Vilkacis

In April 1691, in a courtroom at Jürgensburg in what is now Latvia, an old man with a badly set nose explained to a panel of Swedish judges how he had come by the injury. A dead peasant from Mālpils named Skeistan had hit him with a broomstick that had a horse’s tail bound to the end of it. The blow had landed in hell. Old Thiess of Kaltenbrunn was somewhere in his eighties and did not appear to think any of this needed softening. He had been a werewolf for decades, he said, and he had been down there fetching back the grain.

The Latvian word for what he claimed to be is vilkacis, also vilkatis, and in the eastern dialects vylkacs or vylkate. It is built on vilks, wolf, from an Indo-European root carrying the sense of tearing, seizing and killing. Popular accounts like to gloss it as “wolf’s eyes,” which the ending invites, since acis means eyes in Latvian. The philologists do not go that way. They set the Latvian forms alongside Lithuanian vilktakis, one who runs in wolf shape, and note that Latvian never adopted the rival Baltic family of words, the vilkolakis type cognate with Polish wiłkołak, which points instead at wolf hair. Latvian werewolves run. They are not wearing a costume.

Pēteris Šmits collected a hundred and eight Latvian tales about them, and the belief they describe is consistent and unglamorous. A vilkacis is a person. Nobody is born one, no bite passes it along, and the moon has nothing to do with it. Somebody does it to you, or you accept it from someone who wants rid of it.

The commonest route runs through the bathhouse. A man sits naked in the steam, another man throws a fur coat over him, and it is done. Elsewhere a beggar turned away from a wedding table curses the whole party: if you send me off to the wolves, then you can go and be wolves yourselves. The guests take to the woods in their wedding clothes, and in more than one telling they are still out there. That particular motif is more at home in Lithuania than in Latvia. One Latgalian story has a boy drink from a wolf’s footprint, come up as a wolf, tear his sister apart, and be killed for it.

Thiess got his the way a debt is settled. A stranger from Alūksne bought him a drink in a roadside tavern, breathed into the tankard three times, and said, it will be for you as it was for me. He drank, and it was. Forty years on he was looking for someone to hand it to, and he told the court there was no shortage of volunteers.

The tales are stingy about what a vilkacis actually looks like, which is itself worth noticing. Big, mostly. Slow, in one telling, which reads like a man discovering what a wolf’s day really costs. The charm collections gathered by Kārlis Straubergs are more forthcoming: eyes like coals in a fire, sometimes a red tail, sometimes a tail left over on the human afterwards, and on women, breasts still visible under the hair. What comes through everywhere is that the animal is only the outside. In one Latgalian tale the wolf rears onto its hind legs and points with a front paw at its own hide, asking to be cut out of it. In another, a vilkate weeps, and the tears roll down the muzzle like beans.

Getting fed was the ordinary business of the thing. Thiess said they never took anything from a farm nearby, because tracks lead home. They went a long way off, took lambs and kids and piglets, and carried them back into the woods. Then, and this is the detail no wolf would have supplied, they stole a cauldron and fire from a farmstead, singed the hair off the carcass, cut spits from green wood, and roasted the meat. They carried salt away with them. They ate nothing raw. Asked how paws managed knives, Thiess said they used no knives, tore the pieces off with their teeth, and had turned back into men by the time the meat was ready anyway.

Three times a year, on Pentecost Eve, St John’s Eve and St Lucia’s Eve, the werewolves went down. The way in lay at the end of a lake in a swamp below Mālpils, under the ground, behind a gate that nobody could find who did not belong inside. The sorcerers had stored the year’s theft down there, the grain in one container and the blossom of the grain in another, along with the fish and the fruit of the trees. The werewolves ran in, snatched what they could carry, and ran out again with the devil’s doorkeepers striking at them with long iron goads and hunting them off as if they were dogs. Which, Thiess said, was exactly right, because that is what they were. God’s hounds. Whatever they hauled up they threw into the air, and the prosperity came back down over the whole country, over the rich and the poor together. His accounting was precise. One year the band arrived late, the gates were already shut, and the harvest failed. Another year the Russian werewolves got there first and the good growth went to Russia.

The court did not know what to do with him. The assessors questioned him for a day, the local pastor was fetched in to work on his conscience, and Thiess told the pastor to his face that he understood the matter better than a young man could, and that what really galled him was being the only one prosecuted when he was neither the first nor the last. His own landlord’s tenants had already testified that everyone knew he went about with the devil. Thiess denied the devil flatly. The devil hated him; sorcerers served the devil and their souls belonged to the devil, while werewolves were buried like other people and went to heaven. In October 1692 the high court sentenced him to twenty pairs of blows from the executioner of Mālpils, delivered in front of the assembled parish, and banishment from the country for life. He was by then in his nineties. Nothing in the record suggests he changed his mind.

