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For other uses, see Werewolf (disambiguation).

A werewolf in folklore and mythology is a person who changes into a wolf, either by purposefully using magic or by being placed under a curse. The medieval chronicler Gervase of Tilbury associated the transformation with the appearance of the full moon, but this concept was rarely associated with the werewolf until the idea was picked up by modern fiction writers. Most modern references agree that a werewolf can be killed if shot by a silver bullet, although this is more a reflection of fiction's influence than an authentic feature of the folk legends. Werewolves are sometimes held to become vampires after death.

Contents 1 Origins and variations of the word 2 History of the werewolf 3 Becoming a werewolf 4 Theories of origin 5 Werewolves in modern fiction 6 References 7 See also 8 External links

Origins and variations of the word

The name is thought most likely to derive from Old English 'wer' (or 'were') meaning 'man' (male "man" rather than gender-neutral "person, human"). It has cognates in several Germanic languages including German: 'we(h)r', 'we(h)ren' (compounds include Abwehr, Feuerwehr, Bundeswehr 'group of men engaged in defense') and Old Norse: 'var' The second element is '*wlkwo-' or wulf meaning simply 'wolf'. The two elements joined thus yield 'man-wolf.' The first element is thought to be representative of the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European roots '*wi-ro-' meaning 'man.' Also thought to be descended from this root are Latin 'vir' Old Prussian: 'wirs', and Irish 'fir.' An alternative etymology looks to Old English weri (to wear) plus "wolf", thus bearing wearer of the wolf skin.

Other sources believe it is derived from warg-wolf, where "warg" (or later "werg" and "wero") is cognate with Norse "varg" meaning wolf and as "vargulf" means the kind of wolf that slaughters many of a flock or herd but eats only a bit. This was a serious problem for herders as they had to somehow destroy the individual wolf that had run mad before it destroyed their entire flock or herd. They then used the wolf's hide as a decorative ornament in the bedroom of a young infant, believing it to give the baby supernatural powers. "Warg" by itself was used in Old English for that specific kind of wolf (see J. R. R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit) and it was used as well for what would now be called a serial killer.

The Greek term Lycanthropy (a compound of which the first part derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root for "wolf", *wlkwo-, as the English word) is also commonly used for the "wolf - man" transformation. The term for the metamorphosis of people into animals in general, rather than wolves specifically, is therianthropy (therianthrope means animal-man). The term turnskin or turncoat (Latin: versipellis, Russian : oboroten, O. Norse: hamrammr) is sometimes also used. Another name for a werewolf is loup-garou, from the Latin noun lupus meaning 'wolf.' [1] The second element is thought to be from Old French 'garoul' meaning 'werewolf.' This in turn is most likely from Frankish '*wer-wulf' meaning 'man-wolf.' [2]

Compare Shape-shifting.

