Werewolf Legends (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic) 3031060814, 9783031060816

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PALGRAVE HISTORICAL STUDIES IN WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC

Werewolf Legends Edited by Willem de Blécourt · Mirjam Mencej

Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic

Series Editors Jonathan Barry, Department of History, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK Willem de Blécourt, Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Owen Davies, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK

The history of European witchcraft and magic continues to fascinate and challenge students and scholars. There is certainly no shortage of books on the subject. Several general surveys of the witch trials and numerous regional and micro studies have been published for an English-speaking readership. While the quality of publications on witchcraft has been high, some regions and topics have received less attention over the years. The aim of this series is to help illuminate these lesser known or little studied aspects of the history of witchcraft and magic. It will also encourage the development of a broader corpus of work in other related areas of magic and the supernatural, such as angels, devils, spirits, ghosts, folk healing and divination. To help further our understanding and interest in this wider history of beliefs and practices, the series will include research that looks beyond the usual focus on Western Europe and that also explores their relevance and influence from the medieval to the modern period. ‘A valuable series.’ - Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft

Willem de Blécourt · Mirjam Mencej Editors

Werewolf Legends

Editors Willem de Blécourt Meertens Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Mirjam Mencej University of Ljubljana Ljubljana, Slovenia

ISSN 2731-5630 ISSN 2731-5649 (electronic) Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic ISBN 978-3-031-06081-6 ISBN 978-3-031-06082-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Willem de Blécourt This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The original version of this book was revised: Author names, affiliations, and email addresses have been updated. The correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_15

Contents

1

2

3

4

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Werewolf Legends: False, Fabricated or Altogether Absent—Fragments of a Nineteenth-Century Historiography Willem de Blécourt

1

“You Are a Werewolf!” Swedish Werewolf Legends from an International Perspective Willem de Blécourt

21

Of Wolf-Belts, Hungry Servants and Tattered Skirts: The Werewolf in North German Legends Petra Himstedt-Vaid

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Wolf-Shaped Otherness: Finnish Werewolf Legends Reflecting Suspension from Human Community Kaarina Koski and Pasi Enges

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Werewolves in Lithuanian Folklore Sources of the End of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries J¯urate˙ Šlekonyte˙

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Legends and Beliefs About Werewolves Among the Eastern Slavs: Areal Characteristics of Motifs Marina Valentsova

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CONTENTS

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The Werewolf as the Slavic and Germanic “Other”: Czech Werewolf Legends Between Oral and Popular Culture Petr Janeˇcek

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9

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Werewolves as Social Others: Contemporary Oral Narratives in Rural Bosnia and Herzegovina Mirjam Mencej When the Other Is One of Us: Narrative Construction of Werewolf Identity in the Romanian Western Carpathians at the End of the Twentieth Century Laura Jiga Iliescu A Strange Kind of Man Among Us: Beliefs and Narratives About Werewolves in Southern Italy Vito Carrassi

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237 261

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Werewolves in the Western Alps Fabio Armand

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Running the Fate: Portuguese Belief Narratives About Werewolves Paulo Correia

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From Type to Cluster: Werewolf Legends in the Netherlands Willem de Blécourt

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The Werewolf of Hull Deborah Hyde

Correction to: Werewolf Legends Willem de Blécourt and Mirjam Mencej Index

339 C1

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Notes on Contributors

Fabio Armand is an assistant professor at the Institute Pierre Gardette, Catholic University of Lyon He holds a joint Ph.D. in Linguistics (University Grenoble-Alpes) and in Psychology, Anthropology, and Educational Sciences (University of Turin). His main field of research is the experience-centered narrative heritage in faraway alpine environments: from French-speaking Alps to Nepalese Himalayas, especially among Hindu high castes Bahun-Chhetri and Tibeto-burman ethnic groups (Newar and Eastern Gurung). He published Petit dictionnaire du francoprovençal valdôtain (2013) contributed to the development of a neurocognitive anthropological model, BRAINCUBUS, which aim to bridge field folkloristics and cognitive neuroscience, in Les imaginaires du cerveau (2013); specifically on the "loup garou" in: Le patrimoine oral (2016) and on phantom bodies in the journal TricTrac (2016) and in Observation de l’entre-corps: imaginaire et émotions (in press). Vito Carrassi is an independent scholar, formerly adjunct professor of Folkloristics at University of Bari and Cultural Anthropology at University of Basilicata. He obtained a Ph.D. in Literary Sciences. His main field of research are history and theory of folk narrative genres (focusing, in particular, on the concepts of fairy/fairies and fairy tale), orality/literacy and folklore/literature interactions (especially in the Irish context), folk beliefs and narrativity, local and etiological legends, folk rituals and festivals. About these topics he has published two monographs—The Irish Fairy Tale. A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats ix

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and Stephens (2012), and. Il lago e la città scomparsa (2021). He coedited three volumes of La memoria che vive (2013, 2016, 2020) and contributed to the journals Folk Life, and the Electronic Journal of Folklore. Paulo Correia is an anthropologist and teaches in the Algarve University, Portugal. He specializes in Portuguese folktales and legends, among other things through extended field work, archival, and cataloguing of lusophone folktales. He has given special attention to some less studied sub-genres like tall tales and etiologic origin narratives; he is also responsible for the online Portuguese legends database (lendarium.org). He is the author (together with Isabel Cardigos) of the Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales (FFC 291) (2006), in Portuguese: Catálogo dos Contos Tradicionais Portugueses (2016) and has assembled two volumes in the series Aux Origines du Monde, on Portugal (2018) and Brasil (2020). Among his articles are contributions to Imaxes de Muller on shapeshifting women (2012) and a contribution to the Festschrift of Pinto Correia on the relationship between the living and the dead (2020). Willem de Blécourt is a historical anthropologist specialized in the study of witchcraft, werewolves and fairy tales in Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. He is an independent researcher, an Honorary Research Fellow at the Meertens Institute (Amsterdam) and an editor of the series Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. He has published numerous articles, for instance on werewolves in trial accounts, literature, legends, and film, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. His books include Termen van toverij (1990) and Het Amazonenleger (1999). He also published Tales of Magic, Tales in Print. On the Gealogy of Fairy Tales and the Brothers Grimm (2012), and the edited volumes Tierverwandlungen (2011, together with Christa Tuczay) and Werewolf Histories (2015). He is currently putting the last touches to the monograph The Cat and the Cauldron. A History of the Witchcraft Discourse in the Low Countries. Pasi Enges is a lecturer of folkloristics at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku. His special areas of interest are Finnish, Scandinavian and Sámi folk belief and narrative traditions. In his Ph.D. disseration “Minä melkein uskon” —Yliluonnollinen ja sen kohtaaminen tenonsaamelaisessa kulttuurissa (2012) he analysed experience narratives about encountering supernatural beings in the context

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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of River Sámi culture. He has published numerous articles (mainly in Finnish) and co-edited volumes on agrarian and urban folk belief. Besides his own interest areas he teaches widely on various topics of Finnish folklore, folklore methodology, research history, fieldwork methods and folklore archives. Petra Himstedt-Vaid is a research assistant for the international project Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends (ISEBEL). She is the editor of the Zeitschrift für Balkanologie and studied Balkanology and French Philology at the Free University of Berlin. Her dissertation on folksongs on the Balkan was published as Synkretische Glaubensvorstellungen in den Volksliedern der Südslawen (2018). She edited (with Wolfgang Dahmen and Gabriella Schubert) the volumes Auge und Sehen (2019) and Von der Wiederholung zum Ritual (2020), both on cultural aspects of SouthEastern Europe. She also contributed an essay on witchcraft based on texts in the Wossidlo archive in the Festschrift for Christoph Schmidt, Von Mund zu Ohr via Archiv in die Welt (2021). Deborah Hyde writes and talks about belief, specializing in malign folklore. She has appeared on national and international TV to discuss subjects from vampires to poltergeists to witchcraft. She speaks regularly at conferences and writes for publications such as The Guardian. For ten years, Deborah was the editor of The Skeptic Magazine, the UK’s only regular magazine to take a critical-thinking and evidence-based approach to pseudo-science and the paranormal. Deborah was Co-Convenor of Westminster Skeptics and Speaker Liaison of Soho Skeptics. In February 2018, she was elected a fellow of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Laura Jiga Iliescu is a senior researcher at the Constantin Br˘ailoiu Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, the Romanian Academy; she is an associate professor at the University of Bucharest. Her main fields of interest are orality and literacy; ethnological religious studies; charms; beliefs narratives; mountainous ethnology; space imaginary; modern and postmodern coordinates of religious meanings about nature; oral performance; field-working and archiving oral culture documents. She wrote Tales and Legends from Transylvania (2007), as well as Structuri mentalitare carpatice (2013), and Biserica de al˘aturi : câteva rituri necercetate ale ciobanilor din Carpa¸ti (2020). Among her recent articles are a study on charms in Acta Ethnographica Hungaria (2018) and an essay on fairy trance (2021)

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Petr Janeˇcek is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Until 2013 he worked as head of the Ethnographical Department of the National Museum in Prague. His research focuses on contemporary and modern verbal folklore (especially legends, rumours, jokes and conspiracy theories) and theory, methodology and history of folkloristics and European ethnology. He has published a monograph on Central and Eastern European version of Spring-heeled Jack narratives Mýtus o pérákovi, Mˇestská legenda mezi folklorem a populární kulturou (2017) which is due to be published in English as The Myth of Spring Man. An Urban Legend Between Folklore and Popular Culture (2022), a series of four collections of contemporary Czech legends and ˇ rumours titled Cerná sanitka (2006; 2007; 2008; 2020) and a collection of contemporary Czech ghost stories Krvavá Máry a jiné strašlivé historky (2015). He has also contributed to The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage (2017) about Czech traditional culture and published more than 50 scholarly articles in Fabula, Diogéne and other folklore, ethnological and historical academic journals. Kaarina Koski is an adjunct professor of folklore studies at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku, Finland. She focuses on the analysis of vernacular conceptualization and meanings of otherworldly beings and agencies, handling the topic in her Finnish-language monograph Kuoleman voimat (2011); see also her English contribution in: Body, Soul, Spirits and Supernatural Communication (2019). Together with Frog and Ulla Savolainen, Koski edited the volume Genre—text —interpretation. Multidisciplinary perspectives on folklore and beyond (2016); this collection includes her theoretical chapter "Legend genre and narrative registers". Other recent international research articles include "Discussing the supernatural in contemporary Finland: Discourses, genres, and forums" in Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore (2016); "The Sacred and the Supernatural: Lutheran Church Buildings in Christian Practice and Finnish Folk Belief Tradition" in: Stories and Supernatural Places (2018); and "Blending the vernacular and esoteric: Narratives on ghosts and fates in early twentieth century esoteric journals" in: Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis (2020). Koski’s recent publications in Finnish are about afterlife beliefs, nightmares, uncanny experiences, and their stigmatization, as well as internet cultures.

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Mirjam Mencej is a Professor of Folkloristics at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. From 2013 to 2021 she served as a chair of Belief Narrative Network Committee at the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. Her main fields of research interests include belief narratives on the dead, witchcraft, and vernacular religion. She has published numerous papers and seven monographs on folklore and vernacular religion, among others Gospodar volkov v slovanski mitologiji (2001), Coprnice so me nosile. Raziskava vaškega cˇarovništva na podeželju vzhodne Slovenije ob prelomu tisoˇcletja (2006), Sem vso noˇc lutal v krogu. Simbolika krožnega gibanja v evropski tradicijski kulturi (2013), and Styrian Witches in European Perspective. Ethnographic Fieldwork (2017). J¯ urate˙ Šlekonyte˙ is a senior researcher at Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Department of Folk Narrative, Vilnius, Lithuania. Her main research interests are: Lithuanian folk narratives; archiving, classification, and digitalization of folk tales; Lithuanian tales of magic; the context of folktales’ telling. She has written on Tales of Magic, Stebuklin˙es pasakos (2016 in Lithuanian with a summary in English) and is preparing the next volumes. She published about 30 research articles in Lithuanian and English and co-authored a research monograph about Lithuanian storytelling tradition, The Storytelling Human (2020). She has done extensive fieldwork in various regions of Lithuania. Marina Valentsova is a philologist and senior research fellow at the Department of the Ethnolinguistics and Folklore, Institute of Slavic Studies of Russian academy of sciences, Moscow, Russia. She conducted field work in Polesye, in the Carpathians and the Russian North. Her research interests are: Slavic ethnolinguistics, lexicology, phraseology, etymology of Slavic languages, Slovak studies, areal linguistics, Slavic lower mythology and demonology. She has mainly published in Russian as documented in the Bibliogpafi of the Clav ncka tnolingvictik, but lately also in English on comparative mythology in the Electronic Journal of Folklore (2018), in the volume New Researches on the Religion and Mythology of the Pagan Slavs (2019) and contributed to The Soul in the Axiosphere (2020).

List of Figures

Atlas över Svensk Folkkultur: Sägen, tro och högtidssed (Swedish folklore atlas: popular beliefs, legends and calendar customs), 31, Werewolves, southern half. Among other things, the map shows the relative density of the research Richard Wossidlo in front of his card trays, Wossidlo Archive, Rostock Fragment of the manuscript The Black Books (Juodosios knygos) Matas Slanˇciauskas, folklore collector, Lithuanian Folklore Archive East Slavic cultural regions: in italics. The sanserif country names provide a rough orientation Front page of Czech werewolf broadside ballad Pˇríbˇeh neslýchaný, kterak jeden pastýˇr skrze své cˇarodˇejnictví v vlka se obcoval, z této písnˇe se vyrozumí. Printed in Kutná Hora by Jan Jeˇrábek, third quarter of the 18th century. Courtesy of the Library of the National Museum, Prague, signature KP 1074 Gra¸tian, screen shot Lucas Cranach, early sixteenth century: melancholy, also known as the werewolf Map of Portugal and neighbouring Spain. Portugese regions in sanserif. In italic bold upper case are the names of the regions of the western Iberian Insula during the Roman occupation Toponymic plate: Werewolf’s Cave Dutch folklore atlas, kaart 12019: weerwolf verschijnt als Map of Barmston Drain. The numbers refer to the sightings described in the text

36 64 110 111 131

169 234 243

287 308 324 362

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CHAPTER 1

Werewolf Legends: False, Fabricated or Altogether Absent—Fragments of a Nineteenth-Century Historiography Willem de Blécourt

In this volume, the term ‘legend’ is defined within the discipline of folklore. This implies that notwithstanding an etymology that derives ‘legend’ from legere, ‘to read’, the oral aspects of the term are dominant; even though most texts used in this book are recorded in writing, they represent records of oral expressions. Legends are subject to at least two rules that apply to folklore in general: multiple existence and variation, which according to Alan Dundes (1934–2005) are ‘the sine qua non of authentic folklore’.1 One instance or text is not a legend and only when different people have related different things about a subject is it possible to call their collective utterings ‘legends’. As it is missing this element of variation, a literary text or a film, however popular it may be, is decidedly not a 1 Alan Dundes, Folklore Matters (Knoxville 1992), 85.

W. de Blécourt (B) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_1

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legend.2 Literary authors in general use very little legend material in their work, with one of the rare exceptions being Angela Carter (1940–1992) who wrote in her short story The Company of Wolves: ‘A witch from the valley once turned an entire wedding party into wolves because the groom had settled on another girl’. Later in the story she wrote about a man who vanished on his wedding night and roamed around as a werewolf, and when he came back his wife had married another man. This too was derived from a legend, as several other elements; the short story was a clever collage.3 Carter’s source was not even an oral legend. Because she was English (and, as I will explain below, there was no tradition of werewolf legends in England) she used motifs from elsewhere, in her case from around the Baltic and thus will have obtained them from a folklore publication.4 The first of the tales mentioned above was well-known, the other less so. The criteria of multiple existence and variation lend some claim to collectivity but they say very little about the content of a ‘legend’; it is not necessary for it to be traditional, or historicized, or to reflect something like ‘folk belief’’ in order to meet them.5 Most of the time such characteristics are imposed by researchers, and an approach geared more towards the categorisation of the people researched should break legends down into the more neutral yet overlapping categories of stories and memories.6 In the case of the story of the cursed wedding guests, it may well 2 One can argue that the different comments on and analyses of a literary tale still constitute a legend, which even has oral aspects. These ‘legends’ can be grouped as a special sub-genre which will not be discussed in this book. See: Brian J. Frost, The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature (Wisconsin 2003); Brent A. Stypczynski, The Modern Literary Werewolf. A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif (Jefferson 2012); Bryan Senn, The Werewolf Filmography: 300+ Movies (Jefferson 2017). 3 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (Harmondsworth 1981), 111–118. 4 Cf. John Theophilus Naaké, Slavonic Fairy Tales (London 1874), 135–140; the

werewolf stories are Polish. 5 Timothy Tangherlini, ‘“It Happened Not Too Far From Here…”: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization’, Western Folklore 49 (1990), 371–390. 6 This distinction is somewhat similar to that between fabulates and memorates; the latter are underrepresented in folklore studies, certainly in their appearance as reminiscences of genuine events and not just as stories told in the first person to impress authenticity on the public. This is an ongoing discussion for a large part based on an uncritical reception of the work of Linda Dégh who prioritised the fabulate. Cf. Linda Dégh and Andrew Vászsony, ‘The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate’, Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974), 225–239.

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have been that the groom had left his previous girlfriend pregnant, which had very little to do with any ‘belief’. A so-called ‘folk belief’ is also less systematic than is taken for granted, and as a concept it wrongly leaves out people’s religious beliefs. Moreover, a legend can be contested: not everyone who knows it needs to agree on its exact details. The reason for a legend being seen as ‘traditional’ can be found in the history of folklore as a discipline, which initially sought to reconstruct pre-Christian concepts in an attempt at creating a mental archaeology. In this process everything Christian was set aside, although the nature of the ‘superstition’ which was the focus of research into ‘folk belief’ was still determined by Christianity. A true mental archaeology was impossible in any case: it is not possible for a specific memory to transcend an individual mind or its life span, and even the individual mind was not always reliable. As a rule, a legend discusses issues relevant at the time of its expression and recording. A legend may have historical aspects and its content may hark back to past times; however, this needs to be proved in every individual case. Some legends were older than others, but even if there are grounds for accepting a legend’s history, that does not automatically imply that its meaning has remained unchanged over time. Returning to the previous example of a cursed wedding party, few informants actually told a legend collector that the witch wanted to avenge her daughter and mostly gave other reasons for her curse, such as not being invited.7 This may have been because people did not want to talk about illegitimate pregnancies, especially to strangers, but they also could have forgotten this element or heard the legend from someone who had substituted something else for the original motivation of the witch. Another issue that needs attention here is the idea of ‘folk’. Again, I refer to the work of Alan Dundes, who described ‘folk’ as ‘any group of of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor’.8 This can be occupation, class, family, gender, community, religion or language. There is nevertheless a difference between legends carried by any such group and those carried by a large group which could comprise different social characteristics. Dundes’s definition was a reaction against nineteenth-century 7 See, among others, Chapters 4, 5 and 6 on Finnish, Lithuanian and Polysian ‘Wedding Guests’ legends. 8 Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore (The Hague 1975), 7; he already used the description in The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs 1965), 2; cf. Elliott Oring (ed.), Folk Groups and Folklore Genres (Logan 1986).

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romantic nationalistic folklore, which framed the lower rural classes as the carriers of an age-old heritage, and his questioning of this attitude can only be supported. The werewolf material, given that it was for a large part collected amongst elderly inhabitants of the countryside, sometimes allows conclusions related to some of these indicators (such as gender, or age) but is, on the whole, clearer on the subject of area and the main religion that was practised there. It all depends on the quantity and quality of the research. One legend text tells us very little about a whole area. It is also often overlooked that when a legend is recorded by a researcher, the dynamics of the telling have changed; the now-absent addressee may have been a vital part of the legend. Both legends as a concept and werewolf legends as one of the concretisations of that concept largely came into being in the early nineteenth century. The 1790s saw the formulation of the concept of Sage, the German equivalent of a legend, but generally used in the sense of a historical literary narrative, and more belonging to the reading than to the listening public, as is evident in titles as Sagen der Vorzeit (Legends of Long Ago), Sagen der Ritterzeiten (Legends from the Times of the Knights), or Sagen aus dem Altherthume (Legends from Antiquity).9 In 1807 Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) emphasised Volkssagen as national legends and legends of the common people and thereby equipped them with a sort of collectivity. As he wrote: ‘And in all the legends of ghosts, dwarfs, wizards and monstrous miracles there is buried a silent but veritable cause, for which we carry an internal timidity, which in pure characters never has obliterated education and was dispersed into every secret truth’. Legends brought life into dull history.10 Nine years later in their collection Deutsche Sagen (German Legends), he and his brother Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) kept the historical connotation, pushed it even more in the direction of fiction and linked it to a particular place. In this way, they opened the door to legends about dwarfs and giants, witches and ghosts and thus also to legends about werewolves. In the course of the next hundred years the notions of werewolf legends developed if ever so slightly, finally arriving at the multiple oral narratives as 9 Leonard Waechter, Sagen der Vorzeit (Berlin 1787) with many reprints and sequels; no author, Sagen der Ritterzeiten (Leipzig 1792); August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine, Sagen aus dem Alterthume (Berlin 1799–1800). 10 Jacob Grimm, ‘Gedanken: wie sich die Sagen zur Poesie und Geschichte verhalten’, Zeitung für Einsiedler 18/19 (1808), 152–156, cit. 154.

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they are known today. In the meantime, several narratives came and went that cannot be considered as legends any more, such as the tale of the husband who returned to find his place taken. In the rest of this introduction I will continue to discuss other nineteenth-century opposites of the legend, which now are not legends, in this case not werewolf legends, but which have been considered as such. In addition to literary texts, it concerns demonological examples, fake legends, fairytales, and the absence of werewolf legends.

The Brothers Grimm When assessed against the criteria formulated above, only one of the five werewolf texts that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published in their Deutsche Sagen can be called a ‘legend’.11 The three texts grouped together under the heading ‘Der Wärwolf’ relate an ‘oral’ tale from Hesse; a story about a shepherd who wounded a werewolf with his axe, after which he discovered a woman who was busy staunching a wound; and a reference to a trial in Liège in 1610. Tales designated as oral were not necessarily recorded from oral informants,12 but in all likelihood the Hessian tale about a man who put on a belt, changed into a wolf and ate a foal was once part of an oral exchange.13 I have called this tale ‘The Hungry Farmhand’ and half a century later it was the ‘most common’ German werewolf story; at least eleven versions were known to exist by that time.14 Whether the story about the shepherd hitting a wolf and finding a woman was ever a more or less widespread tale remains the question and it was not specific enough in this form to be considered a werewolf tale.15 It was published by Bräuner in Curiositaeten in 1737, who had in turn copied it from the late

11 Brüder Grimm, Deutsche Sagen (Berlin 1816), 293–297; https://de.wikisource.org/ wiki/Deutsche_Sagen_(Brüder_Grimm,_Band_1). 12 Lutz Rörich and Hans-Jörg Uther, ‘Sage’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens 11 (2004), 1023: ‘Doch ist die Beteuerung der Mündlichkeit nicht wörtlich zu verstehen, sondern eher ein Zugeständnis an den Zeitgeist, da dem Volk als überlieferungsträger bei den Brüdern Grimm und vielen ihrer Zeitgenossen eine hohe Bedeutung zukam’. 13 The third edition locates the tale in two places: Biebesheim and Wernigerode. 14 Wilhelm Hertz, Der Werwolf , 80. Willem de Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You

Too’, Folklore 118 (2007), 23–45. 15 Cf. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, III (Bloomington 1956), 308: G275.12.

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seventeenth-century supplemented edition of Nicolas Rémy’s Demonolatria. The reference to the trial in Liège (Lüttich) was also published among others in 1686.16 The first of the two other werewolf tales in the Grimms’ book contained a text from Otmar, the pseudonym of Johann Carl Christoph Nachtigal (1753–1819), published in his Volcks-Sagen.17 It was a story about a fight between a shepherd and a man who changed first into a wolf and then a thorn bush. This was rather unique, and the title ‘The Werewolf Stone’ referred more to geographical features named after the Devil than to werewolves. The last werewolf story in the Deutsche Sagen was taken from Caspar Peucer’s Commentarius de praecipuis generibus divinationum, reprinted a number of times in the second half of the sixteenth century, and concerned Latvia, which was apparently German enough to be included in the Deutsche Sagen. In fact, this story also came from Bräuner’s Curiositäten, as both Bräuner and Wilhelm Grimm made the same spelling error (Pucerus instead of Peucerus).18 The Grimms were librarians rather than ethnologists and this showed in their work, as did their romantic disposition. Chapter nineteen about ‘Wehr-Wölffen’ in Bräuner’s book was therefore the main source for the werewolf legends in the Deutsche Sagen. Johann Jacob Bräuner (born 1647, date of death unknown) was a physician and his book stood at the end of a long line of demonological works which merged with entertainment literature in the seventeenth century. It concerned a discussion about the truth of people changing into wolves, in the course of which certain narratives were presented as illustrations of the argument.19 In his opinion, neither the human soul nor the body was able to be changed into an animal; the devil tricked people into believe that this was the case. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm left this context completely out of their versions. Although not every demonological narrative can be considered as a legend, the diverse and multiple demonological works

16 Theophil Laube, Dialogi und Gespräch von der Lycanthropia (Frankfurt 1686), 24. 17 Inez Köhler-Zülch, ‘Nachtigal(l), Johann Carl (Conrad) Christoph’, Enzyklopädie des

Märchens 9 (1999), 1125–1128. 18 Hans-Jörg Uther, ‘Johann Jacob Bräuners “Curiositäten” als Vorlage der “Deutsche Sagen” der Brüder Grimm. Zur Bedeutungswandel von Geschichten durch Nacherzählen’, in: Dieter Harmening and Erich Wimmer (eds.), Volkskultur – Geschichte – Region (Würzburg 1992), 552–571. 19 Johann Jacob Bräuner, Physicalisch- und Historisch erörterte Curiositaeten (Frankfurt am Main 1737), 246–263.

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available would allow the researcher to follow a narrative paper trail back into the sixteenth century. That will not be done in this book. The few selected werewolf texts in Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie only featured two legends. He cited the 1837 Polish edition of the book by Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki (1807–1879), which featured a tale about a witch who put her girdle under the threshold of a house where a wedding was taking place, whereupon the bride, the groom and six guests were changed into wolves for three years. After that, the witch covered them with a pelt which made them human again. However, the groom kept his tail, because it was not covered by the pelt. This was a genuine legend and Wójcicki had actually talked to informants; the next story concerned a variant with a soldier cursing the participants of the wedding, which was not mentioned by Jacob.20 Jacob’s other legend text, in a footnote, concerned a Hessian tale, which included a Baltic motif that was rare in Germany about a man who called his wife by her name in order to change her back into a human.21

Wilhelm Hertz In 1862, the twenty-seven-year-old author and Germanist Wilhelm Hertz, later Ritter von Hertz (Ritter = Knight) (1835–1902), author of Der Werwolf , could point to a two page list of werewolf studies spanning from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century.22 His own work on the subject, his Habilitation, however, was a Contribution to Legend History according to the subtitle, providing a new approach that was less based on learned studies and more on the legends themselves. A mentioned, today’s definition of the legend and especially the werewolf legend, points to short stories about werewolves thought to circulate orally amongst 20 Kaziemierz Władysław Wójcicki, Polnische Volkssagen und Märchen (Berlin 1839), 66–67. 21 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche mythologie, 2nd edition, part 2 (Göttingen 1844), 1049; Teutonic Mythology, part 3 (London 1883), 1094–1095. An example of naming was later recorded near Schleswig, see Karl Müllenhoff, Sagen Märchen und Lieder der Herzogthümer Schleswig Holstein und Lauenburg (Kiel 1845), 232 (nr. 318.3). See the next chapter on Sweden and also Chapter 3 of this book on the naming motif near Rostock. 22 Wilhelm Hertz, Der Werwolf: Beitrag zur Sagengeschichte (Stuttgart 1862), 5– 7. Digital: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:De_Der_Werwolf_(Hertz_W). For an overview of the then available literature see also: J.G.T. Grässe, Bibliotheca magica et pneumatica (Leipzig 1843), 20–24.

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elderly people in the countryside.23 Although like the Grimms Hertz may have collected a lot of texts, he did no fieldwork himself. As is apparent from his adjacent publications, his interests were geared more towards medieval literature, for instance about Lancelot and Guinevere (1860), Le chanson de Roland (1861) or the poet Marie de France (1862).24 Like the Grimms, his sense of the Sage (Legend) was more as a historical and less as an oral narrative. From his perspective, the classical story of Lykaon was the oldest werewolf legend and precise temporal situating of legends was not important. It hardly mattered whether he discussed, for instance, the ancient Egyptians or the nineteenth-century Tartars. There is an incongruity between the modern legend concept and Hertz’s. Hertz decontextualized local werewolves and recontextualised them with other decontextualised werewolves and related shape-shifters. I cannot discuss his nineteenth-century legend texts here one-by-one and can only give a few examples of texts that need to be reconsidered. The werewolf of Rousse, in the Netherlands, which was specified as such by Baring-Gould, actually originated from Ronse in East Flanders, now Belgium. The story about how the werewolf was hit with an arrow and then turned into a burgomaster’s servant may have been presented as a legend transmitted orally (mündlich)25 but it came from the sixteenthcentury demonologist Jean Bodin.26 It was never very popular in the Flemish oral tradition.27 One of the specific werewolf legends that Alfons Roeck (1927–2014) identified was the wounding legend. This, however, told the story of how a wanderer met a werewolf at night and drew blood from him, forcing him to reveal himself on the spot.28 In contrast to Baring-Gould, who is discussed in more detail below, Hertz mentioned all the werewolf legends published by Johann Wilhelm Wolf, including

23 Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief. Dialectic of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington/ Indianapolis 2001). 24 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/wilhelm_hertz. 25 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 69; Baring-Gould, Were-wolves, 113–114, from Johann Wilhelm

Wolf, Niederländische Sagen 337–338. 26 Bodin, tr. Scott, On the Demon-Mania, 123. 27 Notwithstanding O’Donnell, Werwolves (London 1912), 223. Here the original text

is further distorted. 28 Alfons Roeck, De Nederlandse weerwolfsage in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Catholic University of Leuven (1967), 262–264.

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the more popular tales such as the one about a werewolf skin that was burned. A second example is the Slovakian story ‘The Werewolf’s Daughter’ of which Hertz published an accurate version.29 The original was published by the professor of philosophy Ignác Jan Hanuš (or Hanush) (1812– 1869) as an almost literal translation of a fairytale that had been written down but never published in print, referred to as a märchen.30 It consisted of three parts: in the first, a father starts to murder his nine marriageable daughters, but the youngest knew that her father was a werewolf and worried about her sisters. When her father asked her to undress before he killed her, she pushed him into a pit, grabbed her clothes and fled. The second part is a kind of magical flight in which the girl drops garment after garment and orders her father to tear them to pieces and spin them back together again. Eventually she runs out of clothes and hides in the smallest heap of hay in a field. The werewolf cannot find her, becomes tired and runs off. After three days the king’s dog discovers her. In the third part, the king is smitten, marries her and she bears him two sons. As a condition of their marriage she had stipulated that no beggar should stay in the castle overnight. Her father, disguised as a beggar, manages this regardless, and kills the two princes, putting the bloody knives next to his daughter and disappearing. She is banished and roams the country with the bodies of her two sons tied around her neck until she finds a way to revive them. She is reunited with her husband, the werewolf is caught and killed and they all live happily ever after. The story was without doubt told by an experienced narrator, but as a fairytale it was unique and it was no werewolf legend. The misunderstanding was created by Hanuš who had translated vlkolak with ‘werewolf’ when ‘ogre’ (Ungeheuer or Monster in German) would have been more apt in this particular case. Hertz remarked that no shape changing occurred, and that vlkolak meant wizard but nevertheless republished the story. Hertz’s approach was in accordance with the notions of his time, displaying a strong reliance on the work of Jacob Grimm. In fact, the late sixteenth-century demonologists that Hertz referred to already followed

29 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 121. 30 J.J. Hanush, ‘Der Werwolf (Vlkolak)’, Zeitschrift für deutsche mythologie 4 (1859),

224–228.

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the practice of throwing all werewolves together into one heap. On occasion other shapeshifters were discussed as well. However, Hertz refrained from discussing origins much, as he considered it more useful to display the rich material which in his method had to precede any conclusive explanation, if such an explanation would even be possible to arrive at. In the conclusion of his book he discerned an east–west movement, in accordance with the wanderings of the ‘Arian tribes’, which all adhered to the concept of a periodical metamorphosis and declared their outsiders to be wolves. In Christian times the shift into a werewolf was ascribed to the devil and the werewolf’s actions had deteriorated to pure bloodlust.31 These conclusions far exceeded the nineteenth-century material and have now become impossible to support. Werewolf legends were subject to historical change, and are firmly grounded in time and place without necessarily revealing anything about long distant pasts. Hertz included the texts referred to by the Grimms but placed them in a much wider overview of German werewolves, including the demonological examples, which dated (with one exception) from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. He found nineteenth-century legends in the north and east of Germany and presented them according to their subject: how they changed and how it was countered, ending with ghostly werewolves.32 He also referred to the Swedish story of the groom on his way to his wedding riding through a wood and being changed into a werewolf along with his companions. The bride waited in vain. One day she went into the wood, thinking about her groom and instinctively called out his name. By coincidence the wolf was nearby and changed back into a human through the power of his Christian baptisal name.33 Variants turned up along the eastern Baltic coast, where a wedding party were said to have been changed into wolves because of their sins.34

31 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 10–11, 133–134. On the designation ‘arian’, or Arier, see among others: Klaus von See, Ideologie und Philologie. Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Heidelberg 2006), 9–55. 32 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 77–88. 33 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 61, from Arvid August Afzelius, Volkssagen und Volkslieder aus

Schweden älterer und neuerer Zeit (Leipzig 1842), 362. 34 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 62–63.

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Sabine Baring-Gould Writing only three years after Hertz, the Anglican minister Sabine BaringGould (1834–1924) would have struggled to make his The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) stand out in approach, method and material.35 It may also be that he started writing his book because he had different thoughts about werewolves; under the influence of the French historian Jules Michelet he devoted three chapters to the Maréchal de Retz, better known as the infanticide Gilles de Rais.36 For Baring-Gould werewolves, child murderers and cannibals belonged to the same category.37 No werewolves are mentioned in these three chapters. His chapter on legends (he called them ‘folklore’) drew on a selection of the texts Hertz had published. This resulted in a particular dearth of German werewolf stories. As he included less comparative material, Baring-Gould made more mistakes, or at the very least caution should be exercised when referencing some of the texts he published. Although The Book of Were-Wolves featured the Polish story of the witch who made a wedding party transform into wolves,38 he omitted the other Polish and the Baltic variants of this tale. In the case of ‘The Daughter of the Werewolf’, in contrast to Hertz he (wrongly) pointed at parallels with other werewolf legends such as the Danish version of the ‘Werewolf Husband’—which he did not recognise as a migratory legend. The newspaper at the end is an invention by Baring-Gould.39 When Baring-Gould did publish two more or less similar texts from the Périgord, in south-western France, they were in fact only representative of a single text, and a fabricated one at that.40 The second of these two was 35 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (London 1865); https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Were-Wolves. 36 Cf. Ben Parsons, ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Gilles de Rais and His Modern Apologists’, Fifteenth Century Studies 37 (2012), 113–137; Thomas A. Fudgé, Medieval Religion and its Anxieties (London 2016), 51–87. 37 Hence the inclusion of serial killers in: Brad Steiger, The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shapeshifting Beings (Detroit/London 1999). 38 Baring-Gould, Were-Wolves, 116, without source indication. 39 Baring-Gould, Were-Wolves, 124–128, with insufficient source. 40 It concerns, in fact, five texts whose authors all copied each other. Next to Taillefer

(see note 41): Axel Gautier, Statistique du département de Charente-Inférieure (La Rochelle 1839), 234—the source of Baring Gould’s first text; Alfred de Nore, Coutumes, Mythes et Traditions (Paris 1846), 99–100; Eugène Rolland, Faune populaire de la France

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the primary text, as not only was it more detailed but it corresponded more closely with the French original, published by Wlgrin de Taillefer (1761–1833).41 This started as follows: Certains hommes, notammant les fils de prêtres, sont forcés, à chaque pleine lune, de se transformer en cette espèce de bète diabolique. C’est la nuit que le mal les prend. Lorsqu’ils sentent les approches, ils s’agitent, sortent du lit, sautent par la fenêtre, et vont se précipiter dans une fontaine. Après avoir battu l’eau pendant quelques momens, ils sortent du côté opposé à celui par lequel ils sont entrés, et se trouvent revêtus d’une peau de chèvre que le diable leur a donnée.

That this was not original ‘folklore’ is apparent from at least three of the elements referenced. It features the moon as an indicator of the time of the metamorphosis. In contrast to modern cinema, the moon was actually extremely rare as a motif in werewolf folklore, and certainly in nineteenth-century French narratives.42 It was more the moon of Petronius, illuminating the observations of Niceros, than the moon of Gervase of Tilbury, which was a new moon and which was still 700 years in the past. Its sudden appearance in the Périgord is suspicious and needs to be explained. This applies even more to the second element: the water. The werewolf changed by jumping into a pond (translated as ‘well’ by BaringGould). When he emerged on the other side, he was wearing a goat-skin given to him by the devil. The nearest narrative equivalent for this can be found in Pliny’s Historia naturalis about Arcadian werewolves where a

(Paris 1877), 155; Jules L.M. Noguès, Les moers d’autrefois en Saintonge et en Auni (Saintes 1891), 233. Part of this copying was noticed by Paul Sébilot, Le folk-lore de France, II (Paris 1905), 205, note 4. 41 Wlgrin de Taillefer, Antiquités de Vésone, cité Galoise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, I (Périgueux 1821), 250. 42 On the Romanian vârcolaci, see: Agnes Murgoci and Helen Beveridge Murgoci, English Pages on Romanian Folklore (Bucharest 2005), 112–114. See on the moon also Chapters 10 by Vito Carrassi and 12 by Paulo Correia on respectively Southern Italy and Portugal in this volume.

