready to hand. A sea novel of the 1830s included an episode about a hunter in the mountains of Germany who marries a beautiful stranger, unaware that she is a wolf. A sprawling penny serial of the 1840s made a werewolf the tormented hero of its melodrama. Toward the end of the century, a story by an English writer and artist told of twin brothers and a pale, lovely stranger who was not what she seemed, and other writers set werewolf curses in colonial outposts and lonely country houses. Behind many of these tales lay new anxieties: that civilized people might carry an animal within them, that a respectable surface might hide an appetite, that the beast might be inherited.

In the twentieth century the werewolf moved into the cheap fiction magazines printed on rough pulp paper. Their stories were fast, violent and sensational, and they helped spread details that later audiences would take for granted, among them the special power of silver.

The werewolf on screen

Film made the werewolf that most people know today. Studio horror pictures of the 1930s and 1940s needed rules an audience could follow, and supplied them: the curse passed by a bite, the change came at the full moon and could not be resisted, and only silver could kill. A mournful little verse about wolfsbane, written for a film of the early 1940s, was soon being quoted as if it were ancient folklore. Above all, these films made the werewolf a tragic figure, a decent man who hates what he becomes and cannot stop it. The page on the full moon follows how one of those rules took hold.

The creature's look changed with the makeup artist's craft. Early films showed the change in a series of dissolves, the face growing hair between one shot and the next. In the early 1980s new mechanical and makeup effects let audiences watch the whole agonizing transformation in full light, and the change itself became the centerpiece. Later, computer-made imagery made the werewolf larger, faster and stranger again, though many viewers still prefer the handmade beasts.

Romance, packs and young readers

From the later twentieth century the werewolf found new readers in a new mood. In paranormal romance and urban fantasy it became a love interest: strong, protective, a little dangerous and loyal to a fault. Fiction for young readers turned the change into a story of growing up, with packs of teenage werewolves standing in for families, friendships and rivalries. These packs are often ruled by an "alpha" in a way that owes more to old misreadings of captive wolves than to the family life of the real wolf. Television, comics and games have added their own versions, some affectionate, some funny, a few genuinely frightening. The werewolf also gained a rival in the vampire, a pairing much newer than it looks; see werewolves and vampires.

Why the werewolf endures

A figure that has lasted more than three thousand years must answer to something deep. Several answers suggest themselves, and each age has leaned on a different one.

• Adolescence. A body that changes without permission, sprouting hair, hungry and moody, is the werewolf's story and also the story of growing up.
• Anger. The werewolf is the rage a decent person fears in themselves, the moment when control slips and someone is hurt.
• Illness. A condition that comes and goes on its own schedule, that must be hidden, and that others fear catching has made the werewolf a figure for chronic illness and stigma.
• The outsider. From the exiled outlaw to the stranger in the village, the werewolf is the one who does not belong, and readers who have felt that way often take his side.
• The wild. And there is the plain longing to run: to leave the house and its rules behind and be fast, strong and free under the trees.

Why therians in particular love these stories, and why the stories are nonetheless a different thing from an identity, is the subject of Wren Tarnlow's essay Folklore Is Not Identity.