Welcome back, one and all, to the spookiest season
of the year! Crisp, autumnal magic is in the air, the moon is bright, the wind is howling, and
it’s the perfect time to dive into one of the most iconic halloween monsters - the werewolf.
Somewhere in the shadowy liminal space between animal and human, while the werewolf is simple
on paper, if we take a closer look we find a surprisingly complicated mess of tropes and
existential questions about the nature of humanity itself, all tangled up in an oddly flexible
figure that’s filled a lot of roles over time. Now werewolves, like vampires, are broadly
common knowledge in modern pop culture, but their specific mechanics vary a lot depending on who you
ask and who’s writing them. Werewolves have a lot of associated tropes, but not a lot of internal
consistency, which makes it a little difficult for me to give a snappy one-line definition we can
work off of. The one consistent throughline is that werewolves are humans who sometimes transform
into something like a wolf. Some versions of werewolves transform exclusively during the full
moon, triggered by moonlight, while some can transform whenever they want, and some can choose
to transform except on nights of the full moon when they’re forced to. Some turn into mindless
monsters while others stay totally coherent and in control, some turn into full-on wolves while some
take a hybrid humanoid form instead. Sometimes being a werewolf is a transmissible curse that
functions like a blood-born disease, transmitted by bite, and sometimes it’s hereditary or done
by magic or artifacts. Sometimes werewolves are practically unkillable except with specific
weaknesses like silver or wolfsbane, and sometimes a regular bullet will do the job. And that’s
not even touching on the low-calorie werewolf tropes that get used in broader media, like giving
characters wolf-like traits like fangs and claws, enhanced senses, social pack dynamics and certain
NSFW qualities that form the backbone of an entire genre of erotica I regrettably now know exists.
But we’ve seen this kind of inconsistency before. Frankly, it’s much more common for pop-culture
staples like these to have lots of internal variation than for them to have some kind of rigid
canon defining how everything works. Fittingly for creatures of such fundamental transformation,
the werewolf has changed a lot over time. Today let’s trace that evolution and explore
how the modern werewolf gradually took form! Now, like I said, it’s not exactly easy
to nail down what should and shouldn’t constitute a werewolf. If we work on the popular
modern full-moon-and-silver-weakness version, there are no werewolves before 1940, and
even if we try broadening it to “person who turns into a wolf” technically there’s
only a handful of werewolves after 313 CE. So let’s loosen the definition significantly
and just start looking for anything that kinda looks like a person who turns into a wolf.
We get a couple promising candidates in ancient greece and rome. In Herodotus’s Histories, a
record of local culture and history written back in the 400s BCE, Herodotus describes the
Neuroi, a tribe he locates around northern Ukraine who supposedly transform into wolves for a few
days every year before changing back. Virgil’s Eclogues around the turn of the millennium
feature a character named Moeris who uses “baneful herbs” to turn himself into a wolf, and
a few decades later we get another casual werewolf in Petronius’s Satyricon, where a character
recounts a nighttime journey he took with a soldier who he later discovered was a werewolf.
The soldier snuck off on his own, stripped naked, peed in a circle around his clothes to turn them
to stone, then transformed into a wolf and ran off to kill some sheep. Ovid’s Metamorphoses right
around the aughts CE recounts the tale of King Lycaon of Arcadia, who tests Zeus’s omniscience
by killing someone - either a hostage or his own son - and serving him for dinner. As punishment,
Zeus transforms him into a wolf. That’s all Ovid has to say about it, but we’re gonna be
hearing a lot more about Lycaon from now on, and about a hundred years later, Pausanias’s
Descriptions of Greece featured a more detailed version of the story, wherein King Lycaon founds
the city of Lycosura on the mountain Lycaeus, founds the Lycaean games and gives Zeus the
new epithet Lycaeus. Which, for translation, is basically “king wolf founds wolf city on
wolf mountain and starts the wolf games in honor of wolf zeus.” Ahh, Latin. Wonder what
the twist is. Now according to Pausanias, Lycaon was a contemporary of Cecrops,
ancient mythical founder-king of Athens, and that back in these days humanity was kind of
reevaluating how to worship their gods. Cecrops had made the wise decision to pull back on
the whole human sacrifice dealio, but Lycaon apparently decided to double down and honored Zeus
Lycaeus by straight-up killing a baby. Zeus didn’t like that very much and turned Lycaon into a
wolf as punishment. Pausanias thinks this is 100% believable and historical, but expresses
skepticism about a follow-up piece of folklore that attests that every year at the Lycaean Games
someone is transformed into a wolf, but transforms back if they avoid eating any people for the next
nine years. Pausanias thinks that’s just silly, but that first wolf thing was totally real.
