Month: July 2022

Well, it was only a matter of time before I got round to covering Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1865 Book of Were-Wolves. If Universal’s The Wolf Man did for werewolves what Dracula did for vampires, Sabine Baring-Gould can lay claim to being the Dr. Polidori of lycanthropy, pulling together lore and legend in a text that would become a key influence on later writers.

The first chapter opens on an autobiographical note, the author describing a visit to a small hamlet in France where the locals lived in fear of loups-garoux:

“Picou tells me that he saw the were-wolf only this day se’nnight,” said a peasant; “he was down by the hedge of his buckwheat field, and the sun had set, and he was thinking of coming home, when he heard a rustle on the far side of the hedge. He looked over, and there stood the wolf as big as a calf against the horizon, its tongue out, and its eyes glaring like marsh-fires. Mon Dieu! catch me going over the marais to-night. Why, what could two men do if they were attacked by that wolf-fiend?”

Baring-Gould himself harboured no such fears, as he made clear in his retort: “I will walk back by myself, and if I meet the loup-garou I will crop his ears and tail, and send them to M. le Maire with my compliments.” He spends the remainder of the chapter musing about the widespread nature of werewolf folklore. He compares himself to a paleontologist — a discipline that had seen great strides in recent decades — on the grounds that, while he has no living specimens to examine, he can at least study the traces left by this presumably long-gone species. (A folktale is very different from a fossil, but this hardly damages the poetic appeal of the analogy).

Continue reading “Werewolf Wednesday: Sabine Baring-Gould Chapters 1 and 2 (1865)”

While digging around I found a reference to werewolves in Edward Smedley’s 1836 book The History of France Part 1: From the Final Partition of the Empire of Charlemagne, A. D. 843, to the Peace of Cambray, A. D. 1529. The reference is brief and likely included as a bit of a joke, but it nonetheless caught my eye, largely because the book was published in 1836 — two years before the earliest piece of werewolf fiction I’ve covered in this series, Sutherland Menzies’ “Hugues, the Wer-Wolf”.

The section in question describes the death of the tenth-century monarch Louis IV:

The life and reign of Louis were terminated by a remarkable accident. A wolf crossed his path as he was riding on the banks of the Aisne, and (undeterred by an omen which might have staggered the courage of a Roman†), he clapped spurs to his horse in pursuit. The horse stumbled, and in his fall injured his master beyond the relief of surgical skill*. He expired in his thirty-third year…

The passage has two footnotes. The first simply explains a classical allusion made in the paragraph:

† —-ab agro
Rava decurrens Lupa Lanuvino
is among the evil omens mentioned by Horace, iii. 27.

The second, meanwhile, is the one that concerns werewolves. Possibly with his tongue in his cheek, Smedly wonders if his source for the above account, the chronicler Flodoard of Reims, had lycanthropy on the mind:

* We are by no means sure that Flodoardus does not mean to imply that a weir-wolf was the cause of this disaster. He writes, apparuit ei quasi Lupus præcedens, “there appeared to him, as it were, a Wolf going before him;” and he attributes the King’s death in the end to elephantiasis.

Make of this tidbit what you will…

Previous posts in this series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15.

The final chapter of Elliott O’Donnell’s book Werwolves covers lycanthropy in Russia and Siberia. “Nowhere is the werwolf so much in evidence today as in the land of the Czar,” the author tells us, as this is a land where “the very atmosphere is impregnated with lycanthropy.” He follows these remarks with some picturesque descriptions of werewolves stalking the Russian plains nad haunting the Caucasus mountains, before offering some brief (and uncited) accounts of folktales:

It was here, in these lone Russian mountains, so legend relates, that Peter and Paul turned an impious wife and husband, who refused them shelter, into wolves: but Peter and Paul, apparently, had not the monopoly of this power; for it was here, too, in a Ural village, that the Devil is alleged to have metamorphosed half a dozen men into wolves for not paying him sufficient homage.
There is no restriction as to the sex of werwolves in Russia and Siberia—male and female werwolves are about equal in number, though perhaps there is a slight preponderance in favour of the female. Vargamors are to be encountered in almost all the less frequented woody regions, but more especially in those in the immediate vicinity of the Urals and Caucasus.

Although quite how the Vargamors of Sweden ended up in Russia is left unexplained. Next comes another of O’Donnell’s allegedly authentic incantations, ready to be practiced by any would-be lycanthropes out there:

Continue reading “Werewolf Wednesday: Elliott O’Donnell’s Last Chapter (1912)”

Benjamin Thorpe’s 1851 book Northern Mythology has a chapter on Swedish folklore. Here, we find a one-page section headed “The Werwolf” that includes a single tale of lycanthropy. It deals with a man named Lasse who is turned into a werewolf by a supernatural being called a Vargamor:

In a hamlet within a forest there dwelt a cottager, named Lasse, and his wife. One day he went out in the forest to fell a tree, but had forgotten to cross himself and say his Paternoster, so that some Troll or Witch (Vargamor) got power over him and transformed him into a wolf. His wife mourned for him for several years; but one Christmas eve there came a beggar woman, who appeared very poor and ragged; the good housewife gave her a kind reception, as is customary among Christians at that joyous season. At her departure the beggar woman said that the wife might very probably see her husband again, as he was not dead, but was wandering in the forest as a wolf.

Towards evening the wife went to her pantry, to place in it a piece of meat for the morrow, when on turning to go out, she perceived a wolf standing, which raising itself with its paws on the pantry steps, regarded the woman with sorrowful and hungry looks. Seeing this she said: “If I knew that thou wert my Lasse, I would give thee a bone of meat.” At that instant the wolf-skin fell off, and her husband stood before her in the clothes he had on when he went out on that unlucky morning.

Continue reading “Werewolf Wednesday: Lasse and the Vargamor (1851)”