Ancient and Medieval Origins of the Werewolf

The oldest wolf

The earliest surviving story of a human made into a wolf comes from Mesopotamia. In the great epic of the hero Gilgamesh, set down on clay tablets more than three thousand years ago, the goddess of love offers herself to the hero, and he refuses her by listing the fates of her former lovers. One was a shepherd, who brought her loaves baked in the embers. She struck him and turned him into a wolf, so that his own herd boys drove him off and his own dogs snapped at his heels.

It is a few lines only, but the pattern is already whole: a human being cast out of human company and into the shape of the animal his people fear most.

Lycaon and the mountain

The Greeks gave the werewolf its learned name and its most famous founding myth. Lycaon was a king of Arcadia, a rugged country of shepherds in the heart of the Peloponnese. In the best-known telling, by the Roman poet Ovid, the king doubts that his guest is truly the lord of the gods and tests him by serving human flesh at table. The god brings down the house in flames. Lycaon flees into the fields, tries to speak, and can only howl. His clothes become bristling hair and his arms become legs, but his gray head and his savage eyes remain what they were.

The story was tied to a real place. On an Arcadian mountain whose name means Wolf Mountain there was an ancient sanctuary, and writers of antiquity report a tradition about its rites: that a man who took part might become a wolf, and that if he kept from human flesh for nine years he would regain his own shape. Another account tells of a man chosen by lot who hung his clothes on an oak, swam across a pool, and lived among wolves for nine years before swimming back.

Travelers' tales and a soldier's story

The historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century before the common era, passes on a report about a distant northern people called the Neuri. Their neighbors swore, he says, that every one of them turned into a wolf for a few days each year and then turned back. He adds that he does not believe it, but that they swear it all the same.

The liveliest ancient werewolf comes from a Roman novel of the first century. A freedman at a dinner party tells how he once walked out at night with a soldier as his companion. The moon was shining like noon. Among the tombs, the soldier stripped, laid his clothes by the road, did something to fix them in place, and became a wolf, howling and running for the woods. When the narrator reached the farm he was bound for, he learned that a wolf had got in among the sheep and had been speared in the neck. Home again at dawn, he found the soldier in bed, with a surgeon tending a wound in his neck. Here are three motifs that would last two thousand years: the moonlit night, the clothes that must be kept safe, and the wound that passes from the wolf to the man.

Wolfskins in the north

The Norse world thought about shape in its own way. A person had a hamr, a shape or skin, and some were said to be "not of one skin." In one saga, the hero Sigmund and his son come upon a house in the forest where two men lie asleep with wolfskins hanging above them. They put the skins on, and cannot take them off. They run as wolves, speak in howls that each can understand, and fight until the day comes round when the skins will loosen, whereupon they burn them.

The sagas also speak of the ulfhednar, the wolf-coated, a company of warriors named alongside the bear-linked berserkers, and of a man called Evening-Wolf, mild by day and dangerous to cross after dusk, of whom people said that he was a great shape-changer. These figures are discussed further under the bear and the berserker.

The gentle werewolf of romance

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the werewolf entered courtly literature and became, surprisingly, a figure of sympathy. The finest example is the Breton lay of Bisclavret. A baron, loved by his king, vanishes for three days each week. Pressed by his wife, he confesses that he becomes a wolf, and that he hides his clothes because without them he cannot return. She has the clothes stolen and marries another man. The wolf lives in the forest for a year, until the king's hunt finds him and he runs to the king and kisses his foot. Astonished by the creature's courtesy, the king takes him to court, where he harms no one, except the false wife and her husband. The truth is drawn out, the clothes are returned, and the wolf is left alone in a chamber with them, since he would be ashamed to change before others. He is found asleep on the king's bed, a man again.

Other romances of the period tell of a prince turned wolf by a jealous stepmother, who rescues and guards a young hero. And a churchman's account of Ireland, written in the 1180s, tells of a priest who meets a wolf in the woods that speaks to him gently, explains that he and his wife are under a seven-year curse, and asks only for the last rites for his dying mate.

These are stories about a human mind inside a wolf's body, and about how such a creature should be treated. They were told in the same centuries in which learned opinion generally held that no real transformation could occur, and that what seemed to be one was illusion or dream.

The werewolf on trial

From the later fifteenth century, and above all in the sixteenth and seventeenth, the mood darkened. Across parts of France, the German lands, the Alps, the Low Countries and the Baltic, people were accused in court of being werewolves, usually in connection with a supposed pact and often with the murder of children or livestock. Confessions, many of them taken under torture, spoke of ointments and of belts given by a dark stranger. Some of the accused were certainly poor, solitary and unwell. Some were probably guilty of real crimes, to which the wolf was added. The cases were fewer than those for witchcraft but came from the same fear, and they ended as cruelly.

The Baltic produced a different kind of testimony. There, some of the accused spoke of werewolves not as servants of evil but as its enemies, who fought witches for the sake of the harvest. Their judges were baffled, and historians have been fascinated ever since.

Physicians, meanwhile, kept alive an idea from late antiquity: that "lycanthropy" was a sickness of the mind, a melancholy in which sufferers wandered among graves at night believing themselves wolves. By the end of the seventeenth century this medical view had largely prevailed, the trials dwindled, and the werewolf passed from the courtroom back into story. Its modern descendant is described under clinical lycanthropy.

What the old stories leave us

Read together, these sources show that the werewolf was never one thing. He is punishment in Arcadia, prowess in the north, pathos in the romances and terror in the trials. What stays constant is the question underneath: where does the human end? Each age answered according to its own fears. The next page follows one thread, the moon, from those early sources to the present day.