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change is likewise effected by crossing water.43 The combination of water and moon suffices to disqualify Taillefer’s narrative as a French legend. The third alien element in the story is the inclusion of the fils de prêtres, merely ‘bastards’ in Baring-Gould’s rendering. From a mere claim by a young Jean Grenier, made to impress a girl in the early seventeenth century,44 the trope had moved to a ‘genuine’ piece of folklore, or at least that was the intention.45 It is now possible to deduce that its maker was at home with Petronius, Pliny and De Lancre, or at least with publications discussing these authors. The three elements may have been out of place in early-nineteenth-century French folklore,46 but they were not in the context they first appeared in: an archealogical treatise on the remains of the cities of the Gauls. By presenting a skewed selection of the folklore material available at the time, Baring Gould could ignore the first signs of the multiple existences and variations of werewolf legends, pushing them away from werewolves and toward serial killers instead. This will have been related to his particular form of Christian belief which denied the concept of werewolves. It also did not help that he was unable to discuss werewolves with his congregation in Devon where they were unknown.

Absence Jacob Grimm did not find any werewolves in medieval German poetry.47 Hertz noticed that the werewolf does not appear in medieval Dutch sources.48 According to Baring-Gould English folklore was ‘singularly 43 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 37, 45. On the classical werewolves, see now: Richard Gordon, ‘Good to Think: Wolves and Wolf-Men in the Graeco-Roman World’, in: Werewolf Histories, 25–60; Daniel Ogden, The Werewolf in the Ancient World (Oxford 2021). As Carrassi clarifies in Chapter 10, when werewolf and water occur in combination, water has a purifying not a boosting function. 44 Jan Machielsen, ‘The Making of a Teen Wolf: Pierre de Lancre’s Confrontation with Jean Grenier (1603–10)’, Folklore 130 (2019), 237–257, esp. 244. 45 The motif would later feature in Guy Endore, The Werewolf of Paris (New York 1933). The same case is mentioned without comment by Montague Summers, The Werewolf (London 1933), 114. 46 Cf. for a more genuine local werewolf ‘memorate’: William G. Pooley, Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford 2019), 89–90. 47 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, I (Göttingen 1844), 1048. 48 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 68.

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barren of werewolf stories’.49 Medieval werewolf poems and romances are in fact restricted to Iceland, the kingdom of Denmark, including Norway,50 and France.51 In early modern England, werewolves had become very rare. In nineteenth-century Czechia werewolves were invented.52 Yet absence does not imply a complete black hole. The criterium of multiple presence suggests that one narrative does not make a legend. Where exactly the boundary lines is unclear: five instances? more than ten? This also depends on the intensity of the research carried out. Narratives that either touch on the theme of werewolves or are adjacent to it but are not werewolf narratives themselves also reveal something about the creature’s absence. When, for instance, a student in Bavarian Augsburg recorded a story about a man who quarreled with his neighbour before attacking him in the shape of a dog, this was probably not a very widespread story; it was also not about a werewolf , although the caption said so, but about an alsatian (Wolfshund), in which shape the man was said to have changed to attack the neighbour. The latter had a perpetual injury in his neck afterwards.53 This is one of the main examples of a man changing into a wolf in an overview of Bavarian legends. It indicates that animal metamorphosis may be present, but that the notion of werewolves may be slightly problematic. This problem is especially virulent for Southern Germany and the adjacent areas.

49 Baring-Gould, The Book of Wer-Wolves, 100. In this he was correct, see: Ernest W.

Baughman, Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America (The Hague 1966); Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land. A Guide to England’s Legends, from Sping-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London 2005). 50 Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, ‘The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007), 277–303; Christa Agnes Tuczay, ‘Into the Wild – Old Norse Stories of Animal Men’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 61–81. 51 Leslie A. Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf: A Literary Study from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Jefferson en London 2008); Aleksander Pluskowski, ‘Before the Werewolf Trials: Contextualising Shape-Changers and Animal Identities in Medieval North-West-Western Europe’, in: Werewolf Histories, 82–118. 52 See Chapter 7 of this volume. 53 Günther Kapfhammer, Bayerische Sagen. Sagen aus Altbayern, Schwaben und Franken

(Köln 1971), 82. Ms. 67/626, legend research of the pedagogical academy in Augsburg, not dated.

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Hertz’s illustrative examples of nineteenth-century German legends all derived from the north.54 These findings are echoed in Adolf Wuttke’s handbook on contemporary superstitions, which appeared in consecutive editions from 1860 to 1925, with reprints in 1970 and 2006. The ‘belief in werewolves’ was more prevalent in the north and east, than in the south, and also in regions where for two centuries no wolves had lived.55 I leafed through the indexes and tables of contents of the main Southern German legend volumes from around the middle of the nineteenth century and also encountered hardly any werewolves. This is to say: the tables of contents of Ernst Meier’s books on Swabia in south-west Germany), with special sections on the devil, witches, and animals, do not reveal anything that looks like a werewolf.56 From a later Swabian collection only one werewolf tale is known, about a shepherd who shoots a wolf and finds an injured man the next morning. This is basically a demonological legend, and is not restricted to werewolves.57 No Werwolf figures in the index of Deutsche Alpensagen which is over 400 pages long and covers 400 different narratives.58 Reiser’s even thicker work on the Allgau does have sections on shape-changing witches and demons in animal form, and even a story about a man who was changed into a dog by a curse, but again no werewolves.59 In Schönwerth’s volume on the Upper Palatinate, bordering today’s Czechia, mention is made of the Wyrwulf or Wärwolf . The stories, however, show very little of the creature. One instance is more of a joke about a man who can turn into a fox with the aid of a belt; the belt is then tried out on a chaplain. Another, more serious, deals with a shepherd who steals sheep in the shape of a wolf, and a third is about another shepherd

54 Hertz, Der Werwolf , 79–88. Cf. Petra Himstedt-Vaid, Chapter 3 of this book. 55 Karl Friedrich Adolf Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart (Leipzig

1925), 277 [fourth edition]. 56 Ernst Meier, Deutsche Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Schwaben (Stuttgart 1852), 3 volumes. 57 Rudolf Kapff, Schwäbische Sagen (Jena 1926), 97; Johannes Künzig, Schwarzwald Sagen (Jena 1930), 6. 58 Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Alpenburg, Deutsche Alpensagen (Vienna 1861). 59 Karl Reiser, Sagen, Gebräuche und Sprichwörter des Allgäus (Kempten 1895), 284:

the story was depicted on a panel hanging in a house in Vorderburg but had disappeared in the late nineteenth century.

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who could control wolves.60 Only the second story qualifies as a werewolf legend. Then there is the Book of Legends of the Bavarian Lands, also in three volumes, which features thirty shape-changing narratives. Most of them deal with people or things that turn into stone and only rarely does a human become an animal, such as the women who end up as ducks, or the man who has to spend the rest of his life as a roebuck.61 Appearing in legend compilations,62 or in internet posts, the ‘werewolf’ of Ansbach was never a legend but the account of a late seventeenthcentury animal trial against a wolf.63 This wolf was killed and then dressed up as a man, and at the most one could call it a reversed ‘werewolf’. Once more, featuring it as a ‘werewolf’ illustrates the lack of genuine werewolves available to researchers. This absence of werewolves in Bavaria is neatly illustrated by a local joke about them: when a wolf they have captured escapes, some peasants consult a priest. He tells them that it must have been a werewolf and advises: ‘The next time that you capture that wolf … see that you chain it by the leg, and in the morning you will find a Lutheran’.64 In Catholic Bavaria there were as few Lutherans as there were werewolves. Austrian legend collections have one or two werewolf texts but significantly they contain a version of an early eighteenth-century trial, rather than memorates.65 The Swiss Alps was the area of origin of the European werewolf trials, but very little of this seems to have remained in the minds of its inhabitants.66 Ursula Brunold-Bigler did find several werewolves, however, and in her chapter on wolves, rather than werewolves, she published six texts, four of which dealt with the change from a human into a wolf. That is still not a large quantity, especially if one considers that two of those four are already typified as close to the fairytale (as märchenähnlichen Erzählungen) because the shape-shifting is the result of a curse. The third is 60 Franz Schönwerth, Aus der Oberpfalz. Sitten und Sagen, III (Augsburg 1859), 209–

212. 61 A. Schöppner, Sagenbuch der Bayerischen Lande (München 1852–1853). 62 Kapfhammer, Bayerische Sagen, 213–215. 63 Bernhard Schemmel, ‘Der “Werewolf” von Ansbach (1685). Ereignisse und Meinungen’, Jahrbuch für fränkische Landesforschung 33 (1973), 167–200. 64 Ambroce Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionairy (New York 1993), 134–135. 65 Theodor Vernaleken, Alpensagen (Salzburg 1930), 51–52. Original: Chur 1858. 66 According to Elmar Lorey, ‘Wie der Werwolf unter die Hexen kam’, https://www.

elmar-lorey.de/werwolf/genese.htm. Last accessed in late December 2019.

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about a wolf’s hunt; the animal is finally found because someone puts his knife in an unknown tree trunk, upon which the trunk changes first into a wolf and then into a witch. The fourth werewolf legend is a text from the French Dauphiné about a girl who is taken by a werewolf and devoured. This is not a large harvest of texts, and one can only conclude that legends about werewolves in the Swiss and Austrian Alps are very rare indeed.67 For the French part, thanks to the work of Charles Joisten (1936–1981), the researcher had access to a large quantity of werewolf texts, of which more could have been translated and incorporated into Brunold-Bigler’s book.68 Assessing folklore texts requires the student to steer a course not only between oral and written versions but between individual texts and the overall picture derived from them.

Historical Contexts Even when it is impossible to read much history from legend texts, the presence or absence of the legends themselves was still the result of historical processes. If one is concerned with genuine legends, grounded in systematic research, then several factors may be considered: the occurrence of real and cultural, especially biblical wolves, entertainment literature featuring werewolves, and werewolf trials. As the finishing remarks of this introduction, I will sketch these factors in very broad strokes; to elaborate them further would need another book. There was no lack of wolves in the areas discussed here also where there were no werewolves. Some of them even found their way into the legends. In German Baden, the place name of Wölfingen was explained by a story about a wolf bitch who had attacked and devoured twelve children.69 In the Bavarian Sagenbuch, a woman appears who is attacked by wolves.70 Wolves attracted as many sayings, fables and other stories as werewolves, and possibly even more. A French folklorist preceded his 67 Ursula Brunold-Bigler, Wolfsmensch und Bärenhexe. Tiere in Sagen und Märchen aus den Alpen (Chur 2010). 68 Charles Joisten, Robert Chanaud, Alice Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, Le Monde alpin et rhodanien 20 (1992), 17–182. See further Chapter 11 of this book. 69 Bernard Baader, Volkssagen aus dem Lande Baden und den angrenzenden Gegenden (Karlsruhe 1851), 329. 70 Schöppner, Sagenbuch, 51.

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survey of werewolves with a lengthy exposé on the canis lupus.71 I have not even started to assemble a Europe-wide overview of the relationships between wolves and humans.72 Yet even in places where wolves had died out, they could still be part of people’s repertoire. The Bible mentioned the image of the wolf and the lamb as a metaphor for peaceful coexistence (Isaiah 11: 6) and the parable of the Good Shepherd, defending his flock against the preying wolf, or Satan (John 10: 11–18). Perrault’s tale of Little Red Riding Hood, with its talking wolf as a sexual predator, was one of the most popular of his fairy tales.73 Starting with Aesop, numerous wolf fables circulated throughout Europe, contributing to a wolf-conscious cultural environment. Even if there was no direct narrative link between these wolves and werewolves, characterisations of wolves and werewolves sometimes show similarities.74 There was an extensive body of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century entertainment literature featuring werewolves, from the even earlier but constantly available Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso (also known as Ovid), to Laube’s dialogues about lycanthropy (1686), Laurent Bordelon’s L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de monsieur Oufle (1710) or Bräuner’s Curiositäten (Curiosities) and many others. This still needs serious study, for instance posing the question of and how it influenced the later legends, or whether it just had a separate kind of appeal. In nineteenth-century England, the new genre of the gothic novel, also comprising werewolf stories, came into being without any underlying local trials or legends, or actual wolves for that matter.75 The dearth of werewolves in the South of Germany and the adjacent Alps could in theory be due to a paucity of research. As this is very unlikely, my theory is that it is possibly related to the absence of

71 Rolland, Faune populaire, 105–153. 72 Jean-Marc Moriceau, Histoire du méchant loup: La question des attaques sur l’homme

en France (xve-xxe siècle) (Paris 2007); L’homme contre le loup. Une guerre de deux mille ans (Paris 2011). 73 Christine Shojaei Kawan, ‘Rotkäppchen’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens 11 (2004), 854–

868. 74 Werner Bies, ‘Wolf’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens 14 (2014), 912–923. 75 Hannah Priest (ed.), She-Wolf. A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester

2015); Robert McKay and John Miller (eds.), Wolves, Werewolves and the Gothic (Cardiff 2017); Sam George and Bill Huges (eds.), In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild Children (Manchester 2020).

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werewolf trials. In contrast, France had a continuous werewolf tradition, which included sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century werewolf trials. In Franche-Comté, trials have been documented from 1521 to 1663.76 Will Pooley counted 133 French legend text from before 1945 and eight mentions of werewolves in criminal cases between 1830 and 1855, which may not be an overwhelming amount compared to other legends, but still puts France on the map of werewolf culture.77 In the north of Germany and the Netherlands, without medieval werewolves, the late sixteenth-century trials introduced the concept of the werewolf. At that point, it was hardly indigenous, but the trials exhibited such a cultural force that afterwards the werewolf became a popular motif.78 In the course of the seventeenth century, werewolf trials moved to the northeast of Germany.79 The werewolf legends in the northern half of Germany number a few hundred.80 In Austrian Salzburg a few final werewolf trials took place in the early eighteenth century, apparently without having left much of an impression.81 Werewolf trials were not introduced in Swabia or in the rest of Bavaria, nor in England or elsewhere in Europe, but where they had been held later legends can usually be found. Around this French–German–Dutch trial area a much bigger area can be found, including the Nordic countries, Poland, the Baltic states,82 Russia, Romania, Southern Italy and Portugal without trials and still with werewolves, as will be elaborated on in the subsequent chapters of this book. What exactly the historical state of the werewolf legends that can 76 Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch. Male Witches in Central Europe (Basingstoke 2009), 8–35. 77 Pooley, Body and Tradition, 94–95. 78 Rita Voltmer, ‘The Judge’s Lore? The Politico-Religious Concept of Metamor-

phosis in the Peripheries of Western Europe’, in: Werewolf Histories, 159–184; Willem de Blécourt, ‘Werwolf Berichte. Der Fall Peter Stump und seine Folgen’, in: Rita Voltmer & Stephan Laux (eds.), Europäische Hexenforschung und Landesgeschichte (tba). 79 Katrin Moeller, Dass Willkür über Recht ginge. Hexenverfolgung in Mecklenburg im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld 2007), 191–184. 80 Including those kept in the Zentralarchiv der deutschen Volkserzählung, Marburg. 81 Martin Scheutz, ‘Bettler – Werwolf – Galeerensträfling. Die Lungauer “Werwölfe”

des Jahres 1717/18 und ihr Prozess’, Salzburg Archiv 27 (2001), 221–268. 82 The trials in the eastern Baltic were primarily a consequence of German influence. In the cultural melting pot of ‘Livonia’ the impact of Scandinavian werewolf imagery and practice probably was a more decisive factor; cf. Willem de Blécourt, ‘A Journey to Hell: Reconsidering the Livonian “Werewolf”’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 2 (2007), 49–67.

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still be found in this larger area might be is not precisely clear as of yet, and to assess them properly the areas without werewolf legends also need to be considered, such as Iceland, Ireland, England, Southern Germany and adjacent areas of Switzerland and Czechia, and most of Spain and Greece. It is possible, however, that older notions survived, subjected to other influences but unaffected by the trials. Werewolf legends, actively carried by thousands of people all over Europe, although not to every place or in the same way every time, were part of people’s daily outlook on life. This volume seeks to make a fresh start in studying them, with all their similarities but also their contradictions and controversies, although the latter are easier to spot when one reads between the contributions.

CHAPTER 2

“You Are a Werewolf!” Swedish Werewolf Legends from an International Perspective Willem de Blécourt

Very little has been written in English about Swedish werewolf legends. Baring Gould related a story about a group of Russians who had transformed Swedish prisoners into wolves and sent them home in that shape.1 Summers quoted the Swedish pastor Arvid August Afzelius’s story about

1 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (London 1865), 109; without references.

I could not have written this chapter without the invaluable help of Fredrik Skott, Catharina Raudvere, Kaarina Koski, Pasi Enges, Tommy Kuusela, Lidy Jansen, Louise Nyholm-Kallestrup, Agneta Lilja and Anders Gustavsson. It goes without saying that they are in no way responsible for my conclusions. W. de Blécourt (B) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_2

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a soldier who returned from Russia in the shape of a wolf and was shot just outside his native village. When the beast was skinned, ‘a man’s shirt was found next to the body’.2 In fact, both authors used the same source, the work of Afzelius, although in his version the shirt was supposed to have been under the skin and they missed the legend about the bridegroom and his guests who were changed into wolves. Only when the wolf heard his bride lament and call his name, did he change back into a human. The power of his Christian name had broken the enchantment, according to Afzelius.3 It portrayed the werewolf’s shape as the result of a curse, inflicted by others, in this case hostile Russians as well as some ‘evil spirits’. This, however, is only one aspect of the Swedish werewolf. For additional legend texts, the present-day non-Swedish scholar has to make do with a few pages in American-published volumes of Scandinavian legends.4 This dearth of legend material is hardly compensated for by the now available Swedish catalogue of ‘folk legends’, as this only indexes types and does not break down the individual stories into motifs.5 This situation is all the more astounding because in Sweden one of the handful of European werewolf monographs was produced (but not translated), written by Ella Odstedt, the self-taught folklore collector at the Uppsala Institute of Dialect and Folklore Research.6 Moreover, the volume of werewolf legends in Sweden is one of the largest compared to collections elsewhere in Europe. Odstedt’s book itself is a treasure trove of werewolf legends and the Swedish folklore archives harbour an unspecified number of werewolf narratives. Another reason to pay attention to Swedish nineteenth- and twentieth-century werewolf legends is that

2 Montague Summers, The Werewolf (London 1933), 244. Summers only refers to a note in the Svenska folk-visor of 1816. 3 Wilhelm Hertz, Der Werwolf. Beitrag zur Sagengeschichte (Stuttgart 1862), 60–61, from the translation of Afzelius by F.H. Ungewitter, Schwedens Volkssagen und Volkslieder, II (Leipzig 1842), 360–362. 4 John Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales (Berkeley 1978), 176–179; Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf (eds.), Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Oslo 1991), 74–78, originally Minnesota 1988. 5 Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend (Helsinki 2010), 306–310. 6 Ella Odstedt, Varulven i Svensk Folktradition (Uppsala/Kopenhagen 1943); reprinted

in 2012 with an extensive appendix that does not involve a new approach to the legends. The German summary in the original was omitted. In this chapter I will refer to the 1943 edition.

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Sweden may well have been the place of origin of most European werewolves (rather than, for instance, Estonia or Polesey or Ancient Greece for that matter). In the context of legends, however, I can merely mention this; it moves the discussion to the field of archaeology.7 The subject teems with potential misunderstandings, both about the non-changing character of the oral legend and about the fixed locality of werewolf legends. It is in no way certain that oral legends survived in Sweden from pre-Christian times onwards and the issue needs extremely careful scrutiny. I will, in fact, argue that only a few werewolf legends may have persisted since the Middle Ages, but based on the present evidence this is no more than a suggestion. This chapter is mainly to entice future scholars to pick up the challenge, venture beyond the work of Ella Odstedt and analyse the abundance of folkloric material.8 The catalogue by Bengt af Klintberg mainly indexes the published Swedish legends, the so-called fabulates. Although it provides an indication of whether a legend text is available in one of the four folklore archives, in Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm or Uppsala, it does not provide quantified information on the presence of specific legends in the archives. Klintberg also used a ‘more limited definition of legend’, in reference to his teacher Carl-Herman Tillhagen. This meant that many texts were left out, such as ‘narratives about personal supranormal experiences (memorates, to use C.W. von Sydow’s term) as well as non-narrative statements related to beliefs and historical events, or belief accounts and chronicates as they have been labelled by Nordic scholars’.9 This restriction may well facilitate indexing (memorates can only be indexed with great difficulty), but it impedes analysis. From the catalogue it remains unclear, to give an example of a memorate frequently occurring in the Dutch material, whether anyone ever met a werewolf on his way home at night. This gap is largely covered by the work of Odstedt and by the

7 See my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Werewolf and the Moon. 8 Whether there are any archival sources on werewolves bridging the gap between the

medieval and modern times is unclear. In her book Magic, Body and the Self in EighteenthCentury Sweden (Leiden 2009), Jacqueline van Gent only mentions werewolves in passing, although she pays attention to shapeshifting and the hamn, 73–79. 9 Klintberg, The Types, 12.

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two maps in the Swedish folklore atlas, the commentary of which was also written by Odstedt and published posthumously.10 Klintberg identified nineteen distinct werewolf legends, although some of the types are questionable because they are only represented by one variant.11 Afzelius’s text, for instance, can be found under Q47 ‘Clothes inside fur’, which lists five other authors who reported this narrative. Other identified types fall within the category of being a werewolf as the result of a curse or a conjuration, which follows the categories applied by Odstedt. They include ‘Werewolf tears foetus out of pregnant woman’ (Q31) and ‘Werewolf does not attack woman with trailing ribbon’ (Q36), both types stressing the werewolf’s lust for pregnant women. The type description of the last starts with: ‘A pregnant woman is out late one evening’. Other types include the legends of how men became werewolves: ‘Vengeful witch turns man into wolf’ (Q41), and ‘Wedding party turns into wolves’ (Q46). The most common, but also geographically restricted notion of becoming a werewolf, however, was that where the transformation was attributed to a mother who did not subscribe to Genesis 3: 16 and did not bring her children forth in sorrow, thus birthing werewolves (boys) or maras (girls) (a mara is a night mare)—this did not make it into a type.12 ‘Wolf tail remains’ (Q43) about a man who had to make a hole in his chair for his tail after he was turned back into a human looks more like a tall tale, although it has serious underpinnings as well because it emphasises the impossibility of getting rid of all werewolf traits. The Swedish werewolf, one can conclude, did not lose his humanity by his own fault. Though many words for werewolf contain the element of hamn, a skin, conveying the idea of a device to conceal one’s identity and thus pointing to self metamorphosis, these are the older ones such as hamnvarg or varghamn (lit. wolf’s skin).13 For legends about wearing a skin, or crawling through a belt, as it is sometimes described in the

10 Ella Odstedt, ‘Varulven. The Werwolf’, Atlas över svensk folkkultur II: Sägen, tro och högtidssed (Uddevalla 1976), 74–79. While the maps were updated, Odstedt’s text did not go beyond her book. 11 For example, the types ‘Farmhand has scratches on face’ (Q35), ‘Tailor understands the language of wolves’ (Q48), ‘Human face in water reflection’ (Q51). 12 Odstedt, Varulven, 115–134; cf. Klintberg, The Types, 299; 303: Q19 Rite with foal foetus stopped; this is a mara type. 13 Odstedt, Varulven, 34–36, vgl. 71–72.

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actual narratives, one has to proceed to the section of the legend catalogue that describes the werebear or hamnbjörn, which mostly consists of texts recorded in the vast areas north of Stockholm. This makes it highly questionable whether Odstedt’s idea of the werewolf as a soul-animal applies to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century legends. These ideas are hardly substantiated by the Swedish legend texts, considering that Odstedt could only quote a case of a Lapp who during one month every year had to ‘walk as a bear’, while his body lay in a trance. She then concluded: ‘It also shows that there are traditions that go back to the core of Old Norse notions of metamorphosis, namely the detachment of the soul from the body and its appearance in another form’.14 Odstedt concurred with the prevailing notions of her time and while they now have to be approached critically, her work to salvage parts of Swedish culture can only be appreciated.15 In the following sections, I will present a discussion of the two most commonly occurring Swedish werewolf legends (at least according to my count of the examples given by Klintberg), the migratory legend ‘The werewolf husband’ (aka. ML 4005), also known outside Sweden as far away as Romania, and ‘Naming the Werewolf’,16 the most common way to overcome the werewolf, which is primarily a Scandinavian motif.

The Werewolf Husband One day they were out working in the field. They were getting in grain, for it was harvest time. In those days people used pitchforks. The man said to his wife – he had a hunch that he was sometimes transformed into a werewolf – “If something comes after you here, don’t stab with the pitchfork, but hit it as hard as you can.” And later he was changed into a werewolf and he returned. And she hit him to defend herself. But he tore her skirt with his mouth, and a few threads were caught between his teeth. [Later] while they were having dinner she happened to notice 14 Odstedt, Varulven, 44, 222. The example is taken from Dag Strömbäck, Sejd.

Textstudier i Nordisk religionshistoria (Stockholm 1935), 121. 15 Agneta Lilja, ‘“She Was Cut Out for This Work”. Ella Odstedt, Woman and Researcher’, Arv. Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore (1999), 25–50. 16 Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomingston 1956), H64.1: Recognition by disenchanted person by thread in his teeth and D772: Disenchantment by naming, only refer to a Danish version of this story.

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the threads caught between her teeth. She said to him: “I think you are a werewolf.” “Well, if I am, thanks for telling me, for now I am freed from it,” he said.17

This legend, collected in Skåne in 1915 by Louise Hagberg,18 comprises two legend types: ‘The werewolf husband’, in Klintberg’s terminology ‘Threads Between the teeth’ (Q32), is mentioned 32 times in his index, four instances of which are in combination with the second legend ‘Man’s name is mentioned’ (Q42), which occurs 22 times. The first was primarily found in the southern part of Sweden: Västergotland, Östergotland, Småland and Värmland. The second was more widespread. Odstedt mentioned 19 full versions of ‘The werewolf husband’, of which 14 were drawn from folklore archives, mostly Lund. There is bound to be some overlap with Klintberg’s inventory, but to assume an approximate total of 50 versions would not be unreasonable, all the more so because Odstedt also found about 25 less complete versions which are not counted here. The full versions mostly originate from Sweden’s southernmost provinces of Skåne and Blekinge, which had formerly been part of Denmark, as well as from Småland, situated to the north from these, and Bohuslän, the latter represented with only one text. The less complete legends stem from the same area; in this group there are three from Bohuslän. In geographical terms the published werewolf legends indexed by Klintberg and the unpublished ones mentioned by Odstedt complement each other, Klintberg’s werewolves extending their presence slightly more northwards. The text from Skåne (Borrby) with which I opened this section is formulated in such a way (the man had a ‘hunch’, an inkling, aning in Swedish) as to exonerate the man, but no agent of the transformation is identified, at least not in Lindow’s fragment; the man is ‘cursed’— ‘he was changed into a werewolf’. Most interesting, however, is that an almost identical text from Skåne (Glumslöv) specifies that the woman was pregnant.19 Ella Odstedt proposed that the legend was part of a 17 Lindow, Swedish Legends, 177. 18 Mentioned by Odstedt (1943), 135 note 2. The text was published in Louise

Hagberg, ‘Sägner och folktro från Borrby socken i Skåne’, Folkminnen och folktankar 18 (1931), 174. Klintberg refers to FF 1931: 174. 19 Bengt af Klintberg, Svenska folksägner (Stockholm 1972), 246; mentioned by Odstedt (1943), 135 note 3.

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larger complex in which the ‘curse’ was the result of the mother’s ‘sin’, specifically that she had crawled through a fölhamn, the caul of a foal (the membrane enclosing a foal foetus), in order not to suffer the pains of birth. Some narrators did indeed make the connection and Hagberg noticed it as well.20 The two notions, werewolf and caul, were linked through the hamn; the caul of the foal and the skin of the shape-changer. Another text from Skåne illustrates the woman’s point of view: At midnight, a wife goes out to look for her husband and she is assaulted by a werewolf. He bites into her robe, but she struggles loose and returns to her home undamaged. In the morning she sees a piece of her robe between her husband’s teeth. She understands then, that the man is a werewolf and that this is why he did not want to be at home at midnight since she was expecting a child he wanted do not ‘buy his salvation’ with her and the child’s life. She decides to save him and does not go to bed the next night and does not let the man go away. When the clock strikes twelve, he then turns into the werewolf and wants to tear her apart, but she says: “Damn, you are a werewolf, a varulf !”, and thus he is saved.21

Here the curse is merely presumed, as the man needs to be saved from something. The motif of the threads between the teeth is now entangled in the story of two different ways to lose the curse: to consume the baby from the woman’s womb or to be recognised for what he is and thus overcome his affliction. It looks like an impossible choice. The first option is expressed in the story of the werewolf who killed a woman to drink the blood of the foetus she carried.22 The second choice I will discuss below. In a third Skåne text, however, the problem is circumvented. A boy had made his lover pregnant and told her to be careful when she goes out at night and to take a stick with her. When she was attacked, she beat the thing away from her skirt. In the morning she discovered by the telltale piece of her skirt that it was the boy and understands that he was a varulv, a poor bugger, a stackaren.23 Again, the boy cannot help it, but now the

20 Hagberg, ‘Sägner’, 173: Och de blev sådana, därför att deras mora tagit en “fölavånu”. Cf. for instance: Carl-Martin Bergstrand, Västgötasägner (Göteburg 1944), 112; idem, Hallandssägner (Göteburg 1949), 143. 21 Odstedt, Varulven, 138, from: Eva Wigström, Folkdiktning (1880), 105. 22 Wigström 1952: 109. Svenska sagor och sägner (Uppsala 1952)—posthumus. 23 Odstedt, Varulven, 139.

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narrative reads as his attempt to escape an unwanted pregnancy (and with it an unwanted marriage). What was the ‘curse’ of the werewolf? According to Odstedt it concerned ‘expressions of an erotic phantasy’ and the whole complex had a ‘sexually pathological character’. She then gave three stories which displayed an erotic aspect, including the narrative about the maid who was assaulted at night by her master, about the farmer who had to serve other women, and about the gentleman who also visited his maid. French sixteenth-century werewolf trials also showed a sexual pathology in Odstedt’s analysis.24 Whilst I can subscribe to the latter, this does not necessarily support a sexual explanation of Swedish legends, four centuries later and 1500 kilometers away.25 Some of the recorded werewolf legends may indeed read as reports of sexual encounters but, at least in Southern Sweden, their main focus is on births. They emphasise what can happen if a woman attempts to avoid birth pains, and they relate that werewolves eat foetuses and that women should therefore be afraid of them. The legends reveal more about how it was thought that women should or should not behave when pregnant than they do about male werewolves. Only in one legend from Västergötland did a boy become a werewolf because he had abandoned a girl, presumably when she was pregnant.26 In another legend, from Gästrikland (at the other, eastern side of Sweden) it was the child of an illicit liaison who became a werewolf.27 The question about the curse may therefore be wrong—it is not so much the werewolf who is cursed but his victim who is admonished to behave like a ‘proper’ woman. While there can be no doubt that this applies to the southern part of Sweden, it remains debatable whether the threads between a man’s teeth were part of that complex. In some places ‘The werewolf husband’ appears to be well integrated in Swedish werewolf lore. Yet the c. 50 complete variants of it emphasise that the most popular legend stood apart from the rest. In a legend from Dalsland, the woman is again pregnant

24 Odstedt, Varulven, 158–159. 25 Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Werewolf, the Witch, and the Warlock’, in: Alison

Rowlands (ed.), Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke 2009), 191–213. 26 Odstedt, Varulven, 83. 27 Odstedt, Varulven, 77.

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(hon war havande) and thus has particular reasons to fear the werewolf.28 On the whole, however, outside the Danish sphere of influence in Skåne and Halland the legend lost its familiar form. In a legend from Västergötland the motif of the threads between the werewolf’s teeth is embedded in the statement about his mother crawling through a fölungehamnen.29 In a text from Småland, the motif serves as an introduction to the wife acknowledging that her man is a werewolf.30 The legend about the man in Foss (Bohuslän) who ate his breakfast in the woods told his wife to mention his name in case a wolf attacked her. The piece of dress he still had in his mouth when he had changed back into a man was merely mentioned in passing.31

International Distribution Since ‘The werewolf husband’ is a migratory legend and not just a legend with a recognisable plot, it has to be dissected in terms of geographical movement. It is far more widespread than just Sweden but, like the werewolf in general, not omnipresent throughout Europe. There are even regions where werewolf legends were recorded, but where ‘The werewolf husband’ remained unknown. Due to its limited occurrence, it should be possible to trace at least a tentative route of its distribution. Within Scandinavia the main indications point to the west. In Livonia (mostly overlapping with present-day Latvia) only vague fragments were found.32 There do not seem to be Finnish equivalents of the legend.33 In Norway, on the other hand, ‘The werewolf husband’ was rather popular as at least some fifteen variants were collected there. As in Sweden, none of these

28 Carl-Martin Bergstrand, Dalslandssägner (Göteborg 1951), 144–145; cf. Bergstrand, Gammalt från Orust (Göteborg 1962), 59 in which a failed relation is hinted at. 29 Carl-Martin Bergstrand, Västgötasägner (Göteborg 1944), 112; see also: Dalslandssägner (Göteborg 1951), 144–145. 30 Svenska Sagor och Sägner 3. Sagor från Småland, 119. See also the legends from Småland and Västergötland mentioned by Odstedt, Varulven, 80, 83–84. 31 Carl-Martin Bergstrand, Bohuslänska sägner (Göteburg 1947), 119. English in: Kvideland & Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief , 76. 32 Oskar Loorits, Livische Märchen und Sagenvarianten (Helsinki 1926), 64: no. 167, Die rote Spur am Munde. 33 Marjatta Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index of Finnish Belief Legends and Memorates (Helsinki 1998), 165–167.

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were from the northern parts. Some of them featured a bear instead of a wolf. In one version the man who had been a bear ‘had slivers of meat and hair between his teeth’.34 Elsewhere the clue of the legends are the threads between the werewolf’s teeth, and thus I read the meat and hair as a double deterioration of the legend, an adaptation to local circumstances. Christiansen found seven variants from southern Norway and again seven from the west of the country. In four of these the woman is depicted as pregnant, which corroborates the versions of southern Sweden discussed above.35 The absence of the story in eastern Norway may have to do with the state of research there. The Danish versions are seamlessly connected to those in southern Sweden. The provinces Skåne, Halland and Bohuslän were Danish until the middle of the seventeenth century and will have retained parts of Danish culture afterwards. As Odstedt remarked from a twentiethcentury perspective: ‘we have apparently received these traditions from Denmark’.36 Of the 42 werewolf texts collected and published by Evald Tang Kristensen, seven allude to the tale of the man with threads between his teeth. The most elaborate was told by Jens Kristensen, a clogmaker at Ersted in northwest Jylland.37 This version starts with an explanation of how werewolves came to be, in that their mothers had climbed (rather than crawled) through a horse skin (rather than a horse’s caul, although the word is the same) and the protagonists are boyfriend and girlfriend (rather than a married couple). He adviced the girl not to stick the wolf with a pitchfork, but to hit it with her apron. She did so and he ‘tore it to tiny pieces’. When the boy came back and she told him what happened, he started to laugh and she saw the threads of her apron between his teeth. She confronted him: ‘It was you’ and because he had been revealed, ‘he never became a werewolf again’. The same combination of motifs appears here, but instead of a husband and a wife, an unmarried couple figures in this version. It is not mentioned whether they ever married, as the solution of naming the werewolf made that irrelevant. Bitte Jens (Kristensen) was an experienced narrator and it is no surprise that he opened his story

34 Reidar Christiansen, Folktales of Norway (Chicago 1964), 49. 35 Reidar Christiansen, The Migratory Legends (Helsinki 1958), 58–60: ML 4005. 36 Odstedt, Varulven, 159, also 116. 37 Timothy R. Tangerlini (ed.), Danish Folktales, Legends, & Other Stories (Seattle & London 2013), 64–91, esp. 78–79.

