Werewolf Folklore: Signs, Causes, Cures, Silver and Wolfsbane

Folklore, not instruction. Everything on this page is a record of what people once believed. Nothing here can turn anyone into anything. Several of the plants named in the old accounts are dangerously poisonous, and no recipe, ritual or challenge based on them should ever be attempted.

How the change was said to come

Folklore offered many roads into the wolf's shape. They differ from region to region, but they sort into a few kinds.

By putting something on

The commonest belief of all, from Scandinavia to the Balkans, was that the change was made by wearing a wolf's skin, or a belt or girdle cut from one. The belt could be a hand's breadth wide and was fastened with a buckle of many tongues. Take it off, or have it taken, and the wolf was a person again. Trial records of the sixteenth century are full of such belts, though none was ever produced in court.

By an ointment

Others were said to strip and rub themselves with a salve. Recipes written down by hostile witnesses list fats mixed with strong and dangerous plants. Some later writers have wondered whether such mixtures, absorbed through the skin, might have produced vivid dreams of running and flying. It is an interesting conjecture and no more than that.

By a curse or a fate

A person might be made a wolf by the anger of a god or a saint, by a witch, or by a wronged parent. In some places the fate was fixed at birth: a child born on a certain holy night, or the seventh son in a line of sons, was expected to become a werewolf in time. A curse often ran for a set term, seven or nine years being usual.

By an act

Smaller beliefs filled in the map. Drinking rainwater from the print of a wolf's paw. Eating the flesh of a wolf, or of an animal a wolf had killed. Sleeping in the open on a certain night with the moon on one's face. Passing three times beneath an arch of briar.

By a bite

This, the best-known cause today, is hardly found in the old sources. It belongs to the fiction of the last hundred years or so, and it changed the werewolf from a sinner or a victim of magic into the carrier of something like a disease.

How a werewolf might be known

Since a werewolf in human form looked like anyone else, people collected signs. They are, of course, simply ordinary features on which suspicion could fasten, and it is sobering to think how many harmless people must have had them.

Eyebrows that meet above the nose.
Hair on the palms of the hands, or bristles under the tongue.
Curved, reddish or almond-shaped fingernails.
Ears set low and back on the head.
A long, swinging stride.
Great thirst, dry eyes, and a tired, hollow look by day.
Scratches on the legs, from running through thorn.

The surest sign was the oldest: a wound given to the wolf that appeared on the person. A paw cut off in the night that was a human hand by morning, a neighbor found bandaged where the wolf was struck. The idea runs unbroken from a Roman novel of the first century to the ghost stories of the nineteenth.

In wolf form, a werewolf was said to be known by its lack of a tail, by its human eyes, or by its boldness in the face of fire and dogs.

How the curse was lifted

The remedies of folklore are, on the whole, gentler than those of fiction. Most aim to restore the person, not to destroy the wolf.

Remedy	The belief
The name	Calling the werewolf three times by their baptismal name would bring them back to themselves.
The reproach	In parts of the north, simply telling a person to their face that they were a werewolf was enough to free them.
Three drops of blood	Drawing a little blood from the wolf, by a scratch or a light blow to the brow, would break the spell.
The skin or belt	Finding and burning the wolfskin or the girdle ended the power to change.
The clothes	A werewolf whose clothes had been taken could not return until they were given back, and given privacy.
Abstinence	In the Arcadian tradition, a wolf who ate no human flesh for nine years regained his own form.
Endurance	Some curses simply had to be served out, like a sentence, for their seven or nine years.

Protections: silver, iron and herbs

Certain things were held to keep a werewolf off. Iron and steel, as against most uncanny beings: a knife thrown over the wolf's head, a key, a plowshare. Rye, mistletoe and the wood of the mountain ash, in various districts. Running water. A blessing.

Silver has a slight and scattered place in the older lore, where a silver button or a blessed silver coin is occasionally named as the only shot that will tell against a creature protected by magic. Its fame as the one sure weapon against werewolves was fixed by twentieth-century storytelling.

Wolfsbane, also called monkshood or aconite, is a tall blue-flowered plant of mountain meadows. Its name is real and old: it was used to poison bait for wolves. Legend made it both a cause of the change and a guard against it. It is one of the most poisonous plants in Europe. Every part is toxic, and the poison can pass through the skin. It must never be eaten, brewed, or handled without care, whatever any story may say.

What the lore was for

It is fair to ask why such a body of belief existed. Several needs seem to have met in it.

Wolves were a real danger to flocks and, in hard winters and in the wake of war, sometimes to people. A wolf of unusual boldness asked for an unusual explanation. The outlaw, driven from the community to live in the forest, was called a wolf in the law codes of more than one northern people, and the name was not only a figure of speech. Illness played its part: rabies, which is passed by a bite and brings rage and a horror of water, and conditions of mind in which sufferers believed themselves beasts. And beneath all of these lay the plain knowledge that human beings are capable of savagery, and the wish to give that savagery a shape that could be recognized, named and, with luck, called back by the sound of its own name.