Two centuries of foreign scholarship had already decided what a Livonian werewolf was, and it looked very little like Thiess. Sebastian Münster put the shape-changers of the eastern Baltic into his Cosmographia in 1550, and five years later Olaus Magnus worked that brief note up into something far more lurid. In his version the transformed men gather on Christmas night in their thousands, besiege isolated houses in the forest, break down the doors and eat everyone inside, then get into the beer cellars, drain the casks and pile the empties in a heap in the middle of the floor, which he offers as proof that they are not true wolves. Between Lithuania, Livonia and Courland, he writes, stand the walls of a ruined castle, and there they assemble to test their agility by leaping it, and the fattest, who cannot clear the wall, are set upon with scourges by the captains and killed. Caspar Peucer added a lame boy who goes round at Christmas summoning them, an iron whip, a river that opens a dry path when the leader strikes the water, and a transformation lasting exactly twelve days. Livonia became the werewolf country of the European imagination, largely at the hands of men who had never been there.

The tales told inside the country are far more interested in getting out than in getting in. A piece of bread from a human hand will do it, which is the commonest cure in the whole corpus and a neat piece of reasoning: bread is the one food that does not occur in nature, so eating it is a claim to be human. Cutting the wolf skin open works. So does leaping over the hide of a vilkacis that somebody has shot, jumping being a crossing of a boundary in the same way people jump the midsummer fire. And other people’s hands are a danger to the clothes you left at the treeline, because whatever you took off has to be waiting when you come back.

The powers follow from all this. A vilkacis covers enormous distances and stays out for a week at a stretch, outruns farm dogs, hauls a fattened pig on foot across thirty miles of forest, and lives on hares in between. It keeps a man’s judgement inside a wolf’s body, which makes it worse for livestock than any wolf and better for people than any wolf, since it knows perfectly well whose barn it is standing in and how far the neighbours will chase it.

The limits are just as plain. The wolf takes the damage and the man keeps it. A Courland landowner shot at a wolf raiding his own flock in 1684 and found afterwards that his tenant Mickel had come home limping, and had bitten his horse’s throat out in temper at the failure; half the district corroborated it, including Mickel’s wife. In Olaus Magnus a servant who offers to demonstrate the trick to his mistress loses an eye to the dogs and appears the next morning blind on that side. Nothing in this material heals. And a vilkacis is always hungry, which is what puts it in the sheepfold, and eventually in front of a gun.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vilkacis?

A vilkacis is the werewolf of Latvian folklore: a living person who takes the shape of a wolf, almost always because someone else put the condition on them. The name is built on vilks, the Latvian word for wolf. Nobody is born a vilkacis, no bite transmits it, and the full moon plays no part.

How does someone become a vilkacis?

The Latvian tales describe a sorcerer throwing a fur coat over a naked person in a bathhouse, a beggar cursing an entire wedding party, or a child drinking from a wolf’s footprint. In the 1691 trial of Old Thiess, the condition was passed on with a drink: a stranger breathed into the tankard three times and said that it would be for Thiess as it had been for him.

How do you turn a vilkacis back into a person?

The commonest remedy in the Latvian tales is a piece of bread given by a human hand, since bread is food that only humans make. Other methods include cutting the wolf skin open and leaping over the hide of a vilkacis that has been shot. The clothes left behind at the moment of transformation also matter, because they have to be undisturbed for the person to return to them.

Was the vilkacis considered evil?

Not straightforwardly. In many tales the person is transformed against their will, keeps a human mind throughout, and takes livestock out of hunger rather than attacking people. Old Thiess told a Swedish court in 1691 that werewolves were God’s hounds who stole the country’s harvest back from the devil, and that their souls went to heaven while sorcerers’ souls did not.

Who was Old Thiess of Kaltenbrunn?

Old Thiess was a Latvian peasant, then in his eighties, tried at Jürgensburg in April 1691 for lycanthropy. He testified that he descended into hell three times a year with other werewolves to recover the grain and grain blossom that sorcerers had stolen from the fields, and that throwing it into the air restored the country’s prosperity. He refused to recant and in October 1692 was sentenced to twenty pairs of blows and lifelong banishment.

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