He’s not the only historian to be selectively skeptical. A few decades earlier, Pliny wrote
his Natural Histories, an attempt to write down the entire body of human knowledge all in one
place, and in it, he laid out a somewhat different werewolf setup, though this one is also supposedly
set in Arcadia. Pliny says there’s a tradition in Arcadia where a young man is chosen by lot
to dump his clothes and swim across a swamp, at which point he’ll transform into a wolf. He’ll
then spend nine years as a wolf, and if he avoids eating any people in that time he’ll be able to
swim back across the swamp to turn back. Pliny also mentions the whole festival of Zeus Lycaeus
thing and brings up an actual historical dude, Demaenetus, who was supposedly transformed
into a wolf at a sacrifice to Zeus Lycaeus, spent nine years as a wolf, turned back and
went on to become an olympic prize-winning boxer. Forget doping scandals, from now on this
is the only sports controversy I care about. Now at this point we’ve got some pretty recurring
themes. There’s some variation, some of these werewolves are transforming at will or with the
use of magic herbs, but most of these stories involve the transformation being some kind of
divine punishment, usually from Zeus, and a very specific nine-year timeline of being stuck as a
wolf before changing back in the tenth year - and only if the werewolf didn’t hurt anyone, making
the whole thing functionally a test of character. These werewolves also unilaterally turn into
proper wolves, no wolf-man hybrids in sight. And that is pretty much the roman consensus on
werewolves until around 313 CE, when a funny thing happened - emperor Constantine started
to think this hot new Christianity thing was sounding pretty sweet and decided to pump the
brakes on oppressing them and look into joining them instead. Now around 410 CE, another funny
thing happens - Rome gets sacked by the visigoths! This bums out the romans in general, especially
the roman christians, several of whom worry that this sudden spate of bad luck might be divine
punishment for their conversion. Sensing unrest, Bishop Augustine of Hippos decides to assuage
those fears by writing The City Of God in 426, which, surprisingly, has a lot to say about
werewolves. See, at the time, everyone kinda just… believed werewolves existed. It was one of
those “common knowledge” things. But believing in werewolves has been deemed un-christianly
for nearly a century at this point, since a werewolf was presumably not transformed by god,
and thus shouldn’t be able to transform at all, because that would require power that only god
has. This is going to be a recurring problem for the burgeoning religion, and Augustine decides
he’s the man to tackle it. He brings up several now-familiar bits of werewolf lore - the Arcadian
swamp, Demaenetus the boxer, all that good stuff. Augustine admits that categorically
denying these claims is kind of tricky, because there are plenty of people who will swear
on their lives that they either saw a werewolf, know someone who saw a werewolf, or even are a
werewolf. Augustine thinks this is all pretty stupid and frankly impossible, but struggles to
reconcile this with the fact that, through god, all things are possible, and the big man
has a habit of working in mysterious ways. The implication is that a werewolf could exist,
but only if god was cool with it. Augustine does think, however, that the idea of a human being
physically transforming into a wolf is impossible. What Augustine does think is possible is that a
person could be put into a deep, magical trance, their dream self could then be extracted from
their body, magically transformed into a wolf easily because it’s just a dream, and then
phantasmally projected out into the real world where other people can see it. I love a
simple solution. Believe it or not, this hot take basically turned into the official church doctrine
on how werewolves worked - they weren’t actually werewolves, they were just hallucinating so hard
that everyone else started hallucinating too. Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, the official
christian stance on werewolves didn’t actually matter all that much to most people, even after