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by telling where werewolves came from. The other texts from E.T. Kristensen are much shorter and given the amount of narratives Kristensen collected, the number of his werewolf legends is relatively small.38 In several articles about Danish werewolves Michèle Simonsen has suggested that the apron is ‘a symbol of the womb’, both in a metaphoric and metonymic sense. She argued that ‘the werewolf does not have to destroy a woman’s womb literally. Attacking its symbolic substitute, the woman’s apron, is just as efficient’.39 Simonsen’s interpretation can be seen as an elaboration of Odsted’s. The Danish and the South-Swedish versions of ‘The werewolf husband’ are here significantly connected to the motif of the woman crawling through a foal’s caul to avoid the pains of birth—if the baby was a boy, he would then become a werewolf. In Simonsen’s view the legend of ‘The werewolf husband’ becomes a substitute for the narrative in which a werewolf tears the foetus out of a pregnant woman (Q31). This alerts once more to the problem of a local explanation of an international legend. Only in areas where the other motifs occur does the reconstruction gain validity; but these other motifs are highly local. Outside the Danish sphere of influence, Simonsen’s interpretation loses its validity. If a story seems integrated in local narration, does that imply that it has also acquired a local meaning? The logical route of transmission of ‘The werewolf husband’ to southern Sweden would have run through Denmark, coming from Germany. One of the German versions of the narrative was told by a young woman in Rostock with close connections to Sweden. In her rendering it concerned a young woman with a husband who was often absent, which gave her the idea that he was a werewolf. One day, as they worked in the fields, the man went off once more. Suddenly a wolf came out of the bushes, took her red skirt between his teeth and ‘zerrt sie hin und her’. She chased him off by shouting and by hitting him with her pitchfork. Then the man came back, laughed, and she noticed the woolen threads of her skirt between his teeth. She denounced him to the local judge and 38 Evald Tang Kristensen, Danske Sagn, som de har lydt i folkemund. Udelukkende efter utrykte kilder, II (Arhus 1893), 227–241. 39 Michèle Simonsen, ‘La variabilité dans les legendes: les récits danois sur les loups-

garous’, in: Veronika Görög-Karady (ed.), D’un conte à l’autre—la variability dans la litterature orale (Paris 1984), 181–186; idem, ‘Danish Werewolves Between Beliefs and Narratives’, Fabula 51 (2010), 225–234; idem, ‘The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 228–237, citation: 233.

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he was burned.40 I have found about 35 German versions,41 mostly from northern Germany,42 and some from the more middle regions: Waldeck, Lippe, and Minden. The legend is also recorded in the Rhineland and down as far as Luxembourg.43 For instance the version from the Westeifel shows the similarities and differences with the Swedish versions: a woman had brought her husband soup for lunch which he went to consume in a bush. A little later a wolf appeared from the bush and attacked the woman. She cried: ‘Wellem helf, e Wolf ’ (William, help, a wolf) and the wolf went away, but not without having torn her clothes. Then the man appeared again and she complained: ‘I called you as loud as I could, but you didn’t hear anything’. He laughed about it and she could see the rags from her bonnet between his teeth.44 Mentioning the man’s name did not have any effect here. In the Netherlands and Flanders the narrative is one of the most frequently recorded werewolf stories. In the Netherlands there are at least as many versions as in the whole of Germany (see Chapter 13). The Flemish (Belgium) bank has 278 versions of SIN0823, Das zerbissene Tuch, half (140) of them in the Belgian province of Limburg, 42 in the province of Antwerp, which more indicates the intensity of the research than anything else. These many versions have several features in common: they concern a girl and her boyfriend who were walking on their way home, the boyfriend told the girl to throw her hanky or her skirt in case a dog or some animal looking like that appears, and when he is later recognised by the remains of the girl’s handkerchief or clothing between his teeth, the engagement is broken off.45 The different dynamics between the main protagonists result in a specific ending that is not encountered elsewhere. When the story is occasionally combined 40 Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Mecklenburg, I (Vienna 1879),

148. See also the chapter by Petra Himstedt-Vaid in this volume. 41 Willem de Blécourt, 28–29. ‘“I Would Have Eaten You Too”: Werewolf Legends in the Flemish, Dutch and German Area’, Folklore 118 (2007), 23–43, esp. 28–29. 42 Will-Erich Peuckert, Niedersächsische sagen, II (Göttingen 1966), 503–506. 43 Wilhelm Bodens, Sage, Märchen und Schwank am Niederrhein (Bonn 1937);

Nikolaus Gredt, Sagenschatz des Luxemburger Landes, I (Luxemburg 1883), 295–298. 44 Matthias Zender, Sagen und Geschichten aus der Westeifel (Bonn 19803 ), 377–380. 45 J.R.W. Sinninghe, Katalog der niederländischen Märchen-, Ursprungssagen-, Sagen-

und Legendenvarianten (Helsinki 1943), 104 nr. 823 lists nine Dutch variants. Later research unearthed about 25 more. See Chapter 13 in this volume.

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with another werewolf story, it is the one about the burning of the werewolf belt. The combination is not natural, however, since the belt does not figure at all in ‘The werewolf lover’, and in terms of the story it is difficult to accept that the boy would have carried it with him and quickly put it on when he went into the wood to let down his trousers. In the French-speaking regions of Belgium, the legend is known as well.46 It is absent in France. In this rough overview, Germany appears in a central position. From there the legend seems to have migrated both to Romania and to Poland from which it moved to the Ukraine.47 In Romanian Transylvania, the legend was clearly brought in by German migrants.48 It also travelled from Germany to Denmark. In the seventeenth century Swedish troops could have picked it up and brought it to Scandinavia.49 Although this is merely a suggestion, I can point to a similar process that occurred several centuries later, when American soldiers brought werewolf stories from Germany back to the United States.50 On the basis of its modern distribution, I hypothesise that the legend originated in the French parts of the Low Countries, or in Northern France where the oldest example has been found,51 and from there moved eastwards and then north. Given this timeline, the legend would thus not be originally Scandinavian. There is no reason why the ‘The werewolf husband’ could not have been imported

46 Alfons Roeck, De Nederlandse weerwolfsage in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw (Leuven 1967), 444. 47 On Poland, see the chapter about Czech werewolves by Petr Janeˇcek in this volume, note 24. On the Ukraine, see the chapter of Marina Valentsova in this volume, note 52. 48 Harry Senn, Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania (Boulder 1982), 79–87; Inge

Sommer, ‘“Krechintza zwischen den Zähnen”. Aspekte der Siebenbürgisch-Saksischen Prikulitschsage’, Neue Literatur: Zeitschrift des Schriftstellerverbandes der SR Rumänien, 39, No. 3 (1988), 51–55. 49 The legend also turned up in Portugal and Southern Italy. See the Chapters 10 and

12. 50 Matthias Burgard, Das Monster von Morbach. Eine moderne Sage des Internetzeitalters (Munster 2008). 51 Claude Lecouteux, Elle courait le garou. Lycanthropes, hommes-ours, homme-tigres: une anthologie (Paris 2008), 189–190. The late fifteenth-century source, Les évangiles des quenouilles, English The gospelles of dystaves or Distaff Gospels, was a parody, ridiculing the ‘knowledge’ of women. It became very popular, which may explain the traces it left in later folklore.

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to Scandinavia. There it mingled with the werewolf motifs already present, such as calling the werewolf by his name of birth.

Naming the Werewolf There was someone who had been to Finland. It happened during the Finnish war. He must have been a soldier, I believe. He had been turned into a wolf in Finland. He had obviously talked with some Finn and got cursed. He was to be a wolf until his real name was uttered. His name was Lasse. The wife waited for him, but he never came home. Once the wife stood there and baked. Then she saw a wolf outside. She went out with the peel to scare it away. “What are you here for?” she said. “Shoo, you Lasse!” Then the man stood there. He became free from it, but he had the tail left, it never went away. Someone from Appuna told about this. It was supposed to have happened in her grandmother’s time.52

This story was collected in Högby, Östergotland. The calling the werewolf by his name is not just the end of ‘The werewolf husband’, but also of other legends. If one consults the Swedish folklore atlas, particularly map 14 of 1976, the motif D772 ‘Disenchantment by naming’—is tied to a number of other motifs. In Västergotland and Dalsland the wife or the mother of the man changed into a wolf by a wizard was said to have called his name, whereupon he lost his wolf’s skin (Q42). The same was said to have happened with some of the transformed guests at the wedding party (Q46). This last legend was only recorded sixteen times in Sweden and was dispersed over the provinces west of Stockholm: Uppland, Närke, Värmland and Dalsland. Since ‘The wedding guests’ also has a migratory proclivity, it serves as another example of how narrators joined local materials with those from further afield. An even less frequently recorded legend about the wolves jumping over a fence also transformes the one wolf who is unable to scale the obstacle when his (or her) name is called (Q45). A number of times the metamorphosed wedding guests are also reported as jumping fences.53 Klintberg further mentions the method

52 Bengt af Klintberg, Svenska folksägner, 247–248. ULMA 5270s. 8, collected in 1932. Translation Kaarina Koski. 53 Odstedt, Varulven, 90, 93; Klintberg, Svenska folksägner, 249.

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of disenchantment in the case of the man with the residual tail (Q43). This makes naming the werewolf into a general motif rather than into a specific type, especially since it also applied to the nightmare.54 It is a simple formula and it alleviates any fear of the werewolf, and reassures by affirming the possibility of reintegration into the Christian community. Related to this motif is one of Klintberg’s other types, where a girl does not even have to call her fiancé’s name but simply has to tell him: ‘You are a werewolf’ (Q33).55

54 Odstedt, Varulven, 140; Klintberg Q15. 55 Odstedt, Varulven, 129–131, 139: ‘Du är ju varulv!’

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Atlas över Svensk Folkkultur: Sägen, tro och högtidssed (Swedish folklore atlas: popular beliefs, legends and calendar customs), 31, Werewolves, southern half. Among other things, the map shows the relative density of the research In the legends grouped by Odstedt under the naming of the werewolf the reason for the original metamorphosis usually remains vague: a man or a boy disappears or goes away fighting in a war; sometimes it is mentioned that he is enchanted ( förtrolled) but without any clear cause. Only in some of the legend texts is mention made of a broken relationship, where a woman transforms a boy into a wolf because he did not want her daughter.56 When the man returns in the shape of a wolf, his wife is suspicious and names him, whereupon he drops his wolf’s skin and metamorphoses from a stranger back into a member of the community. Here the werewolf appears primarily metaphorical and the story is centred on the wife who takes back the straying husband. How the naming of the werewolf combines with the role of the werewolf as a frightening figure for pregnant women is still an unresolved question. There are versions of the legend to which the naming is not attached. They may indicate an alternative but could also point to a decline of the tradition. In both cases it concerns an involuntary change, when argued from the position of the metamorphosed man. Perhaps this is another example of the local integration of werewolf tales; the naming and the frightening may originally have belonged to different traditions. The naming also occurred in the mara legends (Q15) but these do not provide an abundance of examples. A similar legend type constructed by Oskar Loorits across the Baltic with four variants has the werewolf addressed by his human name. He then becomes vulnerable, or is torn apart by dogs.57 This may be ascribed to Swedish influence; it is unclear, however, whether these latter legends represent just a variant or are historically related in the sense that they are either older or younger. The same applies to the island of Rügen, where in Gustow a sexton with a wolf’s belt was said to have lived. A woman who saw a wolf running towards her called the Christian name of the sexton and he immediately stood in front of her.58 The exclamation ‘You 56 Odstedt, Varulven, 79. 57 Loorits, Livische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten, 65, nr. 175. 58 A. Haas, Rügensche Sagen (Bergen, Rügen 1939), 87 (first print 1891).

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are a werewolf’ (Du er jo en varulv) is also found in the Danish collection by Kristensen.59 The common factor of calling the werewolf by his human name notwithstanding, the Swedish werewolf legends are divided into those in which the werewolf returns home and those in which he frightens women into natural births.

Some Closing Remarks In Odstedt’s view notions and narratives about werewolves were disappearing; the majority of her informants did not know them, or only provided fragmentary information. In 1942 in a letter to a fellow collector she wrote: ‘These traditions are becoming extremely rare. In large areas they have already fallen into complete oblivion’.60 This may be an accurate observation and she was well-positioned to make it, although it does not take into account that people may not have been willing to talk about werewolves for whatever reason—the shame of knowing about werewolves, or a taboo surrounding talking about them. The last may have been the case when it concerned births out of wedlock or abortions. At this stage of the research the question of how the researcher was affecting this process can hardly be answered. She was never impartial and never without some influence, if only on the selection of stories pried from an informant. In terms of quantity the maps of the folklore atlas nevertheless show that several hundred of werewolf narratives could still be unearthed, which is much more than in many other areas of Europe, where the concept of the werewolf may also have been on the wane. Eventually the body of material available would be enough for a thorough analysis; here I can only set out a few hypotheses. The different legends, both the fabulates as listed by Klintberg and the memorates discussed by Odstedt, do not just have a distinct geographical distribution, they have a different history, too. It is impossible here to resolve all these different histories and I can only give a few tentative options. A fabulate such as ‘The werewolf husband’ was probably

59 Evald Tang Kristensen, Danske sagen som de har lydt i folkemunde (Århus 1893), 234–235 (nrs. 18, 19); cf. 236–237 (nrs. 30, 31, 32). 60 Lilja, “She Was Cut Out for this Work”, 32.

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imported from Germany; my guess is that this happened in the seventeenth century. The legend of ‘The wedding guests’ may have been Polesian in origin and later spread to Sweden and Estonia, or the other way around.61 A version of ‘The hungry farmhand’, a distinctly German story, somehow ended up in northern Sweden without its typical ending.62 The motif of naming the werewolf as well as his relation to the mara, nightmare, will have been indigenous, although with different geographical and possibly ethnic centres of gravity, and it only started to become a problem with the advent of the Reformation. Jumping werewolves were mentioned, however, by Olaus Magnus in the middle of the sixteenth century.63 The motif of the clothes underneath the wolf-skin goes back at least as far as the twelfth century.64 Becoming a werewolf by birth was already documented in the tenth century. Motifs such as becoming a werewolf at the time of the new moon or by going into a trance had almost completely disappeared by the nineteenth century— if they were ever current in Scandinavia.65 Discussing the distribution and history of these motifs exceeds the boundaries of this volume; I will come back to them elsewhere. They are mentioned here to provide a historical background to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Swedish werewolves. For now it seems that most of the migratory legends or fabulates may have originated outside Sweden, while the memorates, including those found elsewhere in Europe, did have Scandinavian roots. As a shapeshifter, the werewolf was linked to the hamn, ‘the physical and moral side of the fluid self’. The hamn was a skin, ‘in the anthropological sense of a social role’.66 Yet this role was not always consciously taken; in many ways it was ascribed and there were few people who acted

61 Marjatta Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index of Finnish Belief Legends and Memorates (Helsinki 1998), 165; see also the chapter by Kaarina Koski and Pasi Enges. On Polesia, see the chapter of Marina Valentsova. 62 Odstedt, Varulven, 44–47. Not acknowledged by Klintberg. 63 Odstedt, Varulven, 73. 64 It appeared in the story about the werewolves of Ossory, Ireland, related by Gerald of

Wales in his Topographica Hibernica. See: John Carey, ‘Werewolves in Medieval Ireland’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 44 (2002) 37–72, there: 48–49. It was also incorporated in the thirteenth-century Norse Konungs Skuggsjá (King’s Mirror). The discussion is about the direction of its movements. 65 On the new moon: Odstedt, Varulven, 57. 66 Van Gent, Magic, Body and the Self , 73.

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as werewolves. If they had ever done so, by the nineteenth century there were few traces left of it. The same applies to their mothers; Catharina Raudvere suggests in her analysis of the mara, the werewolf’s sister, about women crawling through the caul, that ‘There is no evidence that the prophylactic rituals and actions it describes were practised by pregnant women in agrarian society’. It only seems to be recorded in records of ‘folk belief’ and there are no photographs of ‘a preserved foal’s caul’. She adds: ‘This, of course, does not rule out the possibility that occasionally women may have performed the procedure in the hope of pain relief’.67 Outside Southern Sweden and Denmark werewolves and nightmares were said to come into the world because a boy was one of seven boys, or a girl one of seven sisters. Alternatively, it could be ascribed to being born on a particular day, such as St. Gallus’ Day, Twelfth Night or St. John’s Day.68 The notion of the caul is exclusively Danish and, as I have suggested above, this is because of the synonymity between the different forms of hamn. In some instances the Danish motif of a painless birth is connected to an illegitimate pregnancy, although this does not seem to be exclusively so.69 The unique character of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Swedish werewolf legends points, in my opinion, to the influence of the Lutheran church. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf considered a name to be something magical and wrote that: ‘The name is magically identified with a person or a thing’.70 Yet in Lutheran Sweden a name was given through the ritual of baptism. Lutherans in Scandinavia tied ‘The werewolf husband’ and the werewolf in other legends to his salvation by the calling of his name. This process was meant to reintegrate him symbolically into the Christian community. Raudvere considers it as a ‘folk’ adoption of ‘church traditions like this biblical passage’; i.c. Genesis

67 Catharina Raudvere, Narratives and Rituals of the Nightmare Hag in Scandinavian Folk Belief (London 2020), in print. Translation of: Föreställningar om maran i nordisk folktro (Stockholm 1993). 68 Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, III, Gallus, cols 281 and Geburt, 409,

411. 69 Raudvere, Narratives and rituals, quotes the 1940 study of J.S. Møller in this context. 70 Kvideland and Sehmsdorf (eds.), Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, 76.

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3:16.71 It is equally valid in relation to the motif of the werewolf’s redemption at Christmas or on Christmas Eve.72 The main Swedish traditions had, according to Raudvere, discourses that were defined by their maleness. This applied to ‘both the folk and the church traditions’ and is encapsulated in the figure of the Swedish werewolf. He is always portrayed as a man and not as a sinner but as a victim, either through the actions of his mother or those of outsiders. In this dimension the divergent roles of the Swedish werewolf can be reconciled, as the motifs of naming him and fearing him are focused on the position of the woman. They can be understood in the context of the constraints the werewolf put on the behaviour of women: giving birth in ways that were considered proper and Christian and welcoming their man back into the marriage when he had been absent for a while.

71 According to Raudvere, the Bible translation used in the nineteenth century links pain in childbirth with submission to the husband. 72 Examples, among other places in: Odstedt, Varulven, 75–78.

CHAPTER 3

Of Wolf-Belts, Hungry Servants and Tattered Skirts: The Werewolf in North German Legends Petra Himstedt-Vaid

When my grandfather came to Appelhagen in 1865, an old hunter told him that he had shot several people turned into wolves (von Bülow in Kobrow 1936). (Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, p. 392, no. 1330)

Sources for the representation of the werewolf in North German legends are largely drawn from unpublished legends in the collection of notes made by Richard Wossidlo (1859–1939), held in the Wossidlo Archive in Rostock. Among them are handwritten notes1 with Low German keywords of legends, which Wossidlo recorded on his field research 1 All notes can be found in the digital Wossidlo Archive (www.wossidia.de) under ZAW—Zettelarchiv Wossidlos. Unless otherwise stated, Wossidlo himself recorded the legend being referenced.

P. Himstedt-Vaid (B) Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_3

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trips in the villages and towns of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and the written letters of his collection helpers, in which the legends are completely written down in mostly Low German language. Altogether, Wossidlo noted 90 werewolf legends, mostly from his own field research, some from letters from his collection helpers and a few from excerpted literature on legends from Mecklenburg. In addition, there are a total of 827 excerpts from the library of Wossidlo. These notes refer to the werewolf in the European context. In the legends quoted below, there are two types of citation: If Wossidlo received the legends from his collection helpers by letter, he wrote only a few keywords on the note, but the full legend could be transferred from the letter. Then there are notes which Wossidlo wrote during his own field research, in which he recorded only the core of the legend and the metadata such as narrator, place, and date. In the 1950s, members of the Academy of Sciences supplemented parts of these notes with the keywords in their entirety. In addition to the manuscript documents, published legends from North German legends collections from Mecklenburg, the historic region of Pomerania and Schleswig–Holstein are consulted. In the year 1867 a legend is documented in which the belief in werewolves is described as still active: “The belief in the werewolf is spread throughout the whole of Pomerania”. The werewolf is said to especially attack horses. As an explanation for this persistent belief in werewolves, a Pomeranian legend published in 1892 reveals the presence of real wolves still roaming the area at that time.2 The wolf population had increased since the Thirty Years War (1618– 1648), as during the turmoil the systematic control of wolves was absent. Complaints accumulated about damage to livestock, especially the damage to horses. Conversely, only a few oral accounts of deadly wolf attacks on humans with deadly consequence were recorded. In most cases, the human came off lightly. The ideas of war, death, and wolf had in this way been linked since the Thirty Years’ War. By 1640, the eradication of wolves had begun, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the wolf had disappeared in many regions of Germany.3 However, even if

2 ‘Der Werwolf’. Blätter für pommersche Volkkunde 1 (1892), 35–36. 36. 3 Janin Pisarek, ‘“Wer hat Angst vor dem bösen Wolf?”—Die Tradierung einer Märchen-

figur im Kontext der Rückkehr des Wolfes’. Märchenspiegel. Zeitschrift für international Märchenforschung und Märchenpflege 29, No. 2 (2018), 16–32, 20–21.

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there were only sporadic wolves, the fear of the wolf persisted. The existence of a farmer or shepherd in agricultural North Germany could still be threatened by wolves. The wolf is assigned attributes, characteristics and symbolism, all pointing in one direction. It is insatiable and has a pronounced hunting instinct; in psychology, the wolf is associated with an unrestrained instinctual nature and a demonic intellectual energy. In Christian Biblical imagery, the wolf stands as a negative counterpart to the good shepherd, and is demonized as an analogue of a devil.4 In narratives, one associates the wolf with an encounter with primeval fears, within a world of wild instinct and sexuality.5 Those living alone or notorious loners were already dubbed in antiquity with “Old Wolf” or “Lone Wolf” epithets, since lonely wolves wandering away from the pack were a widely known phenomenon. The lexicon of this animal symbolism points to the aspect of standing apart from society: “For Teutons a werewolf was an outlaw, condemned to live in the wood and considered dangerous. He stood outside human society or excluded himself and fled from the light on the basis of inner tension and unrest”.6 In the Enzyklopädie des Märchens the aspect of the outsider is clearly emphasized: “Wolfmen were usually imagined as social outsiders or criminals; They were charged with incest, brutality and sexual crimes”.7 This outsider aspect will play a role in the following North German legends, because it is often the case that the character who turns into a werewolf, and who is therefore outside of society, is already foreign in the village or comes from a neighbouring 4 The witch hunts have contributed to the negative image and demonization of the

werewolf. In numerous witch trials it was documented that witches had confessed to have ridden a wolf—later it was the broom—or to having been transformed into a wolf. For medieval accounts of werewolves and the witch and werewolf persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, see Christian Stiegler, Vergessene Bestie: der Werwolf in der deutschen Literatur (Wien 2007), 108–114 and Christa Agnes Tuczay, ‘Die wilde Lust am Wolfsleben’, in: Willem de Blécourt, Christa Agnes Tuczay (eds.), Tierverwandlungen. Codierungen und Diskurse (Tübingen 2011), 35–59, 51–53. 5 Clemens Zerling, Lexikon der Tiersymbolik: Mythologie, Religion, Psychologie. Völlig überarb. und erw. Neuausg (Klein Jasedow 2012), 337; Stiegler, Vergessene Bestie, 102. 6 Zerling, Lexikon der Tiersymbolik, 336. 7 Willem de Blécourt, ‘Wolfsmenschen’. Enzyklopädie des Märchens. vol. 14, column

975–986, 976.

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place, or a place about which there are already rumours in the village community. Otherwise, it is a neighbour who has transformed himself into a werewolf by means of a wolf belt.

Werewolf: Self and Other-Directed Transformation into the Wolf Form by Magical Means People could turn into wolves, according to legend. This happened in most cases through magical means: by means of the wolf-belt also known in other European regions, by means of a magical ointment, as it is known from the witches’ transmutations and the journey of the witches to the Blocksberg, or by magic performed by other humans. The wolf belt was plainly the magical medium through which the wolf form was assumed. The belt was recorded as being able to turn mostly men, but also women and children, into a werewolf for a few hours. ‘Dei Lüüd hebben ‘n’ Wulfsreimen. Sei willen anner Lüüd allerhand Leegheiten andauhn’ [The people have a wolf belt. They want to do all kinds of bad things to other people], as the widow S. in Belsch (district Ludwigslust Parchim) said, whose conceptions of werewolves were recorded in the year 1903 by one of the collection helpers of Richard Wossidlo, the teacher Ernst Pegel.8 The wolf belt was said to have been made of wolf leather or human skin, especially from the skin of a hanged man, according to North German folk beliefs. The belt often included the 12 celestial signs, and was strapped around the naked body, or sometimes over the clothes. When the werewolf returned to its human form, they would open the buckle.9 Ms. Wulff, an informant of Wossidlo, was not sure if the wolf belt was believed to be made from the skin of an unborn wolf, but then decided upon the skin of an unborn deer calf: ‘Wulfband ward je wol / Ungeburen wulf / Ne, von’n un ungeburen hirschkalw /

8 Belsch 1903, contributor (correspondent): teacher Ernst Pegel, informant: widow S.; Richard Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen. Ein Volksbuch, Band 2 (Rostock 1939), 393, no. 1333. ZAW-B906-001-001. 9 ‘Der Werwolf’. Blätter für pommersche Volkkunde 1. 1892, p. 35; Adolf Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart (Leipzig 1925), 277; Wilhelm Hertz, Der Werwolf. Ein Beitrag zur Sagengeschichte (Stuttgart 1862), 79; Gustav Fr. Meyer, SchleswigHolsteiner Sagen (Jena 1929), 307. Hertz gives an overview of North German Werewolf Legends; Hertz, Der Werwolf , 79–86.

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Wenn se sik umsnallen, / koenen se alles maken’ [It was probably wolfs’ belt / Unborn wolf / No, by an unborn deer calf / If they strapped it on, they could do anything].10 In 1903, the teacher Pegel heard from the cottager-widow V. that some children had said that their parents had put on a wolf belt and that they went ‘wolfing’: ‘Dei kinner hebben seggt, as Lüüd kamen sünd, dei Öllern wiern hen wulfen, sei hadden sick ’n Reimen ümsnallt (mehr war nicht zu erfragen)’ [The children said, when people came, the parents went ‘wolfing’, they strapped a belt (more was not available)].11 Wossidlo explicitly points out in his legends collection that the verb ‘wulfen’ is used, which describes the transformation into a werewolf and probably includes the frightening of other people. Wossidlo also includes the verb ‘wulfen’ under the lemma ‘wulwen’ with the meaning ‘to walk around as a werewolf’ in the Mecklenburgian dictionary and quotes the testimony of his collecting helper: ‘de Jungens hebben seggt, de Öllerns wiren hen wulfen’ [the boys said that their parents were out for wolfing].12 Wossidlo points in his Mecklenburgian legends to the use of further verb forms of the noun werewolf in North Rhine-Westphalia: er wolfet nicht, warwulfen, werwolfen, werven gehen.13 The motif of turning into a werewolf and deliberately frightening people is present in many of the recorded legends, including the following excerpt: ‘Hebben sik mit reemens / Ton wulf un bor / makt / blos de lüd bang makt ’ [Have made themselves with a belt / to a wolf and a bear

10 Poppendorf near Marlow 24.12.1912, informant: cottager [owner of a small rural

estate] Mrs. Wulff. ZAW-B906-001-005. For further explanation of the genesis of the wolf belt in Low German legends, see Thorsten Strube, ‘… “dat was en Mann, de sich en Koefell ummehänge”. Betrachtungen zum Werwolfmotiv in der Niederdeutschen Erzähltradition’. Quickborn. Zeitschrift für plattdeutsche Sprache und Literatur 90, No. 4 (2000), 16–26, 18–19. 11 Belsch 1903, contributor (correspondent): teacher Ernst Pegel, informant: cottager-

widow V.; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 393, no. 1332. ZAW-B906-001-002. 12 Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch. Hrsg. von der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig [aus den Sammlungen Richard Wossidlos und aus den Erg. und nach der Anl. Hermann Teucherts], 7 Bde (Neumünster 1942ff.), vol. 7, column 1570. 13 Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 393, No. 1352.

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/ [Have] only scared the people].14 Even a sexton in the legend ‘Werewolf in Gustow’ from the island of Rügen,15 wanted to scare the people. However, since there were many complaints about the werewolf, he was forced to leave that place.16 In addition to the transformation into a werewolf, it was believed to be possible to transform into a bear or, as in the next set of legend notes, into a dog. In this narrative, the werewolf hid his wolf belt in a knothole in the barn.17 With this he transformed into a wolf or a dog, and went into the milking-room and ate his fill; often he would overeat. When the maids came to the milking in the morning, he was gone again: Reimen hebben se anhatt in ’ne Schuen in’n Tappenlock wenn se denn wat willen, halen se sik den Reim her un maken sik to’n Hund oder Wulf Denn gung ’t unter sünd ok in de Melkkoek kamen wo de Melk uppe ward (nebenan is ne Kamer) Dann hebben se sik satt fräten, oft ok verfräten Wun de Mätens morgens kamen sünd, sünd se rutwatscht 18

Belts have they worn in the barn in a knothole when they then want something get the belt and make themselves into a dog or a wolf Then it went around Have also come to the milking-room Where the milk is stored (Next door is a chamber) Then they ate themselves full, also often gorged themselves When the maids came in the morning, they ran out

14 Neukloster 23.12.1915, informant Mr. Wegner. ZAW-B906-001-006. 15 Ingrid Schmidt gives an overview of ‘Rügener Wolfsgeschichten’—legends about the

werewolf and the roggenwolf [ryewolf], probably Roggenwaur, to whom the last sheaf was dedicated to harvesting, Götter, Mythen und Bräuche von der Insel Rügen (Rostock 1997), 89–92. 16 Rügensche Sagen, ges. und hrsg. von A. Haas, 5. Aufl. (Stettin 1920), 80–81, no. 141. Narrator: cowherd in Neparnitz 1852. 17 See lemma ‘Tappenbalken’: ‘The Werewolf Hides His Belt in a Mortise in the Barn’, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch, vol. 7, column 28. 18 Röbel 2.6.1934, informant: Mr. Plikat. ZAW-B906-001-007. Quoted in the structure of the original note.

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It also happened in these narratives that the wolf belt would be simply found on the street, as the teacher Pegel was told in 1898 in Laupien.19 In this motif, a man found a belt that looked like one for his trousers lying on the dirt road and took it. The belt was shaped so that it could be reopened while the wearer was in wolf shape. So, a young craftsman straightened the belt so that the buckle sat in front and he could open it with his teeth, to become a human again.20 A legend recorded in 1892 describes the belief that anyone who used the wolf belt could become a werewolf. This could be children as well as men and women; a shepherdess could turn into a wolf and could carry sheep away from other flocks. Her son was said to have strapped on the belt, turned into a wolf, and bitten his own sheep until they were dead, then he ran away and did not come back.21 In addition to the belt as an auxiliary and magical means of transformation into a wolf, rubbing oneself with a magical ointment could also lead to the transformation of a person’s shape. In one legend, a foreman lay down in a paddock to sleep, but then took a glass of ointment and applied it to his body. In this way he turned himself into a werewolf who devoured a whole foal. After the ointment wore off, he turned back into a human: Twe knecht heb tosam meihgt hebben frühstück äten De Grotknecht leggt sih to slapen Is ne koppel het n’ glas hatt het sik damit insalwt de salbung is nu all von em af wedder minsch

Two farmhands together mowed, have eaten breakfast. The foreman lies down to sleep. Is a paddock Has had a glass, has anointed with it The ointment is now completely off from him, human again

19 Laupien 1898, contributor (correspondent): teacher Ernst Pegel ZAW-B906-001-

003. 20 Mirow 1901, contributor (correspondent): music director Schnell, informant aus Carvitz. ZAW-B906-004-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, pp. 396–397, no. 1344. 21 Jabel 1892, informant: farmer Micheel, ZAW-B906-015-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 399, no. 1354.

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slicht to mod fahlen dat süsst ihrer seggt hebben 22

in a bad mood Foal You should have told that earlier.

The motif of the other servant, who told the werewolf that he had watched him during the shapeshifting and eating of a whole foal, is found in numerous legends, which are described in detail in the next section. Wossidlo points out that he only heard the legend of ointment transformation once. He sees parallels to the witches’ ride to the Blocksberg, but does not elaborate on the witches’ ointment, instead referring to the account of witch trials by Beyer and Bartsch. In addition to wolf belts and magic ointment, a magic spell could also trigger the transformation into a werewolf. For example, in one legend a wedding was celebrated in a village. A man came in and played the violin. The wedding guests became alarmed and threw him out. When they wanted to go to church the next day, they had to go travel through an area of forest. There stood the man, surrounded by snow and hail. Then he turned the whole wedding party into wolves.23 In this legend, social aspects of the werewolf beliefs become visible when people excluded from society use magic to avenge themselves.24

22 Quoted in the structure of the original note. Bartelshagen 1895, informant: Mrs. Klänhammer. ZAW-B906-002-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 394, no. 1337. 23 Klein-Rahden 12.07.1931, contributor (correspondent): teacher Gossel, informant:

worker Holz, 88 years old. ZAW-B906-003-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 395, no. 1339. 24 The cursing and transformation of wedding guests is also known from a Polish legend, in which a soldier, who is chased away by the groom with dogs, enchants the wedding guests into werewolves (Hertz, Der Werwolf , 119). Also in Finnish and Estonian legends, the transformation of wedding guests is a popular topic (‘Wolfsmenschen’. Enzyklopädie des Märchens, vol. 14, column 975–986, 980). In Swedish legends about the motif “wedding guests turn into werewolves” a beggar is cursing the wedding guests in revenge, because she was scared away from the farm while begging (Q46: ‘Wedding party turns into wolves’, Bengt Af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend (Helsinki 2010), 308.

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The Hungry Werewolf Is Overeating Numerous legends tell of how a farmer, a farmhand, a woodworker or a journeyman kept watch on a foal or calf—in other legends the werewolf also eats sheep and pigs—, persuaded his companion to sleep, then through secret means such as a belt or, as in the following example, by means of a saddle transformed into a werewolf and ate the foal or calf along with its skin and hair. When he changed back, he complained to his companion that he felt unwell. The companion replied that this would not be a miracle since he had eaten a whole foal. In a legend recorded in 1896 in Wittenburg, two farmhands guarded horses. Around twelve o’clock, one of the farmhands woke up, realizing that something was sniffing at him. This already indicated the presence of an animal. Only then did he see that his companion got up in human form, threw on a saddle and turned himself into a wolf: In earlier times, horses and foals were kept outside at night. There were also two farmhands out by the horses and both were finally sleeping. So, around twelve a farmhand heard something sniff at him. He woke up and saw that the other man had gotten up, put on a saddle and turned himself into a wolf. He did not react and pretended to be asleep. He saw how the other man ran away and tore one of the foals and ate them up completely. When he had consumed it, he came back again, took off the saddle again and lay down again opposite him. He always stayed completely still. When they sat at breakfast the next morning, one said: What is wrong with me? Yes, said the first, you should feel bad, you have consumed an entire foal overnight. When the other one heard that, he suddenly disappeared.25

In the recorded legends it is told again and again that a specific character, about whom it seems that people have always told stories, becomes a werewolf. They were the person that one would wonder about, who was a magician and thus became an outsider of the village community. In the legend ‘De Werwulw’26 three woodcutters went into the forest to cut wood. One of them would always turn into a werewolf, so it was said. The woodcutter about whom rumours were already circulating turned 25 Wittenburg 1896, contributor (correspondent): teacher Sagner, informant: carpenter Bremer. ZAW-B906-000-002; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 397, no. 1346. 26 Broock near Lübz ca. 1935, contributor (correspondent): secretary Richard Brauer, informant: master blacksmith Krogmann.

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promptly into a werewolf at lunchtime, by means of a wolf belt, and ate a foal. In a legend recorded by Wossidlo, the one who has always been suspected of being a magician becomes a werewolf: ‘In Bortschen Holft hebben weck arbeitt–- // den enen harren se all ümmer up visier hatt, // dat he zaubern künn // de geiht afsids // – snallt sik reimen üm –’ [Some of them worked in the Barth Forest, // They always suspected the one // that he can do magic. // He goes off // straps the belt on].27 Suspicions within the family were also confirmed in these narratives, such as when brothers would work together on the field and one preferred to stay alone in the field during lunch instead of going home. Looking at the mare and her foal in the meadow, the eldest brother said to the younger one: ‘I know what you want’ and left. When he returned, the mare stood alone in the meadow.28 Sometimes the suspicion is also expressed aloud, as in a legend recorded in 1912, when people gathered at the home of a person suspected of being a werewolf and talked about the wolf. The man then confessed that he could transform himself into a wolf, but at the same time warned them to go to safety: Sünt alle in stuv räden von wulf… ja, he künn dat un se süllen de ledder na sik trecken 29

They are all in the living room Talking about the wolf… Yes, he could do that and they should pull the ladder

The reason given for eating a foal or calf was often the envy of a neighbour’s attractive pet or the beauty of the foal, both of which were said to stimulate the appetite. Enmity towards another man might entice the werewolf to kill the animals belonging to their adversary. Envy is probably expressed in one narrative when it is said that a farmer and his farmhand saw a horse grazing with its foal in the neighbour’s pasture, and the farmer then turned into a werewolf and ate the foal: In Grebs wir een Buerkeun sall Zauberreimen

In Grebs was a farmer with a magic belt

27 Neuhof / district Ribnitz-Dammgarten 1889/1893, informant: Mr. Wendt. ZAWB906-004-009. 28 Tewswoos 1.9.1933, informant: Mrs. Panke. ZAW-B906-004-015. 29 Bartelshagen 27.12.1927, informant: Sophie Brüdigam. ZAW-B906-014-002.

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’n Wulfsreemen wäst sien. De Buer is eens mit sinen Knecht na’n Messschürren wäst Dor sehn se – Nawers koppel Pierd und Fahlen weiden 30

51

a wolf belt. Once the farmer has gone with his farmhand to spread manure. Then they see in the pasture of the neighbour a horse and foal are grazing

Envy also plays a role in another story when two woodworkers went to work in the forest. One has only a few bad horses, but the other had good ones, including a pregnant horse that was foaling. The man with the bad horses was jealous of the foal, and so turned into a werewolf and ate it. The owner of the foal confronted the other with his story and told him that the werewolf felt bad in the stomach—so unwell and wobbly— because he had his foal in his stomach.31 In a legend recorded in 1907 it is told that a neighbour,32 who shared his paddock with a farmer, owned a ‘real’ foal. The farmer turned into a werewolf and ate it halfway.33 Then again, the foal was so small and pretty that a man came up with the idea that it would taste good: ‘There were once two two men mowing and on the nearby meadow several foals grazed.

