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)”