the broader christianization of europe. Plenty of the werewolf literature from this era has
almost nothing to do with whether believing in werewolves is technically heresy or not. For
instance, in 1188 CE, Archdeacon Gerald of Wales writes the Topographia Hibernica, an account of
the landscape of Ireland that includes an anecdote about a priest who encounters a wolf in Ossory
who can speak and tells him he’s really a human, and that his people were cursed for disrespecting
a saint so that, every seven years, two of them have to take the form of wolves for the next seven
years, changing back if they manage to survive. He asks the priest to help his companion, a
sick she-wolf who wants to be given her last rites before she dies. The priest reluctantly
obliges and the author contemplates the ethics of the whole situation, bringing up Augustine’s
assessment of the whole transformation-vs-illusion dilemma and concluding that god could totally
make a werewolf in the same way he could make Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt or water
into wine. Gerald briefly considers where transubstantiation fits into this and decides
it’s probably safest not to touch that particular theological mess, which is honestly hilarious.
On a similar note, the Norwegian text King’s Mirror in 1250 tells that when Saint Patrick
came to Ireland to try and convert the locals, he was met with particularly ferocious
opposition from one clan in particular, who drowned out his sermons by howling like
wolves. Angered, Saint Patrick prayed for god to punish them, and apparently the big man decided
to approve the werewolf thing just this once, because the clan is cursed to turn into man-eating
wolves every seven years. Both of these stories seem to tie into the Werewolves of Ossory, a
supposed lineage of people descended from… [sigh] L-Laighnech Faeladh. L-Laighnech…
Laighnech… Faeladh. Fay-ladh. Fie-ladh. …Guys, I'm really sorry. I - I looked up how
to pronounce this, and there is literally… no pronunciation guide for this anywhere on
the internet! Normally there's SOMETHING! There's something, but L… LAIGHNECH FAELADH is the
one guy… who's got NO PRONUNCIATION GUIDE ONLINE. Okay. Uh-
He's described in The Fitness Of Names as a man who could turn himself
into a wolf and would go hunting with his family, and he later produced a whole line of people who
could turn into wolves whenever they wanted. It’s interesting to note that the Irish text about
this frames the transformation as voluntary, while the welsh and norwegian versions make it a
curse as punishment for defying the christian god. Now at this point, werewolf lore has shifted
a bit. The classic version - “person who can turn into wolf” - still exists, but because of
christianity’s fundamental beef with the base concept, wherever those werewolf stories bump
up against the spread of christianity they get reworked to fit. In this model, werewolves can
only exist as illusions or divine punishments. The 10-to-1200s breaks this rule with a few
explicitly heroic werewolves, most of which follow one plot structure. The anonymous Breton
lay of Melion and the poem Bisclavret written by Marie de France both pop up in the 11th century
and describe a heroic warrior and friend to the king who is secretly able to transform into a
wolf, but can only change back if he has access to his clothes or a magical artifact. His wife
learns of this, traps him in wolf form and runs off with another man. The werewolf, stuck as a
wolf, eventually finds his king, who finds this mysteriously tame wolf strangely endearing and
fiercely loyal, so the wolf becomes the king’s constant companion until he eventually encounters
his wife and her new husband, attacking them and forcing them to confess the truth to the king. The
werewolf is restored to human form and everyone winds up happy. In Bisclavret the werewolf is just
some cool baron guy, but in the lay of Melion the werewolf is an arthurian knight and the king is
king arthur. Another french poem from this era, Guillame de Palerme, I'm also saying that wrong,
features a similar werewolf in a supporting role - he’s been trapped in wolf-form by his
stepmother and helps the heroes, who in turn help him win back his kingdom and get him changed back.