Werewolf ... English

Guerulfus ... Medieval Latin

Vargulf ... Scandinavian

Varulf ... Swedish

Vaerulf ... Danish

Ulfhedhnar ... Norse

Berwerker ... Norse

Baren-hauter ... German

Loup-Garou ... Norman French

Lobarraz ... Portuguese

Upo-Manaro ... Italian

Lupu-Minaru ... Sicilian

Vlkodlak ... Czech

Vulkolak ... Bulgaria

Vlukodlak ... Slavonic

Wilkolak ... Polish

Olkolka ... Russian

Volkodlak ... Russian

Vulkodlak ... Serbian

Brukolaka ... Modern Greek

Bourkolakas ... Modern Greek

Vrikas ... Sanskrit

Varka ... Persian

Warg ... German

Vargr ... Old Norse

Velku ... Old Common Slavic

Hirkas ... Hittite

Okami Hito ... Japanese

Okami On'na ... Japanese

Juben Tsuki ... Japanese

Seibuno Okami ... Japanese

Chemoo ... Achumawi

Harkeu ... Ainu

Ujk ... Albanian

Tuk'sit ... Algonquin

Mah'cho ... Apache

Tha'lab ... Arabic

Gail ... Armenian

Llobu ... Austrian

Otso ... Basque

Shial ... Bangali

Lobisomem ... Brazilian Portuguese

History of the werewolf

Many European countries and cultures have stories of werewolves, including Greece (lycanthropos), Spain (hombre lobo), Bulgaria (varkolak, vulkodlak), Czech (vlkodlak), Serbia (vukodlak), Russia (oboroten' , vurdalak), Ukraine (vovkulak(a),vovkun,pereverten' ), Poland (wilkołak), Romania (vârcolac), England (werwolf), Ireland (faoladh or conriocht), Germany (Werwolf), Denmark/Sweden (Varulv), France (loup-garou), Galicia, Portugal (lobisón, lobisomem), Lithuania (vilkolakis and vilkatlakis), Latvia (vilkatis and vilkacis), Estonia (libahunt), Argentina (lobizón, hombre lobo) and Italy (lupo mannaro) . In northern Europe, there are also tales about people changing into bears. In Norse mythology, the legends of berserkers may be a source of the werewolf myths. Berserks were vicious fighters, dressed in wolf or bear hides; they were immune to pain and killed viciously in battle, like a wild animal. In Latvian mythology, the Vilkacis was a person changed into a wolf-like monster, though the Vilkacis was occasionally beneficial. A closely related set of myths are the skin-walkers. These myths probably have a common base in Proto-Indo-European society, where the class of young, unwed warriors were apparently associated with wolves.

Shape-shifters similar to werewolves are common in myths from all over the world, though most of them involve animal forms other than wolves. See lycanthropy for more information.

In Greek mythology the story of Lycaon supplies one of the earliest examples of a werewolf legend. According to one form of it Lycaon was transformed into a wolf as a result of eating human flesh; one of those who were present at periodical sacrifice on Mount Lycaon was said to suffer a similar fate. The Roman Pliny the Elder, quoting Euanthes, says (Historia Naturalis viii. 22/34. 81) that a man of Anthus' family was selected by lot and brought to a lake in Arcadia, where he hung his clothing on an ash tree and swam across. This resulted in his being transformed into a wolf, and he wandered in this shape nine years. Then, if he had attacked no human being, he was at liberty to swim back and resume his former shape. Probably the two stories are identical, though we hear nothing of participation in the Lycaean sacrifice by the descendant of Antaeus. Herodotus (iv. 105) tells us that the Neuri, a tribe he places to the north-east of Scythia were annually transformed for a few days, and Virgil is familiar with transformation of human beings into wolves (see Eclogues viii. 98). In the novel Satyricon, written about year 60 by Gaius Petronius, one of the characters recites a story about a man who turns into a wolf.

There are women, so the Armenian belief runs, who in consequence of deadly sins are condemned to pass seven years in the form of a wolf. A spirit comes to such a woman and brings her a wolf's skin. He orders her to put it on, and no sooner has she done this than the most frightful wolfish cravings make their appearance and soon get the upper hand. Her better nature conquered, she makes a meal of her own children, one by one, then of her relatives' children according to the degree of relationship, and finally the children of strangers begin to fall as prey to her. She wanders forth only at night, and doors and locks spring open at her approach. When morning draws near she returns to human form and removes her wolf skin. In these cases the transformation was involuntary or virtually so. But side by side with this belief in involuntary metamorphosis, we find the belief that human beings can change themselves into animals at will and then resume their own form.

In the Volsungasaga of Norse mythology, the hero Sigmund and his son Sinfjötli spent some time wearing cursed wolf-skins, which transformed them into wolves.

France in particular seems to have been infested with werewolves during the 16th century, and the consequent trials were very numerous. In some of the cases -- e.g. those of the Gandillon family in the Jura, the tailor of Chalons and Roulet in Angers, all occurring in the year 1598, -- there was clear evidence against the accused of murder and cannibalism, but none of association with wolves; in other cases, as that of Gilles Garnier in Dole in 1573, there was clear evidence against some wolf, but none against the accused; in all the cases, with hardly an exception, there was that extraordinary readiness in the accused to confess and even to give circumstantial details of the metamorphosis, which is one of the most inexplicable concomitants of medieval witchcraft. Yet while this lycanthropy fever, both of suspectors and of suspected, was at its height, it was decided in the case of Jean Grenier at Bordeaux in 1603 that lycanthropy was nothing more than an insane delusion. From this time the loup-garou gradually ceased to be regarded as a dangerous heretic, and fell back into his pre-Christian position of being simply a "man-wolf-fiend".

The lubins or lupins of France were usually female and shy in contrast to the aggressive loup-garous.

In Province of Prussia, Livonia and Lithuania, according to the bishops Olaus Magnus and Majolus, the werwolves were in the 16th century far more destructive than "true and natural wolves", and their heterodoxy appears from the Catholic bishops' assertion that they formed "an accursed college" of those "desirous of innovations contrary to the divine law".

