Werewolf

A man walks down to the edge of a marsh in Arcadia, strips, and hangs his clothes on an oak. Then he swims. On the far bank he comes out on four legs, and for the next nine years he runs with the wolves in the hills. If he can keep from tasting human flesh for the whole of that term, he is allowed to swim back, find his clothes still hanging where he left them, and put them on again as a man nine years older. Pliny the Elder wrote all this down in the first century, sourced it to a Greek author called Euanthes, and then remarked that it was astonishing how far Greek credulity would go.

The belief was already ancient when he mocked it. Herodotus had heard, five centuries earlier, that the Neuri north of Scythia each became wolves for a few days every year and then changed back; he reported it and said plainly that he did not believe it. Plato knew a story about the mountain shrine of Lykaian Zeus in Arcadia, where the sacrificial meat was said to contain one scrap of human flesh among the rest, and whoever swallowed that piece became a wolf. Pausanias, walking the same stony country, was told that King Lykaon had cut the throat of a human infant on that altar and was down on all fours before the blood had finished draining off the stone. He also recorded, with visible reluctance, that a boxer from Parrhasia named Damarchus had spent nine years as a wolf and then come home and won at Olympia.

Ovid gave the change its most quoted description. Lycaon’s clothing turns to shaggy hair, his arms drop under him and become legs, his mouth stretches out into a muzzle, and his appetite for slaughter carries over into the new body entirely unaltered, which is the whole point of the story. The Romans had a better word for the creature than ours: versipellis, the skin-turner. Petronius put one at a dinner party. A freedman named Niceros tells the other guests how he once walked out of town by moonlight with a soldier for company, how the soldier stopped among the roadside tombstones, pulled off his clothes, made water in a ring around them, and went off into the trees as a wolf, howling. The clothes had turned to stone. Niceros ran the rest of the way and found the house he was going to in an uproar, because a wolf had been in among the livestock and one of the farmhands had put a spear through its neck. Walking home at first light he passed the tombstones. The clothes were gone and there was blood on the ground. He found the soldier lying in bed with a doctor working on a wound in his neck.

The English word is younger than the belief and much narrower. Werewulf splits into wer, the old word for a man, and wulf. Almost every surviving Old English use of it comes from one pen, that of Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who worked it into the law code he drafted for King Cnut around 1020. He did not mean a shapeshifter. He meant the Devil, working the edges of a Christian flock the way a wolf works a fold.

What the thing actually looks like has never settled. In the Greek and Roman accounts it is simply a wolf. In the medieval material it is a wolf with something recognisably human behind the eyes, and occasionally a wolf that can be opened. In the confessions taken at the French and German trials it is a plain animal again, or a very large one, grey and stinking and moving low to the ground. The upright figure with a long snout, a barrel chest and human hands, the shape that comes to mind now, is barely ninety years old. It was designed for Universal Pictures in the 1930s and fixed in place by the makeup Lon Chaney Jr wore in 1941. Silver bullets and the full moon arrive from the same direction. Neither belongs to the trial record, where werewolves were run down with ordinary dogs, wounded with ordinary iron and burned by ordinary courts.

Not long before 1185, a priest travelling from Ulster into Meath camped in a wood on the boundary and built a fire. A wolf came out of the trees and spoke to him, courteously. It explained that it and its companion came from Ossory, that an abbot named Natalis had laid a curse on their people generations back, and that every seven years one man and one woman were compelled to leave their bodies and their country and live as wolves. If they survived the term they could come home, and two others would go out in their place. Its companion was dying and wanted the last rites. The priest baulked at giving the sacrament to an animal, so the wolf reached over and peeled the she-wolf’s pelt back from her head like a hood, and there was an old woman inside it. Gerald of Wales collected the story a few years afterwards and worried at it for pages, because it raised a question he could not put down: whether the creature kneeling in front of a priest was a beast or a Christian.

The clothes keep coming back. Marie de France, writing in Norman French in the same century, told of a Breton baron who vanished for three days out of every week. His wife pressed him until he admitted where he went and, fatally, where he left his clothing, since without it he could not return to human shape. She stole it. He stayed a wolf for a year, was taken into the king’s household as a favourite, and behaved beautifully until his wife walked into the hall, at which point he tore the nose off her face. He got his clothes back in the end. She did not get her nose back, and neither did several of her daughters.

The northern version puts the skin on the outside and turns it into a trap. In the Volsunga saga, Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli find two men asleep in a forest house with wolf-pelts hanging above them, pelts that can be shed only once every tenth day. They put them on out of curiosity and cannot get them off. For ten days they run in the woods howling, kill a great many men, and finally turn on each other before the interval comes round and releases them. Behind that story stand the ulfhednar, the wolf-coated warriors in Odin’s following, who were said to fight without armour and to be past fear and past stopping.