Now werewolves are broadly notably absent from most norse and scandinavian literature - unless
you kinda stretch the definition of “werewolf” to include “person who wears a wolf pelt and
acts like a wolf” - but there’s a pretty classic werewolf story buried in the 13th-century
Volsunga saga, where two characters find enchanted wolf skins that turn them into
wolves until they manage to remove them. The werewolves in this era strike an odd
balance - it’s not consistent whether or not their transformation is a curse, even in
the space of a single story. These werewolves often initially transform willingly, but are
then trapped and can’t freely change back. They’re all intelligent and several are
surprisingly heroic, although Melion does kill a bunch of people while he’s a wolf, so
it’s not like they’re strictly unproblematic. At least in Britain and France, being a werewolf
seems to just be… a thing that some people are, a surprisingly neutral and even positive
framing for such a generally loaded concept. But unfortunately the fun times screech to
a halt in the late 1400s. The problem is, while it might’ve been the official church
doctrine that werewolves were, ultimately, mostly fictional and/or harmlessly delusional, the actual
beliefs people generally held got a little bit… contradictory. Since the root doctrine was the
idea that it was impossible for people to derive real power from pagan sources, because capital-G
god was the only real god, it followed that it was heretical to believe that anything pagan could
have real magic behind it - in 785 the Council of Paderborn made it actually illegal to accuse
anyone of witchcraft because good christians didn’t believe in witchcraft. This changed at the
end of the medieval period where witchcraft was recharacterized as a form of heresy and thus both
dangerous and deserving of capital punishment, which was really catalyzed in 1486 with the
publishing of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum. You may have heard of this book as “the hammer
of witches,” almost singlehandedly responsible for kicking off the witch hunts and by extension
the brutal and tortuous deaths of something like 30,000 innocent women, conservatively, and
something on the order of 10,000 innocent men, and you might’ve entertained the idea that
the dude who wrote it maybe didn’t have the healthiest attitude towards women overall,
and you would not believe how right you were. To make a very long story short, the year
is 1485, the place is Innsbruck, Austria, and newly-arrived churchman Heinrich Kramer is
already having some serious problems with Helena Scheuberin, a local woman known for having
opinions and being unafraid to share them, which is always a dangerous combination. Helena is
deeply unimpressed with Kramer, calling him a “bad monk” and “in league with the devil” and refusing
to go to his sermons because of his absolutely rancid vibes. Kramer responds by putting her on
trial for witchcraft. Helena is found innocent, in large part because Kramer is obviously obsessed
with her, and the bishop ends up calling him out for his wildly unfounded claims and tells him to
back off. Helena moves on with her life and Kramer does not, haunting the city for the following
year investigating witches and stalking Helena until the bishop finally kicks him out. Kramer
responds by writing the Malleus Maleficarum, a book about how women are super incredibly
evil and in league with the devil and need to be tortured and killed about it as quickly
as possible. Judge Claude Frollo wishes he had what this guy had. The text was described by
contemporary theologians as unethical, illegal, and actively heretical, but it was unfortunately
very influential on account of being 98% fearmongering by volume, which has a very high
success rate at convincing people to do terrible things. Despite the controversy of the text within
the church and the fact that from the moment it was published people realized it was going to
hurt a lot of innocent people, Kramer still managed to sway public opinion and stoke terror
that witches were very real and very powerful and had to be stopped at any cost, especially if that
cost was torturing and killing a lot of women. Man, I am just so disappointed to learn that the
inventor of the witch-hunt was a terrible person. It’s just - every time, you know? Do you guys
think we could separate the art from the artist? Now while the witch-hunt era was mostly fixated
on witches, werewolves came up too - although not as much as you might expect. While witches were
consistently considered Very Real Problems worth murdering about, the throughline still seemed
to be that werewolves were a bridge too far, and were probably just being deluded by
the devil into thinking they were wolves, and were at most simply covered in the illusion
of a wolf. Still, there was some argument about this - many contemporary texts and sermons
back up the “delusion and illusion” version, but others say that werewolves could transform
through a potion or a trinket given to them by the devil himself, which was similar to how
they believed witches could supposedly fly. Around this time “werewolf” was also being
used as a synonym for “serial killer.” In 1589, German farmer Peter Stubbe was tried for murder,
cannibalism, incest and a whole bunch of other stuff broadly under the umbrella of “being an
evil werewolf” and was executed on halloween. Now while he’s commonly described as a werewolf
cannibal serial killer executed for an array of horribly lurid crimes, it is important to
note that he admitted to said lurid crimes under torture, and his confession included
practicing black magic since he was twelve, turning into a wolf using a magic belt and boning
a succubus, all of which seem rather unlikely. Between that and the records of the actual
investigation being sparse to nonexistent, we… literally have no idea if he actually did
anything wrong. His daughter and mistress were also executed for his alleged crimes.