In England, however, where at the beginning of the 17th century the punishment of witchcraft was still zealously prosecuted by James I of England, the wolf had been so long extinct that that pious monarch was himself able (Demonologie, lib. iii.) to regard "warwoolfes" as victims of delusion induced by "a naturall superabundance of melancholic". Only small creatures such as the cat, the hare and the weasel remained for the malignant sorcerer to transform himself into, but he was firmly believed to avail himself of these agencies.

The werewolves of the Christian dispensation were not, however, all considered to be heretics or viciously disposed towards mankind. "According to Baronius, in the year 617, a number of wolves presented themselves at a monastery, and tore in pieces several friars who entertained heretical opinions. The wolves sent by God tore the sacrilegious thieves of the army of Francesco Maria, duke of Urbino, who had come to sack the treasure of the holy house of Loreto. A wolf guarded and defended from the wild beasts the head of St. Edmund the Martyr, king of England. St. Odo, abbot of Cluny, assailed in a pilgrimage by foxes, was delivered and escorted by a wolf" (A. de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, 1872, vol. ii. p. 145). Many of the werewolves were most innocent and God-fearing persons, who suffered through the witchcraft of others, or simply from an unhappy fate, and who as wolves behaved in a truly touching fashion, fawning upon and protecting their benefactors. In Marie de France's poem "Bisclaveret" (c. 1200), the nobleman Bisclavret, for reasons not described in the lai, had to transform into a wolf every week. When his treacherous wife stole his clothing, needed to restore his human form, he escaped the king's wolf hunt by imploring the king for mercy, and accompanied the king thereafter. His behavoir at court was so gentle and harmless than when his wife and her new husband appeared at court, his attack on them was taken as evidence of reason to hate them, and the truth was revealed. Others of this sort were the hero of "William and the Werewolf" (translated from French into English about 1350), and the numerous princes and princesses, knights and ladies, who appear temporarily in beast form in the German fairy tales, or Märchen. See "Snow White and Rose Red", where the tame bear is really a bewitched prince.

Indeed, the power of transforming others into wild beasts was attributed not only to malignant sorcerers, but also to Christian saints. Omnes angeli, boni et mali, ex virtute naturali habent potestatem transmutandi corpora nostra ("All angels, good and bad have the power of transmutating our bodies") was the dictum of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Patrick transformed Vereticus, a king in Wales, into a wolf; and St. Natalis cursed an illustrious Irish family with the result that each member of it was doomed to be a wolf for seven years. In other tales the divine agency is still more direct, while in Russia, again, men are supposed to become werewolves through incurring the wrath of the devil.

Some Werewolf lore is based on documented events. The Beast of Gévaudan was a creature that terrorized the general area of the former province of Gévaudan, in today's Lozère département, in the Margeride Mountains in south-central France, in the general timeframe of 1764 to 1767. The beast was often described as a giant wolf, and attacked livestock and humans indiscriminately.

In the late 1990s, a string of man-eating wolf attacks occurred in Uttar Pradesh, India. Frightened people claimed, among other things, that the wolves were werewolves.

Becoming a werewolf

Historical legends describe a wide variety of methods for becoming a werewolf. One of the simplest was the removal of clothing and putting on a belt made of wolf skin, probably a substitute for the assumption of an entire animal skin which also is frequently described. In other cases the body is rubbed with a magic salve. To drink water out of the footprint of the animal in question or to drink from certain enchanted streams were also considered effectual modes of accomplishing metamorphosis. Olaus Magnus says that the Livonian werwolves were initiated by draining a cup of specially prepared beer and repeating a set formula. Ralston in his Songs of the Russian People gives the form of incantation still familiar in Russia. It is also said that the seventh son of the seventh son will become werewolf. Another is to be directly bitten by a werewolf, where the saliva enters the blood stream.

In Galician, Portuguese and Brazilian folklore, it is the seventh of the sons (but sometimes the seventh child, a boy, after a line of six daughters). This belief was so extended in Northern Argentina, that seventh sons were abandoned, ceded in adoption or killed. A law from 1920 decreed that the President of Argentina is the godfather of the every seventh son. Thus, the State gives him a gold medal in his baptism and a scholarship until his 21st year. This ended the abandonments, but it is still traditional that the President godfathers seventh sons.

Various methods also existed for removing the beast-shape. The simplest was the act of the enchanter (operating either on himself or on a victim), and another was the removal of the animal belt or skin. To kneel in one spot for a hundred years, to be reproached with being a werewolf, to be saluted with the sign of the cross, or addressed thrice by baptismal name, to be struck three blows on the forehead with a knife, or to have at least three drops of blood drawn have also been mentioned as possible cures. Many European folk tales include throwing an iron object over or at the werewolf, to make it reveal its human form.