Then the courts took an interest. Between roughly 1520 and 1650, in the forested country between the Jura and the Rhine, the werewolf stopped being a story and became a charge. Gilles Garnier, a beggar living outside Dole in Franche-Comte, was burned in January 1573 for killing and eating four children, sometimes as a wolf and sometimes as himself. In 1598 the Gandillon family went to the fire at Saint-Claude, and at Angers a vagrant called Jacques Roulet was condemned and then, unusually, had the sentence overturned on appeal and was sent to an asylum for two years instead. The best known of them is Peter Stumpp of Bedburg near Cologne, broken on the wheel on the last day of October 1589 after confessing to a wolf-belt given him by the Devil and to twenty-five years of murder, his own son included. A London pamphlet printed the year after carried the whole account into English, with woodcuts.

Every one of those confessions was taken under torture. What survives in them is the shape of the questions.

One old man broke the pattern. In April 1691 a Livonian farmer in his eighties, called Thiess, was questioned by the provincial court at Venden and cheerfully agreed that he was a werewolf. He then insisted that this made him one of the hounds of God. Three nights a year, he said, the werewolves went down into hell to fight the Devil’s witches with iron whips, because the witches had stolen the grain and the fish and the young of the livestock, and somebody had to bring it all back. He had been doing it for years and the harvests proved it. The court had no box for a werewolf who worked for the other side. It convicted him of turning people away from Christianity, had him flogged and banished him.

The powers are consistent across all of it and modest by the standards of monsters. A werewolf gets a wolf’s body and keeps a man’s intentions inside it, which is the entire horror. It gets speed, endurance, night sight, jaws that will take the spine out of a sheep, and a hunting range no man on foot can match. Where the belief runs strongest it also gets cover, because a wolf that takes a child off a hillside leaves behind no witness who can name anybody.

The limits are just as consistent, and they attach to the crossing rather than to the animal. There is nearly always an interval that cannot be hurried: nine years in Arcadia, seven in Ossory, ten days in the saga, three nights in Livonia. There is nearly always a physical token, clothes on a branch, a pelt, a belt, and whoever holds the token holds the man. And there is the wound. Cut the wolf and the man bleeds in the same place, and that test runs unbroken from Petronius’s soldier with the spear-hole in his neck to the magistrates of Franche-Comte examining a beggar’s forearms for the marks a farm dog had left on a wolf the night before. A confession can be argued with. A scar sits there and says the same thing every time somebody looks at it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a werewolf?

A werewolf is a human being who takes the body of a wolf, either at will, at fixed intervals, or under a curse, and who keeps human intention inside the animal. The Old English word werewulf simply joins wer, meaning man, to wulf. The Romans called the same creature a versipellis, a skin-turner, which describes the mechanism better.

Are werewolves really killed by silver bullets?

No. Silver bullets do not appear anywhere in the historical werewolf record, and neither does the rule that transformation is triggered by the full moon. Both come from later legend and from twentieth-century cinema, chiefly the Universal Pictures films of the 1930s and 1941. In the actual trials, accused werewolves were hunted with dogs, wounded with iron weapons and executed by ordinary courts.

What is the oldest werewolf story?

The oldest surviving accounts are Greek. Herodotus wrote in the fifth century BC that the Neuri became wolves for a few days each year, and Plato and Pausanias both record the Arcadian tradition that eating human flesh at the shrine of Lykaian Zeus turned a man into a wolf for nine years. The fullest ancient narrative is Roman: the freedman Niceros tells a complete werewolf story in Petronius’s Satyricon.

Were people actually put on trial as werewolves?

Yes. Between roughly 1520 and 1650 hundreds of werewolf trials took place in France, Switzerland and the German lands, and the accused were routinely tortured, condemned and burned. Gilles Garnier was burned at Dole in 1573 and Peter Stumpp was broken on the wheel at Bedburg in 1589. The confessions that survive were extracted under torture and record the interrogators’ assumptions rather than anything the accused had done.

How does a werewolf turn back into a human?

Almost every tradition sets a fixed term that must be served: nine years in the Arcadian account, seven in the Irish Ossory legend, ten days in the Volsunga saga. Many stories also require the recovery of a physical token, usually the clothes or the pelt left behind at the moment of change. Marie de France built an entire tale around this, in which a knight is trapped as a wolf for a year because his wife has hidden his clothing.

Related Entries

Werewolves of Ossory, Loup-garou, Rougarou, Wulver, Lycaon, Beast of Gévaudan, Sigmund, Fenrir, Capitoline Wolf, Werecat, Werehyena, Witch, Vampire, Skin-walker, Nagual