So… that’s… pleasant to think about. Today’s hot take! The witch
hunts were Bad Actually! Surprisingly, this era also saw a few
self-proclaimed werewolves. In the late 1500s Northeastern Italy had the Benandanti, who
claimed to be good werewolves who fought witches. Instead of physically transforming, they turned
into animals in their dreams and traveled in spirit-form to fight witches, protect harvests
and occasionally travel into hell to bring back supplies that were stolen by demons. This was dope
as hell, so obviously the witch-hunters were very suspicious, but since the benandanti were very
insistent that they were warriors of god and fighting the real bad witches, this legitimately
seems to have thrown the witch-hunters off their game enough that they mostly just dismissed them
as harmless, even kind of annoying, since the benandanti would regularly accuse other people of
being evil witches they’d fought in their dreams. A few decades after the Benandanti faded out of
focus, an eighty-something man in Jürgensberg, Sweden claimed before a judge to have been the
same kind of heroic werewolf, serving as a warrior of god and battling witches in his dreams. The
judge was less interested in his werewolf thing and more interested in how he hadn’t been going
to church regularly and had been practicing folk healing for the locals, so the dude was flogged
a little and banished for life, obviously a completely just and proportionate response.
Thankfully the whole “witch hunting” thing gradually wound down during the 1700s, but
the effect it had on the popular image of werewolves was severe. Arguments over heresy
aside, werewolves were now characterized as completely in control of and responsible for their
transformation, gaining their wolf-form through deals with the devil and being fundamentally evil
and corrupt. This era did also have the hidden undercurrent of the “wolf warriors of god”,
but they were pretty severely overshadowed by the satanic devil-werewolf version. Werewolves in
this era were thought to transform either through trinkets like fur belts or wolfskins or through
illusions that just made them look like wolves. And that’s where werewolf lore stayed until
1897, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. Now, we all remember Dracula - archetypical vampire,
classic gothic horror, there’s a cowboy in it, all that good stuff. But while Dracula is a vampire,
there’s plenty of werewolf stuff in his book. Dracula says outright that werewolf legends were
inspired by him and his family, and the suspicious peasants Jonathan Harker keeps brushing off call
Dracula “vlkolak”, which Jonathan says means either “werewolf” or “vampire” interchangeably
but actually just means “werewolf”. Essentially, while Dracula is a vampire - I’d argue he’s
even THE vampire - functionally speaking, Dracula is also a werewolf. It’s like he’s
a point of convergence that lets some traits bleed over from one archetype to another. He can
transform into a wolf at night and at noon, and he also controls wolves, though they seem to find
him fundamentally wrong and very unnerving. The moon is also prominently referenced several times
in the book as having some kind of connection to his powers - although that might just be gothic
horror flavor text, it's a little hard to tell. On that note, you may have noticed
that the moon has not factored into any of the historical werewolves we’ve dealt with
til now. And there’s been another popular modern werewolf trope conspicuously absent - the idea of
lycanthropy as a transmissible ailment. Cursed or not, none of the werewolves we’ve talked about
so far have been contagious. But after Dracula, and his charming habit of cursing people by biting
them - that changes. In 1935 we get Werewolf of London, the first surviving hollywood movie to
feature a werewolf, in which the protagonist is bitten by a werewolf, and over the three nights
of the full moon transforms into a surprisingly dapper wolf-man that, despite his best efforts,
murders uncontrollably until he’s shot and killed by a policeman in the finale. This theme pops
up again in 1941’s The Wolf Man, the movie that really solidified the modern image of a werewolf
- another one transformed by bite, affected by the full moon and this time vulnerable to silver,
another new addition to the lore courtesy of hollywood. These movies also feature humanoid
werewolves rather than full transformations into quadrupedal wolves, possibly for special-effects
practicality reasons. After The Wolf Man, werewolves got locked into pop culture as tragic,
cursed monsters, transformed by the full moon into wolf-man hybrids and functionally unstoppable