30 Grebs 24.05.1929, informant: Mr. Jacobs. ZAW-B906-004-014. Quoted in the structure of the original note. 31 Stargard 1907, informant: ‘old man’. ZAW-B906-004-012; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, p. 395, no. 1341. 32 In a Danish legend, there is a dispute between neighbours. A man and his servant were in the pasture, where the male and the neighbour’s foals were standing. The man turned into a werewolf killed the neighbour’s foal. In addition to this voluntary transformation, in Danish legends there are also werewolves, which do not change according to their own will. These are the victims of a magical ritual practised by their mothers. Women who wanted to avoid severe pain during the birth of their child were said to crawl naked through the afterbirth of a mare. The male baby then became a werewolf. A wolf belt as in German legends does not exist in Denmark. See Michèle Simonsen, ‘The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (Basingstoke 2015), 228–237, 230–231. 33 Wustrow 1907, informant: Mrs. Engel. ZAW-B906-005-001.

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Among them was such a pretty foal that one always says: Look, the little foal must taste good, I would like to have a piece of it’.34 Even a small, fat foal could entice a day labourer to transform into a werewolf.35 In addition to the neighbour and the companion at work, there are other characters who lose an animal to the werewolf: the foal of a Dutchman, who met a woodcutter in the woods,36 and the calf of a priest.37 In the first case the werewolf targets the foal of a stranger, in the second case the werewolf attack seems to target the calf of an unspecified clergyman in a region dominated by Protestants. Priest and pastor are used synonymously in the Low German legends; both persons who, according to popular belief, were outside society. In a legend recorded in 1937, it is explicitly stated that the werewolf wanted to harm those who lost the animal—here a pregnant cow that was killed—and to whom he was hostile.38 When the werewolf had eaten its fill and become a human again, he was often said to complain to his companion that his stomach was feeling terrible: ‘“Mi is so leg tau Maur”. “Ja, di sall woll slecht sin’, harr ’n anne meint , dei blot tau’n Schin slapen harr, du jest jo ’n ganz Kalf upfreten” ’ [‘I feel so bad in the stomach’. ‘Yes, you should feel bad,’ said another, who had just pretended to be asleep, ‘you ate a whole calf, too’].39 Another werewolf is asked on the farm in the morning by the youngest hand, who had watched the transformation, if the foal was not yet digested.40 In a legend recorded in 1912, the farmhand-werewolf implored his companion not to tell his master about the transformation and the eating of the animal:

34 Wittenburg 1895, contributor (correspondent): Sager, informant: worker Wulff. ZAW-B906-005-002. 35 Wittenburg 1898, informant: wife of the worker Wulff. ZAW-B906-005-004; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 394, no. 1336. 36 Wittenburg 1898, informant: worker Behnk. ZAW-B906-004-011. 37 Penzlin 1907, informant: worker Brüggmann. ZAW-B906-006-003; Wossidlo, Meck-

lenburgische Sagen, p. 402, no. 1367. 38 Güstrow 1937, informant: Mr. Oppermann. ZAW-B906-004-013. 39 Suckow 1906, contributor (correspondent): E. Schulz, informant: old man. ZAW-

B906-004-002. 40 Laupin 1898, contributor (correspondent): Ernst Pegel, informant: fee farmer Sch… ZAW-B906-004-003; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 397, no. 1345.

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Then the werewolf says, ‘I’m so fat’. ‘If you eat half the foal, you’ll probably be fat.’ He pleads that he should not tell it to the Master.41

Some legends end with the caught werewolf becoming angry and threatening the one who exposed him: “dat harrk weiten sullt, dun // harr di ok upfreten” [I should have known, I would have eaten you too].42 A farmer in Grebs (region Ludwigslust) was said to threaten his farmhand: “Täuw, Hallunk, datt haddk man weiten süllt , denn wierst du toihrst ankamen!” [Wait, you scoundrel, I should have known that, then it would have been your turn first!].43 Even a mower became angry with his colleague, who watched him take a belt from a basket, turn into a werewolf and tear up a foal: ‘Then his colleague got angry and says: “You cursed carrion, you must have spied on me, then I want to tear you too’, and runs to the basket and wants to put on his belt again. But it was cut into three parts so he couldn’t do anything to him”.44 In a legend recorded in 1895, the companion of the werewolf became active, cutting the wolf belt and thus saving his friend’s life. In a legend recorded in 1912, the motif of the werewolf with a stomach ache from over-eating is linked to the motif of the cut or removed belt, because in this case the wolf belt was removed from the basket and hidden.45 In Serrahn, an old farmhand is said to have become a werewolf, eaten a whole foal and then been unable to sleep. He said to the herding boy who took care of the horses: ‘Mi is so wiwwelwawwelk’, so wobbly in the stomach. kümmt wedder an, snallt reimen af, is wedder heirdjung – snarcht kann nich slapen von all dat freten

Comes back, unfastens the strap, is a herding boy again – snores, can’t sleep because of all the food

41 Poppendorf near Marlow 24.12.1912, informant: cottager Harwel. ZAW-B906-005007. Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, p. 394, no. 1336. Based on the note written by Wossidlo, the transference of the narrative becomes clear: the narrator has recounted the story of his distant brother-in-law, who heard it from a certain Bütz, who tells of the Meyers, whom the werewolf is said to have torn the foal. 42 Passin 1892, informant: cottager Hecht. ZAW-B906-004-010. 43 Grebs 24.5.1929, informant: Mr. Jacobs. ZAW-B906-004-014. 44 Wittenburg 1895, contributor (correspondent): Sager, informant: worker Wulff. ZAW-B906-005-002. 45 Bartelshagen 27.12.1912, informant: Sophie Brüdigam. ZAW-B906-005-005.

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mi is so wiwwelwawwelk Jungen hebben rasch den reimen nahm en un in’t fuer smeten ‘Ja du bist de fahlenfreter’

‘I feel so unwell’ [The] boys quickly take the belt Throw [it] into the fire ‘Yes you are the foal devourer’46

In addition to the well-known motifs in the werewolf legend—the werewolf transformation, complaining of abdominal pain after eating a whole foal and cutting the belt—another motif is added in a legend from 1895: the daughter of the werewolf demonstrated the function of the belt and her werewolf transformation to a neighbour: From the werewolf. A man had a belt, and if he buckled it on, he could turn into a wolf. A neighbour once visited this man’s house and she saw this belt hanging on the wall. When she asked the daughter what kind of thing it was, she replied: You should see that, but you have to climb into the hayloft first and pull the ladder after you. The woman did so. As the girl had put on her belt, she raged around as a wolf for a while. Finally she took off her belt and the transformation stopped.47

Only then is the father’s transformation into a werewolf described. In her contribution on Estonian werewolf conceptions, Tiina Vähi places the belief in werewolves alongside a reflection of social conflicts that manifested themselves in herd theft and cattle theft: … in the clan society the mentality of the right of the strongest is expressed in cattle thieves or robbers, which, masked with wolf skins, crossed the territorial boundaries of the clans in order to procure the hunting or herd animals of other clans as food. The thief could be imagined metaphorically as a werewolf.48 46 1887, informant: Mr. Lehmann, water gate. ZAW-B906-005-006. With ‘The werewolf in Kratzig tears a foal’ the motif of ‘being wobbly in the stomach’ is also documented for Pomerania. See Sagen aus Pommern, gesammelt und herausgegeben von Siegfried Neumann (Augsburg 1998), 153–154. 47 Bartelshagen 1895, contributor Brüdigam. ZAW-B906-005-003.

(correspondent):

Dunze,

informant:

Sophie

48 Tiina Vähi, ‘Werwölfe—Viehdiebe und Räuber im Wolfspelz? Elemente des archaischen Gewohnheitsrechts in estnischen Werwolfvorstellungen’, in: Willem de Blécourt, Christa Agnes Tuczay (eds.), Tierverwandlungen. Codierungen und Diskurse (Tübingen 2011), 135–172, 137.

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The werewolf is therefore a lawbreaker who steals or damages livestock. The magical defence methods remind them of the sanctions of common law: “public exposure through reprimand, injury from harvesting tools, or shooting with a silver bullet”.49 Since the Estonians were like the Scandinavians, Slavs and the North German grain farmers and ranchers, not only was the economic way of life similar, but also the popular beliefs and the legal customs. Real livestock thefts on village pastures or robbery on paths up to the beginning of the twentieth century probably contributed to the liveliness of the werewolf in legends, because although the livestock was fenced in and the real wolf population was decimated, the livestock thefts continued. Since it was difficult to identify cattle thieves and tension between neighbours was to be avoided, the farmer was able to ward off popular beliefs and legends corresponding to the werewolf with the help of magic—silver bullets, hitting with a stick, injuring, insulting or calling it by name.50 This was easier for the community than putting the real cattle thief on trial.51 According to Metsvahi, the dependency of the Estonian serfs on the Baltic-German nobility up to the middle of the nineteenth century and the risk of starvation due to poor harvests influenced the subject of werewolf legends. The legend of the hungry farmhand who secretly attacks a foal as a werewolf was also told in Estonia. Here you can see parallels with the northern German social structure of noble landowners and their subordinates. For Metsvahi, the werewolf legends reflect conflict between the social classes, farm owners and contract workers, and the confrontational relationship between the landlord and the farmer.52 A counter argument against the interpretation of the hungry farmhand/ werewolf as a cattle thief is the fact that the werewolf eats only one foal. Cattle thieves would not settle for a single foal or sheep, but would steal

49 Vähi, ‘Werwölfe—Viehdiebe und Räuber im Wolfspelz?’, 135. 50 Vähi points out that the Estonian legends do not use random words to turn

a werewolf back into a human being, but rather fixed expressions and formulas or widespread calls such as “Urjuhh!” or “Hurjuhh” together with the name of the werewolf. By the act of naming the werewolf comes into the power of the speaker. See Vähi, “Werwölfe—Viehdiebe und Räuber im Wolfspelz?, 150–151. 51 Vähi, ‘Werwölfe—Viehdiebe und Räuber im Wolfspelz?’, 144. 52 Merili Metsvahi, ‘Estonian werewolf legends from the island of Saaremaa’, in:

Hannah Priest (ed.), She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester 2015), 24–40, 37–38.

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several animals. The werewolf’s hunger is no greater than eating one foal, and sometimes only half a foal. For de Blécourt, the werewolf’s hunger is a metaphor for sexual hunger.53 In Germany, the legend of the hungry farmhand appears especially often in northern regions. De Blécourt saw a southern Scandinavian influence here, because the motive of the hungry farmhand could potentially come from Denmark. Swedish troops of soldiers might have told this legend during the seventeenth century Swedish invasion in northern Germany.54

The Werewolf Attacks a Woman Another common motif is the werewolf that attacks a woman. In most cases, it was the husband who attacked his own wife in a forest. He often warned her that a wolf would come and attack her. The husband was said to bite into the woman’s red petticoat in wolf form. After he had changed back, the woman would recognize her husband by the red threads that still hung out of his mouth. A variant of this migratory legend from 1906 is: From the werewolf. A man drove out on a cart with his wife. When they came to lie at the Schale [river] in a forest, the man told the woman to hold the horses for a moment. He had to get down. This happened. But as soon as he had disappeared into the bushes, a werewolf came out of the forest and attacked the woman in the cart, tearing her clothes into pieces and rags, including her underwear, and also her red fringed petticoat. Then he disappeared. Soon her husband came out of the forest. She scolded. “You stayed away while a wolf jumped on my cart and tore up all my stuff”. She looked at her husband with anger, and was startled to realize that he still had shreds of her red petticoat between his teeth.55

The werewolf’s attack on his own wife usually happens when the woman is driving into town with her husband or farmhand and is currently in the

53 Willem de Blécourt, ‘“I Would Have Eaten You Too”: Werewolf Legends in the Flemish, Dutch and German Area’, Folklore 118 (2007), 23–43, 33–34. 54 De Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’, 30, 40. He now changed this view due to the scarcity of the legend in Scandinavia, see Chapter 2. 55 Gallin 1906, contributor (correspondent): Heinrich Garbe, ZAW-B906-009-003.

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forest. But the werewolf’s attack can also take place at work in-house, as in a legend from 1923, in which the woman is weaving. After recognizing her husband as a werewolf, she kills herself: Vom werwulf hett grm vertellt fru sitt in wäwtau, hedt ’n frusen rock an – ehr mann … will ehr biten hett noch de fäsen twischen de tähnen hatt (fru hengahn hett sik verdrunken)56

Grandmother told about the werewolf Woman sits at the loom, wearing a fringed skirt her husband … wants to bite her still had the strings between the teeth (Woman went away drowned herself)

Although the subject of the werewolf, who bites into a woman’s red petticoat or apron (Mot. H64.1), has a high status in the world of legends in Northern and Central Europe, as it warns against what were considered at the time to be indecent and immoral relationships,57 this type of legend is only represented in a few variants in the Richard Wossidlo collection.58 One of these legends begins with the fact that the farmer/ werewolf’s wife was an old woman who could perform magic. However, this fact no longer plays a role in the further course of the narrative.59 In this recorded narrative the woman defended herself with a towel, and in another variant she held out her red petticoat to the werewolf, which he tore apart in his anger and inebriation.60 The red colour of the petticoat or an apron, the apron appearing mostly in Danish and southern Swedish legends, can have apotropaic meaning, simply as a sign and colour of the defence against the werewolf, but according to de Blécourt61 it can also 56 Lübtheen 2.2.1923, informant: Mr. Schulz. ZAW-B906-009-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 398, no. 1349. 57 De Blécourt, ‘Wolfsmenschen’. Enzyklopädie des Märchens, col. 980; Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf: An Introduction to Cluster Methodology’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.): Werewolf Histories (Basingstoke 2015), 1–24, 3. 58 Even if this type of legend is not represented in large numbers at Wossidlo, de Blécourt lists 35 different variants for Germany. Half of the legends explicitly state that the torn skirt, petticoat or apron has a red colour, de Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’, 29. 59 Bartelshagen 1895, informant: Mrs. Klänhammer. ZAW-B906-009-002; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 397, no. 1348. 60 Büchen 9.8.1911, informant: Mr. Bonatz. ZAW-B906-009-004. 61 De Blécourt, “‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’”, 35.

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symbolize the menstrual flow of women, and the attack by the werewolf thus becomes the denial of their impurity. The legend of a werewolf attacking a woman and tearing up her clothes has a clearly sexual connotation. The wolf lunges at the woman.62 De Blécourt points out that other legends that are not clearly sexual should also be examined for the sexual aspect, because for him the werewolf is a metaphor for all illicit forms of male sexuality: Men would have to be werewolves and could not control themselves. The men who were considered werewolves were portrayed as anti-social without exception. They were strange, lived in seclusion, were solitary, stubborn, indifferent, harsh, ugly, or godless.63

The legends described so far always end relatively lightly—except for the suicide of a wife—because the werewolf can be driven out. In another legend, however, it is recorded that a werewolf was said to have eaten a human: An old woman told that her father served as a farmhand with a farmer in Parkow. There was another farmhand there who knew the art of turning into a wolf. He transformed with a belt, cornered the father and sniffed around him. Then he ate a whole foal. He is said to have later purchased a bride and told her that one day he would eat her up. The girl suspected no evil, and trusted in God, but the farmhand ate the girl one night, ‘from end to end’ with skin and hair. The narrative ends with the conjecture ‘that must have been magic, how could it happen otherwise’.64

62 In the Pomeranian legend “A woman as a werewolf”, however, the roles are reversed: a farmer’s wife becomes restless when making hay in the meadow and tells her husband to throw his hat to a wild animal and then flee. The woman disappears and comes swimming through the river Swine as a werewolf. She attacks her husband and tears his hat. A farmhand sneaks up with a fork and stabs the werewolf. The wolf then turns back into the farmer’s wife (Sagen aus Pommern, 156–157). 63 Willem de Blécourt, ‘Metamorphosen oder Metaphern? Sprachliche und körperliche Aspekte der Tierverwandlung in den Niederlanden’, in: Willem de Blécourt, Christa Agnes Tuczay (eds.): Tierverwandlungen. Codierungen und Diskurse (Tübingen 2011), 69–84, 81. 64 Zepelin 28.5.1911, informant: worker Giese. ZAW-B906-011-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 398, no. 1351.

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The Female Werewolf The image of the werewolf is dominated by men, but in the northern German legends women also turn into werewolves and go hunting for foals and sheep. In one note from 1894 it is reported that the werewolf was a woman, who ate up a whole foal and then had a big belly.65 A legend from Laupin tells that animals used to be stolen from the pasture and that wolves were seen there. One day, a large number of people chased and cornered the wolf: ‘Then he ran over the banks of the Rögnitz as if he wanted to swim through the water. However, when the pursuers got to the riverbank, a woman was sitting there washing her feet!’.66 In a narrative recorded in 1922 it is said that a woman in wolf form went on a thieving tour of the region: ‘There was a woman who could make herself a wolf. She went everywhere and took something away from people’.67 She went into a house and was caught by the children who quickly climbed up to the attic. The werewolf followed, but the children pulled up the ladder. Then the werewolf howled terribly in the house. In Klein Krams, it was said that a person showed up in wolf form and that they were always there while hunting, but nobody could catch them. When the hunters were after it again, the wolf ran into a farmhouse. The hunters went into the house and found the supposed wolf in bed: a tail peeked out of the bed, and it was found out that the woman had put on a wolf skin.68 In a variant in which the werewolf had eaten the piglets of a swineherd, the werewolf was shot and withdrew into its bed, from which only the tail could be seen hanging. There is no explicit mention of a female or male werewolf. Even in a Swedish legend, the wolf tail remains after the werewolf has been transformed back into a man (Q43: “Wolf tail remains”69 ). One could agree with the equation of the werewolf tail with a penis if it were a question of male werewolves in the legends about

65 Woldzegarten/Ganzlin 1894, informant: Mrs. Dahl. ZAW-B906-004-006. 66 Laupin 1898, contributor (correspondent): Ernst Pegel. ZAW-B906-008-002. 67 Kummer 18.04.1922, informant: Mrs. Pankow. ZAW-B906-014-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 398–399, no. 1352. 68 Göhlen 10.08.1911, informant: a woman [name unknown]. ZAW-B906-008-007; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 399, no. 1357. 69 Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend, 308.

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the tail hanging from the bed.70 How does this equation fit with female werewolves? This hypothesis could only be correct if the narrator merely replaced the male werewolf figure with a female werewolf. However, as soon as the narrator speaks explicitly of the female werewolf, this thesis no longer applies, since the figure of the woman does not match the male sexual organ. The woman who can turn into a werewolf is also often suspected of being able to perform witch magic, such as in a Schleswig–Holstein legend of a woman who attacked a sheep every Sunday in the guise of a wolf.71 In another Schleswig–Holstein legend, it is pointed out that there used to be witches in the community of Owschlag and that strange things happened. A farmer drove into town and saw two wolves on either side of the path. They always went ahead of him to the village and jumped over a door there: “When the farmer went after them, the woman and her daughter stood in the hallway with wolf belts in hand”.72 Helene, who was called werewolf by the village people because she could turn into a wolf, was also equated with a witch, according to Wossidlo. Wossidlo writes on his note: ‘mädchen // hexe // wolf et schaf // heleneken wat wist du mit dat schapeken’ [Girl // witch // wolf and sheep // Heleneken, what do you want with the little sheep].73 When Helene stole the sheep as a werewolf, the villagers addressed her by her name, and the girl turned into a human again. In another version, dated 1895, Wossidlo notes that Helene is said to have had a wolf’s mouth.74 When Wossidlo was told in Doberan in 1911 that a woman had turned into a wolf, he explicitly asks whether it was not a man, but received the answer that a woman in wolf form had bitten cattle to death. When it is called by name, “it has come back to life” and takes on a human form.75 70 De Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’, 39. 71 ‘The Woman with the Wolf Belt’, in: Meyer, Schleswig-Holsteiner Sagen, 308. 72 Karl Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogtümer Schleswig, Holstein

und Lauenburg, neue Ausgabe besorgt von Otto Mensing (Schleswig 1921), no. 371 ‘Werewölfe’. 73 Bartelshagen 1892, contributor (correspondent): H. Dunze, informant: old wife of a worker. ZAW-B906-007-001. 74 Bartelshagen 1895, contributor (correspondent): H. Dunze, informant: Mrs. Blank. ZAW-B906-007-002; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 399, no. 1355. 75 Doberan 23.07.1911, informant: Mr. Bökmann. ZAW-B906-007-003; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 399, no. 1356.

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In a legend recorded by Bartsch, ‘Witch as Werewolf’, contamination between witch and werewolf beliefs also takes place. The red threads from the underskirt of a woman, which the werewolf still had between his teeth after his transformation was reserved, are equated with red hair. Sometimes a witch in the form of a werewolf walks across the field to bewitch the cows of a farmer. Here comes her husband, and as he sees the werewolf, he fears that it is his wife and calls him (sic) to ‘Marie, Marie, why do you do it?’ Then the woman is startled and changes into her human form. But as the man approaches her, her long red hair still hangs over her neck and chest and her eyes still sparkle like wolf eyes.76

Overlaps of werewolf and witch beliefs77 can be found in the following motifs: transformation of man/werewolf and witch into an animal (the witch transforms into three-legged rabbits, cats, mice, etc.), the magic damage done to humans and cattle and defence against witches and werewolves. Defence takes place in both beliefs, as will be seen in the following chapter, with a bullet of inherited silver. Additionally, the nature of the reverse transformation into human form shows parallels with witch and werewolf. Like the witch, the werewolf was also put on trial: men were accused of having committed crimes in wolf form.78 The charges included suspicion of human and especially child eating or the practice of prohibited forms of sexuality (e.g. incest or sodomy). Shepherds were particularly accused of attempting and failing to banish wolves.79

76 Karl Bartsch: Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg I (Wien 1879), 150, no. 185, informant: Mrs. B. in Wustrow. 77 For parallels in German legends of werewolf and witch—the transformation into an animal—see Hertz, Der Werwolf , 71–77. A Swiss report on heresy and magic processes from the fifteenth century speculates about the transformation of witches into wolves, see Tuczay, ‘Die wilde Lust am Wolfsleben’, 51. 78 For the symbolism of the wolf as a power threatening faith and Christianity and the werewolf processes see Tuczay ‘Die wilde Lust am Wolfsleben’, 51–52. For the lawsuits against alleged werewolves with the accusation of devil pacts and damage magic see also Wolfgang Schild, ‘Der Werwolf als Ungläubiger’, in: Ulrich Kronauer (ed.), Der “Ungläubige” in der Rechts- und Kulturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg 2015), 207–248, 215–217, 242–247 and de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werwolf: An Introduction to Cluster Methodology’, 7 with an overview of European werewolf processes based on a list of processes by journalist Elmar Lorey. 79 De Blécourt, ‘Wolfsmenschen’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens, col. 978.

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In an Estonian variant of the Low German legend of the hungry farmhand described above, the werewolf was female: two girls went to bed and one girl secretly disappears behind a bush. She did three somersaults and thereby turned into a werewolf. The wolf killed a foal, drank its blood and put pieces of meat into its pocket. As in a legend recorded by Wossidlo’s collection worker Sager, the werewolf sniffed the other girl, then lay down and turned into a human again. Merili Metsvahi80 interprets this variant with the female figure of the werewolf as the girl’s escape from everyday life with its social norms and roles: The active woman protagonist of the tale ‘The Other Sleeper Kills an Animal’ flees from her daily reality – in which she is bound to fulfil a subordinate role both in the social sense and as concerns her gender – into a world with different rules, into the wild wood where she is the master and can show her power. After having killed an animal and taken the meat, she returns to the everyday world and continues her life as she used to, usually remaining unpunished for her deed.81

The commonality of the female werewolf is reflected in numerous other Estonian legends.82 This may be due to the historic position of women within Estonian and Livonian society, which according to archaeologists was matrilinear and matrilocal. However, the female werewolf was also popular in patriarchal society because, in addition to procuring meat in the form of a she-wolf, it also meant, as already described, an escape from harsh living conditions and the arbitrariness of the landlord: When the subject is viewed from a woman’s point of view, projecting onto the she-wolf was tempting because of the strength, freedom of movement, and access to resources (meat) of the wolf, in addition to being able to encourage the mother’s instinct. These were the three things the woman

80 Metsvahi, ‘Estonian werewolf legends from the island of Saaremaa’, 29–30. 81 Metsvahi, ‘Estonian werewolf legends from the island of Saaremaa’, 36. 82 In the legend texts in the Archives of Estonian Folklore, which were collected

between 1926 and 1940, the relationship between male and female werewolves is as follows: 135 times a man is transformed into a wolf, 261 times a woman, see Merili Metsvahi, ‘Die Frau als Werwölfin (AT 409) in der estnischen Volkstradition’, in: Willem de Blécourt, Christa Agnes Tuczay (eds.), Tierverwandlungen. Codierungen und Diskurse (Tübingen 2011), 193–220, 208. There are 250 different Estonian texts from the legend and fairy tale “The woman as a werewolf” (AT 409).

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longed for in the patriarchal and slave society world under poor living conditions and arbitrariness of the landlord.83

In the case of the Low German legends, the sources of narratives about the female werewolf are mostly women. In the Low German legends, the narrator tells of female werewolves who went hunting for cattle and either fetched the cattle from the pasture or snatched the prey from the hunters. By focusing on the meat-consuming werewolf, Metsvahi could be right that the hunting she-wolf was a virtual escape from the everyday lives of servants of landlords or of poor day labourers and peasant women. Another reason also lies in the legend world of northern German and Mecklenburg, in which some male legend characters have been replaced by female ones. The Wild Hunt is one example. The legendary figure of the Waud is the leader of the wild hunt, which took place in the spring and autumn and consisted of male riders—an army of the dead led by dogs. Connected with ‘Fru’ or ‘Mudder’ as Fru Waud, Fru Waur, Fru Gode and others is a female mythical figure, mainly during twelfth night, accompanied by her dog and travelling on a wagon.84 Fru Waud can also function as a collective term for the Wild Hunt, as was originally the case with the Waud. Fru Waur was a feared being that roamed the area, either rewarding or punishing people depending on their behaviour. Belief in these figures was very much alive at the end of the nineteenth century.

83 Metsvahi, ‘Die Frau als Werwölfin (AT 409) in der estnischen Volkstradition’, 213. 84 Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch, vol. 7, col. 1215:

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Richard Wossidlo in front of his card trays, Wossidlo Archive, Rostock

Reverse Transformation of the Werewolf and Its Death As can be seen in the legends described concerning the female werewolf, it was believed that one might fend off the werewolf and force it to transform back into a human by calling it by name. Helene was called by her name and returned to her human form again, standing as a person in front of the village people. There are parallels to the three-legged hare, the witch in animal form, who has to assume their human form when called by name.85 In a legend about a worker in the Barth forest, who was often suspected of being able to do magic and turn into a werewolf, it also says in general terms: “If you call them by name, they become human

85 Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 401.

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again”.86 In a legend recorded in 1898, the werewolf must be called by the name given to the person at baptism. Finding the right name seems difficult in the heat of battle when the werewolf bares its teeth in front of you. In this case, a whole family is said to turn into werewolves with a belt. You make a werewolf human again by calling him by his baptismal name: A man once went to his neighbour, whose daughter was alone at home. She had two belts that he asked to use. She replied that her father and her mother buckled on the belts and then became wolves, and he didn’t want to believe her. Then the daughter put on one of the belts. Suddenly a wolf was standing in front of him, approaching him. Since he could not save himself otherwise, he quickly jumped up the ladder and got to the floor while the wolf was standing below and showed his teeth. There he called several names from above until he found her baptismal name. Now she was standing in front of him again as a girl. He asked: Why are you doing this? She replied: Oh, I’m laughing that he’s so afraid of me.87

Even in the case of the lame miller from Spornitz, from a legend recorded in 1913, the motif appears that a werewolf could be returned to human form by being named: the lame miller had a quarrel with another man. The man went to a field where he met a wolf. The wolf fell into a pit, allowing the man to take a closer look at it. The thought came to him that this could be the lame miller and he called out: ‘Müller, what do you want … There the miller stands as a person’.88 The motivation to turn into a werewolf in this case could have been anger or revenge. In a legend recorded in Waren by Wossidlo in 1892, however, it is greed for money: Two farmers rode to Lübeck, and sold grain and the money cat, i.e. the purse, strapped to the horse. One of the farmers briefly left his companion in a wooded area and a short time later a wolf approached: ‘The other is startled, but calls the other’s name. There he stands as a person with a strap. It was his colleague who wanted to rob him, and he asked him

86 Neuhof 1889/93, informant: Mr. Wendt. ZAW-B906-004-009. 87 Laupin 1889, contributor (correspondent): Ernst Pegel, informant: carpenter J.

ZAW-B906-015-002, ZTW-B906-000-008; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 399, no. 1356. 88 Dütschow 12.07.1913, informant: Mr. Dunze. ZAW-B906-010-002.

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repeatedly not to give him away’.89 Even around 1930, the legend ‘The Werewolf at Vietlübbe’ is still recorded after the story of the former head of the village Schlottmann near Lübz, in which a farmer riding through the forest at night suspects his neighbour in the figure of the attacking wolf and forces him to change back by naming the wolf.90 Variants of the legend can be located around the catching of neighbours in wolf form in the Spornitz/Lübz region. In 1911, Häusler (day labourer) Helmke from Spornitz told Wossidlo about his grandfather, who was attacked by a werewolf while he was herding horses. The grandfather had previously argued with another man, who then attacked him as a wolf. The grandfather shouted ‘Jehann Hinnerk, you old werewolf’, whereupon the wolf became human.91 Defending oneself from a werewolf by naming it also occurs in a legend from 1933, in which a man, who had always been said to be a werewolf, was asked to transform himself into a wolf at a festival. He excused himself at first, but then got involved in the game. Everyone was told to sit quietly and not say a word, even if he pressed them. However, when he turned into a wolf, his bride could not keep silent and cried out, ‘Johann, is that you?’ upon which the werewolf jumped through a window and never came back.92 There are numerous variants of the Werewolf from Spornitz described above. On the one hand it was described as being the lame miller, but on the other it could also be a boy who took the wolf belt from his father—who might be the miller—and transformed into a wolf at school. In the form of a wolf, he bit the sexton’s legs. The boy was attacked by the villagers and died.93 The character of the lame miller from Spornitz is also described as having taken his father’s belt as a young boy, and as having shown the other boys the transformation. They 89 Waren 1892, informant: Mr. Eggerts. ZAW-B906-010-004. 90 Heiligendamm ca. 1930, contributor (correspondent): Richard Brauer, informant:

head of a village Schlottmann. ZAW-B906-010-003. An earlier variant of the legend is published in Bartsch, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg, 150, no. 183. Bartsch’s informant is Pastor R. Bassewitz, who was told the legend about 1844 by an old cowherd from Siggelkow. 91 Spornitz 29.01.1911, informant: cottager Helmke. ZAW-B906-010-005; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 401, no. 1364. 92 Tewswoos 01.09.1933, informant: cottager Pankow. ZAW-B906-014-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 401, no. 1365. 93 Tessin 04.10.1917, informant: worker Klaeter. ZAW-B906-015-003; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 398, no. 1350.

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simply had to name him, and then he would become human again. The boys forgot his name in the excitement and had to get to safety from the werewolf, climbing onto tables and benches. Fortunately, the mother came home and called her son by name.94 Based on the werewolf from Spornitz, another method of defence can be recognized in addition to the attribution—a blood wound: There was one in Spornitz who ate nine foals in three nights. The farmer had another foal in the stable (he consumed all of the others). The farmer injured him with a bloodwound, then he was human again. Later the son put on his belt, he also became a wolf and was burned in Parchim.95

The bloody wound as a method of warding off a werewolf seems to have a general validity: ‘wenn se blautwundt würden, süllen se wedder minschen sein’ [If they are wounded bloody, they should be human again].96 In 1907, a worker related a story that his grandfather from Mölln told him about a werewolf. The werewolf had told the grandfather—probably whilst in human form—that he was sick. That would be no wonder since he had eaten all of the priest’s oxen. Then he cuts him so that he bleeds. The belt could then be removed: ‘sleit em dat he // Blött // dor hebben se em den // reimen afnahmen // dordörch is de kunst afkamen’ [Cut him that he // bleeds // there they took // his belt off, // so the art went away].97 In another legend, it is said that a pair of horse boys repeatedly encountered a werewolf who always stole the horses and drove them into the thorn hedge. The boys knotted a cross knot in a whip and used it to beat the werewolf. They put the werewolf in human form on the thorn hedge.98

94 Dütschow 12.07.1913, informant: Mr. Dunz. ZAW-B906-015-004; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 402, no. 1366. 95 Tessin 27.03.1910, informant: worker Klaeter. ZAW-B906-006-004, ZTW-B906000-015; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 395, no. 1340. 96 Trebs 09.04.1914, informant: cottager Frahm. ZAW-B906-006-002; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 402, no. 1367. 97 Penzlin 1907, informant: worker Brüggmann. ZAW-B906-006-003; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 402, no. 1367. 98 Bartelshagen 1895, informant: worker. ZAW-B906-006-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 402, no. 1368.

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It was said that if you shot a werewolf, it would be kept from the house: ‘ok de worwulf // ward dörch dat scheeten von’t huus afhollen’.99 When a werewolf entered the Laps smithy, and made a huge noise as he chased the chickens, people came and stabbed the wolf directly over the eye with a fork. Then the wolf changed: ‘Dor is dat dat oll schultenwief. // de kraft hett in den // reim insäten’ [That’s the old wife of the head of the village. // The power was in the // belt].100 In the legend ‘The Werewolf and the Shepherd’, a shepherd attacked the werewolf with an axe and smashed its hip. The werewolf turned out to be a woman who had done great damage to the shepherd because she had eaten his sheep. The wolf crept into a bush, the shepherd after it to kill the wolf. There he discovered a woman trying to stop the bleeding.101 In several legends, it is said that werewolves were repelled by gunshot wounds. In Möllenbeck, a werewolf swineherd took away some piglets. A hunter then shot his front leg, but the wolf disappeared. When the pursuers tracked him to a house, the werewolf was in human form but his tail was still hanging out of his bed.102 In a variant, the type of weapon is specified, in that the shot must be done with a bullet made of ‘Erbsilber’—inherited silver—because only inherited silver can injure or kill a werewolf. Here there are parallels with the beliefs about defence against witches, because these too could be recognized with the help of inherited silver, in the form of an inherited key. The hunter poured a bullet of inherited silver and shot the werewolf: A woman put on a belt and became a wolf. When there was a hunt, she ran in front of the shooters and when they shot a rabbit, she took it and carried it home. A hunter poured inherited silver into a bullet, which he shot at her front leg. She still got up; when they came to the village, she was lying in bed with a wound on her leg (hand?).103

99 Loosen 1898, contributor (correspondent): teacher W. Sass. ZAW-B906-008-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 401, no. 1362. 100 Ave 1895, informant: day labourer Micheels. ZAW-B906-008-005; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 400, no. 1359. 101 Heiligendamm, contributor (correspondent): cantor Brauer. ZAW-B906-008-004. 102 Brenz 12.07.1913, informant: cottager Schröder. ZAW-B906-008-008; Wossidlo,

Mecklenburgische Sagen, 397, no. 1347. 103 Penzlin 20.03.1910, informant: worker Dammann. ZAW-B906-008-006, ZTWB906-000-003; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 400, no. 1358.

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It is also said in Schleswig–Holstein that werewolves can only be fended off with inherited silver. In one narrative, a boy revealed a woman to the villagers as a supposed werewolf. They shot her, but only a bullet of inherited silver could hurt her. She kept an open wound for a lifetime that no doctor could heal.104 The Rügen legend “Werewolf von Jarnitz” confirms that “bullets made from inherited silver […] never fail to have an effect”.105 The reversal of the werewolf’s transformation by a bullet of inherited silver is a magical act, while the hurts inflicted with other objects like whips or hatchets move away from such magic. The re-transformation by speaking the werewolf’s baptismal name still shows magical features and reveals parallels to the role of naming in fairy tales—in the fairy tale ‘Rumpelstilzchen’ (KHM 55) the ‘appointment’ and recognition is accepted with the indication that the correct name had probably been betrayed by the devil. When the correct name is pronounced, the power of the supernatural being expires. A syncretism of magic and religion can be seen in the Christian superimposition of these names on the name given at baptism.

Special Forms of the Werewolf and Transformation into a Dog, Cat or Bear In the narrative about a priest who turns into a werewolf, there is a syncretism of belief in the werewolf and the Maart (Moort). In a legend recorded in 1915, the priest says: ‘De Preester in en Dörp bi Wittenburg is so’n Diert (d. h. ein Werwolf) wäst ’ [The priest in a village near Wittenburg was such an animal (i.e. werewolf)].106 Wossidlo introduces the summary of the legend with the fact that people can be turned at their baptism into a moortrider, i.e. the nightmare, and that they can also be turned into a werewolf. The priest is referred to as Moorwolf in the narrative, which Wossidlo comments, since the term is unusual and suggests a contamination of beliefs between Werwolf and Moort: ‘When they come to the Totenberg [mountain of the dead] (and the bells have

104 ‘The Women with the Wolf Belt’, in: Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogtümer Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenburg, no. 370. 105 Rügensche Sagen 1920, 81, no. 142. 106 Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 394, no. 1338.

