Vârcolac

The noise came first, before any explanation. Church bells swung hard and out of time, iron trays beaten with wooden spoons, a shotgun fired straight up at nothing, a boy dragging a stick along a fence, and over all of it the moon turning the colour of old wine. In Romanian villages a century ago this was not panic. It was work. Something was up there with its teeth in the moon, and the racket was how you got it off her.

The thing doing the biting was a vârcolac, and the first surprise is that nobody could agree on what it looked like. Ion Otescu, who gathered peasant sky-lore for the Romanian Academy and read his findings to it in the spring of 1907, wrote down four separate answers from four separate directions. Some said the vârcolaci were animals a little smaller than a dog, or simply small dogs. Some said they were balauri or zmei, the dragons and drakes of the same folklore. Some said they were animals covered in mouths, like the suckers running down an octopus arm. And some said they were the pricolici, the dead who come back. Four bodies, one name, and no hint anywhere in the record that the tellers found this awkward.

The name itself argues with all four. Vârcolac is a Slavic loan, kin to Bulgarian vărkolak and Serbo-Croatian vukodlak and to the Greek vrykolakas, built from words meaning wolf and hide. So the word says wolf while the villagers said dogs, dragons and ghosts. Otescu tried to close the gap from the other end, floating a Latin derivation from something like vermicolacius, meaning worm-like, and then a few pages later conceding that the word really does look like it comes from wolf, and that the little dogs ought therefore to be little wolves. He was arguing with himself in print. The Slavic derivation is the one that held.

Where they came from is far better attested than what they were, and it makes a bleak list. A child who died before baptism became a vârcolac. So did a child born to unwed parents. After that the causes stop concerning the dead and start concerning the living, and specifically housework done wrongly: chew maize while poking the fire and you make one, sweep the dust of your house out towards the sun and you make one, spin thread at night with no candle burning and you make one.

That last one carries more weight than it looks, because spinning was also how they travelled. Agnes Murgoci, a British zoologist whose marriage took her into Romania and who spent the 1920s collecting its beliefs about the undead for the journal Folklore, set the mechanism down plainly. The vârcolaci go up to the sky on the thread of a woman spinning by moonlight, turned the wrong way round. While the thread holds they can move wherever they please up there. Break it and their power breaks with it, and they drift away to some other quarter of the sky, hungry and lost. A woman at her distaff after dark was not merely being careless. She was laying the road.

So the ordinary night of the thing runs like this. It goes up the twist of grey wool the way smoke goes up a chimney, fits its mouths around the rim of the moon, and bites down. Nothing tears. The moon only reddens where the teeth are, and the redness spreads across her. Murgoci’s informants read the copper of a lunar eclipse exactly that way. That is not shadow on her face. That is the vârcolac’s blood running over it.

Which raises the question the peasants had asked long before any folklorist thought to write it down: if the vârcolaci eat the moon, why is she whole again next month? Otescu collected three answers and they are all wonderfully practical. She is stronger than they are, so they can only nip at her, because if she were ever truly swallowed that would be the end of the world. Or she is so vast that she wears them out until they have to let go. Or it comes down to speed, since the moon runs and the vârcolaci can manage one bite before they fall behind. The sun has an easier time of it, because the lion he rides turns and fights them off him.

None of which meant standing still. When the sky darkened, the bells went, the trays and pails were beaten, guns were fired and any instrument that would carry was played as loudly as it could be played, and in some places Easter candles were lit and prayers said over the noise. Otescu’s informants also read the direction of the omen with grim precision. If the sun went dark in wartime the signs were bad for the Christian side; if the moon went dark, they were bad for the Ottomans.

The wolf in the name did eventually get its due, though later and more narrowly than the popular English version suggests. Harry Senn, working in Transylvanian villages in the 1970s, found that Romanians still used vîrcolac almost entirely for the old sky-beast that devoured the sun and moon, and that ordinary speech kept it distinct from the strigoi. Where the word did attach to a living person, it meant someone who changed periodically into a pig, a dog or a wolf, which puts it nearer the werewolf than the vampire without making it either. The pricolici, by contrast, always came back in wolf shape, while a strigoi kept the face it had worn alive. The Romanian werewolf of the paperbacks is largely a translation.

What the vârcolac can do follows directly from what makes it. Being generated rather than born, out of the unbaptized dead and the badly kept house, it has no fixed body to be tied to, which is why the descriptions scatter across dogs and dragons and mouths. Being unclean, it can use an unclean road, and the thread of a nightspun spindle is the only ladder it needs to reach the sky. Its bite discolours rather than consumes, which is precisely the power an eclipse requires and no more.

The limits are just as tidy. Cut the thread and the vârcolac is stranded. Make enough noise and it lets go. The moon can outrun it, outlast it, or simply outweigh it, and the sun keeps a lion. Every one of the causes has its own small cancellation too: a child baptized in time, dust swept the other way, a candle lit before the spindle turns. The defence of the heavens, in the end, rested on somebody in a dark room remembering to strike a light.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vârcolac?

A vârcolac is a being from Romanian folklore that rises into the sky and bites the sun or the moon, causing eclipses and the reddish colour of an eclipsed moon. The name is a Slavic loanword meaning something like “wolf-pelt,” and vârcolaci are usually spoken of as a class rather than as one named individual.

What does a vârcolac look like?

Romanian sources give several incompatible answers. Collections made for the Romanian Academy in 1907 record vârcolaci as animals a little smaller than a dog or simply small dogs, as balauri and zmei, as animals covered in mouths like the suckers on an octopus arm, and as pricolici, the returning dead.

How does a vârcolac get up to the sky?

It climbs the thread of a woman spinning by moonlight, turned the wrong way round. Agnes Murgoci recorded in the 1920s that the vârcolaci can move freely across the sky for as long as that thread holds, and that breaking the thread breaks their power and leaves them stranded in some other part of the heavens.

Where do vârcolaci come from?

They are generated rather than born. A child who dies unbaptized or is born to unwed parents can become one, and so can a series of small domestic transgressions: chewing maize while poking the fire, sweeping house dust out towards the sun, or spinning thread at night without a candle lit.

Is the vârcolac a werewolf?

Only partly, and mostly by way of its name. Fieldwork in Transylvania in the 1970s found Romanians using vîrcolac almost exclusively for the sky-beast that eats the sun and moon; where the word did describe a person, it meant someone who periodically turned into a pig, a dog or a wolf. The wolf that always looks like a wolf is the pricolici.

Related Entries

Pricolici, Strigoi, Moroi, Balaur, Zmeu, Solomonari, Muma Pădurii, Iele, Zburator, Vrykolakas, Sköll, Bakunawa, Tiangou, Werewolf, Vampire