except by silver - a trait which, fun fact, was given some retroactive legitimacy in the 1940s
when French author Henri Pouratt wrote a somewhat fictionalized retelling of a real historical
thing that happened in 1764 - a series of deadly animal attacks terrorized the french province
of Gévaudan. Now, what most likely happened was that there were several wolves or wolf-coyote
hybrids or other canine critters in the area, they were hungry, they occasionally attacked,
and they were gradually whittled down by hunters until the last one was killed in 1767. What
people thought was happening was that there was one unkillable Beast of Gévaudan they kept
hunting and killing and it kept coming back for more. Witnesses also insisted it was like a wolf,
but not a wolf, which, real talk, is one of my favorite horror tropes. I love it when the only
way people can describe something is by listing the familiar things it’s not. Anyway, the “beast”
was finally killed in 1767 by a local hunter, Jean Chastel, using what were by all accounts perfectly
normal bullets and a perfectly normal gun. Well, Pouratt’s version is a bit more spiced up than
that. Pouratt attributed Chastel’s final victory over the Beast to silver medallions of the Virgin
Mary that he melted down into silver bullets with which to finally slay the beast. Since he was
writing this in 1946 and The Wolf Man had come out in 1941, this definitely didn’t originate the idea
of werewolves being vulnerable to silver bullets, but it certainly helped reinforce it and
add a veneer of legitimacy to the idea by giving it some retroactive historical clout.
Now before we get fully into the modern werewolf, there’s one very important facet of their
characterization that we’ve completely neglected - namely actual wolves. The pop culture
interpretation of the werewolf is naturally going to heavily rely on the pop culture opinions of
wolves in general, and until fairly recently, that opinion was not good. There’s been a handful
of heroic wolves in folklore - the she-wolf that raised rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus, is
probably the most well-known example - but for the most part, wolves in folklore are bad news. Wolves
in sheep’s clothing, the boy who cried wolf, the big bad wolf, aesop’s fables about shepherds
trusting wolves - “wolf” was practically fable shorthand for “villain.” When english colonists
first came to the americas, wolves had been extinct in england for over a century - but
were alive and well in north america. And, much like the other native inhabitants of the
continent, the colonists wanted them gone. Wolves were scary, and for those new settlers
they also presented a broader threat - not because they were attacking them, but because they
attacked their livestock, which was usually big, dumb, slow, and already caged for their
convenience. With starvation already a very real threat for the colonists in those
early years, this immediately put wolves pretty high on their sh*t list, and inspired
the first of many “extermination campaigns”, which are exactly as bad as they sound. See,
back in ye olden times, Joe Colonizer wasn’t exactly familiar with the concept of a trophic
cascade, and assumed most problems were simple and self-contained and could be easily solved
by simply killing everything involved. Until the early 1900s the actual stated goal of
this push was to drive wolves to extinction. Now the fact is, wolves are not really all
that dangerous to humans most of the time. Wolves basically don’t attack humans unless
they’re sick or starving - or they’ve been habituated to lose their wariness of humans - and
wolf packs usually top out around eight members, most of them not even adults. But if there’s
one thing we know about horror, it’s that humans fear the unknown, and after those first few
extermination campaigns, wolf encounters were rare enough that they were almost completely unknown
to your average Joe Colonizer, both because their numbers were dropping and because wolves were
hiding from humans more. And now that wolves were more elusive, they were more unknown, and thus way
scarier. In the 17 and 1800s, stories about wolf attacks got exponentially more sensationalized
- wolves weren’t just hungry and dangerous, they were also morally evil and actively
treacherous. Somehow. Stories of wolf attacks wouldn’t just involve dozens of wolves, but
massive packs of hundreds of starving creatures all hell-bent on hunting down innocent mothers
and children in the snow. Some contemporary natural histories even insisted that wolves
reproduced unnaturally quickly and only constantly murdering them was keeping their numbers down.
