Werewolves and Vampires

Kin, not rivals

Modern stories love to set the werewolf against the vampire: fur against fangs, the beast of the forest against the pale lord of the castle. The folklore of eastern Europe tells another story. There the two figures grew from the same soil, shared names, and passed into each other so easily that collectors could not always tell which one a village meant. This page follows that overlap, sets out how the two were nonetheless told apart, and traces how the famous rivalry was invented, much later, by fiction and film. For the werewolf's many regional forms, see werewolves around the world.

From wolf-pelt to walking dead

The Slavic words for the werewolf, vukodlak in Serbian and Croatian, volkodlak in Slovene, varkolak in Bulgarian and their relations, are built from the word for wolf and a word for hair or pelt. They mean, roughly, wolf-haired or wolf-skinned, and in origin they named a living person who could take a wolf's shape.

Over time, across much of the Balkans, the meaning drifted. By the time folklore was being written down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, vukodlak in much of the western Balkans, and varkolak in parts of Bulgaria, usually meant a corpse that would not rest in its grave, one that rose at night to trouble the living, spread sickness and drink blood. The same old word traveled into Greek as vrykolakas, where it lost its wolfish sense almost entirely, and into Romanian as varcolac, which in some regions names a creature that devours the moon and so causes eclipses.

No one knows for certain why the word shifted. Werewolves and revenants were both imagined as beings whose souls or bodies went out by night to do harm, so the one could shade into the other. People feared as werewolves in life may also have been the first suspected after their deaths. Most likely several such ideas worked together over many generations.

The Greek vrykolakas

In Greece the vrykolakas became one of the most feared figures of village belief. It was a dead body that did not decay as it should. Swollen, ruddy and tight-skinned, it left its grave at night, knocked at doors and called the names of those inside, and it was said that whoever answered would sicken and die. It pressed on sleepers, spread disease, and troubled its own family first.

Many roads led to this fate: a wicked life, a violent death, burial without the proper rites, a curse, or excommunication, for it was said that the earth would not receive the body of one cut off by the church. Some local traditions add that eating the meat of a sheep killed by a wolf could make a person a vrykolakas, a faint echo of the creature's wolfish past. When a village decided it had a vrykolakas, the body was dug up and prayers were read over it; if that failed, it might be burned. One volcanic island in the southern Aegean, whose soil was believed to keep the dead from decaying, became so associated with vrykolakes that sending one there passed into proverb.

A French traveler on a small Aegean island at the start of the eighteenth century left a vivid and skeptical account of one such panic, which ended only when the villagers burned the body. His account was widely read, and helped make the Greek revenant known across western Europe.

The werewolf who would not rest

In several Balkan and Greek traditions the line between the two was crossed in time. A person known or suspected to be a werewolf in life was counted among those most likely to return after death, so that the same soul might run as a wolf while living and walk as a revenant afterward.

On the Istrian peninsula and in neighboring Slovene and Croatian lands, an old belief set two kinds of people against each other. The kudlak, whose name is a worn-down form of the same old word, was a malign being who harmed the living and might return after death to harm them further. Against him stood the kresnik, a protector. Both were said to be marked at birth by the caul, and at night their spirits went out, sometimes in animal shape, to fight over the harvest and the luck of the community. The belief closely resembles the Baltic testimony of werewolves who fought witches as the hounds of God, told on the origins page. It shows how flexible these figures were: one root word could name a wolf, a witch and a walking corpse.

How folklore told them apart

For all their kinship, the two figures were usually distinct in the telling. Like every table of folklore, this one simplifies; local belief often blurred exactly these lines.

The deepest difference is this. The werewolf is usually a living person caught between two shapes, and much of its folklore is about bringing that person home. The revenant has already left the human world, and nearly all of its folklore is about keeping it out. Much of what villagers took as proof, a swollen body or blood at the lips, is now understood as the ordinary work of decay, and the run of deaths as the spread of disease through a grieving household.

The vampire goes west

In the 1720s and 1730s, officials and army surgeons on the Austrian frontier in Serbia sent home reports of villagers opening graves to stop the dead from drinking the blood of the living. The reports were printed, debated by learned men and read across Europe, and the Serbian word vampir entered the western languages. By the 1750s the empress in Vienna had sent her own physician to look into such cases, and the opening of graves was forbidden.

In the west the vampire then took a road the werewolf did not. A short tale of 1819 turned it into a pale and fascinating nobleman, and the century's fiction followed. The werewolf stayed closer to the forest, the farm and the poor. Yet a famous vampire novel of the 1890s still remembered the old kinship: its count commands the wolves, and can himself take a wolf's shape.

An invented rivalry

The war between werewolves and vampires is a modern story. In the 1940s, film studios began to gather their monsters into the same pictures, and by the end of the decade a werewolf and a vampire could be seen grappling on screen, more for spectacle than for any reason in the plot. Tabletop role-playing games of the early 1990s built imaginary worlds in which the two kinds were ancient enemies. A series of action films in the early 2000s turned that enmity into a centuries-long war, and a bestselling romance for young readers in the years that followed placed its heroine between a vampire and a werewolf, with readers loudly taking sides.

None of this has roots in folklore. Old village belief would not have understood the question of which side to choose. It feared both, and often thought them the same.

Why the pairing appeals

Still, the modern pairing has lasted because it works. The two figures are mirror images. The werewolf is hot-blooded, the vampire cold. The werewolf is body, appetite and motion; the vampire is stillness, elegance and control. One belongs to the moon and the forest, the other to the night and the house. One runs with a pack, the other usually hunts alone. One was a peasant's fear, the other, in fiction, an aristocrat. Set side by side, they let storytellers stage old arguments in new dress: nature against culture, instinct against calculation, the family against the solitary self.

And both, in the end, are stories about the border of the human, about what we might become if hunger or death loosened our hold on ourselves. That thread runs through all the werewolf lore in this library. For how the werewolf moved from village belief into fiction, see the werewolf in story, and for the old remedies set against it, signs, causes and cures.