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started ringing), the priest comes running as a moor wolf (=Moorwolf, so quinquis [d = dixit = he says] clearly)’.107 In the narrative, the priest baptized a new-born in the name of the devil, rather than in God’s name. This was noticed by an inspector who wanted to protect the child and took it. On the Totenberg the priest came running up as a moorwolf and tried to seize the child. The inspector took a small sword and struck the wolf on the mouth. The child was then baptized again by another priest. When the inspector tried to confront the first priest the next day, he had a scar over his mouth. The priest/werewolf would have created a new werewolf through his perversion of the baptism. The legends about the shapeshifting priest reflect the popular image of the Protestant pastor—the Preester/Preister was first the pre-Reformation clergyman, then the Protestant clergyman who served as pastor—of the Protestant majority in the population of Mecklenburg after the Reformation. The clergyman played a special role in society and was therefore the subject of legends. The pastor as a werewolf is also listed in the index of Livonian legends compiled by Oskar Loorits. The transformed priest could be recognized while in the shape of a wolf, since he had a white spot under his neck. In one legend, he ate a foal, and in another he saved his maid from other wolves.108 In a legend from 1921, the narrator was not entirely sure whether the transformed shepherd who stole sheep at night is a dog or wolf: ‘The shepherd in Dargelütz was able to transform into a dog: then he ran somewhere else and stole [a] sheep (ms. Werewolf // or was that a wolf)’.109 Wossidlo asked (ms. = mea sponte ‘upon my question’), whether it could be a werewolf, but the narrator stayed with the dog. In a legend from 1939, Wossidlo was told, ‘a peasant woman had a werewolf belt. She disguised herself as a black dog’.110 The narrator’s replacement of the werewolf with a dog may indicate that this legend variant is a new form of transformation legend. 107 Neukloster 05.04.1915, informant: worker Wulff. ZAW-B906-012-001; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 394, no. 1338. 108 Oskar Loorits, Livische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten (Helsinki 1926) (= FF communications 21, 1), 64–65. 109 Parchim 13.02.1921, informant: Frederich. ZAW-B906-016-002, ZTW-B906-000016; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 403, no. 1371. 110 Wulfshagen 26.01.1939, contributor (correspondent): Werner Auhls, informant: Mr. Rost. ZAW-B906-016-001.

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In addition to the dog, the bear also appeared in legends about the transformation of a person. ‘At 12 noon hunters shot a bear at the RühnZernin crossroads, but the bullet bounced off in vain. Then they shot it with an inherited key and behold, the bear was an old woman from a neighbouring town’.111 In the legend recorded in 1939 ‘Officer as a bear’112 the narrator tells of his grandfather, who was stationed as a soldier from 1899 to 1901 and had to watch over a shooting range which the werebear was said to haunt. One night a bear came to the shooting range. Since the bear did not react to the shoemaker who was on guard, he shot it. Then he realized that he had shot the officer on duty, who had been wearing a bear skin. In a legend recorded in 1932, a shepherd was also suspected of attacking a man in bear form with fiery eyes. However, a man could push the bear into water, whereupon the bear disappeared. When the shepherd disappeared the next day, people claimed that the shepherd was the bear.113 Then there is the transformation into a cat by magic: in 1923, in Penzin a legend was recorded that women could turn into cats by putting on a belt. The cats, who haunted a castle at night, were beaten up with an iron bar. The next morning, several women from the village were found to be in bed, unable to get up. They were found with a belt that transformed them into a cat.114 The transformation into a fox, ‘Dat hett Lüd geeben // De hebben sik // Ton voss maken kunnt ’ [There were people who could make themselves a fox],115 which was recorded in 1933, recalls the transformation of the witch into an animal shape, by means of a belt or a rope. Wossidlo wrote only two notes recording the transformation into a cat and a fox. Due to the small number of variants, one could speculate that the narrators were wrong about the animal in question. However, Bartsch also records a legend in his collection about the transformation into a fox. Wossidlo did not write down this legend because 111 13.09.1920, contributor (correspondent): Hans Wilhelm Barnewitz, informant: Untertertianer [Middle school student]. ZAW-B906-017-001, BKW-B150-018-002-003. 112 Völkshagen 26.01.1939, contributor (correspondent): Gerhard Wilken. ZAW-B906017-002. 113 Stoffersdorf 12.04.1932, informant: Ulrich Frahm. ZAW-B906-019-021; Wossidlo, Mecklenburgische Sagen, 403, no. 1370. 114 Penzin 1923, contributor (correspondent): Hans Wilhelm Barnewitz, informant: old inhabitant of Penzin. ZAW-B906-018-001, BKW-B150-026-004-011. 115 Teevswoos 1933, informant: Mr. Koch. ZAW-B906-018-002.

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he only collected unpublished legends. In the legend ‘The Fox-mountain near Dodow’116 recorded by Bartsch, an old woman was transformed into a fox using a fox belt. The grandchild took the fox belt to school, the teacher took the strap from the child, and inadvertently turned into a fox and scared the children. This is very reminiscent of the little werewolf from Spornitz, who took his father’s belt to school. In another legend a female farmer from Warnkenhagen, who turned her two daughters into calves with the help of small branches, which she put around her neck like a garter, is equated by Wossidlo in his notes with a witch.117

Conclusion: The Belief in Werewolves in North German Legends Werewolves are cultural concepts, as de Blécourt118 states in his introduction to werewolf stories, which have to be considered in connection with the linguistic, cultural and social context. However, these concepts can also vary within a language or overcome linguistic and cultural boundaries. If one considers the subjects of the Low German legends, one can see parallels to Scandinavian and Baltic legends: Even in the Livonian legends, the werewolf transforms back into a human being when addressed by name. The wounded werewolf is recognized in human form by its wound. The migratory legend of the man biting his wife’s skirt or apron in the forest can also be found in the historical landscape of Livonia119 and in other European regions. The Baltic Sea region combines a common repertoire of werewolf legends. In the Low German legends examined here, the werewolf is largely a cattle thief. If one looks at the location in the narratives, it is striking that werewolf legends are told where there is a forest area nearby, or where pastureland meets forest. Thus, the cattle owner’s real fear of the wolves living in the forest may have played a role in the creation of the legends.

116 Bartsch: Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg, 146, no. 181. 117 Rostock 25.04.1915, contributor (correspondent): Hans Wilhelm Barnewitz. ZAW-

B906-019-015, BKW-B150-005-002-003. 118 De Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werwolf: An Introduction to Cluster Methodology’, 1. 119 Loorits, Livische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten, 64–65.

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This may be the case even if, as already described, the wolf had been largely exterminated in Germany since the seventeenth century. However, individual wolves would have fuelled the general fear of cattle owners about the wolf. The second appearance of the werewolf as back rider, which, according to Strube’s investigation, also occurs in Low German legends in Central Germany, does not appear at all in the Low German legends in North Germany. The back rider waits for his victim behind hedges or hidden paths and then jumps on his back. Then he can be carried part of the way.120 De Blécourt does not see clear sexual references in back riding,121 but back riding is a close physical encounter between man and werewolf, so that this interpretation is not absurd. In my opinion, however, these implied sexual references lack such clarity in the Low German legends in North Germany, in which agricultural references to livestock and the risk of theft of livestock play a greater role. De Blécourt points out, however, that the researcher must be aware that sexual elements in the legends do not immediately catch the eye: In many werewolf texts the sexual element is not immediately evident. It has to be kept in mind, however, that sexuality was rarely openly discussed, certainly not by elderly people telling legends in the presence of a folklorist, who has just dropped by for a couple of hours to record tales about ‘superstition’. But wild hair stands for wild morals and, if the texts are read carefully enough, the werewolf does emerge as a metaphor for deviant male sexuality.122

For de Blécourt, the narrator did not have to explicitly point the researcher to a possible sexual interpretation of werewolf motifs, because in his opinion people had very specific images of the werewolf in their heads: […] since people (the folklorist excluded) readily understood the back rider as a (homo)sexual creature, while the Werewolf Husband legend gave them the opportunity to discuss (hetero)sexual assaults, and the Hungry Farmhand narrative was understood as denoting sodomy. The probable sexual

120 Strube, ‘dat was en Mann, de sich en Koefell ummehänge’, 19. 121 De Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’, 36. 122 De Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’, 38.

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meaning of the counter measure of hitting a werewolf below the belt, as was advised in Lower Saxony, was probably clear enough, too.123

And who are the narrators who told Wossidlo and his collection helpers about the werewolf? Following de Blécourt’s assumption that sexual elements resonate when telling a story about the werewolf, one would assume, given the narrative data of the nineteenth century, that men are more likely to speak more of sexually connoted characters than women. Evaluation of the gender distribution of the narrators confirms this thesis: in the legends examined here, 68 legends indicate the gender of the narrator. A quarter of the narrators are female, and three quarters are male. Feminine topics are the cut strap, the rescue from the werewolf in the attic and the female werewolf, about which women report with one exception. In summary, it can be said that the northern German werewolf legends examined here largely reflect social conflicts in a rural society, coupled with the desire to tell about the transformation of a person—man or woman—into a wild, seemingly unpredictable animal.

123 De Blécourt, ‘I Would Have Eaten You Too’, 39.

CHAPTER 4

Wolf-Shaped Otherness: Finnish Werewolf Legends Reflecting Suspension from Human Community Kaarina Koski and Pasi Enges

Finnish werewolf narratives share some central motifs with Swedish and Estonian traditions but with an original twist. Finnish tradition lacks the idea of the werewolf as a dangerous and bloodthirsty shape shifter. Instead, people are turned into wolves and find it hard to support themselves in animal shape, and the werewolf’s liminal position between human and animal makes it an outcast evoking pity rather than fear. In the type and motif index of Finnish belief legends, human–animal metamorphoses and thus also werewolf legends belong to the category of tales

K. Koski (B) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] P. Enges School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_4

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about sorcerers and witches.1 The person in the wolf shape is a victim of sorcery, or, in some cases, the voluntary metamorphosis is one more trick in a sorcerer’s arsenal. In the core areas of werewolf tradition, instead of being afraid of werewolves, people feared the possibility of being turned into one.2 In this article, we draw an outline of Finnish werewolf legends in the nineteenth century and explore the values and concerns discussed through them. The Finnish Literature Society’s archive houses more than 350 werewolf legends, recorded around the beginning of the twentieth century but predominantly during the active collecting campaigns of the 1930s. Most narrators, divided equally between women and men, were born between the years 1860 and 1880. The corpus consists of legends and local lore and does not include first-person accounts. The majority of the legends describe involuntary metamorphosis, i.e. sorcerers turning people into wolves. Less than 30 of the recorded legends are about sorcerers voluntarily turning themselves into wolves or bears.3 We approach Finnish werewolf tradition as part of the vernacular discourses of social otherness and community membership. Wolves have been connected with outcasts and outlaws in early Scandinavian traditions. The Anglo-Saxon ‘warg’ and Old Norse word for wolf, ‘vargr’, have both indicated an outsider or outcast. The outlaw was deprived of the right to be part of the human community, and he could even be hunted like the wolf.4 In nineteenth-century Finland, the wolf-ness of outcasts was only a metaphor but a relevant one. In nineteenth-century Finnish and Karelian belief tradition, the relation between the human

1 Unless stated otherwise, legend numbers in this article follow the Finnish belief legends’ motif index. See Marjatta Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index of Finnish Belief Legends and Memorates. Revised and enlarged edition of Lauri Simonsuuri’s Typen- und Motivverzeichnis der finnischen mythischen Sagen (Helsinki 1998). 2 J. Lukkarinen, ‘Tietoja susi-ihmisistä Inkerissä’, Virittäjä 5 (1914), 142. 3 Ulrika Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen på finskspråkigt område’, Budkavlen 47 (1968),

79–82. 4 Joonas Ahola, Outlawry in the Icelandic Family Sagas (Helsinki 2014), 87–88; Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf: An Introduction to Cluster Methodology’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 2; Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, ‘The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (July 2007), 282–283.

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community and its various opposites and outskirts, such as the otherworld and the forest wilderness, is a central issue.5 Inside the community, individuals deviating from social and Christian norms were paralleled with animals or other non-human beings. Regular prayers were important not only for safety but in order to stay human.6 The metamorphosis is a consequence of inappropriate behaviour and implemented magically by an offended person. In this context, werewolf legends discuss the justification of magical revenge and the possibility for an outcast to return to human society. Two contextual factors are particularly relevant to Finnish werewolf legends. First is the cultural geography of the division between eastern and western areas and Lapland in the north. Second is the legacy of local sorcerers.

Geographical Remarks Finnish werewolf tradition follows a geographical pattern. Voluntary shape shifting is found in Lapland, whereas legends about a sorcerer who turns people into wolves have dominant western and eastern types. In western Finland, a thief is turned into a wolf as a punishment. In the east the international wedding guests legend prevails, in which a beggar is turned away from a house where a wedding is being celebrated and changes the whole party into wolves. While both legend types are known almost throughout the country, their popularity is geographically distributed. In addition, there are motifs which focus on the reversal of the metamorphosis and the return of the former wolf to the human society. These were either narrated independently or added to the theft or wedding legends. Finnish folk culture is generally divided into eastern and western areas. The Lutheran church and western European folklore have had the strongest impact in the south-western parts of Finland, whereas the

5 See e.g. Laura Stark-Arola, Magic, Body, and Social Order. The Construction of Gender through Women’s Private Rituals in Traditional Finland (Helsinki 1998), 161–162; Lotte Tarkka, Songs of the Border People. Genre, Reflexivity, and Performance in Karelian Oral Poetry (Helsinki 2013), 370–371, 423, 496–497. 6 Kaarina Koski, ‘Folk Belief and the Lutheran Church in Nineteenth-Century Finland’, Cosmos 30 (2014), 78–80; Kaarina Koski, ‘Uskomusperinne ja kristillinen kasvatus 1800luvulla’, Kasvatus & Aika 5, No. 4 (2001), 18–19.

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wooded inlands towards the north-east preserved local traditions and the roles of sorcerers for longer. South-eastern areas, especially the Karelian Isthmus and Ingria in present-day Russia, had close contacts with eastern and southern neighbours.7 Ingrian folklore has been affected by harsh circumstances: serfdom prevailed until 1864 and the rural population experienced remarkable poverty.8 Influenced by Estonian culture, Karelia and Ingria form the core area of the eastern Finnish werewolf tradition. In the north, Lapland with its mixed population of Finns and Sámi differs significantly from the rest of Finland when it comes to environment and culture. Lapland witches, their ecstatic technique and even their ability to fly and change themselves into various animals were well known in the whole country.9 Werewolf legends are centered in the densely populated regions around the biggest cities of that time.10 Turku was the former capital on the south-western coast, and cities like Vyborg and St. Petersburg had a great impact in the east. Exposed to international contacts, these were also the regions where modernisation first started to affect rural people’s lives. The Finnish word for werewolf, ihmissusi, ‘human wolf’, is seldom used in vernacular metamorphosis stories. Legends simply mention “wolves”, or in eastern areas, vironsusi—literally ‘Estonian wolf’. In the early twentieth century, some scholars rejected the literal meaning of vironsusi as folk etymology and derived the word from German Werwolf and Swedish varulv, which are (so it was thought) based on the Latin word vir, ‘man’.11 A larger corpus of legends and analysis of their geographical distribution has more recently shown the connection to a popular belief that people were turned into wolves in Estonia (Viro in Finnish) and then

7 Matti Sarmela, Finnish Folklore Atlas. Ethnic Culture of Finland (Helsinki 2009), 10–12, 18–23. Karelian Isthmus was populated by Finns before the WWII, and Ladoga Karelia with Orthodox Karelian population also belonged to Finland. Due to the vivid interaction between different Finnic groups in that area, the eastern end of the “Finnish” werewolf tradition is ethnically diverse. It had a relevant contribution from Orthodox Karelians and Izhors neighboring the Lutheran Finnish population of Karelian Isthmus and Ingria. 8 Aili Nenola, Inkerin itkut—Ingrian laments (Helsinki 2002), 13–18. 9 T.I. Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset vuoteen 1945 II (Porvoo—Helsinki 1948), 344, 348. 10 See Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 94. 11 E.g. Kaarle Krohn, Suomalaisten runojen uskonto (Helsinki 1914), 169.

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ran to Finland.12 Legends mention this as the reason for the great number of wolves in eastern Finland. Yet, both in Finland and Estonia, people who were changed into wolves were not considered to be real wolves. Real wolves were discerned from these witch-made, fake, wolf-looking non-wolves which can be turned back to humans.13 The motif of wolves coming from Estonia had grounds in real life. In the nineteenth century, wolfpacks migrated from Estonia and Russia to Finland during harsh winters, cutting across the Finnish Gulf on ice.14 In Finland wolves killed not only cattle but a lot of people too, mostly children. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Finland and especially Southern Karelia had the highest rate of wolf deaths (175) of all European countries from which there are records of causes of death. The horror evoked by wolves led to an organised wolf hunt and temporary destruction of the whole species in Finland in the late nineteenth century.15

The Legacy of Sorcerers Finnish sorcerers or cunning men and women were generally called tietäjä, ‘the one who knows’. Especially in the east, they had public roles as recently as the nineteenth century, for example as protectors of weddings and bear hunts.16 Generally, tietäjäs had an ambiguous position in rural society: they could heal illnesses and find stolen goods but also cause mischief and execute harsh counter-sorcery. Due to the fear of magical revenge, a reputation of magical skills could help beggars to get better treatment from local householders.17 Werewolf legends about sorcerers turning thieves or inhospitable householders into wolves represent this discourse of social dynamics and magical harm. In the nineteenth 12 Felix Oinas, ‘Viron susi’, Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 58 (Helsinki 1978), 257–260. 13 Oskar Loorits, Grundzüge des estnischen Volksglaubens I. Skrifter utgivna av kungl.

Gustav Adolfs akademien för folklivsforskning 18, No. 1 (Lund 1949), 312, 314. 14 Antti Lappalainen, Suden jäljet (Helsinki 2005), 129. 15 Ibid., 13–14, 94–106, 138. 16 Tarkka, Songs of the Border People, 43–45; Vesa Matteo Piludu, The Forestland’s Guests. Mythical Landscapes, Personhood, and Gender in the Finno-Karelian Bear Ceremonialism (Helsinki 2019), 76. 17 Laura Stark, The Magical Self. Body, Society and the Supernatural in Early Modern Rural Finland (Helsinki 2006), 167–176, 180–193.

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century, the justification of revenge was largely disputed, since Christian ethics emphasised forgiveness.18 Involuntary and voluntary metamorphoses in Finnish werewolf legends relate to the division between Finnish tietäjäs and northern shamans. Tietäjäs implement involuntary metamorphoses as punishments, whereas voluntary metamorphosis belongs to the repertoire of the northern shaman-like witches. The tietäjä institution of rural villages developed from shamanistic practice. While shamans travelled to other worlds in a trance or took on an animal shape to carry out tasks, tietäjäs started using powerful words to force natural and supernatural powers and spirits to work for them. Traces of shamanistic imageries have been preserved in tietäjä tradition.19 Shaman-like sorcerers who fell into trances were still known in Lapland in the early twentieth century. These sorcerers formed the major part of people who, in legends, were said to turn themselves into wolves, bears, or other animals. The rural tietäjä type of sorcerer could, in turn, summon wolves or bears to attack people or cattle.20 Turning people into animals has not been in the Finnish tietäjä’s repertoire except for these werewolf legends.

Common Finnish Werewolf Legend Types The Theft Legend In the western type of Finnish werewolf legend, a sorcerer is asked to punish a man, usually because of theft. The thief is turned into a wolf for a specified period of time, usually between one and seven years. These legends are often embedded in the local past. In the south-western area, the sorcerer is frequently identified as the famous Rättäkitti. She was a farm mistress in Loimaa parish and widely known as a witch and prophet

18 Laura Stark, ‘Taikuus ja kristinusko. Suomalaisen maalaisyhteisön kaksi moraalijärjestelmää 1800-luvulla’, in: Pekka Laaksonen, Seppo Knuuttila and Ulla Piela (eds.), Kansanetiikkaa. Käsityksiä hyvästä ja pahasta (Helsinki 2005), 92–97. 19 Anna-Leena Siikala, Mythic Images and Shamanism. A Perspective on Kalevala Poetry (Helsinki 2004), 335–349. 20 Legend types D 916 “Summoning a wolf” and D 911 “Summoning a bear”. In eastern Finland in 1652, a sorcerer confessed to having summoned the wolves which had terrorized the area and killed 18 children. He was sentenced to death. See Lappalainen, Suden jäljet, 22–29.

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of doom.21 Local lore included a rumour about her turning the son of the local farm Pytty into a wolf.22 Meanwhile in Merikarvia parish, roughly 150 kilometers to the north-west, the werewolf legend is strongly connected to the farm of Romppanen, where the master was said to have a tail. Both cases go back to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The connection to local history has without doubt increased the legend’s attractiveness, but it also has other reasons for its popularity. While the main point of this legend could perhaps be to warn against stealing, there are features which give a more nuanced picture. The popularity of any legend type is increased by its potential to convey more than one argument and to discuss diverse delicate problems. These werewolf legends touched on various relevant concerns in nineteenth-century Finland. The following version summarizes some of the most common motifs: Here in Merikarvia someone stole 700 marks from Romppanen’s house. They did not know who did it. The master went to a sorcerer. – “Make the thief be a wolf for seven years”, Romppanen said to the sorcerer. When the master of the house went home, his own son had already left as a wolf. The son had stolen the money. After seven years he changed into a human again. He told them that he had taken a cat from a window to eat. He had a chair with a hole for a tail. When the boy had gone to drink as a wolf, he had seen the reflection of a human in the water.23

The thief appears to be the theft victim’s own son in almost all theft stories. This motif is only seldom present in other Finnish legend types in which the sorcerer solves a theft. It can be interpreted through the framework of the aforementioned moral discussions about counter-sorcery and the justification of revenge. In these legends, revenge is portrayed as an act which does not make good the original crime but which causes even more sorrow within the family:

21 See Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 93; Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index, 170–

172. 22 About the history and lore around Rättäkitti, see Heli Syrjälä, Tarinat ja elämä. Rättäkitti Tepon talossa 1800–1900-luvuilla (Turku 2015), http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fife2015080710782. 23 SKS. Merikarvia. Lauri Laiho 2770. 1936.

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[...] The mistress was happy on her way home, as she had got the thief punished. But when she got home, her joy turned into sorrow when the master told her what had happened. She realized that her son had stolen the meat. She would have given anything to get back her son. [...]24

However, more often than not, the parents knowingly punish their own son. In some cases the sorcerer explicitly inquires whether they really want this punishment carried out no matter who the thief was, even if it was their own son. Their answer is explicit: “Even my own son”.25 Home thievery was a real problem in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the patriarchal society, the house master owned the farm and its products while the mistress and children had no assets. They could not afford commodities from shops to restore their prestige except by pilfering from the farm. Home thievery was hard to prevent, and reporting it to the authorities would have harmed the family’s reputation.26 This may be one reason for the narratives to display the theft as a family affair. With modernization, tension between generations increased for several reasons. New values, working methods and ideologies adopted by the young questioned their parents’ experience and authority.27 In the legends, the discord between generations also stems from the son being fond of the maid, or from his being too religious or belonging to a religious sect.28 These reasons equally express fractures in the family unit. The nineteenth century witnessed simultaneous secularization and growing spirituality in Finnish villages. In the religious outlook, Christian customs were necessary for decent people and provided protection against all evil, but not everyone shared the same views.29 Belief legends reflect this dissent by emphasizing the importance of blessing and praying. Here, the charm does not work as long as the thief recites a blessing every morning before getting up. The parents or the witch try various methods to make him get up from his bed without the blessing. Finally they set his

24 SKS. Tyrvää. Erkki Kullaa 2. 1903. 25 SKS. Huittinen. K.F. Vakkila 1. 1887. 26 Laura Stark, Limits of Patriarchy (Helsinki 2011), 100–119. 27 Kati Mikkola, Tulevaisuutta vastaan. Uutuuksien vastustus, kansantiedon keruu ja

kansakunnan rakentaminen (Helsinki 2009), 168–170, 269. 28 Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 91. 29 Kaarina Koski, ‘Uskomusperinne ja kristillinen kasvatus’, 10–12.

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bedstraw on fire, and he jumps up from his bed and immediately turns into a wolf. In Loimaa, there was a witch called Rättäkitti, who performed all kinds of sorcery. A farmer was accused of stealing his father’s silver bowl. The father asked Rättäkitti to turn his son into a wolf. She tried, but it did not succeed, because the son always blessed himself when he woke up. But once they set fire to the bedstraw, the boy jumped out, cursed, and changed into a wolf. His mother used to take pieces of meat from the storehouse and throw them out for the wolves, since she thought her son would get to eat them. [...]30

The narrative which portrays the mother feeding her son who hides in the woods like a wolf is common and reminiscent of outlawry. Disappearing from home and turning into a beast for a determined time period parallels with imprisonment or banishment. Due to the wretched condition of prisons in Finland, there were plenty of escapees who terrorized society and often returned to their home region.31 Outlaws approached the community like wolves. Theft legends follow this line by always portraying the adult son as the one who is suspended from the community. This differs from the reality of home thievery which emerged in the late nineteenth century and mostly concerned female family members. It seems that the motif of metamorphosis, interesting but marginal in local belief tradition, has been harnessed to comment on diverse problems and family relations in changing cultural contexts. Theft legends discuss norm breach and consequence. The secretly fed wolf could refer to outlawry, but during the nineteenth century, disloyalty between generations within the same family became a more relevant theme. The parents in the legend are ready to punish their son harshly and even exclude him from the community. This motif questions the justification of the parent’s authority over their offspring. The mother’s compassion towards wolves has a shade of regret and guilt. Juxtaposing the revenge with mercy, the legends also discuss Christian customs and ethics in opposition to sorcery.

30 SKS. Turku. Heikki Haavio 293. 1947. 31 Alpo Juntunen, Suomalaisten karkottaminen Siperiaan autonomian aikana ja

karkotetut Siperiassa (Turku 1983), 26.

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The Wedding Guests Legend In rural communities, weddings and other big celebrations were expressions of wealth and hospitality. Refusal to entertain strangers as well as invited guests was a norm breach, even an insult.32 If we approach the wedding as a rite of passage, the feast is a rite of incorporation in which hospitality and shared food manifest inclusion in the community.33 Turning a beggar away from a wedding means excluding him from the community. The offended beggar’s revenge—the curse which turns them into wolves—is actually a magnified reproduction of what they did to him: expulsion from the community. Often the story ends here without commenting on the later fate of the unfortunate human-wolves at all. As a warning legend, the story is completed by showing what happens to the inhospitable, and the metamorphosis functions as the narrative’s resolution. A short version of the story goes as follows: When a man went to a house where there was a wedding and asked for lodging, and he was refused, he got angry and started to cast a spell so that everyone started to shed tears and then they started to jump towards the walls and in the end the man opened the door and they all ran out as wolves.34

Longer versions of this legend type have recurrent motifs such as a boy or a girl who travels with the beggar, and a more detailed description of the wedding party’s phased transformation into wolves. The next example includes a final episode in which a wolf returns to his human form: Once an old beggar went to a feast with his son, and he sent the son to beg for food, as the guests were dining. The beggars were not given anything to eat, so they set out to bewitch the guests. The beggar sent his son to take a look and when the son returned, he asked: “What were they doing there?” He answered: “They stared at each other with tears in their eyes.” Then the man told the son to look again and asked: “What are they doing now?” “They all jumped behind five tables.” He went to look for the third time and the beggar asked “What are they doing there now?” “They already had tails and they moved around on the floor and ran out 32 See Stark, The Magical Self , 165–177. 33 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago 1960), 165. 34 SKS. Kylmäkoski. KT 60. Vuorela, Oili 6. 1936.

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the door.” And so they ran into the woods and stayed there for a long time. When one of those wolves came to the house, to the storage shed door, the mistress threw it some bread, and it was pleased and went away. When he came out of the wolf’s form and turned into a human again, he returned to praise the mistress and told her how he had been about to die of hunger.35

The wedding party’s transformation is typically described in three phases, which the accompanying child or youth reports to the sorcerer. The pattern of three as a stylistic device hints to artistic elaboration of the narrative, which detaches it from immediate social reality. However, repeating actions thrice is also common in magic rituals and could be constitutive to the charm which is cast upon the wedding guests. In any case, these three phases mark crucial changes which the wedding guests go through. First, the guests start noticing nascent signs of change in each other and water starts running from their eyes. They may be reacting to the situation by bursting into tears, but crying is also an essential characteristic of Finnish werewolves and a motif which also appears in Swedish tradition.36 In the second phase, the wedding guests already act like beasts: wolf down their food, jump restlessly, or hide behind furniture. At the third look, they have totally lost their human appearance and finally abandon society. In some versions the insulted sorcerer equips the escaping but still incomplete wolves with tails by throwing brooms or other slender objects after them. This finalizes the outcome, as the tail is the only essential part of the wolf which does not have an equivalent in the human body.37 In the transformation back into a human, it is likewise the tail which is hardest to get rid of. In most of the recorded narratives, the wedding guests disappear into the woods for good and nothing more is told about them. Correspondingly, there are stories about werewolves turning back into their human form without any information about how they ended up being wolves in the first place, or with just a short remark that they had been part of such a transformed wedding party. Both these legend types connect to 35 SKS. Orivesi. Sirén, Signe. 205. 36 Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 86; Ella Odstedt, Varulven i svensk folktradition.

Skrifter utgivna genom Landsmåls- och folkminnesarkivet i Uppsala, Ser. B: 1 (Uppsala 1943), 65. 37 Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 86.

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an idea that some wolf packs were perhaps made of people. There are indeed some texts which present this incident as the origin of wolves or werewolves in this world. One of those texts is a sacred legend in which the beggar is God in disguise. Once rejected in the wedding house, God proceeds to a poor dwelling where good people share their scanty food with him. A little boy from this poor house is then sent to witness and report the gradual metamorphosis of the wedding party into wolves. The story presents the punishment as justified and ends like a proper myth of origin: “And from those times there have been wolves in this world.”38 A clearly distinguishable subtype of the eastern wedding guests legend describes a man searching for a pack of wolves in order to turn them back into wedding guests. In this subtype, the transformation is almost always stated to have happened in Estonia: An old man from Moloskovitsa told that once when he was young, a pack of 25 wolves with their mouths open came from the Estonian direction and passed the village of Rollokka. Shortly afterwards a man came from the same direction and asked if a certain kind of wolf pack had been seen. The man was guided to the track of the wolf pack, which the villagers had already guessed to be a cursed wedding party. After some time, the searcher returned through the village with a wedding party of 25 persons, who with the help of a sorcerer had been turned back into their human form. The party had been found “far east”.39

The foreign origin of werewolves is a widespread idea. In Swedish tradition, Sámis, Finns and Russians are the most probable malefactors, while in Estonia, Russian, Latvian or Lithuanian sorcerers are often blamed.40 In Finland, magical expertise is generally found in the north. The Sámi sorcerers (noaidis) have been known as especially powerful practisers of magic.41 The one who searches for wolves, however, only seldom comes 38 SKS. Jyväskylän pit. Jyväskylän lys. konv. 44. The birth of wolves also presented in SKS. Kangaslampi. Lukkarinen a) 196. 1912, mp. 1932 and SKS. Ruokolahti, Lilli Lilius 696. 1891. 39 Lukkarinen, 141. A similar story but about Latvians searching for a wolf pack in Estonia has been published by Loorits. Oskar Loorits, Grundzüge des estnischen Volksglaubens I. Skrifter utgivna av kungl. Gustav Adolfs akademien för folklivsforskning 18:1 (Lund 1949), 312–313. 40 Oinas, ‘Viron susi’, 259–260. 41 Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset, 348.

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from the north42 because werewolves are so strongly connected with Estonia. More connections between wolves and weddings are found in old Finnish and Ingrian wedding vocabulary. In the nineteenth century, Ingrian brides’ custom of making a couple of days’ visit to the groom’s home before the wedding was called preparing a wolf skin. Similarly, the bride and groom were called wolves when they visited their relatives together before the wedding. In the whole of Finland, couples living together without being married have been called wolves or a wolf couple. Linguists find behind these expressions an old custom of trying out a partner before taking the actual decision to marry.43 In Karelia, wolves also appear in rumours about Estonian wedding customs. According to them, in Estonia, young couples are made to run as wolves for some years.44 This happened at the point of the wedding when the bride leaves her home. “Then they gaze like mindless, burst into a howling cry and leave running like wolves.” The narrator emphasized that this was customary in Estonia, not in Karelia.45 Weddings were also known to be occasions which were especially magically threatened. In Karelian weddings, the spokesman needed to have magical skills to ward off any attempts to harm the bride and groom or their future which was in the making. A plan to ruin a wedding and the young couple’s luck could be motivated by revenge, envy, jealousy, or simply a desire to steal some of their luck and fertility to oneself.46 In Ingria, where the werewolf tradition was especially strong, the fear of being transformed into wolves was according to J. Lukkarinen one of the reasons why it was important to find a mighty sorcerer to protect the occasion.47 In Finland too there are legends about attempts to ruin the wedding or harm the wedded couple, for example by making them sick or mute. Sometimes the spokesman succeeds in preventing the sorcery.48

42 E.g. SKS. Metsäpirtti. Laiho, Lauri 1181. 1935. 43 R.E. Nirvi, Petojen nimitykset kosinta- ja hääsanastossa (Helsinki 1981), 11–16, 20–

21, 140–142. 44 SKS. Parikkala. Rouhiainen, Anna KRK 136:32. 45 SKS. Impilahti, Kitilä. Lukkarinen, J. a) 192. 1912, mp. 1932. 46 Matti Sarmela, Suomen perinneatlas (Helsinki 1994), 82–83. 47 Lukkarinen, ‘Tietoja susi-ihmisistä’, 142. 48 E.g. legend type D823; see Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index, 158–161.

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A few wedding guest legends from western Finland also allow a Lutheran minister to reverse the curse immediately.49 As a religious specialist, the priest or Lutheran minister is often a substitute or a rival of the local tietäjä.

Life in a Wolf Shape In Finnish and Karelian narratives, humans in a wolf shape remain essentially human even though they lack the normal human appearance and communicative skills. Transformation into wolves means being cast out of human society. People feared wolves and chased them away, especially near farms and cattle. It could be a risk for the wolf-shaped person to approach the community they had used to belong to. The emotional distress of being driven off is reported in one text by a woman who had been a wolf: I came home, under the window, to look at my own child. The hardest thing was when people chased me away and shouted shoo, shoo, shoo… Then I had to cry!50

The werewolf does not properly belong among the wolves either. As some narrators have explicitly stated about the man in wolf-shape, the wolves would eat him if they found out his real nature.51 He has to keep his distance from the other wolves while drinking from a pond, because his reflection in a surface of a water pool is human. He also smells like a human: [...] And when they were all howling together, he had to keep himself downwind, because they would have recognized him by the smell, as he was a human and only in the shape of a wolf.52

The inability to act like a wolf is most clearly expressed in the werewolf’s struggle to get food. It is a central motif of Finnish werewolf

49 SKS. Merikarvia. M. Roslin 18. 1892. 50 SKS. Rautu. L. Laiho 1184. 1935. 51 Lukkarinen, ‘Tietoja susi-ihmisistä’, 141. 52 SKS. Huittinen. K.F. Vakkila 1. 1887.

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legends that werewolves are not allowed to harm humans or their livestock.53 The reason is not specified, but werewolves are thus determined to be harmless. In accordance with older southern European traditions, we infer that eating human flesh would ruin their chance to return to human society.54 In their human form again, they tell how hungry they had been in wolf shape. Descriptions of their diet include poetic metaphors of nothingness: during all the years as wolves, they had eaten nothing but northern wind, one knot of a string, or a lousy cat.55 In Ingria, werewolf packs were said to run with their mouths open towards the wind. Lukkarinen has concluded that wind is their main sustenance. According to a Sámi narrator, the wind prevents the hungry wolf’s bowel from tangling up with his backbone.56 A cat snatched from a window is regularly mentioned as rescuing the werewolf from starving. In European witchcraft discourses where cats could be witches in disguise and witches could be harmed by attacking the cat,57 we would be able to interpret the cat motif as the cursed person’s aggression towards the sorcerer. In Finnish tradition, however, the connection between sorcerers and cats is practically absent.58 Presented in the context of hunger, the cat represents a poor meal. The cat motif also illustrates that the werewolf looks for food around towns and villages. Abstaining from harming livestock, it snatches prey which has no economic value to people.59 Otherwise, the werewolf only gets food if it is given to him. When the werewolf is said to live among other wolves, he is fed as a member of the pack. Finally, however, 53 E.g. SKS. Maria Häkli KRK 125:11. 54 Richard Gordon, ‘Good to Think: Wolves and Wolf-Men in the Graeco-Roman

World’, in: de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories, 38–39. 55 E.g. SKS. Elimäki. Kujala, Antti 140. 1915; SKS. Ruskeala. Matti Moilanen 494.1936; SKS. Metsäpirtti. L. Laiho 1182. 1935. The Finnish word for worthless and useless, rupinen, would be literally translated as ‘scabby’. 56 Lukkarinen, ‘Tietoja susi-ihmisistä’, 142; Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset, 527. 57 See Willem de Blécourt: ‘“Keep That Woman Out!” Notions of Space in Twentieth-

Century Flemish Witchcraft Discourse’, History and Theory 52 (October 2013), 363, 377–378. 58 In some legends, the witch gets the corresponding injury which is made to the creature or object (e.g. hayfork) which represents her. Cat shape, however, is very rare in this context (Legend types D1721, D1731). 59 Historian Antti Lappalainen has estimated that people hardly resented losing a cat but they could not tolerate wolves killing dogs. Lappalainen, Suden jäljet, 129.