This frankly ridiculous swath of misinformation was finally undercut ever-so-gently in 1944,
when american wildlife biologist Adolph Murie decided to actually try studying the darn
things in the wild. He found that wolves don’t see humans as prey and actively avoid them
whenever possible, that wolf packs usually stay small because they’re too territorial to form
large groups, and - most importantly - that wolves are actually good for prey populations
in the wild by keeping their numbers manageable, preventing overgrazing and subsequent starvation
from the environmental damage. This didn’t reverse the wolf’s bad rep overnight, but it
definitely flipped the narrative. By 1973, the endangered species act declared that maybe
genociding entire species just because we don’t like them is Bad Actually and introduced actual
legal protections for wolf populations that had been whittled down to almost nothing.
This decision was not unilaterally popular, because four hundred plus years of bad press
doesn’t just disappear overnight and some people really like shooting wolves, but it was a good
step. This also led to a preliminary look into how wolves socialize, leading to the whole “alpha
wolf” concept - which was, fun fact, misleading enough that the same researcher who popularized
it later disowned it, because the idea that some wolves were “alphas” implied a strength-based
dominance hierarchy and some kind of fundamental alpha trait that made some wolves better than
others, where in actuality the observed pack “alpha wolves” were literally just the parents of
the rest of their pack, in charge not because they were powerful and dominant but because they were
mom ’n dad. Then in 1995 wolves were reintroduced into yellowstone, giving them a protected
area to repopulate and avoid getting shot in, and by all accounts that’s going really well.
Now obviously, wolves aren’t… you know… harmless. They’re wild animals, they’re
predators that hunt to survive, and those teeth are not just for decoration.
But now that they’re actually being studied, they’re not unknown horror monsters either. And
the shift in the pop culture attitude towards wolves has been mirrored in a shift in werewolf
characterization. Early hollywood werewolves were compassionate, tragic humans overwhelmed by a
monstrous, mindless beast driven to murder by uncontrollable animal instincts, mirroring the
popular attitude towards wolves at the time. Modern werewolves usually still have an element
of that “beast within” concept, but not always. Some werewolves retain the historical concept that
their minds never change when they transform and they’re still fully human on the inside, only
physically changing. In others, the “beast” thing doesn’t do much to affect their behavior,
but will play into a (usually outdated) model of wolf social hierarchies - pack loyalty, alpha
wolves, lone wolves, all that good stuff. The idea that wolves are inherently evil has withered
away, and as a result, the wolf side of the werewolf is losing that implication too. They’re
still wild, but not necessarily villainous. The modern werewolf is a flexible beast. There’s
a solid two thousand years of lore to draw on, but no universally accepted canon to be limited
to, so when a writer wants to write a werewolf they can pick and choose the traits they want to
use. And what traits get used usually reflects what story they want to tell. The classic
hollywood horror werewolf was pretty popular for a few decades - an innocent human cursed
with a horrific and painful transformation trying very hard not to kill people once a month -
and those werewolves were almost always basically mindless rage-monsters when they transformed,
strongly affected by the full moon. But the tragic monster version has been largely phased
out more recently in favor of a less categorically antagonistic version. Many modern werewolves
are in at least partial control of their actions when transformed and can shift at will,
with the more emotionally volatile parts of the character leveraged for drama rather than tragedy.