In other cases the transformation was supposed to be accomplished by Satanic agency voluntarily submitted to, and that for the most loathsome ends, in particular for the gratification of a craving for human flesh. "The werwolves," writes Richard Verstegan (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 1628), "are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an oyntment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, doe not onely unto the view of others seeme as wolves, but to their owne thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they weare the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in wourrying and killing, and most of humane creatures." Such were the views about lycanthropy current throughout the continent of Europe when Verstegan wrote. The ointments and salves in question may have contained hallucinogenic agents.

Becoming a werewolf simply by being bitten by another werewolf as a form of contagion is common in modern fiction.

Theories of origin

A recent theory has been proposed to explain werewolf episodes in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ergot, which causes a form of foodborne illness, is a fungus that grows in place of rye grains in wet growing seasons after very cold winters. Ergot poisoning usually affects whole towns or at least poor areas of towns and results in hallucinations, mass hysteria and paranoia, as well as convulsions and sometimes death. (LSD can be derived from ergot.) Ergot poisoning has been proposed as both a cause of an individual believing that he or she is a werewolf and of a whole town believing that they had seen a werewolf.

Like most attempts to use modern science to explain away religious beliefs and folklore, this theory is controversial and unsatisfactory. Witchcraft hysteria and legends of animal transformations, as well as hysteria and superstition in general, have existed across the world for all of recorded history. Even if ergot poisoning is found to be an accurate explanation in some cases, it cannot be applied to all instances. An over-reliance on any one theory denies the diversity and complexity of such occurrences.

Some modern researchers have tried to use conditions such as rabies, hypertrichosis (excessive hair growth over the entire body) or porphyria (an enzyme disorder with symptoms including hallucinations and paranoia) as an explanation for werewolf beliefs, although the symptoms of those ailments do not match up well with the folklore or the evidence of the episodes of hysteria either.

There is also a rare mental disorder called clinical lycanthropy, in which an affected person has a delusional belief that he or she is transforming into another animal, although not always a wolf or werewolf.

Others believe werewolf legends arose as a part of shamanism and totem animals in primitive and nature-based cultures. The term therianthropy has been adopted to describe a spiritual concept in which the individual believes he or she has the spirit or soul, in whole or in part, of a non-human animal.

Werewolves in modern fiction

Main article: Werewolves in fiction

The process of transmogrification is portrayed in many films and works of literature to be painful. The resulting wolf is typically cunning but merciless, and prone to killing and eating people without compunction regardless of the moral character of the person when human. The form a werewolf takes is not always an ordinary wolf, but is often anthropomorphic or may be otherwise larger and more powerful than an ordinary wolf. Many modern werewolves are also supposedly immune to damage caused by ordinary weapons, being vulnerable only to silver objects (usually a bullet or blade). This negative reaction to silver is sometimes so strong that the mere touch of the metal on a werewolf's skin will cause burns. Current-day werewolf fiction almost exclusively involves lycanthropy being either a hereditary condition or being transmitted like a disease by the bite of another werewolf.

More recently, the portrayal of werewolves has taken an even more sympathetic turn in some circles. With the rise of environmentalism and other back-to-nature ideals, the werewolf has come to be seen by some authors as a representation of humanity allied more closely with nature. This is most notable in the role-playing game Werewolf: the Apocalypse published by White Wolf, Inc..

References

• Wolfeshusius, De Lycanthropia (Leipzig, 1591).
• Franciscan monk Claude Prieur, Dialogue de la Lycanthropie (1596).
• Rev. Montague Summers, The Werewolf (1933; reissued, University Books, 1966). Written by an individual claiming that werewolves are real, it is understandably filled with a number of bizarre conclusions but has an impressive bibliography.
• Basil Copper, The Werewolf: in Legend, Fact, and Art (St. Martin's Press, 1977).
• Adam Douglas, The Beast Within: A History of the Werewolf (1993).

See also

• Lycanthropy
• Clinical lycanthropy
• Roux-Ga-Roux
• Shapeshifting
• Therianthropy
• Vampire
• Wolfsangel
• Beast of Gévaudan
• Werwolf
• Vârcolac

External links

• Arby Stones, "Hellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underworld"
• The Book of Were-Wolves, by Sabine Baring-Gould, 1865
• Therianthropy History Timeline
• Allen Varney, "The New Improved Beast" (Originally InQuest, Wizard Press, 1995).

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