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he is expected to make his own contribution to the hunting or else be eaten himself. Here, again, he is saved by snatching a cat, “even though wolves do not generally find a cat any kind of good prey.”60 The usual alternative to starving is to be fed by humans. In the legends, the wolf looks sad or sheds tears when it approaches a human as if begging him to share his lunch. The poor creature evokes compassion and gets some meat or bread.61 Especially in the theft stories, the mother of the transformed young man either recognizes and feeds him or throws meat to wolves regularly hoping that her son might get some. Compassion toward werewolves and the possibility of turning them back into humans makes it important to recognise them among real wolves and not to harm them. In particular Ingrian tradition includes tips on how to discern a werewolf from real wolves. A white collar or a white spot on the chest as a reminiscence of bridal outfit make it easy to recognize the human in wolf form. Werewolves are also said to run with their mouths open, and their legs to bend differently than real wolves’ legs, looking stiff.62 Werewolves have also been stated to have more toes than real wolves or even to wear rings and belts.63 Generally, in Finnish as well as Swedish and Estonian tradition, jewellery or belts have been found under the skin only when a wolf has been killed and skinned.64 According to the legends, it is distressing to find out that the freshly shot wolf was, after all, a human.65 Estonian folklorist Merili Metsvahi has suggested that in Estonia, this well-known motif even led to unwillingness to kill wolves in the nineteenth century, just to be sure not to kill people.66 In Finland, werewolf tradition was not that influential. Hatred towards wolves had

60 SKS. Tyrvää. Erkki Kullaa 2. 1903. 61 E.g. SKS. Kivennapa. E. Pelkonen KRK 134:100; SKS. Rautu. L. Laiho 1185. 1935. 62 Lukkarinen, ‘Tietoja susi-ihmisistä’, 141–142; Oinas, ‘Viron susi’, 260. In Swedish

tradition one can discern the Lutheran minister from the wolf pack by his white collar and the pregnant bride by her round belly. Bengt af Klintberg, The types of the Swedish folk legend (Helsinki 2010), 308. 63 SKS. Virolahti, Virojoki. Alava, V. IVB. 40. 1889; SKS. Impilahti. KRK 155. Vanninen, Aino 111. 64 a f Klintberg, The Types, 308–309; Merili Metsvahi, ‘Estonian Werewolf History’, in: de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories, 215–216. 65 E.g. SKS. Impilahti, Kitilä. Lukkarinen, J. a) 192. 1912, mp. 1932. 66 Metsvahi, ‘Estonian Werewolf History’, 215–216. In Karelia, bear meat was avoided

for the same reason: because bear was a transformed human being. Pertti Virtaranta:

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grown together with the number of wolf deaths, and in the 1880s, people strongly demanded the state to organize effective wolf hunts, especially in western provinces. In this context, metamorphosis into a wolf was not only a suspension from the human community, but meant being treated like an enemy.

Turning Back into a Human and Life Thereafter In the theft legends, the time period as a wolf is usually predetermined, and thus the metamorphosis back to a human eventually happens when the time is complete. The determined time ranges between three days and 110 years, which is exceptional. Usually, the thief must run as a wolf for seven or nine years.67 Besides the time limit, the most common way to reverse the curse is to feed the werewolf with bread. [...] The boy’s mother used to take pieces of meat from the storehouse and throw them out to the wolves, thinking that her son could eat them. Indeed, the son who had been turned into a wolf often visited the storehouse and ate the meat. Once the mother went to the storehouse again but there was no meat left, so she took some bread, blessed it and threw it out. The son ate it and returned to his human form.68

Human and non-human foods are relevant symbols of belonging: whose food you ingest defines whose community you belong to.69 Bread was regarded as the cornerstone of human culture. Agriculture is an exclusively human endeavor, and the process from sowing to baking was permeated by Christian blessings. Also a mere blessing is sometimes said to reverse the curse.70 Similarly, depending on cultural area and local food ways, any food processed to fit human consumption can have the same

Vienan kansa muistelee (Helsinki 1958), 313. See also Vesa Matteo Piludu, The Forestland’s Guests. Mythical Landscapes, Personhood, and Gender in the Finno-karelian Bear Ceremonialism (Helsinki 2019), 67–68, 255. 67 Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 92–93. 68 SKS. Turku. Heikki Haavio 293. 1947. 69 The same point is expressed e.g. in legends about visits to underground beings: you must not eat anything while visiting non-human beings. Otherwise you would not be able to come back any more. Legend type M 321. 70 E.g. SKS. Pielavesi. Hannes Pulkkinen KRK 113:161.

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impact on werewolves, for example dried fish in the northern areas.71 A relevant line is also drawn between cooked and raw meat. [...] And when he came home again at Christmas when his mother went to the storehouse on Christmas Eve, he went to sit on the stairs of the storehouse and his mother threw a cooked pork leg to him. And as he got cooked meat he popped into the bathhouse to change into a human. [...].72

Besides the human food saving the poor wolf from starving, human compassion is a vital element in the returning process. [...] A man was ploughing his slash-and-burn area, and he had a campfire in the middle of it, and he was eating by the fire. A wolf came to the opposite side of the fire. And as the man was eating, the wolf cried. The man thought: it must be hungry since it cries like that. The man cut a piece of bread, threw it over the fire to the wolf and said: eat bread, don’t cry! The wolf turned into a human and said: I was so hungry, for fifteen years I have eaten nothing but one cat from an oven side window of a house, and had you not given me this bread, tonight I would have eaten your horse.73

As in the example text below, the man sometimes declares after returning into his human form again that he had been so hungry that he would have eaten the person’s horse or even his own mother if he had not been fed: [...] The following Christmas when the farm mistress went to fetch some meat from the storage house, a wolf came, and she threw a pork leg to it. Another year passed. Then the son came home in his human shape again, and he told that if his mother had not thrown meat to him last Christmas, he would have eaten her.74

We interpret that the werewolf had been on the edge of breaking his abstinence from human flesh, which would have made him lose his human 71 E.g. Inari. Samuli Paulaharju 26399. 1934. 72 SKS. Huittinen. K.F. Vakkila 1. 1887. 73 SKS. Rantasalmi. Vesterlund, a. 33. 1888. 74 SKS. Merikarvia. L. Laiho 2720. 1936.

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essence and become a wolf without restraint for the rest of his life. The threat includes a moral: had there not been compassion and generosity towards the outcast, he would have turned against the human community and remained its enemy. It is noteworthy that it is their lack of compassion and generosity which changed the wedding guests into wolves in the first place. The same virtues are the key to reversing the curse. When the werewolf approaches a man at a campfire, it is often mentioned that he is offered bread on the knife blade. In Ingria, the wolf takes the whole knife with him and runs away; later the man who had fed the wolf finds his knife in a shop and the shopkeeper thanks or even rewards him for reversing the curse. Once a man had offered a wolf some bread from the point of his knife. It happened to be an Estonian tradesman turned into a wolf. The wolf gulped down the knife, too. After turning back to human again the Estonian tradesman hung the knife on the wall of his shop and pondered if anyone should come and claim it. The owner of the knife happened to visit the shop and wondered how his own knife could be there. The tradesman rejoiced and revealed to him the story of the knife, and promised the man free iron and salt for the rest of his life, because he had made him human again.75

This legend type evidently illustrates eastern influence in Finnish tradition and has analogies in Estonian folklore.76 The knife also functions as an identifying object also in cases when a drowned wolf is found and, when skinned, has a belt and a knife under the fur.77 Especially in western Finland, former werewolves can be marked with a tail. It is often explained that when the transformation back to human begins to happen, the wolf retreats to a storehouse or a sauna (bathhouse). Like any magical procedure, the transformation should not be seen by others. If people rush in too early and witness the process while incomplete, the transformation can be interrupted before the removal of the tail.

75 Lauri Simonsuuri, Kansa tarinoi (Helsinki 2006), 153. Orig. SKS. Virolahti, Alava IV 1341. 1881. 76 Simonsuuri, Kansa tarinoi, 152–153; Oinas, ‘Viron susi’, 259. 77 E.g. T. I. Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset, 367.

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[...] A couple of weeks after this [getting fed] he began to gradually turn into his human form again. But because he could not get any clothes in time, people saw him before he had completely turned into a human and that’s why he had to bear some mark of his time as a wolf. A big furry tail was left to him as such a mark, but this boy lived several decades thereafter. In general, he was thought to be a decent man, although some people mocked him and called him “Tail-geezer”.78

We could interpret the tail as a stigma which follows the former werewolf—or a former prisoner or outcast—for the rest of their lives. However, people with tails can be portrayed as quite respectable people, for example farmers or craftsmen, who have a special seat with a hole for the tail. Legends even tell about holes crafted to the person’s regular pew in church. [...] And the son went through the window and soon howled like a wolf. He spent a year as a wolf and then came home, but a tail remained in his bum and did not disappear. At that time people still went to the old church, and they had to make a hole in the pew so that he could sit.79

In both eastern and western areas, legends are told about a man named Romppanen and the history of his tail. The house of Romppanen was located in Merikarvia parish in the western coast.80 While the greater part of the tradition claims that he spent some time as a wolf as a result of stealing from his father, there are also stories about a great wedding in the house Romppanen where a beggar was not fed. Other versions include Romppanen’s quarrel with a Lapland sorcerer or his general bad behavior. In the core of this tradition, there is clearly a man with a tail, and local lore has decorated his life with various stories. According to archived oral information, the tail was hereditary for a few generations,81 and the chair with the hole used to be on display in the house in the 1880s.82 Also, 78 SKS. Tyrvää, Tapiola. Kullaa, Erkki. 2. 1903. 79 SKS. Merikarvia. Aili Laanti 731. 1936. 80 The Romppanen house turns up in documents at the turn of the eighteenth century and people of that surname have lived in the same Köörtilä village least to the end of the nineteenth century. Martti Santavuori, Merikarvian historia 1900-luvun alkuun (Merikarvia 1961), 600, 605, 614. 81 SKS. Merikarvia. Porin tyttölyseo. Sirkka Palander 2030. 1936. 82 SKS. Merikarvia. L. Laiho 2720. 1936.

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the cognomen Romppanen was given to the man and eventually to the house too because of the tail which was called romppo.83 This enigmatic word does not mean anything in Finnish dialects. But one narrator has explained that Romppanen means ‘With-a-tail’, but at that time people spoke Swedish.84 Indeed, the Swedish word for backside, ‘rumpa’, has in some contexts the additional meaning of ‘tail’.85 In some FinlandSwedish dialects, the pronunciation can correspond with romppa. Rumpa, or in Finland-Swedish dialects rompå also denotes a long-shaped landform or a field located at the farthest end.86 Thus, the ‘tail’ may as well have originally referred to the farm and not to the man. The general view conveyed in the legends is that—with the exception of a small yet embarrassing physical deviance—the former wolves have returned to human life uninjured and able to live as contented and respected members of the community.

Voluntary Metamorphosis While the topics of a sorcerer turning either a thief or a whole wedding party into wolves form a rather compact and regionally clustered corpus of legends, in the case of voluntary metamorphosis the situation is quite the opposite. Accounts of humans turning themselves into wolves are few, vary widely, and seem to be infrequently scattered around the country. However, in Lapland and especially among the Sámi people, more coherent ideas on intentional self-metamorphosis can be found. Both in southern and northern Finland, economic benefit and revenge are the two prominent reasons for the metamorphosis. In the legends these two are often intertwined. However, in the southern parts of the country the werewolf mostly is – deservedly or not – the victim of revenge and incapable as a beast. In the north, in turn, the revenger himself takes

83 SKS. Merikarvia. HAKS. Anna-Maija Kouki 9162. 1939; SKS. Merikarvia. A.Laanti 820. 1936. 84 SKS. Merikarvia. M. Roslin 18. 1892. 85 Svensk Ordbok. Utarbetad vid Språkdata, Göteborgs universitet (Stockholm 1987).

The Swedish meaning has also been mentioned in Wolf, ‘Varulvsföreställningen’, 87. 86 We thank professor Marko Lamberg for this information. See ‘Kattrumpan, Rumpan’ in: Kurt Zilliacus and Michaela Örnmark (eds.), Namnledslexicon. Finland’s Swedish place names [online] (Helsinki 2007). Available in: https://kaino.kotus.fi/svenska/ledlex/ (28 May 2021).

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on the character and full abilities of a wolf. The hatred behind this activity may be based on a competitive situation between individuals or groups earning their livelihood on same area and from same natural resources: Once a certain man had for some reason become angry with another man and he had threatened: “A time will come for your calves to run for their lives!” Some time passed. A big wolf started to move about in the area, and it did a lot of mischief. Strangely enough, it attacked only this man’s reindeers, and not the others. It was reckoned that the enemy had turned into a wolf and harassed this man’s reindeers. Once again, the man is herding his reindeers and notices one female reindeer staring in one direction with its nostrils quivering. The man guesses that the wolf was there at that moment, loads his gun with a silver coin and shoots. A moaning human voice is heard. The man becomes scared that he has killed a human being and moves to another place with his herd. Not until the next day does he have the courage to go and look. A man’s body is not to be found, but instead a carcass of a huge wolf is lying on the ground. The man goes to skin it – and under the skin he finds a human body.87

More often, however, the opposing parties in the conflict represent different economic or ethnic backgrounds, for example farm owners and nomads, or different Sámi groups. Also, curiosity or simply willingness to have some fun can be motives for voluntary metamorphosis. It has been told that Sámi youngsters sometimes turned themselves into wolves just to cause a stampede among reindeer Sámis’ herds. The ability to turn oneself into various animals was a central part of a Sámi sorcerer’s expertise, but common people could do the same by practising quite simple magic.88 Once Stuorra-Jovnna (“Big John”) wanted to be a wolf. He went into the woods and there he circled around a warped tree until he turned into a wolf. Then he went to the reindeer herders’ villages and mauled their reindeers. The reindeer herders persued him but without any result. Often, he had hard times and only a narrow escape saved his own life. But then he got bored of living a wolf’s life, and he wished to turn into human again. Now he noticed that his fixed time, the two weeks he was to be

87 SKS. Inari. Aili Kekoni 10.1948. 88 E. Itkonen, ‘Lappalainen kansanrunous’ in: Matti Kuusi (ed.), Suomen kirjallisuus I.

Kirjoittamaton kirjallisuus (Helsinki 1963), 561–563; Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset, 367.

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a wolf, was about to expire the same night, and the place where he had turned himself into wolf was beyond nine wide swampy valleys. He had to get there to release himself from the enchantment, otherwise he would remain a wolf for the rest of his life. He started running at a furious speed and during that evening hour he ran through the nine valleys to the same warped tree where he had turned himself into a wolf. He circled around the tree in the opposite direction to before and so the wolf’s appearance was shaken off and he became Stuorra-Jovnna again.89

Stuorra-Jovnna Jomppanen is a real historical person who lived in 1794–1874 in Utsjoki, northernmost Finland. In the example above, he is curious to find out what it is like to live as a wolf. However, the legend can also be interpreted as a commentary on problematic social relationships between groups engaged in different ways of livelihood. Stuorra-Jovnna was one of the last wild deer hunters in the area, whose way of life was threatened by the expansion of large-scale reindeer husbandry. He was also one of the main protagonists of later local legends. In this legend, by acquiring the beastly qualities of the reindeer herders’ worst enemy, he steps outside the human community and confronts the representatives of a rival livelihood. He is temporarily a total outsider and hunted by humans. Even so, he decides to not remain a wolf, but instead returns to human society through his own will and skill.90

Conclusions The archived collections from the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Finland show a werewolf legendry which discusses relevant moral questions of the time. However, these legends also include enigmatic motifs which are not explained in the text and do not contribute to the plot. Besides the reason for not eating human flesh, which we have interpreted in the light of international parallels, there are other details which remain unexplained in the context of Finnish belief tradition. For example, the frequent association of metamorphosis in theft legends with Christmas Eve is not commented upon in any way, and certain characteristics of the werewolves—running toward the wind with mouth open 89 SKS. Utsjoki. Jalvi, Pedar 38. 1914. 90 Marjut Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut. Tenonsaamelaisten ympäristökertomusten

maailmat (Helsinki 2004), 172–175.

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and shedding tears—are given differing explanations in the archived texts. The logic or meaning of these details seems to have been irrelevant to the narrators. Yet some other causal relationships have been relevant. For example the succession from theft to curse is explained carefully with dialogue and emotional reactions, as well as the bewitching episode in the wedding feast. The legends have focused on those details which served the relevant moral points in the early twentieth century. Obviously, the tradition has undergone changes in which some earlier meanings had been cast aside. The materials available today do not reveal them. In the early twentieth century, werewolf legends from western Finland discuss tensions in the family unit and the moral legitimacy of magical practices. In eastern areas they emphasize the importance of compassion towards beggars. In both regions, individuals or groups who have not followed the norms of human conduct are punished in the legends by being cast out of the community. By definition, narratives not only describe what happens but also evaluate the incidents and take sides.91 Sorcery is always connected to some social conflict which is discussed yet not solved through these legends. The eastern wedding guests legends generally portray the punishment of the inhospitable host as justified. This can be concluded from the narrative structure which places the punishment as the resolution of the story. In addition, God is sometimes presented in the role of the turned-down beggar. Such an interpretation probably had resonance among the poor rural population in the east. Approached from another point of view, the story also portrays itinerant beggars as hostile and vengeful, thus spreading suspicion towards strangers and increasing the need for protective magic. Theft legends of the western area, in turn, quite often question the justification of the magical revenge. Theft is a crime and needs to be punished, but the unexpected outcome of the revenge and the remorseful actions of the mother suggest that the magical intervention turned out to be a bad idea after all. Forgiveness instead of revenge was motivated by Christian outlook, which in the nineteenth century had more influence in western than in eastern Finland. The Sámi tradition of voluntary shapeshifting can be seen as a commentary on social competition and ethnic relations. Even if it can be characterized as a leisure activity, the themes of otherness, social norms

91 William Labov, Language in the inner city (Philadelphia 1972), 363–366.

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and even revenge are present. Attacking another’s herd as a wolf can be a revenge or the crime to be revenged. The violent death of a shapeshifting neighbour when caught in act is not necessarily an accident; silver bullets are only used for supernatural targets. These stories remind listeners that the extraordinary capacities of the Lapland sorcerer come with a cost. Stepping outside the human community means giving up human assets, rights, and protection. Finnish werewolf legendry involves international motifs which have been modified to serve relevant discussions in local communities. Slightly different concerns have dominated in western, eastern and northern areas of Finland, but in all of them, the wolf shape denotes the state of being outside the human community. The legends place in the edge of the society not only criminals, beggars and sorcerers, but also coldhearted householders who reject the less fortunate. They discuss humanity through frameworks of communal norms and compassion.

CHAPTER 5

Werewolves in Lithuanian Folklore Sources of the End of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries J¯ urat˙e Šlekonyt˙e

For centuries Lithuanians have been telling stories about humans shapeshifting into wolves. It has been demonstrated that a human being is turned into or shapeshifts into the animal that is most respected in that particular country.1 It is likely that this kind of respect was caused by the proximity of humans and these predators, resulting in their specific interrelation. Wolves were abundant in the territory of Lithuania, especially at the end of the seventeenth century; their population increased 1 Wilhelm Hertz, Der Werwolf: Beitrag zur Sagengeschichte (Stuttgart 1862), 133.

J. Šlekonyte˙ (B) Department of Folk Narrative, Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius, Lithuania e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_5

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during the beginning of the nineteenth century as well.2 These predators attracted negative attitudes due to the damage they caused to the farms of peasants, yet at the same time they were respected. Continuous contact between humans and wolves is witnessed in memories registered in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, including descriptions of the appearance and the behaviour of the beasts.3 Many belief legends were recorded at that time. For instance, it was believed that a wolf met on a road would do no harm to a human being if the human paid their respects by greeting and bowing to the animal.4 In fear of suffering the harm inflicted by wolves, it was forbidden to mention them while eating5 or on the first day of taking stock animals to pasture.6 Here, it seems, the belief in analogous magic is in force—an action by a person provokes a similar action by a beast. The prohibition of mentioning a wolf as it may invite the beast is illustrated by a proverb that has survived until today: ‘vilka˛ mini, vilkas cˇia’—‘talk of the wolf and it will appear’.7 As a result, substitute names were used for wolves. For instance, a wolf was referred to as ‘the wild one’.8 There are more than thirty euphemistic names for wolves which show respectful fear of this beast.9 In order to avoid harm inflicted by wolves on stock animals, one animal would to be ritualistically sacrificed to the wolves. When stock animals were taken to pasture for the first time that year, the shepherd circled the herd several times and threw an egg at it every time; the animal hit by the egg was considered the wolf’s share.10 Thus there were various

2 Kazimieras Baranauskas, ‘Vilkas’, Visuotin˙e lietuviu ˛ enciklopedija, 25 (Vilnius 2014), 174. 3 Bronislava Kerbelyte, ˙ Lietuviu˛ pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, 4 (Kaunas 2009),

164–167. 4 LTR 4155(67), 3670(16), 1434(63) (LTR = Lithuanian Folklore Archives). 5 Prane˙ Dunduliene, ˙ Lietuvos etnologija (Vilnius 1991), 234. 6 Balys Buraˇcas, Lietuviu ˛ kaimo paproˇciai (Vilnius 1993), 41. 7 Jurgis Elisonas, ‘Vilkas tautosakoje’, M¯ usu˛ tautosaka, 2 (Kaunas 1930), 127–144,

esp. 129. 8 Jonas Balys, Lietuviu ˛ kalendorin˙es švent˙es (Vilnius 1993), 168; Liudvikas Adomas Juceviˇcius, Raštai (Vilnius 1959), 162. 9 Birute˙ Jasi¯ unaite, ˙ Marius Smetona, ‘Eufemistiniai vilko pavadinimai’, Tautodail˙es metraštis, 26 (2014), 20–25, esp. 20. 10 Prane˙ Dunduliene, ˙ Lietuviu˛ kalendoriniai ir agrariniai paproˇciai (Vilnius 1979), 85.

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magical ways to ingratiate oneself with the wolves and so avoid the harm they might cause. Some of the most impressive belief legends are those about humans turning into werewolves. The topic of werewolves has been widely explored: starting with the first indications in historical sources or folklore and continuing up to the images found in contemporary literature.11 However, Lithuanian folklore data on werewolves rarely attracts the attention of researchers. The image of werewolves was extensively discussed in 12 one chapter of a monograph by Lithuanian folklorist Norbertas Velius. ˙ In other works, the picture of a Lithuanian werewolf was analysed rather fragmentally: it was discussed in the research comparing Lithuanian belief legends with their Slavic counterparts,13 attention was paid in works focusing on folklore genres involving the wolf,14 the state of a werewolf was considered from the perspective of religious studies.15 Therefore this analysis will contribute to a more extensive definition of the image of a Lithuanian werewolf. Before starting to analyse texts of Lithuanian belief legends about werewolves, I will firstly provide some contextual data by discussing the first historical sources where werewolves are related to Lithuanians. I will give an overview of the circumstances surrounding the written record of Lithuanian belief legends about werewolves. Finally, I will discuss the texts of belief legends, including the narrator’s emotional response and their attitude to the belief legend. Belief legends about werewolves were mainly written down in the territory that coincides with that of the contemporary Republic of Lithuania. Nevertheless, by introducing data about werewolves form earlier periods

11 As there are many sources of literature concerning the topic, I will only mention one of the most recent collection of articles: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015). 12 Norbertas Velius, ˙ Mitin˙es lietuviu˛ sakmiu˛ b¯ utyb˙es [Mythical Creatures of Lithuanian Belief Legends] (Vilnius 1977), 268–279. 13 Richard A. Ridley, ‘Wolf and Werewolf in Baltic and Slavic Tradition’, The Journal

of Indo-European Studies, 4 (1976), 321–332. 14 IO. Xl konite, ‘Poqemy Gediminacy ppicnilc elezny clav nckie iccledovani , xv, (Mockva 2002), 494–514, esp. 503.

volk’, Balto-

15 Gintaras Beresneviˇcius, ‘Meditacija, kontempliacija, ekstremalios b¯ ukles’, ˙ Lietuva ir Rytai. Rytai–Vakarai: komparatyvistin˙es studijos, IV [Kult¯urologija, t. 12] (Vilnius 2005), 409–412.

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(sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the territorial boundaries considered were expanded, involving Livonia16 and Lithuania Minor (or Prussian Lithuania).17 Even though the limits of the chronological analysis extend from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the main focus will be on the folklore material of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beliefs about werewolves registered in earlier times will serve to provide a particular cultural context.

Records About Werewolves in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries The earliest records of people turning into wolves take us several centuries back. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Livonia was famous throughout Europe as a country abundant with werewolves.18 Some of the information might be related to Lithuanians who lived in the neighbourhood. Olaus Magnus, a Swedish historian, cartographer, catholic archbishop, who was interested in customs and traditions, nature and curiosities of peoples in Northern Europe, described them in his work Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555). Three chapters are dedicated to discussion of beliefs about werewolves in the region on the east coast of the Baltic Sea. He writes that, on the night of the Nativity, a great number of werewolves gather in Prussia, Livonia, and Lithuania in particular places and rage around furiously, thus inflicting greater harm on the local people than true wolves. The werewolves were said to break 16 Livonia is a historical region located on the east coast of the Baltic Sea; these are now territories of the Republic of Latvia and Republic of Estonia. 17 Lithuania Minor (or Prussian Lithuania) is a historical ethnographic region of Prussia, later East Prussia. It included north-eastern territories of the province of Prussia inhabited by lietuvininkai (Prussian Lithuanians). Germans are familiar with it as one of the provinces of East Prussia—province of Lithuania, Prussian Lithuania. The territory had been long dominated by the Lithuanian ethnographic group lietuvininkai. Prussians also used to live here but, unfortunately, they were affected by the processes of assimilation much earlier and in much harsher terms. When colonial Germans started moving into the territories in the thirteenth century, the locals started quickly losing their language and customs, hence the extinction of the Prussian language in the eighteenth century. 18 Stefan Donecker, ‘The Werewolves of Livonia: Lycanthropy and Shape-Changing in Scholarly Texts, 1550–1720’, Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 1 (2012), 289–322. The southern border of Livonia as determined in the fourteenth century mainly coincides with the contemporary border of the Republic of Lithuania and the Republic of Latvia.

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down the doors of houses and kill people and other living creatures that they found inside. It was believed that a person who accepted a glass of beer offered by an experienced magician could be turned into a werewolf, if the magician pronounced particular magical words before the act of drinking. This narrative is interesting as it mentions turning into a werewolf by means of charmed beer. Similar narratives were registered in Lithuanian folklore at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, testifying to the continuity of this belief. Olaus Magnus also writes about the belief that werewolves had an annual meeting where several thousands of them would gather in ruins between Lithuania and Courland. They are said to have competed in jumping over a wall.19 Some decades later, the writing of Caspar Hennenberger, a Prussian historian, geographer and cartographer, and a priest transfers us to the territory of Prussia. He claims to have heard that in 1577, in the area of Dominaw,20 there was a shepherd named Stasius, over a hundred years old, who would walk bent and without a cap. He believed himself to be a werewolf and people believed that he could bring misfortune upon their cattle (Erklärung der preußischen größeren Landtafeln oder Mappen, 1595).21 This tale comes from Lithuania Minor. Despite the fact that some Prussians still lived in the area and that the old shepherd is indicated as a Prussian, it is likely that lietuvininkai (Prussian Lithuanians) who also lived in the territory would have also been referred to as Prussian.22 This theory is further supported by the fact that Caspar Hennenberger knew Lithuanian. His interests included the geography of Prussia and designing of maps. During his journeys, he not only gathered cartographic data but also met local people and recorded the beliefs of the Prussian ethnic group, then already on the brink of extinction, as well as those of the lietuvininkai. 19 Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome: de Viottis 1555), 642. In more detail: Donecker, ‘The Werewolves of Livonia’, 296–297; Merili Metsvahi, ‘Estonian Werewolf History’, in: De Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories, 206–227, esp. 207; Claude Lecouteux, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages (Rochester 2003), 118–120. 20 The area of Dominaw (German Domnau, 1945–1946, Russian Domnay, since 1946—Domnovo) is a settlement in the southern part of contemporary Kaliningrad, region of Pravdinsk. 21 Baltu ˛ religijos ir mitologijos šaltiniai 2 (Vilnius 2001), XVI amžius, 325–326. 22 The ethnographic group of lietuvininkai was formally named in the sixteenth

century.

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The German Johann David Wunderer travelled in Samogitia23 in the sixteenth century. In his book Reisen nach Denmark, Russland und Schweden (1589) he described beliefs that Samogitians lived like beasts without faith and religion, and not only that they worshiped animals and snakes, but also that, with the help of the devil, they could shapeshift into wolves and bears. In the shape of wolves, they could assault travellers and tear them to pieces.24 It is likely that the author based his attitude towards the local inhabitants on other written sources which portrayed the locals as uneducated and superstitous pagans. His attitude absorbed from written sources interweaves with his personal impressions of the journey. However, the idea that the author conveyed authentic local beliefs is supported by the information provided in his description. Samogitians are said to be able to shapeshift into bears. Indeed, the cult of the bear had been especially strong in the area for several centuries.25 In witchcraft trials in Lithuania from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, cases of witches accused of turning into werewolves are very rare. Attention should be paid to one case, dated 1666, where a Samogitian woman was accused of being a witch. The woman confessed that she had shapeshifted into a wolf before St. John’s Day, that she had dragged a neighbour’s animal out of the shed and slaughtered it, and that she had then taken some of the guts and liver and buried them in the pasture so that the neighbour’s stock animals would not prosper. She also admitted to killing a one-year heifer in the yard of the manor another night and leaving it undevoured. On the third night, she confessed that she had strangled a colt in the stables.26 This is, probably, the first extensive piece of information indicating that turning into a werewolf was considered to be some form of witchcraft. It should be noted that the woman carried

23 Samogitia is an ethnographical region of Lithuania, also a geographical and historical region in the West of Lithuania. 24 Baltu ˛ religijos ir mitologijos šaltiniai, 2, 638. 25 As a significant animal in Samogitia, the bear is often depicted on the coats of arms

of the region. For instance, the coat of arms of Samogitia shows a red shield and a black bear standing on its hind legs with a white chain on the neck. Reflections of respect paid to the bear might be found in the notorious novel with horror elements by the nineteenth-century French writer Prosper Mérimée, Lokis (1869). The work tells about a man who lived in Samogitia and who was conceived when a woman was raped by a bear. 26 Baltu ˛ religijos ir mitologijos šaltiniai. 3 (Vilnius, 2003), 423, XVII amžius.

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out these harmful actions before St. John’s Day. This was the time when harmful witchcraft activities were believed to intensify.27 Folklore tradition was well acquainted with the idea of the werewolf. This is well attested to by the incorporation of the word ‘werewolf’ in multilingual dictionaries published in the seventeenth century. Konstantinas Sirvydas (Constantinus Szyrwid), one of the initiators of Lithuanian written tradition, a lexicographer, included the word ‘werewolf’ (wiłkatas ) in his dictionaries.28 From this case until the nineteenth century, no information about the belief of Lithuanians in the existence of werewolves was recorded. Lithuanian folklore started to be collected in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, belief legends about werewolves come into the focus of collectors of folklore only towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Folklorists’ Approach Towards Legends About Werewolves The richest information about the beliefs of Lithuanians concerning werewolves comes from folklore texts which were written down several centuries after the events discussed above. These beliefs about werewolves were collected from the local people; they reflect people’s understanding of these supernatural creatures. The folklore material in the Lithuanian Folklore Archives (LFA, in Lithuanian LTR) includes 350 narratives about werewolves.29 One sixth of them have been published, and the rest remain in manuscripts. These texts are classified as belief legends. Narratives about werewolves comprise

27 Moreover, some beliefs concerning witches were recorded at the beginning of the twemtieth century: they suggest that witches can deprive cows of their milk on the night of St. John’s, therefore protective magical measures were actively employed at that time of the year, Juozas Kudirka. Jonin˙es (Vilnius 1991), 17–20. 28 Promptuarium dictionum Polonicarum Latinarum et Lituanicarum, (~1620), Dictionarium trium linguarum (1642), published in: Baltu˛ religijos ir mitologijos šaltiniai, 3, 474, 475. 29 Bronislava Kerbelyte. ˙ Lietuviu˛ pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas 3 (Vilnius 2002), 241–246.

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only about 1.5% of the total number of belief legends registered in the LFA. The chronological scope of the texts extend to more than a century: from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century.30 As previously mentioned, Lithuanian folklore started to be collected in the first half of the nineteenth century. This process intensified towards the end of the century when, as in many European regions, national revival movements arose, and folklore was treated as a rich source for understanding a nation’s past. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the aristocratic-born cultural activist Meˇcislovas Davainis-Silvestraitis actively joined the movement of folklore collecting. He did so firstly thanks to the German ethnologist Edmund Veckenstedt who wrote the work Die Mythen, Sagen und Legenden der Žamaiten (Litauer) (1883), which contains a chapter about werewolves.31 Davainis-Silvestraitis wanted to collect similar material, yet it soon became clear that Veckenstedt’s texts contained distorted or even falsified information. In response to the material of Veckenstedt’s work, Davainis-Silvestraitis asked local people about werewolves as well. Thus a belief legend where several traditional narrative plots about werewolves interweave was recorded. The legend includes a farmer, Bertulis, who turns into a werewolf and attacks a farm maid; a farm labourer who follows the farmer’s example and turns into a werewolf; and the case of a tail being discovered while laying out a corpse of a dead werewolf. The teller of the belief legend emphasized that many werewolves might be met around Kyiv.32 The text is interesting as it claims that a werewolf may bring happiness if one gets along well with it. It is likely that such a statement is based on well-known beliefs that the wolf brings luck. If one

30 Some of the last stories about werewolves were recorded during the expedition to Gerveˇ ˙ ciai (Astravyets region, Belarus, 2011) inhabited by local Lithuanians. A belief legend was written down that a girl who wanted to revenge herself upon a boy who abandoned her gave a waist-band as a present. When he put the band on, he turned into a wolf (LTRF cd 590-21); (LTRF = Lithuanian Folklore Archives at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore [audio recordings]). 31 Edmund Veckenstedt, Die Mythen, Sagen und Legenden der Zamaiten ˙ (Litauer). 2 (Heidelberg 1883), 152–157. 32 Patarles ir dainos, (Til´zeje, 1889), 9–12, the belief legend was written down in 1883.

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met a wolf on the road or if it crossed one’s path it was taken as a sign of good omen.33 In Lithuanian newspapers towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jonas Basanaviˇcius, an activist and proponent of the Lithuanian National Revival, invited all Lithuanians to start collecting Lithuanian folklore and to send their recordings to him. He classified and published received materials. The structure of the folklore collections he created illustrates the loose classification of folklore genres and mythological beings, as well as reflecting the effort Basanaviˇcius invested to lay the foundation for a typological classification. There are chapters about the creation of the world, about Perk¯unas (the Lithuanian thunder god) and other supernatural beings. One of the chapters is dedicated to werewolves.34 It seems that Basanaviˇcius himself could have heard some belief legends about werewolves in his childhood as his own brother wrote down three such texts in the area where they grew up.35 The texts recorded towards the end of the nineteenth century provide scarce contextual information. It is generally limited to indicating a teller’s name, and the place and the year. It remains unclear what role the tale played in the life of the teller, and how popular the belief in werewolves was in the local community. Matas Slanˇciauskas, a collector of folklore, sheds some light on this missing context. He was a local tailor, and members of this profession used to travel a lot from one place to another to obtain work orders. While travelling around his native village, Slanˇciauskas actively collected tales, belief legends and songs from the local people.

33 Elisonas. ‘Vilkas tautosakoje’, 128. 34 Four belief legends about werewolves are publishedin Lietuviškos pasakos, 1. (Shenan-

doah Pa 1898); seven belief legends about werewolves are published in Lietuviškos pasakos, 2. (Shenandoah Pa 1902). 35 Lietuviškos pasakos yvairios. 4 (Chicago 1905), 107–109.

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Fragment of the manuscript The Black Books (Juodosios knygos) One small collection of folklore bearing the intriguing title The Black Book (1900) and composed by Slanˇciauskas, deserves special attention. Besides one may find four belief legends about werewolves.36 They contain rare narrative aspects in comparison to other recorded legends: werewolves could run around only on moonless nights so that real wolves would not recognize them; if a werewolf was drinking with a man and toasted him ‘to your health’ (sveiks ) and that man replied ‘thanks’ (d˙ekui), then that man acquired the powers of the werewolf and the werewolf lost them (cf. Olaus Magnus, above).37 Several belief legends depict a local man, Puida, who was able to turn into a werewolf. The majority of 36 LMD I 1063(21-24) (LMD = Collections of the Lithuanian Science Society preserved at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore). 37 About the latter narrative see more: Claude Lecouteux, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies, 120. Interestingly enough, all four Lithuanian belief legends about metamorphosis into a werewolf after drinking and toasting with somebody, are written down in the

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the tales were collected by Slanˇciauskas in home environments and put into writing from memory, as the remarks after the legend texts suggest, saying: ‘They say so, I heard it from my early days’ or ‘when I was little, my kin [parents] used to say so’.

Matas Slanˇciauskas, folklore collector, Lithuanian Folklore Archive The belief legends, it seems, were very familiar to local people as Slanˇciauskas collected four similar variants. One may draw an assumption

Northern part of Lithuania, near the border with Latvia. These texts are probably the remains of the so called ‘Livonian werewolf’ tradition.