Despite that flexibility, there’s a few traits that have become staples of the modern werewolf
- silver bullets, the full moon, bite-based curse transmission, some degree of animalistic or feral
behavior - but even then, no two werewolf stories handle them quite the same way. Some stories stay
pretty close to the middle of the bell curve with werewolves that change under the full moon into
wolf-man hybrids and shrug off anything south of a silver bullet - Underworld, Van Helsing,
and about a million others play into this version - but plenty of stories get creative with
the concept, like wolfwalkers, a recent movie that combined three very different pieces of werewolf
lore from three very different eras. First, the base concept is the Werewolves of Ossory, the
irish lineage of werewolves we mentioned. Second, the witch-hunt era concept of the Benandanti
and the Wolves of God, astrally projecting their dream-selves in the shape of wolves rather than
physically transforming into wolves. And finally, the post-dracula idea of werewolves creating more
werewolves by biting people. The wolfwalkers first shown in the movie are an Irish mother and
daughter protecting a forest from a nearby English town trying to clear-cut it. They manifest
wolf-forms when they sleep, an ability that turns out to be transmissible by bite. There’s a few
other features - magical healing abilities, controlling wolves - and a lot of the later
stock werewolf tropes are noticeably absent, like the silver vulnerability or
the moon factoring into anything. Like I said at the beginning, it’s never been easy
to nail down what should and shouldn’t count as a werewolf. And that’s continued into the modern
day. Plenty of stories feature characters that could be argued as werewolves, but their powerset
might have almost nothing to do with their folkloric basis - which, as we’ve established,
is itself a long-standing tradition. Almost none of these historical werewolves have anything in
common with each other. I think this is mostly surprising because werewolves seem really basic
on paper. It’s kind of weird to think that such a simple monster concept has this much going on. And
yea, they’re basic, but it’s because they’re basic that so much about them is flexible. The base
etymology of the word “werewolf” is literally just “man wolf”. Beyond that, anything goes. What
makes the man wolf a man wolf? What connects the man and wolf? Is it a divine punishment, a
magical disease, a bond with the changing face of the moon, an artifact infused with wolf-ness,
a simple magical quirk of the bloodline? How do the man and the wolf interact? Are they at odds,
in sync, at war? Is the man lost in the wolf? Is the wolf just another side of the man? Is the
wolf the man’s shadow? Is the wolf the man’s freedom? The nature of the werewolf is defined
by their duality, but what exactly that duality means is completely up to the storyteller.
And that is why werewolves are objectively cooler and more interesting than vampires.
Yeah, I said it! It’s about time someone did! [Bad Moon Rising]
Well I did not expect this to turn into "The Dude who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum was actually a more extreme version of the bad guy from the Hunchback of Notre Dame" but here we are.
I adore Werewolves! I find the lore behind them very interesting. What's really fascinating is how at different times in history, they've been defined so differently.
In my country there was a legend that old King John - the one from the Robin Hood stories - was a Werewolf, and would shuffle out of his grave every night to go poach sheep or whatever.
I mean...the guy had a big appetite, sure. But I think calling him a Werewolf is a bit much.
Someone was wondering about Halloween special last week, here ya go!
I don't know if I like how quickly she glossed over the fact that the anti wolf genocide scientist's name was Adolf...
Red, my dear, love you and everything but if you see "dh" at the end of a word its not pronounced. Feel free to consult me about any further pronunciation. Don't never pronounce "dh" because it does have phonetic use in some cases but it may as well not exist at the end of a word. Also it's never pronounced "ð" in any of the dialects because that phoneme doesn't exist in Irish
Red I saw those OwOs and UwUs in the King's Mirror bit, and I have to say I heartily approve
Does anyone know where I can find the section on werewolves on St. Augustine's "City of God"?
We need more werewolf as church warriors.