Halloween Special: Werewolves

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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.

👍︎︎ 42 👤︎︎ u/Ynnead25 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2021 🗫︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/SeasOfBlood 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2021 🗫︎ replies

Someone was wondering about Halloween special last week, here ya go!

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/RealAbd121 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2021 🗫︎ replies

I don't know if I like how quickly she glossed over the fact that the anti wolf genocide scientist's name was Adolf...

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/SomeJealousWeeaboo 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2021 🗫︎ replies

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

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/ConfusedIrishNoises 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2021 🗫︎ replies

Red I saw those OwOs and UwUs in the King's Mirror bit, and I have to say I heartily approve

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/Thunderplunk 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2021 🗫︎ replies

Does anyone know where I can find the section on werewolves on St. Augustine's "City of God"?

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/KermitTheHermit10011 📅︎︎ Nov 03 2021 🗫︎ replies

We need more werewolf as church warriors.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/AlexT05_QC 📅︎︎ Nov 27 2021 🗫︎ replies
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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]
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Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions
Views: 1,414,700
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Legends, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, History, Mythology, werewolves, lycanthropes, lycanthropy, werewolf history
Id: 4mm0KyaovhY
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)
Published: Fri Oct 29 2021
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