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on the basis of these variants that a man lived somewhere in neighbourhood, and that he was considered by the community to be a werewolf. No one feared him, and he received friendly acceptance into the life of the village community. All these belief legends feature a humorous aspect; this werewolf involuntarily showed his tail when cold water was poured over him in the sauna, and he was said to shout that people should not make such jokes. The motif of the belief legend is most probably of local origin as further similar variants about a werewolf showing a tail when water was poured over him were collected in this area in the first half of the twentieth century.38 It is likely that the Lithuanian saying ‘he/she is afraid like a werewolf of cold water’39 derived from such narratives. The belief legend stuck in the memory of the collector, most probably due to its anecdotal situation. However, other well-known plots about werewolves were also employed while talking about this werewolf Puida and all then were joined into a cycle of narratives: They used to say that (…) there was a small man, named Puida, in the village of Jakiškiai. So they used to say that he was a werewolf. So when someone would pour cold water over him in sauna, he would say, lisping: ‘fellowsh, shtop joking!’. When someone found a slaughtered, yet undevoured horse, they used to say: ‘That’s Puida’s doing’. Now they also say that there were tales about Puida, that once he had been gathering hay in the woods together with his daughter. And the hour had come when he had to turn into a werewolf. So he had given a rake to his daughter on the cart and had said: ‘When I am gone, a wolf will come to you. You defend yourself against him, but never beat him with the teeth of the rake’. So the father had gone into the bushes, and a wolf had come. It had started attacking, trying to get on the cart, and she had been defending herself with the rake, but she could hardly do it. So she had turned and hit the wolf’s head with the teeth of the rake – lo, a bloody peck she gave! And the wolf ran away, and back came Puida, his

38 LTR 1674(40), written down in 1938, LTR 274(45), written down in 1931. In one variant, one slaps a werewolf on the bottom and thus he shows the tail (LTR 1353(7), written down in 1937). 39 The saying seems to be of only local origins because only six variants were found, some of them in some farther areas. The saying was published in a chrestomathy dedicated to children so it could have spread in other regions.

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head bleeding, scolding his daughter and asking why she had beaten the wolf with the teeth of the rake. Others say it wasn’t Puida there, but somebody else … (my father so told me).40

It becomes clear by the end of the story that the teller has some doubts if the werewolf Puida really attacked the gatherer of hay. It is quite possible that the teller heard a popular belief legend about a werewolf attacking a girl and related this story to the local werewolf Puida. The Lithuanian Society for Science, established in 1907, published a questionnaire concerning folklore collecting after several years of activity. The questionnaire also asked respondents to collect beliefs about werewolves.41 The lions’ share of belief legends about werewolves were collected in the interwar period, in independent Lithuania (1918–1940), when an organized collection of folklore was arranged. This involved teachers who encouraged schoolchildren to interview older people. Enthusiastic collectors of folklore had to make good use of guides to collecting folklore. For instance, due to the effort of ethnographic societies, an extensive guide to collecting folklore was published in 1925. It contains nine questions about werewolves: what a werewolf is; how werewolves differ from wolves; how one turns into a werewolf; what werewolves do; why those celebrating weddings turn into werewolves, etc.42 It is clear that the questionnaire was based on already obtained knowledge about the image of the werewolf in folklore and having in mind potential answers. However, it is worth noting that folklore collectors made poor use of this guide because it was very expensive. The Lithuanian Folklore Archive took the role of the leader of folklore collectors; it published a questionnaire for collecting folklore in 1936. It has only short hints about werewolves, though: what a werewolf is; and how one may turn them into human beings again.43 A later supplemented edition mentions that it is necessary to collect belief legends about werewolves and gives more detail regarding which plots 40 Lietuviškos pasakos, 1, 191, #3. 41 Trumpa folklioro dalykams rinkti programa (Vilnius 1910), 15, 31. 42 Petras B¯ utenas. ˙ Lietuviu˛ tautotyros žiniu˛ ir senienu˛ rinkimo programa (Šiauliai 1925),

82–83. 43 Tautosakos rink˙ejo vadovas (Kaunas 1936), 52.

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about these supernatural creatures should be noted down.44 The effort bore some fruit. In the pre-war period, between 1918 and 1940, the majority of recorded belief legends about werewolves were collected, 208 records. It should be noted that collection of these works intensified during 1935–1939, when 116 belief legends were collected, especially after the publication of the questionnaire in 1936. This suggests that the recommendations for collecting folklore were taken into account. During the Soviet period, belief legends about werewolves were collected during complex expeditions. The aim was to consider what people remembered, yet the material concerning werewolves was not the target on its own account. Nevertheless, a substantial number of the recorded belief legends were collected, 134 records. The number of belief legends collected in this period is also higher because audio recording equipment was used on a wider scale, and people could therefore be interviewed more intensively. Having examined the whole corpus of available Lithuanian belief legends about werewolves, one may find only ten texts that were told in the first person among them. The majority of the texts were written down poorly; having listened to the narrative, the plot was committed to writing from memory. They were mainly obtained by folklore collectors who interviewed narrators according to the questionnaires; sometimes such texts mention summaries of belief legends. To make some general conclusions about the circumstances of collecting belief legends about werewolves, it is possible to say that, in comparison to the general stock of belief legends, the number of belief legends about werewolves is relatively small because, on the one hand, the data was collected in the period when the belief in the existence of werewolves had begun to fade. On the other hand, the scarcity of belief legends about werewolves might be explained by the fact that this particular type of narrative was not systemically targeted for collection. Questions about theses supernatural creatures used to ‘sink’ in the mass of general questions in questionnaires. Nonetheless, belief legends preserved in the archive show that beliefs in the existence of werewolves were more or less familiar up to the mid-twentieth century at least.

44 Tautosakos rink˙ejo vadovas (Kaunas 1940), 19, 38–39.

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Attitude Towards Werewolves in Lithuanian Belief Legends: From Fear to Pity As has been noted elsewhere, belief legends are not primarily meant for entertainment but rather to transfer the knowledge possessed by the teller.45 They seek to establish appropriate tradition-based behaviour and point to inappropriate actions while providing information about the supernatural world; the reliability of existing beliefs is also verified.46 Belief legends about werewolves inform listeners about the appearance and peculiarities of behaviour of these supernatural creatures, as well as circumstances under which a human being may turn into a werewolf. In the Lithuanian worldview, as in some other European nations, the metamorphosis into a werewolf carries a dual meaning. It can occur when a human being shapeshifts into a werewolf or when a sorcerer or a witch turns people into werewolves. In the first case, it happens either if the person transforming is a sorcerer and has abilities to shapeshift into a wild beast, or if they are born half human, half beast and thus have to spend part of the time as a werewolf. In this case, their nature makes them behave so. A ‘natural’ werewolf feels anxiety in particular moments where he ‘feels the urge’ to turn into a wolf.47 Lithuanian texts about werewolves can be grouped into several large thematic groups: 1. A sorcerer turns the participants of a wedding celebration into werewolves. 2. A human is turned into a werewolf and the tale relates what feelings the human turned into a werewolf experiences. 3. A werewolf attacks a woman gathering hay; she defends herself and injures him. 4. When a killed wolf is skinned, one finds a human body with clothes and jewels underneath the skin. 5. Werewolves kill girls during evening gatherings.

45 Linda Dégh, Narratives in Society: a Performer-Centered Study of Narration (FF Communications, No. 255) (Helsinki 1995), 79. 46 Bronislava Kerbelyte. ˙ ‘Folk Legends as a Means of Research into Customs’, Darbai ir dienos, 11, 20 (1999), 53–59. 47 Lietuviškos pasakos, 191, #1.

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In Lithuanian, a werewolf is usually described by one of two words: vilktakis, the word is derived from the Baltic words *vilka-takas and means a subject that is running in a shape of a wolf. This title is more familiar in Western Lithuania and parts of middle Lithuania; vilkolakis, this word is most widespread in Eastern Lithuania. This word is derived from Slavic languages and most probably been obtained from the Polish wilkołak or the Belarusian vo˘ykolak, both meaning ‘a person in a wolf’s skin’.48 The geographical usage of this second title-word was influenced by the neighbouring Slavs; the territory is on the boundary with areas inhabited by Belarusians. Many recorded plots of Lithuanian belief legends are close to Belarusian ones. Belarusian belief legends similarly tell of werewolves-sorcerers, people turned into werewolves, means of shapeshifting, reversing the change and other motifs.49 There is a peculiar feature in Belarusian narratives, in that they describe individuals turning into werewolves as a consequence of particular sins. This motif is not characteristic of Lithuanian belief legends. Common plots with Lithuanian werewolf beliefs may be found among other Slavic nations, particularly in Polish and Ukrainian folklore. For example, the following plots are recorded as being told by both Lithuanians and by people from other Slavic nations: a sorcerer turns those celebrating a wedding into werewolves; a sorcerer shapeshifts into a werewolf; a man shapeshifts into a werewolf at a particular hour and attacks his wife; bridal clothes are found under the skin of a shot wolf; an offended girl puts a waist-band around a boy and he runs away as a werewolf; and others.50 The theme of social conflicts is explored in Lithuanian belief legends about werewolves. Usually people are turned into werewolves, thereby expressing anger and discontent. There are belief legends which relate how an angry girl turns a boy into a werewolf. This theme may also include a mother who does not acknowledge the bridegroom chosen by her daughter. A large group of belief legends is made up of tales about 48 Velius, ˙ Mitin˙es lietuviu˛ sakmiu˛ b¯ utyb˙es, 269–270. 49 T.M. Alifepqyk, A.M. Boganeva, C.B. Avilin. „ Mifalagiqny

napatyvy i pavep’i ppa va˘ykalaka˘y: belapycki matyvy “, Hayqnye qteni , pocv wennye Biktopy Bladimipoviqy Maptynovy. Cbopnik nayqnyx tpydov, Bypyck V (Minck 2017), 183–192. 50 A. B. Gypa, E. E. Levkievcka , ‘Bolkolak’, Clav nckie dpevnocti: tnolingvictiqecki clovap v p ti tomax, 1 (Mockva 1995), 418–419.

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wedding guests turned into werewolves, about one fourth of the total number. These belief legends relate how wedding guests fall victim to a sorcerer who was not invited and who was offended. The bridal retinue are turned into werewolves on their way to the church and run away in different directions. The abovementioned transformations into werewolves all feature the same central event: the wedding. This is a transitional period, when the groom and the bride change their social status and thus this period of time is not very safe. The couple leave their old homes that bear magical protection and have not yet stepped into their new home. This liminal time was considered very dangerous for all those participating in the wedding. A great many examples of protective magic during the wedding against sorcerers were collected. Bread and salt were used, needles were criss-crossed in clothes,51 and the bride and groom would wear their shirts inside out.52 The theme of the turning of the bridal retinue into wolves is spread across a wider area. Russian scholars consider it to be an aspect of common cultural Indo-European heritage. This narrative is believed to reflect an archaic wedding tradition—the capture of the bride.53 Some linguistic relics support this. For instance, in Russia, inhabitants of Pskov used to refer to the bridal retinue as wolves. In other places, the kin of the bride who used to arrive to the groom’s home on the second day of the wedding, were also called wolves. In this way, the adversity between the groom’s side and the bride’s side is expressed through wedding customs.54 Similar relic facts have been retained in Lithuanian folklore. A fairy tale ATU 315 depicts a wolf trying to seduce a girl, in the course of which he agrees to kill her brother.55 The wolf symbolizes the groom in explanations of dreams as well. If a girl dreams of a wolf, it is said that the match-makers will soon appear.56 The parallels are drawn

51 Irena Cepien ˇ e, ˙ Lietuviu˛ tradicin˙es vestuv˙es (Vilnius 2012), 23. 52 LTR 1042(14), written down in 1936. 53 B. B. Ivanov, B. H. Topopov. ‘Bolkodlak’,Mify napodov mipa: nciklopedi

v

dvyx tomax, 1 (Mockva 1987), 242. 54 A. B. Gypa. ‘Bolk’, Clav nckie dpevnocti: tnolingvictiqecki clovap v p ti tomax, 1 (Mockva 1995), 412. 55 Xl kOnitE, ‘Poqemy Gediminacy ppicnilc 56 Elisonas. ‘Vilkas tautosakoje’, 128.

elezny volk’, 503.

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between the wolf as an unfamiliar beast of the woods and the groom, who is considered to be a stranger as he comes from some farther location. Other types of belief legend depict the lives of werewolves, which are complicated and full of oppositions. When the werewolves live among wolves, they have to behave and feed like wolves, stealing stock animals and eating them. However, even if they look like wolves, they retain human minds and habits. They find themselves in a liminal situation. Separated from the human world, they cannot fully identify with the wild nature of the wolf either. Such narratives suggest an element of compassion and pity. Turning into a werewolf indicated a double seclusion. A human shapeshifts into a beast, and hence must change their environment as everyone is afraid of the wolf. In the light of this, some wolves are not frightening because they are longing for their home. For example, the miserable destiny of a werewolf is described in one belief legend as follows: [A werewolf] comes into his village. He knows his strip of land. Yet, people, when they see him, start shouting at him and chase him away.57 In real life, wolves avoid facing man, and thus an open appearance of wolves near houses incited theories that these must be unfortunate people turned into werewolves. The tragic nature of the situation is clearly revealed in sources which discuss killing a werewolf and skinning it. A human body is found under the skin of the wolf, for example: When they were killing [the wolf], it was shouting and squealing like a human. And when they skinned it, they found a human body under the skin.58 If a female werewolf is killed, a female body is found under the skin together with bridal accessories, such as bridal headdress, ribbons, and beads.59 On the other hand, we cannot feel any pity expressed in belief legends that speak about voluntary transformation into a werewolf. There is a story about a man who goes into a particular solitary place, crawls under poles dug in the ground or turns a somersault and, having turned into a

57 Laumiu ˛ dovanos: lietuviu˛ mitologin˙es sakm˙es (Vilnius 1979), 254, written down in 1959. 58 Laumiu ˛ dovanos, 257, written down in 1959. 59 Here I would like to contradict Merili Metsvahi’s idea that the motif of finding

jewellery and accessories under the skin of a wolf is only typical of Estonian folklore: Metsvahi, ‘Estonian..’, 215–216. In Lithuanian folklore, one variously finds a belt, a knife, sacred icons, a rosary, bridal clothes, a veil, ribbons, or a scarf under the skin of a wolf.

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werewolf, steals a stock animal.60 Such a man was treated as dangerous to the local community as he wilfully inflicted material damage. In such cases, being a werewolf was considered an unpleasant, shameful fact which was hidden from the surrounding people. In one belief legend, a werewolf died and his own wife washed the body in order that no-one else should see his tail.61 In another, a father and his four sons made long black robes and wore them until the end of their lives in order to hide their tails.62 Some belief legends reveal fear of werewolves. These creatures come to girls during evening gatherings and cruelly kill them. There might be no chance of retaining one’s life in such situations: There was a husband and a wife, and they went away to a wedding. Their daughter stayed at home. Some girls came to her home to spin together. Many fellows came, a full house was gathered. The fellows joined the girls for an evening gathering. And a distaff [of one girl] fell down. She leaned to take [the distaff] and behold, she sees a tail under the bench. So scared she was, she understood [these are] werewolves, not fellows. And they used to burn splinters in the ancient times. And these splinters were stuck in lighters, the girl blew off the fire and got away by running into the woods. [She] got away. The girl returns in the morning – all the other girls were slaughtered, their breasts gnawed away with teeth.63

This belief legend relies on the custom of youth’s evening gatherings in the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century known as spinning evenings (Spinnstube in German) where mainly young unmarried girls gathered together. Young fellows joined them for entertainment rather than work. The spinning girls were the centre of attraction for them. Fellows tried to disrupt the girls’ work by playing various tricks. A playful conflict between the opposite sexes was

60 LTR 1038(50), 1307(23), written down in 1937. 61 LTR 600(248), written down in 1922. 62 Jonas Balys, Lietuviu ˛ mitologiškos sakm˙es (London 1956), #198, written down in

1934. 63 Laumiu ˛ dovanos, 260, written down in 1934.

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going on, in line with the customs of looking for a life partner.64 The idyllic calmness of the evening described in the belief legend might be disturbed by aggressive fellows. In this case the belief legend becomes a warning legend, cautioning girls not to get involved with men while they are not under supervision of their parents. According to popular belief, uninvited guests could not only be unfamiliar men, but supernatural beings, such as werewolves, which were usually imagined as male. This belief legend highlights the natural, predatory side of the werewolf legend. This might be related to negative attitudes towards wolves formulated under Christianity, when the belief spread that the Devil could appear in the shape of a wolf. For example, it was said that if a wolf crept past night-watchers tending stock animals, the herders would try to kill the beast with a silver coin.65 The Devil is often associated with wolves in Lithuanian folklore. A wolf is variously said to be created by the devil, to have the devil’s hair, or blood, or to have simply swallowed a devil. In some tales and belief legends a devil appears in the form of a wolf or is riding the beast.66 Close semantic relation between the devil and the wolf is indicated by the fact that the words ‘vilkas /wolf’ and ‘velnias / devil’ may be used as synonyms. Similar tendencies are observed in the use of curse words, and in the existence of proverbs where the words ‘wolf’ and ‘devil’ are used interchangeably.67 It is possible to see a peculiar attraction of werewolves towards women in the belief legend quoted above. It is even more evident in the group of belief legends that describe a farmer who turns into a werewolf and attacks a woman gathering hay, in which she injures the beast in selfdefence. After some time, the woman sees an injured farmer and realizes that he is a werewolf. It is interesting to note that, in the majority of cases, the werewolf attacks a woman (a daughter, a wife, a farm maid). Analysis of some variants of this belief legend in other European countries has

64 Auksuole˙ Cepaitien ˇ e. ˙ Verpimas Lietuvoje: liaudies kult¯ uros likimas (Vilnius 2001), 176–179. 65 Kerbelyte, ˙ Lietuviu˛ pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, 3, 187. 66 Norbertas Velius. ˙ Chtoniškasis lietuviu˛ mitologijos pasaulis (Vilnius 1987), 91. 67 Ibid., 95.

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suggested that this legend may hide the story of a sexual assault.68 The suggestion of sexual assault is not clearly expressed in Lithuanian belief legends about werewolves attacking women. In the case described earlier, a woman is taught how to defend herself against the wolf with a tool (a rake), and yet the plea is made to hit the wolf with the handle of the rake and not the teeth. Signs of sexual assault can only be traced in three variants of this legend about the woman or girl gathering hay who was attacked by a werewolf. Later she discovered the red threads of her skirt between her father’s69 or husband’s teeth.70 Unfortunately, these texts provide no more information about the relationship between woman and man/werewolf. Only comparison of these Lithuanian legends with the analogous Scandinavian or German texts helps us to recognize the possible signs of sexual assault.71 To sum up, turning into a werewolf bears ambivalent significance in folklore texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the one hand, it is a curse upon a human being that ends, at best, with a temporary transformation into a werewolf, and at worst with the werewolf perishing at the hands of the village community. On the other hand, turning into or being a werewolf is reprehensible and hidden because while in the wolf state, one threatens one’s neighbours’ property.

68 Willem de Blécourt, ‘“I Would Have Eaten You Too”: Werewolf Legends in the Flemish, Dutch and German Area’, Folklore, 118 (2007), 23-43, esp. 34–36. 69 LTR 1038(79), written down in the firsth half of twentieth century; LTR 3378(414), written down in 1923. 70 Lietuviškos pasakos …2, 192–193, Nr. 4, written down at the end of the nineteenth century. 71 In Lithuanian folklore there are no recorded belief legends about girls who became pregnant due to sexual intercourse with a werewolf. There are some more variants of the legend about women who turn men into werewolves by putting bands around them. In three variants the woman is angry, because the boy has failed to marry her: Jonas Balys. Lietuviu˛ mitologiškos sakm˙es [Lithuanian Belief Legends] (London: Nida 1956), #203, LTR 4056(233), written down in 1969, LTR 5031(323), written down in 1979. However, it is never mentioned if the abandoned woman was pregnant. There is one variant of belief legend about a man who observes the woman-werewolf carrying a baby near his house. This werewolf is a woman from a group of wedding guests—the matron of honour. Wedding guests were turned into werewolves a day before. After some time, when the effect of the spells expired, the woman returned to her human shape, LTR 4813(120), written down in 1972.

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The Attitude of the Narrator Towards the Reality of Belief Legends About Werewolves The image of a werewolf is mostly found in belief legends and sometimes in memorates as they reflect some personal experience. The inclination to believe in the content of belief legends is a typical feature of the genre.72 A belief legend is more efficacious if both the teller and the listener believe in it.73 It is important to take into consideration two dimensions—time and place—when trying to figure out how the sense of reality is created in belief legends. Time is rarely defined in these narratives or if indicated at all it points to the abstract past. The belief legends are likely to start with ‘earlier’, ‘in the ancient times’. Definite years (1861, 1904) and social structure (serfdom) are mentioned only in rare cases. Sometimes the action of a belief legend is related to the present moment, relying upon the listener’s expectation of receiving knowledge about a werewolf: It is said that not long ago there was a man walking about and asking if anyone had seen two wolves with white necks roaming around. If he could see them, he would turn them back to people. These are not wolves, but a man and a girl turned into werewolves. They had white kerchiefs tied around their necks, hence white necks. There has been no news about that man so far. Most probably, having found the werewolves, he took them where he wished.74

A similar narrative was collected more than half a century later. According to the teller, in his childhood, people from Utena75 used to travel through his village and continually ask if anyone had seen werewolves – the sorcerers had enchanted their entire family.76 These narratives follow the

72 Belief legends can also be discussions of whether to believe or not in supernatural phenomena: see Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington 2001). 73 Friedrich Ranke, ‘Grundfragen der Volkssagenforshung’, in: Leander Petzold (ed.), Vergleichende Sagenforschung (Darmstadt 1969), 1–20, esp. 3. 74 LMD I 144(70), written down in 1905. 75 Utena is a town in the north-east of Lithuania. 76 LTR 3715(28), written down in 1964.

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rule that memorates sometimes can turn into belief legends,77 i.e. stories with a stable plot. The location of a werewolf encounter is not always accentuated either, especially if only a distant memory that people might have been turned into these supernatural beings is being relayed. Place names are mentioned only in rare cases, these mainly include names of small towns and villages, or sometimes a particular wood or bridge is named. These are certain geographical reference points recognized by the teller him/herself or his/her relatives. Thus, time and place in such narratives comprise the background of the event and strengthen the impression that the events being told are real. In many Lithuanian belief legends, knowledge of humans shapeshifting into werewolves is limited to that of indicating that a narrator talked to the person who observed the werewolves. In rare cases the teller strengthens the impression of reality by adding that his close relative—a grandmother, a mother, a neighbour—faced a werewolf. In these cases, ‘personal experience’ is not always required, only that the narrator has to know personally the people who experienced some event.78 One of the measures strengthening the feeling of narrative reality is the use of the first person. Such texts feature more characteristics typical of memorates, stories that reveal situations in which belief in supernatural reality was actualized and began to influence behaviour.79 Their plots are more dependent on a particular event or experience. In this way, the teller attempts to convince the listener that the events of the belief legend were real. In the territory of Lithuania, which was abundant with wolves, it was not difficult to see this beast and people paid attention to the appearance of the wolves they met. It was believed that one could distinguish a werewolf from a real wolf according to some details of their appearance. For instance, one teller remembered that there were werewolves in his native region and he himself saw them. They differed from ordinary wolves because they had white spots on their necks and their paws reminded him of human arms and legs.80 77 Lauri Honko, ‘Memorates and the Study of Folk Beliefs’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 1 (1964), 5–9, esp. 12. 78 Linda Dégh, Andrew Vázsonyi, ‘The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate’, The Journal of American Folklore 87, #345 (1974), 225-239, esp. 227. 79 Honko, ‘Memorates and the Study of Folk Beliefs’, 10. 80 LTR 1074(98), written down in 1937.

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There are other features that distinguish a werewolf from a wolf. A werewolf that appears in the shape of a wolf might be distinguished by visible human jewellery on his body. For instance, one teller remembered of one belief legend that, when she was ten years of age, she was herding cattle near a forest and she saw a pack of wolves roaming at the edge of the forest; they had red ribbons tied under their necks. These wolves always wandered in pairs. People used to say that these must have been wedding guests and that a woman had turned them into wolves.81 In the words of the teller, people believed the transformation was real, it was even forbidden to shoot wolves wandering around the village. Such local prohibition of the hunting of wolves in order to avoid accidentally inflicting any harm on werewolves must have contradicted the state policy at the time. In the first half of the twentieth century, though the population of these beasts was already in decline, wolves were considered to be dangerous predators and people were encouraged to exterminate them remorselessly. Bounties were paid for killing wolves.82 Some belief legends tell of a conversation between the teller and a person who claimed that they had been turned into a werewolf and had to live in the shape of the beast for some time. The relationship between the narrator and the werewolf is usually more distant, as he knows someone who knew the werewolf. One teller distinctly remembered the particular appearance of a person who was believed to have the ability to turn into a werewolf. The teller noticed that this man’s face was covered in wolf bites, and that hair was growing in places he had been injured. The teller claimed he truly had spoken with a person who told him that ‘skin-fur fell from me’.83 In another case, the teller remembered that his own father had told him about seeing the hairy neck of one railway worker. The worker had explained that he had been turned into a werewolf and had run with the wolves. After some time, the skin of the wolf fell off and the hair remained only on his neck.84 The grandfather of yet another informant alleged that his own father might have been turned into a werewolf. To prove the fact, the father used to show his thighs, which were covered

81 LTR 1304(09), written down in 1934. 82 J. Sokas. ‘Vilkas’, M¯ usu˛ girios, 1 (1933), 19–22. 83 LTR 2929(8), written down in 1953. 84 LTR 4154(189), written down in 1970.

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in dog bites.85 In these cases, the tellers or their relatives claimed to have communicated with ex-werewolves who retained marks on their bodies that could prove their past experiences. These belief legends accentuate that turning into a werewolf was involuntary; someone turned them into beasts. The cases of men’s extensive hairiness in the face and the neck could have served as a basis for beliefs and belief legends that signs of a werewolf’s nature could be observed on the body.86 People could not understand the causes of such physiological phenomena and looked for some supernatural explanation. Yet, it is quite possible that these could also be people with psychological disorders. For example, perhaps people imagined they turned into wolves, ‘felt’ the fur growing on their bodies, and changed their behaviour.87 Sometimes the situation where the legend teller knows the witness who saw the werewolf is used in narratives that have a consistent form. For instance, a unique development might be observed in a popular belief legend about a neighbour who attacks a girl gathering hay at the end of the hay harvest. The teller states that while visiting her uncle she found out from a local shepherd that a neighbour was a werewolf. It was said that he had turned into a wolf and attacked his daughter, and that she had beaten him with the handle of a rake. The wolf ran away, and after some time the neighbour returned all covered in blood. The teller claimed that her relative saw the injured neighbour.88 It becomes clear from the plot of the belief legend that the suspicions about the man were not accidental. The teller noticed that ‘it had been long told that the neighbour had been a werewolf’. The belief legends reveal the belief that shepherds encountered werewolves in similar circumstances. According to the memories of one teller who used to herd in childhood, their chief herdsman was believed to be

85 LTR 1255(275), written down in 1937. 86 Hypertrichosis, a disease that causes abnormal hairiness of the body, might be

identified in this case. 87 Frida G. Surawicz, Richard Banta, ‘Lycanthropy Revisited’, in: Charlotte F. Otten (ed.), A Lycanthropy Reader. Werewolves in Western Culture (Syracuse, NY 1986), 34–40. The relation between the phenomenon of werewolfness and medical research is critically overviewed in the publication: Willem de Blécourt, ‘Monstrous Theories: Werewolves and the Abuse of History’, Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 2 (2013), 188–212. 88 Laumiu ˛ dovanos, 251, written down in 1948.

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a werewolf. One day before going to the woods, the chief herdsman told his shepherds to give bread, fat, and cheese to a wolf that would come to them. While the chief herdsman was gone, a wolf ran to them. The shepherds gave it some food, and the beast ate it and returned to the woods.89 The teller did not claim directly that the chief herdsman was a werewolf, yet he gave hints so that the listener could come to conclusions of their own. Two more belief legends show that an atmosphere of suspicion could sometimes prevail among the members of a village community, who were unsure if their neighbour was really a werewolf. Nevertheless, sometimes the tellers expressed their doubts that the events described in the belief legends they told were real and tried to explain the werewolf phenomenon rationally. For instance, in several belief legends a sense of uncertainty if the werewolves were really seen overcomes the tellers. They start to reason that maybe some person would dress up as a wolf to scare other people,90 or that maybe it was a real wolf.91 These belief legends were collected in rather different periods and reflect a particular tendency of doubting their veracity. One has to agree with the opinion that there was not unequivocal belief in the content of belief legends, but that there were people doubting and bearing a rather sceptical attitude towards the phenomena.92 The majority of discussed cases are memories from the tellers’ childhood or youth. These narratives introduce a certain temporal distance— they separate the present from the past. We may assert that reality concerning werewolves is transferred to distant times as if wishing to show that the phenomenon no longer exists at the moment of narrating. However, inserting the words ‘long ago’, or ‘in ancient times’ does not always mean that the phenomenon being studied has come to an end. These are only statements that allow the narrator to construct some distance from their retrospective experience, and to reconcile the

89 Merkin˙e. Vilnius, 1970, Nr. 22, written down in 1967. 90 LTR 5092(85), written down in 1978. 91 LTR 1948(105), written down in 1938. 92 Lina B¯ ugiene, ˙ ‘“Nuo tada netikiu ˛i baidymus”: pasauleži¯ ˙ uros l¯užiu˛ atspindžiai

sakmese’ ˙ [Since then I ceased believing in haunting: reflections of the changing worldview in folk legends], Tautosakos darbai, 18 (25) (2003), 109–119, esp. 112.

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narrator’s belief in certain phenomena with the rational discourse of the researcher.93

Conclusion At the end of the nineteenth century, when belief legends about werewolves were starting to be collected from local people in agrarian regions of Lithuania, the belief in the existence of werewolves was still vigorous. In the first part of the twentieth century, the majority of belief legends about werewolves functioned as memories of existing beliefs that people could in the past have had abilities to turn into or were turned into these supernatural beings. There are very few belief legends from this period which claim that the teller has seen a werewolf with their own eyes. Thus, the belief in the existence of these supernatural beings seems to have weakened. Belief legends about werewolves often touch upon the topics of social conflicts. It was believed that a human being might turn into a werewolf to take revenge or to express discontent. Similarly, by means of these narratives the didactic lesson was passed not to trust strangers who might acquire the shape of a werewolf and threaten the lives of members of the village community. One can feel the sense of compassion in belief legends that speak about cases when people were turned into werewolves against their will. Belief legends about werewolves show that belief in the existence of these creatures could affect relations between members of a village community. Suspicions that a neighbour could be a werewolf frequently reflected social tensions between neighbours and created favourable conditions for doubts about whether that particular person was trustworthy. The idea that such animosity could have existed among village people is supported by examples showing how the local community shunned people suspected of witchcraft.94

93 As Jeanne Favret-Saada noted in her research about witchcraft, in order for their knowledge not to be received as nonsense the narrators tell their story by distancing themselves from it, thereby avoiding discussing their involvement in witchcraft: Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words. Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge 1980), 42–44, 51–52; see more about placing narratives to the past: Mirjam Mencej, Styrian Witches in European Perspective (London 2017), 54–55. 94 Vélius, Mitin˙es, 253–255.

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In agrarian areas of Lithuania, the wolf was a very familiar beast; facing it was not a desirable occasion, and yet it was associated with awe and willingness to please the animal. The majority of local inhabitants from the end of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth- century met wolves in one way or another. It is possible to claim that the vitality of Lithuanian belief legends and beliefs about werewolves was maintained by a considerable population of wolves; people observed them, accumulated knowledge about the beasts and interpreted it within the framework of their mythical worldview. Curiously, some of the motifs found in belief legends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are recognizable in sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These early sources were compiled mainly by foreigners who bore a rather stereotypical attitude towards the local people whom they considered to be pagans and thus able to shapeshift into wolves. Therefore, the phenomenon of werewolfery has five centuries of demonstrable continuity in the Lithuanian worldview.

CHAPTER 6

Legends and Beliefs About Werewolves Among the Eastern Slavs: Areal Characteristics of Motifs Marina Valentsova

It is true that in vast territories of the Slavic people, beliefs about the vlko(d)lak ‘the werewolf’, or the ‘wolfman’, can vary widely, including the name, characteristics, functions and associated beliefs and legends. The reason for such differences are to be found in the considerable heritage of werewolf imagery, the diverse points of contact of Slavic tribes with other Indo-European and non-Indo-European peoples in the process of settlement throughout Europe, the migration of folklore plots and the internal development of the image itself over time. However, throughout the Slavic region it is possible to speak of a uniform image of the werewolf in all Slavic traditions, which retains its semantic core of shapeshifting into a wolf, and the common roots of its name, albeit via common roots with

M. Valentsova (B) Department of the Ethnolinguistics and Folklore, Institute of Slavic Studies of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_6

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corresponding changes according to the morphological changes of the diverse Slavic languages.1 There are a number of existing linguistic, ethnographic, ethnolinguistic, and mythological works dedicated to the vlko(d)lak.2 The legends and beliefs discussed in this paper refer mainly to the comparatively late period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a large part of them are drawn from source material collected in the field. The main goal of this analysis is to trace their geographical extension, alien influences, and quantitative and mainly areal characteristics of the motifs surrounding vlko(d)lak. For this reason, this chapter will begin with the supposed epicentre of these beliefs and continue with the areas where the image of vlko(d)lak fades out, and with the traditions where it is not developed and even its name is hardly known.

1 In this work we use the term werewolf for common-Slavic vlko(d)lak ‘a man-wolf, ˚ called shapeshifter or a turnskin into the wolf’, contrary to other shapes of changing, turnskin. 2 Cf. Bladimip H. Topopov, Ppyccki zyk. Clovap . K – L (Mockva 1984), 68– 78; B qeclav Bc. Ivanov, ‘Dialektnoe qlenenie clav ncko zykovo obwnocti i edinctvo clav nckogo zykovogo mipa’, in: Pazvitie tniqeckogo camocoznani clav nckix napodov v poxy pannego cpednevekov (Mockva 1982), 212–236; B qeclav Bc. Ivanov, ‘Pekonctpykci indoevpope ckix clov i tekctov, otpa a wix kyl t volka’, in: Izvecti AH CCCP. Cepi litepatypy i zyka, t. 34 (Mockva 1975), 399–408; Alekcandp B. Gypa, Elena E. Levkievcka , ‘Bolkolak’, in: Hikita I. Tolcto (ed.), Clav nckie dpevnocti. tnolingvictiqecki clovap , t. 1 (Mockva 1995), 418–420; Mapina Blacova, Hova abevega pycckix cyevepi . Ill ctpipovanny clovap (Cankt-Petepbypg 1995), 104–107; Љybinko Padenkoviè, ‘Bampip – vykodlak – v pkolak’, in: Mipjana Deteliè (ed.), Moè knji evnocti. In memoriam Ana Padin, 110 (Beogpad 2009), 279–286; L dmila H. Binogpadova, Elena E. Levkievcka , Hapodna demonologi Polec , t. 1 (Mockva 2010), 478–558; Li Calave , ‘Ba˘ykalak, va˘ykalaka’, in: Belapycka mifalogi (Minck 2004), 70–72; Tat na A. Hoviqkova, Pyccki demonologiqecki clovap (Cankt-Petepbypg 1995), 114–117; B qeclav Bc. Ivanov, ‘Balkanckie imena «vypdalaka» i ix ppoicxo denie’, in: Terra Balkanica/Terra Slavica. K bile T.B. Civ n. Balkanckie qteni , 9 (Mockva 2007), 70–79; Bitali Za kovcki , ‘ timologi , tnolingvictika i zykovye kontakty clav nckix c gpeqeckim, dpygimi balkanckimi i t pkckimi zykami, in: Clovencka etimologija danac (Beogpad 2007), 193–197, B qeclav Bc. Ivanov, Bladimip H. Topopov, ‘Bolkodlak’, in: Mify napodov mipa, t. 1 (Mockva 1997), 242–243; Ute Dykova, Haimenovani demonov v bolgapckom zyke (Mockva, 2015), 88–92.

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East Slavic cultural regions: in italics. The sanserif country names provide a rough orientation

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Polesian Legends About Werewolves In Polesye, the largest quantities of narratives with distinct plots in a single region were recorded.3 Legends about werewolves from this region have been published since the middle of the nineteenth century. In the legends written down in the nineteenth century we discern seven types of plots: on the shapeshifting of a sorcerer into a wolf; on the shapeshifting of a farm labourer, who had pried on the shapeshifting of a sorcerer and did the same; on the shapeshifting of a person into a wolf by force because of anger and for revenge; on the turning of a man into a wolf to avoid recruitment; on the turning into wolves of a whole wedding procession, or just the bride and groom; on ways of assisting in the reversal of the transformation, and of turning of the werewolf into a man; and of the compulsion of turning into a wolf due to human nature. The abundance and development of the werewolf theme in Polesye influenced the attitude to Poleshuks (the inhabitants of this region) of other Ukrainian peoples as ‘great healers and sorcerers’; the same opinion about Poleshuks and partly about Volynians ‘as a tribe of sorcerers’ is retained by Lithuanians.4 Below there are some examples of each of these types of legends. In one type, a sorcerer, who knew how to turn into a werewolf, did a great deal of damage to his neighbour. Local people noticed that when the sorcerer left for his apiary outside the village a wolf with a rope around his neck appeared and immediately started to kill livestock, but only of those people whom the sorcerer was angry with. One day, a neighbour followed the sorcerer. He witnessed the sorcerer disrobing, then taking two ropes. One he tied round his neck, and another he laid on the grass and jumped over. Instead of a man, a huge wolf with a rope around his neck appeared and ran to the herd in the field. The neighbour took the rope that the werewolf had jumped over and the werewolf remained a wolf for seven years, until his neighbour once again put the rope in the same place.5

3 An archaic region covering the northern part of Ukraine (Volyn’, Chernigov,

Zhytomir, Sumy, Kiev, Rovno regions), the southern half of Belarus (Gomeˇl, Brest regions, parts of the Grodno, Minsk and Mogilev regions), eastern Poland (the so-called Podlasie, Lublin province) and the western part of the Bryansk region of Russia. 4 Antoni Nowosielski, Lud Ukrainski, ´ 2 (Wilno, 1857), 227. 5 Nowosielski, Lud Ukrainski, ´ 96–99.

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The second type of plot records how a farm hand spied on the owner of the farm, and saw him turning somersaults through the stump behind the threshing-floor, before becoming a werewolf and running into the forest. The farm hand did the same, became a werewolf and also ran into the forest. He lived for a long time with the wolves, and ate raw meat, but did not know how to turn back into a man. He often ran to the threshing-floor, and wanted to say something to the owner, but the farm hand could only howl. Finally, the owner realized what sort of wolf it was, tipped him back over the stump and turned him back into a man.6 One miller was said to have ground grain for a peasant, and the peasant cursed him for the high price for grounding. The miller revenged himself: while carrying the flour in his cart, the peasant began to grow hair all over his body, and this way became a wolf and ran into the forest. He remained in his wolf form for seven years. The wolves did not like this wolf-man until he began to eat dead horses with them, and then they accepted him. Once this werewolf, trying to drag off a sheep, climbed through the fence of the yard where the local sorcerer lived. This sorcerer guessed that the wolf was not truly a wolf, and the transformation ‘was done to him’. He then grabbed him by the tail and took off his skin, and the wolf became a man again (Vybli, Chernigov district).7 In a fourth type a woman walked around the local village asking if anyone had seen a wolf with a string around its neck. It was not a true wolf, but her son, whom she herself had turned into a werewolf in order to allow him to escape recruitment. She asked for anyone who saw him to tear the string around his neck—if this was done, he would become a man again.8 In a common theme of werewolf narratives, another type concerns people celebrating a wedding. The father of the bride in some way failed to please the ‘boyar’ (a ritual person in traditional marriages), and the latter took revenge by passing the young couple through a horse-collar and thus they became wolves and fled into the forest. For a long time, they ran through the forests and fields, and when they wanted to eat, they ran to the farm hands who were pasturing horses for the night. The men

6 PAntElE mOn Kylix. Zapicki o no Pyci, 2 (Cankt-Petepbypg 1857), 35. 7 BopiC D. Gpinqenko, Iz yct napoda. Malopycckie pacckazy, ckazki i pp

(Qepnigov 1901), 175–176. 8 Nowosielski, Lud Ukrainski, ´ 2, 229.

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already knew what kind of wolves they really were and fed them bread. The father asked the local people, if they were to catch these wolves, to pass them back through the horse-collar. Eventually, one wolf was caught and this cure was applied, and the wolf turned into a bride. The other wolf was said to have run away, and to still run around in its wolf form (Vybli, Chernigov district).9 Some stories told of the wedding party being turned into wolves because the bride promised to marry one man, and then married another (Lutsk district, Volyn’),10 or because the bridegroom broke his own promise and married another girl (Verkiyevka, Nezhin district).11 Similar stories were recorded in the Belarussian Polesye. In this region, it was also believed that there were people who could release people from the spell and turn them back into a human. To do this, they would put a tablecloth on the ground, which had been laid on the table three times at Easter, and force the wolf to jump over it three times (Lutsk district).12 In the tale The Son-Vovkulaka it is told that a husband and a wife did not go to the church at Easter to make the cakes holy, and in this way sinned. A son was subsequently born to them. When he matured, he began to disappear for three or four days at a time. Eventually the father spied the moment, when for his son ‘came the time which forced him to run (as a wolf), and he began to groan’. The son took off his clothes and somersaulted over the knife. Together with ten wolves, he tore up and ate a calf, then attacked a neighbour’s sheep, who had quarrelled with a werewolf. Once the son quarrelled with his wife, attacked her and tore

9 GPinqEnkO, Iz yct napoda, 175. 10 PAvEl P. Qybincki , Tpydy

tnogpafiqecko-ctatictiqecko kcpedicii v Zapadno-pyccki kpa , cnap enno Impepatopckim Pycckim geogpafiqeckim obwectvom. go-Zapadny otdel. Matepialy i iccledovani , cobpannye P.P.Qybinckim, t. 1. Bepovani i cyevepi . Zagadki i poclovicy. Koldovctvo. (Cankt-Petepbypg 1872), 223–224. 11 BopiC D. Gpinqenko, tnogpafiqeckie matepialy, cobpannye v Qepnigovcko i cocednix c ne gybepni x, vyp. 1: Pazckazy, ckazki, ppedani , poclovicy, zagadki i pp (Qepnigov 1895), 45–47. 12 PAvEl P. Qybincki , Tpydy tnogpafiqecko-ctatictiqecko

224.

kcpedicii, 223–

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her up. In the morning, he ran off into the forest and is said to still run there (Ostrog district, Volyn’).13 All these plots have survived to the present day.

Field Records in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century A large corpus of texts about werewolf beliefs (more than 200 individual examples) was collected during field dialectological and ethno-linguistic expeditions of the Institute of Slavic and Baltic Studies from the 1960s to the 1980s.14 Beliefs and mythological stories from the Polesian Archive were published and thoroughly commented on during this period.15 These narratives continue in general the plots known from previously published materials. However, there are also rare, and compilative plots, some of which are not characteristic of Polesye, but are widely known in Slavic regions further to the south and west. Following the classification proposed in the book mentioned above, we list the plots and motifs of the stories about the werewolf with some examples. An explanation for the origin of a werewolf that has been identified in all regions of Polesye, but is not quantitatively numerous, is the deliberate transformation of a sorcerer into a wolf in order to harm fellow villagers. Vaukolaks are wolf people. Here a man goes into the forest, and may return ˆ back as a wolf (Verbovichi, Gomeˇl region). Vovkolak is when a person is a wolf. They jumped over the fence for this. And then he becomes a man again. (Zhikhovo, Sumy region)

In Eastern Polesye stories are recorded about a person who repeats the actions of a sorcerer and turns into a wolf, but who cannot regain human form.

13 BopiC D. Gpinqenko, tnogpafiqeckie matepialy, cobpannye v Qepnigovcko i cocednix c ne gybepni x, vyp. 2: Pazckazy, ckazki, ppedani , poclovicy, zagadki i pp (Qepnigov 1897), 126–128. 14 The Archive of written texts are stored in the Institute of Slavic studies RAS, Moscow. 15 ElEnA E. Levkievcka , ‘Bolkolak’, in: L dmila H. Binogpadova, Elena E.

Levkievcka , Hapodna demonologi Polec , 478–482.

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The farmhand spied that the farmer was turning into a wolf on the threshing floor and tearing apart the neighbours’ horses. The guy decided to take revenge on the sorcerer and himself turned into a wolf and killed his horses. But the man could not turn himself back, no matter how he somersaulted. The owner, seeing this, cursed him to run as a wolf for seven years. (Khorobichi, Chernigov region)

A common motif in Polesye is the forced transformation of a person into a wolf—either by a sorcerer, or by a witch, a mother in law, a rejected girl, or a stepmother. The mother-in-law quarreled with her son-in-law and made him a wolf: wolf skin, but human mind and heart, this was called volkulak. After 3 years, she waved her handkerchief and made him human again, only on his palms did he have hair, and looked at people like a wolf. (Mukhovets, Brest region)

A stable variant of the forced transformation of people into wolves throughout northern Slavia is that of a newlywed couple or the entire wedding procession being turned into wolves. This was done either because a magicians was angry with someone (Bel’sk), or because the groom or bride did not bow to the local sorcerer (Smol’any, Brest region). One development of the ‘wedding’ plot, local to the Brest region of Belarus, tells the story of a bride who had been turned into a wolf, and who approaches humans to give birth to a child. The bride at the wedding did not bow to someone, and he turned her into a wolf. When it came to her time to give birth, she came to the village and huddled under the furnace. The hostess began to drive her out with the poker, her skin burst, and she became human again and bore a child. (Oniskovichi, Brest region)

An important storyline is that of a person’s shapeshifting into a werewolf by himself, but without somersaulting and against his will—shapeshifting as a result of the manifestation of his nature. The story explains his unfortunate urge by the fact that he was conceived on a day when a ban on sexual contact was in effect, or was born on an important holiday such as Easter or during another inauspicious time. Some stories say that a child born from the relations of a woman with a wolf became a werewolf. Sometimes it is emphasized that this happens during certain phases of the

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moon (the full moon or before the full moon). This is a local and rare narrative known only in the Zhytomir and Rovno regions of the Ukraine. One father had a son who often left the house in the last quarter of the moon, and did not say where he was going. Once the father tracked him and saw him go to the crossroads, where he did three somersaults and turned into a wolf, killed the bulls of a passer-by and returned. When the father asked what he was doing, he said that his parents conceived him on Easter night, and that’s why he does so. He was taken to the healer, then to the church, and the priest prayed for him, so that he stopped shapeshifting into a wolf. (Voznici, Zhytomir region) One woman “mixed with a wolf” and gave birth to a boy who could shapeshift into a wolf, it was vovchak. He attacked the cattle of people he was angry with. He shapeshifted during certain phases of the moon. (Kurchitsa, Zhytomir region)

The action of shapeshifting into a werewolf is associated primarily with doing somersaults, tumbling and other types of rollover. It is also associated with simple jumping or stepping over a magic boundary, for example, a stump not enclosed with cross signs, pegs hammered into the ground, knives, or a fence. These actions are widely reported throughout the territory of werewolf stories’ distribution. Less frequently, people are turned into wolves by passing through a horse-collar; sometimes a healer might throw an enchanted belt or a wolf skin on the victim; or a person might consume spell-bound food or drink. These motifs are mainly found in the eastern part of Polesye. If a person is wicked, he will throw the reins on the person and make him a werewolf. (Kopachi, Kiev region) If you put on a wolf’s skin, then you will become a wolf at Christmas time. (Malye Avˇtuki, Gomeˇl region) The man enchanted vodka and put it in a haystack—so that those who would like to steal the hay, drink it and turn into werewolves. But it was his sons who came to collect the hay, and they drank the vodka and turned into wolves. (Zamoshye, Gomeˇl region)

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In Western and Central Polesye narratives tend to focus on shapeshifting into a werewolf as a result of a curse, including that issued by a father or mother (Nobel’, Rovno region). The reverse transformation into a human implies the performance of the same actions, but in reverse order: for example, the werewolf must tumble over the same objects, but in the opposite direction. In this case, all items left by the sorcerer had to remain untouched. For example, if a stump which a sorcerer had tumbled over was spellbound, then the werewolf would remain a wolf (Kopachi, Kiev region). This is a widespread motif in the region under consideration. Similarly, to reverse the transformation where a wolf’s skin was thrown onto a person, the rope, belt, or ribbon, from which they turned into a werewolf, must be torn up. Often the wolf skin is said to fall down when the wolf was beaten or when he accidentally became caught on something. For example, in one tale the stepmother turned the stepson into a werewolf, but when he attacked the cattle, the cow tore his skin with its horns, and he became a man (Kopachi, Kiev region). The motif is widely spread throughout Polesye and outside this region. The soul of werewolf is human, but it is bewitched. And a rope is tied around his neck - if somebody unties it, the werewolf will become a man again. (Vyshevichi, Zhytomir region)

The motif of thrusting a werewolf through a horse-collar occurs occasionally in the Gomel’ and Rovno regions; if it was clear that this was not an ordinary wolf, that it understood human speech, or that it often sat under a window to listen, then it was dragged through the collar, and became a man (Barbarov, Gomel’ region). Other narratives about the transformation of a werewolf into a person are connected with the return of human attributes, such as their clothing or name. These motifs are mainly west Polesian. There were evil people: if they get angry with someone, they could turn him into a werewolf for as many years as they wanted. And when his time comes, the werewolf goes to some man in order that the man might call him by name – Ivan or Stepan – and then he becomes human again. (Vystupovichi, Zhytomir region)

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Occasionally, there are other methods of returning a werewolf’s humanity: throwing a pitchfork or some manure over the beast (Brest region), or performing church rites with it (sporadically found in Volyn’, Zhytomir and Gomeˇl regions). Often the werewolf itself shifts back into a human after the expiration of the spell or the sorcerer himself will lift the transformation. The reported behaviour of werewolves varies depending on their origin. The sorcerer-werewolf slays livestock and attacks people. A person forcibly changed into a wolf experienced despair, did not attack livestock and people, did not eat raw meat, and came to the village to seek human food. One person went to plow and spent the night in the forest. At night a wolf came. Being repelled with a stick – he still didn’t retreat. Then the man gave the wolf bread, he ate, nodded, and walked away. At another time, a stranger came to that person and thanked him for the bread – he said, the witch cursed him to be a wolf for seven years, but he was not allowed to eat raw meat if he was to be able to turn back into a man. (Gortoˇl, Brest region)

The werewolf retains its human nature—smell, ability to understand human speech, food habits and even a human reflection in water. Conversely, when returned back to human form, they retain the signs of being a werewolf: skinned hands, remnants of hair, and memories of their time as a wolf. Of course, the majority of narratives combine several plots and motifs. For example, in the story below, the following plots are interlinked: ‘The wedding is turned into wolves’, ‘The sorcerer shapeshifts people into wolves’, and ‘The etiology of wolves’. The two sorcerers at the wedding began to compete over who was stronger. One made the horses stop, and they did not want to go. Another poured water into the horse-collars – and the horses moved. The procession went to the marriage. The first one turned the whole wedding into wolves, including the groom and the bride and all the rest. They say that from here came the first wolves. (Radezh, Brest region)

Atypical motifs concern the specification of the time or some of the circumstances of transformation: that a man would tumble head over heels and turn into a wolf at the new moon; in order to become human

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again, the werewolf had to stumble over the stump of a tree broken by lightning (Zaspa, Gomel’ region); or that the volkulak is a sorcerer who turned into a wolf on a specific holiday (Tkhorin, Zhytomir region). However, in general, in Polesye the link between the werewolf and the phases of the moon or church holidays is not widespread. There are also rare stories where shapeshifting into a wolf is replaced by shapeshifting into a dog (Doroshevichi, Gomel’ region and some others).16 The type ‘The Werewolf husband’ in Polesye is rare, and only one such text is recorded: One man while gathering hay in stacks with his daughter-in-law, went to the forest for a pole, when suddenly a wolf came instead. The daughter-inlaw hurt him in the eye, and he ran away. When the father-in-law returned with a black eye, he said that he hurt himself; by this incident they found out that he was a werewolf. (Simonichi, Gomeˇl region)

This group of motifs that are rare to Polesye includes a narrative about shapeshifting into a bear, and this appears only in stories about people who removed a thorn from a bear’s paw. In one story, a man who helped a bear subsequently meets a man who says that it was him, and that his brother’s wife had turned him into a bear (Zabolotye, Brest region). In another, a woman pulled out a splinter out of a bear’s paw, and then the bear brought her honey in gratitude for the help (Kochishe, Gomel’ region). Strictly speaking, shapeshifting into a bear does not refer to the subject of the werewolf, but rather to that of shapeshifting in general.

Some Legends from Podlasie The continuation of Polesye to the west, i.e. the territory of modern Poland, is the region of Podlasie. However, beliefs and narratives about werewolves here are significantly different from those in Polesye: new motifs appear, the very essence of shapeshifting is reinterpreted, and the werewolf is endowed with features of a demonological character that are not characteristic of those described in Polesye. It is recorded here that 16 About ritual similarities of a wolf and a dog see, for example: poclav Bacil kov, Me dy cobako i volkom: po cledam inctityta voinckix bpatctv v indi ckix tpadici x, lektponna biblioteka Myze antpopologii i tnogpafii im. Petpa Belikogo (Kynctkamepa) PAH, http://www.kunstkamera.ru/lib/rubrikator/03/03_03/ 978-5-88431-139-8/.

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sorcerers and witches could not only shapeshift into wolves themselves, but could also transfer the souls of ordinary people into the body of a wolf. Such a creature, with the soul of a sinner passed into the body of a wolf after death, was considered to be the most dangerous type of werewolf.17 Such tales are no longer about shapeshifting, that is, about the transformation of man into a wolf and vice versa, but about migration of the soul, including to the afterlife. The stories recorded in Podlasie about healers and sorcerers who could shapeshift an entire wedding procession into wolves coincide with Polesian ones. Some of the methods of transformation are also held in common: to become a wolf, a person must step over a red belt or topple over a stump thrice.18 Field research records indicate Podlasie as the vector of migration of such legends and beliefs, in particular the belief that sorcerers capable of shapeshifting people into wolves lived beyond the Bug-river (that is, in Ukraine and Belarus). Beyond the Bug there were even such people that, if they were not invited to the wedding or were badly treated at table, they could turn its participants into wolves. The transformed wedding guests could be identified by the colour of the werewolf’s fur (they had white wedding bows near their necks), they roamed in flocks, but could not catch anything, because when they saw a sheep, they took a step forward, but at the same time took two steps back. (Vyryki, Lublin region, former Chelm province)19

In another story, a woman who came from Polesye (she was a sorceress, czarownica) turned a wedding procession into wolves (Okshuv, 1990); another sorcerer also turned an entire wedding into wolves, and they rushed over the Bug (Osova, 1990).20

17 poclAvA Konpva, ‘Xtoniqni cvit xolmwakiv ta pidl xykiv’, in: Xolmwina i Pidl xx . Ictopiko-etnogpafiqne doclid enn (Kiïv 1997), 313. 18 KOnpvA, ‘Xtoniqni cvit’, 314. 19 AlEkcandP B. Gypa, ‘Me tniqnoct

v zepkale napodno kyl typy Podl c

iva ctapina, vyp. 2 (98) (2018), 23. 20 Gypa, ‘Me

tniqnoct v zepkale’, 22.

’,

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Belarussian Stories About Werewolves Outside the Polesye Zone Recorded at the end of the nineteenth century, materials on the traditional culture of the Belarusians contain more complete versions of the stories about the werewolves, which in some cases explain the short field records of the twentieth century. There is a recorded folk belief that not all wolves are of the same origin, and that amongst them are a lot of shapeshifted people, so-called voukolaks.21 Having stripped naked and ˆ tumbled over one, five, seven or twelve knives or aspen pegs stuck with the tip up into the ground, such a man was said to gradually acquire the traits of a wolf.22 There were two neighbours, one poor and kind, the other rich, but an evil witcher. The poor man bought a horse and brought it out to graze, and the rich one stuck three knives into the ground and began to tumble over them: over one — his head became wolfish, over second — the body became wolfish, over third – the legs became wolfish. He ran and strangled the horse. Then he ran back and tumbled in the reverse order, but the poor neighbour tracked him and managed to pull out one knife – and the sorcerer stayed with wolfish legs. (Novoselki, Minsk province)23

Sometimes, by chance, a person could fall under his own spell and become a werewolf. In one story, when building a barn, the owner struck the threshold thrice with an axe and, after reciting spells, said: ‘Whoever crosses this place, will shapeshift into a wolf for their whole life!’ Then he drank a little, forgot his words and stepped over the place himself and became a wolf for life.24 Most often, shapeshifting was said to take place during weddings. In Vitebsk Belarus, the North-Eastern part of the country, it was believed

21 PAvEl B. Xe n, Matepialy dl izyqeni byta i zyka pycckogo naceleni Cevepo-Zapadnogo kpa , cobpannye i ppivedennye v pop dok P.B. Xe nom, 3 (CanktPetepbypg 1902), 255. 22 Li Calave , ‘Ba˘ykalak, va˘ykalaka’, 71; Xe n, Matepialy, 253. 23 XE n, Matepialy, 257. 24 HikOlA . Hikifopovcki , Ppoctonapodnye ppimety i povep , cyevepnye obp dy i obyqai, legendapnye ckazani o licax i mectax. Cobpal v Bitebcko Belopyccii H. . Hikifopovcki (Bitebck 1897), 264.

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that forcible transformation into wolves could be carried out on a twelveperson wedding procession. A sorcerer would throw an enchanted pea, taken from a pod with twelve peas, over the procession. Alternatively, while the procession was moving, the sorcerer might pull a thread across the road. Often, a powerful wizard would transform the wedding procession with a strong spell, which was easiest to cast at the place where wedding participants met and fought each other.25 One story tells that a pair of newlyweds were leaving their wedding, and that on the way the matchmaker quarrelled with the miller. The miller shouted to the whole wedding: ‘Huzh, ha!’, and all the guests turned into wolves and ran in a pack into the forest. They ran in this form for seven years. The bride and her girl-friends (druzki) were wearing ribbons, so their skin was stripes of different colours.26 Such werewolves turned at a wedding did not part from each other, but would walk in pairs near villages, following one or two more cheerful wolves (representing the newlyweds). They would never attack a person, but would often approach at close range and run away in case of danger.27 Such werewolves were said to eat plants or pick up the remains of human food. They would eat meat only on days of breaking fast, and would divide it equally. They would howl towards the east and towards their villages when they go to sleep and wake up, as an analogue for prayer; they would arrange a pillow of moss and grass, wash in the mornings in the dew, and rake the ground in the spring as if they were ploughing. At the end of the transformation period, they were said to return to the appearance they had when they were enchanted. If a hunter were to kill a werewolf, under the skinned skin he was said to find a human dress, sometimes already decayed, a cross on the werewolf’s neck, and a ring on their finger in the case of newlyweds.28 Shapeshifters are said to be dangerous only to the sorcerer who bewitched them. If this sorcerer died, being the only who could restore to human form, there was said to be only one way to help the werewolves: having located the transformed wedding (identifiable because the wolves were said to go in pairs), the person wishing to help should stick a sharp knife into some bread dough as soon as possible while it was in a trough,

25 HikifopovCki , Ppoctonapodnye ppimety, 67. 26 XE n, Matepialy, 256. 27 HikifopovCki , Ppoctonapodnye ppimety, 67; Xe n, Matepialy, 254. 28 HikifopovCki , Ppoctonapodnye ppimety, 68.

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and then the wolves’ skin would immediately fall off.29 Werewolves were considered to retain the ability to think and feel humanly. One person who was a wolf for seven years related how he used to come to his house to look at his wife and children. He carried cattle from the village to real wolves, but himself lived from hand to mouth. One day he killed a foal and ate until he was full, but the local men saw him and began to chase. When he wanted to jump across a ditch near a forest, his wolf skin broke, and he became a man (Szydlovice).30 To help werewolves transformed at a wedding, and to shorten the term of transformation, it was said that one needed to play wedding songs on a violin and to ask them pleadingly and reproachfully: ‘Isn’t it enough of your walking, making people laugh, dogs teasing? Better go home!’ As soon as the same part of the song that was playing when the enchantment occurred was played, it was believed that the werewolves would howl happily and become people again.31 Among the other ways to help a werewolf become a human, it was said to be necessary to throw a woollen belt, a rake or sometimes a pitchfork over it; to tear off one’s own shirt or trousers and throw them over the head of the werewolf: the latter was said to turn into a human being as soon as the clothes touched them.32 If there was a pregnant woman in the enchanted procession (a situation which was taboo in itself, as the participation of pregnant women in wedding processions was prohibited), then she, in the form of a werewolf, would give birth to a child. Seeing such a mother with a child, it was said that a person must lay their belt, towel, or kerchief on the ground or pronounce female names: as soon as the werewolf crossed the spread cloth or heard her name, she would immediately turn into a person. However, the helping woman could sometimes become a werewolf herself, especially if she bore the same name as this werewolf.33

29 XE n, Matepialy, 254–255. 30 Michał Federowski, Lud Białoruski na Rusi Litewskiej. Materyały do etnografii

słowianskiej ´ zgromadzone w latach 1877–1891, t. 1. Wiara, wierzenia a przes˛ady ludu z okolic Wołkowyska, Słonima, Lidy i Sokółki (Kraków 1897), 194–195. 31 HikifopovCki , Ppoctonapodnye ppimety, 68–69. 32 HikifopovCki , Ppoctonapodnye ppimety, 69. 33 Ibid., 69–70.

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Ukrainian Legends About Werewolves Outside the Polesye Zone Plots about the shapeshifting into wolves of a whole wedding procession or just the bride and groom continue outside Polesye. In the Ushitskiy district of the Podol’sk province (South-West Ukraine), the narrative was recorded of a gentleman (pol. shlahtich) who loved one girl, but married another. During his wedding, he went to the house of his former beloved for the blessing of her mother. She, being a sorceress, tied a rope around his neck, and the groom, upon leaving the house, immediately turned into a wolf and fled into the forest. He was a wolf for one and a half years, until through the intervention of St. Nicholas, he got into the barn to steal a sheep, but escaping from the barn, caught his charmed rope on something and tore it off. Immediately he became a man again.34

Carpathian-Ukrainian Stories About Werewolves The further away from Polesye, the more legends (mifologicheskiye rasskazy) about werewolves vary. Narratives become most specific in the Carpathians, where new motifs appear, and the image of the werewolf intermingles with those of witches, sorcerers, and other ‘double-souled’ people (dvoyedushniki).35 In the Carpathian-Ukrainian dialects, the werewolf is called vovkun, vovkulak, perevidnik, in the Lemko dialects vovkorab, vovkurad,36 and in the Hutsul dialects it is misishnik.37 On one hand, in the Carpathians, many plots known in Polesye and the rest of the Ukraine and Belarus are preserved: sorcerers (charovniki) themselves could become vovkulaks; ordinary people were turned into werewolves as a result of revenge from an evil mother-in-law, wife, or witch; children conceived at Easter, born from a relationship between a woman and a wolf, and cursed by parents, become vovkuns; in order to turn into a

34 QYbinCki , Tpydy, 223. 35 About double-souled (dvoedyxniki) see more in: Elena E. Levkievcka , Anna A.

Plotnikova, ‘Dvoedyxniki’, in: Hikita I. Tolcto (ed.), Clav nckie dpevnocti. tnolingvictiqecki clovap , 2 (Mockva 1999), 29–31. These are people who are considered to have two souls from their birth—one is good, human, another—evil, devil; when such a man dies, one soul continues living and making harm to those who are alive. 36 Hadi Bo toviq, Hapodna demonologi 37 Ibid. (L viv 1908), 213.

Bo kivwini (L viv 2015), 137.

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wolf, it was necessary to jump three times over a knife stuck into the ground, or to throw on an animal skin with a spell. To help a vovkulak return to human form one had to throw a pitchfork over them, stick a knife into bread dough, call them by their human name, feed them with bread, or cover the wolf with a tablecloth that was used three times on the Easter table.38 On the other hand, minor plots and motifs known in other areas acquire new, specific features, and their significance and weight increases in the Carpathian tradition. These Carpathian narratives tell firstly of the transformation of a man into a wolf due to the time and circumstances of his birth. The idea of ‘dangerous’ times to be born, which were astronomical, associated with the lunar circle, or social, associated with holidays and weekdays, comes to the fore.39 For example, people who were conceived at Easter became werewolves; they could become a person again on major holidays, such as that of John the Baptist, Christmas, Easter, or Winter Nikolay, the patron saint of wolves.40 The intense connection with the lunar calendar is a characteristic Carpathian trait, and in this motif one can discern a foreign influence on the East Slavic tradition—most likely Romanian (or via Romania). According to the Hutsul legends, there are people called misishniks who turn into wolves at the hour when the old moon disappears and a new moon is born.41 In Boykovshina, a sympathetic attitude towards the werewolf prevails, since they believe that a healer (neprosty) was forced to undergo the transformation, because ‘such a minute’ impacts him or he ‘was born under such a planet’.42 During field research at the Russins in Eastern Slovakia, we heard about one old man from a neighbouring village who could shapeshift into a wolf, and they thought that it was the moon that affected him (Ubˇla, Snina district, 2018). It is thought possible in this region to help a vovkulak to return to human form at the

38 Bo tOviq, Hapodna demonologi Bo kivwini, 138, 142. 39 See, f.i, Cvetlana M. Tolcta , in: Hikita I. Tolcto

dpevnocti. 448–452.

tnolingvictiqecki

(ed.), Clav nckie clovap , 2 (Mockva 1999), 1 (Mockva 1995),

40 Bo tOviq, Hapodna demonologi 41 Xyxeviq, Gycyl wina, 213.

Bo kivwini, 141–142.

42 Bo tOviq, Hapodna demonologi

Bo kivwini, 145.

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time of the birth of a new moon, by giving it a decoction of herbs.43 This connection of werewolves to the full moon is included in the legend about the spots on the moon.44 Two brothers were arguing over one highland field. Finally they decided to go up to the top and pour some water out of a bucket: where the water flowed, there would be a border. But the water flowed more on one side, and the offended brother killed the other. For this, their mother cursed the field, and God placed the brothers, the bucket, and the pitchfork, with which the murder was done, on the moon. Vovkuns arose from these two brothers. They bite each other, and eat the moon to erase this image on it; so they gnaw it, but they cannot eat it all up, because it is time for them to become human again. The remaining piece of the moon grows ˇ and renews again. (Yavoriv, Lviv region)45

Another belief about the eating up of the moon by werewolves is recorded in the Hutsuls; werewolves gnaw it and tear it apart, but then the moon becomes whole again (Roztoky, Zakarpatye region).46 On the third hand, new motifs appear in the Carpatho-Ukrainian beliefs. These are either strongly modified old motifs that have acquired different qualities, motifs introduced from other, non-Slavic traditions, or a mixture of the two. For example, it was believed that every ‘doublesouled’ person was a werewolf. This not only included sorcerers, but any child born with unusual signs (with two curls of hair, with a caul, with a tooth), conceived on a holiday, etc.; the person becomes a werewolf ‘involuntarily’, that is, turns into a wolf ‘when such a time comes’.47 It is not considered to be their fault. New demonological features of the werewolf appear in the region, indicating the obliteration of the essence of this character. For example, they believed in Pokutye that a werewolf had a foss under his groin, in which the ends of his skin meet; in Boykivshina that he has one evil eye, three

43 Ibid., 141. 44 Moon spots are often ‘seen’ as Cain and Abel, placed on the Moon for the sin of

fratricide for the edification of people. 45 Xyxeviq, Gycyl wina, 213. 46 HatAl Xobze , Tet na ctpemc ka, Okcana Cimoviq, Ganna Didik-Meyx,

Gycyl c ki cviti. Lekcikon (L viv 2013), 150. 47 Bo tOviq, Hapodna demonologi

Bo kivwini, 139.

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wolf paws, and the fourth, the human leg.48 The motif appears of the gathering of the werewolves (like witch gatherings), where they fight real wolves.49 As the researchers note, there are absolutely no stories about female werewolves in the Carpathians,50 apparently due to the absence of stories about the whole wedding or newlyweds being turned into wolves. Due to the widespread idea of involuntariness and even suffering from the need to shapeshift into a wolf, in the Ukrainian Carpathians there is a fairly widespread legend about the ‘husband werewolf’. There are several variants of such stories, the essence of which boils down to the narrative that a husband and his wife (or father-in-law with his daughter-in-law) go to rake hay on the field. At noon the husband retires to the forest, and instead a wolf runs to his wife; a woman standing on a haystack beats off a wolf with a rake or pitchfork, but the wolf manages to rip out a piece of her skirt; later, the woman sees the thread from her skirt stuck between the teeth of her returning husband, and realizes who he is. Some stories stop at the moment of identification of the werewolf; in other stories, the wife left the husband werewolf (Strigantsy, Kamenets district) or the husband confessed that he was a voucolab, but he explained that he turned ˆ unintentionally, and only when a specific hour came upon him, and the wife continued to live with him (Puzhniki, Buchatskiy district).51 In one story from the Ivano-Frankovsk region, the husband, who loved his wife very much, warned her that when he left a wolf would come. Identified by the thread between his teeth, he confessed that he was a werewolf, but he became ‘clean’ through his confession (Kosmach, Kosovo district).52

Werewolves in Russian Stories and Beliefs Texts about werewolves in Russian territory demonstrate the gradual erosion of this folklore tradition: reducing number of plots, modification of motifs, and changes to the meaning or the disappearance of the term volko(d)lak. Among the meanings of the image appear ‘the spirit of

48 Ibid., 140. 49 Ibid., 142–143. 50 Ibid., 142. 51 BolOdimiP

Gnat k, ‘Znadobi do galic ko-pyc ko| Etnogpafiqni zbipnik, XV (L viv 1904), 175–177. 52 Xyxeviq, Gycyl wina, 213.

demonol oґ i|’,

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an unbaptized infant or suicide who has become a ghoul’, or ‘spirit of a dead witch or sorcerer’.53 The territory of Russia is heterogeneous in its ethnic, dialectological, and folklore characteristics. The western part of the Bryansk region culturally belongs to Polesye and generally continues the archaic werewolf tradition, albeit with a quantity of plot variations. The regions bordering on Belarus, in general, continue the Belarusian tradition. The western part of the Central Black Earth regions,54 Voronezh, Belgorod, and Kursk, bordering on Ukraine, is close to the Ukrainian Polesian tradition and retains stories about the shapeshifting of sorcerers into wolves. In the eastern regions of the Black Earth region, there are stories about shapeshifting of sorcerers into pigs, geese, or stacks of hay.55 The Russian North is a specific area of permanent settlement from the tenth and eleventh century and retained archaic contacts with the Finno-Ugric peoples56 ; narratives in this region are characterized by shapeshifting both into wolves and into bears. Sources of the nineteenth and early twentieth century provide a fairly complete description of the transformation into a werewolf from Western Russian regions. N. Gal’kovskiy, speaking of the preservation of belief in werewolves until the beginning of the twentieth century, cites a story from the village of Luchasy in Smolensk province (West-Russian) about a peasant who could turn into a werewolf by somersaulting over a knife stuck in the ground. When the local people found the knife and took it out of the ground, the man disappeared, and was gone for three years. The wise man advised his relatives to thrust the knife back and soon the man came home, covered with wolf hair. He was stream-bathed with a sauna-whisk, after which the wolf’s hair had all gone. The werewolf said that, while he was running as a wolf, his thoughts and feelings were

53 HoviqkOvA, Pyccki demonologiqecki clovap , 115. 54 The Belgorod, Voronezh, Kursk, Lipetsk and Tambov regions. 55 Ol gA . Titova, Apeal noe iccledovanie mifologiqeckix ppedctavleni pycckix centpal nogo qepnozem (konec XIX–naqalo XXI vv.), Dicc. … kand. ict. nayk. Ha ppavax pykopici (Mockva 2015), 118. 56 Cultural and geographical region in the north of Russia, including the Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Leningrad, Murmansk regions, the Republic of Karelia and Komi. Historically, Veliky Novgorod and Rostov Velikiy, from which the region was colonized, belong to this zone too.

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human and he could not eat carrion. When he drank, his human image was reflected in the water.57 Shorter and less numerous stories of werewolves from this region are presented in the Polesian archive. Two of them narrate about a sorcerer (or a sorcerer-father) who shapeshifts a person (or his son) into a wolf through bewitched drinking or through a curse (Chelkov, Bryansk region). In the third story, one sorcerer changed his victim into a wolf, and another made the wolf man again. This werewolf said he could speak human language in the beast form. This suggest why this sorcerer was called vaukalaka. In the last story the term valkalaka means ‘king of the wolves’, ˆi.e. the leader of the wolf pack (Kartushino, Bryansk region). Stories about shapeshifting in general, including shapeshifting into a wolf, were recorded in various places in Russia. Sergey Maksimov wrote that in the Ryazan’ province (Central Russia) ‘the peasants believe in the werewolves and are afraid of meeting with them’, in the Vologda province (North Russia) they narrate that very long ago there were ‘strong sorcerers who turned into a wolf or a bear’, and there are still such sorcerers ‘in Zyryans’ (between the neighbours, Komi-Zyrians) who can change a human into a wolf; in the Kaluga province, ‘theye believe in the existence of turnskins, but they do not know werewolves’.58 In one story from Ore’l region (Central Russia), the party forgot to invite the local witch to the wedding feast. She threw a handful of dust from the road onto the wedding train, and everybody in the carriages fled as wolves into the forest (Kazinki).59 In the Yaroslavl region (Upper Volga basin) a narrative was recorded about a shapeshifter who could turn not only into a wolf, but also into a bear or any other animal. It was enough for him to go out into the forest, stick a knife into a stump and roll over it, uttering a certain spell. Most often, sorcerers and witches shapeshifted themselves, but they could also transform other people into

57 HikOlA M. Gal kovcki , Bop ba xpictianctva c octatkami zyqectva v Dpevne Pyci, 1, 2 (peppint izdani 1913 i 1916 gg., Mockva 2000), 213–214. 58 CepgE B. Makcimov, ‘Obopotni’, in: Heqicta , nevedoma i kpectna (Cankt-Petepbypg 1903, peppint: Mockva 1993), 103–108, 106–107. 59 TitOvA, Apeal noe iccledovanie, 102.

cila

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different animals.60 A witch, capable of shapeshifting into a wolf herself and shifting other people into dogs, is mentioned in a fairy tale from the Kaluga region.61

Legends of the Russian North A few plots about shapeshifters into a wolf (or a dog) were found in a well-collected mythological prose of the Russian North. The shapeshifters were called here overtun, yubertysh, yeretic, rarely upyr’ and volkodlak, and they were all sorcerers.62 Often, the shapeshifting was committed at the wedding: they were said to have ‘spoiled the wedding’. Sometimes they make a ‘dog wedding’, that is, they turn its participants into dogs.63 If one party breaks the marriage proposal, the former matchmakers would get angry. Well, they might go to get married, but no one will return, everyone will change into wolves and jump off the wagon. There were such old women. Here the procession is going, and she threw a tangle under the horses – all the people jumped off and ran away to the forest [...] They say that once a wolf is killed, there was the silk dress underneath the skin. (Krivee, Novgorod 1990)64

As in the other Eastern Slavic zones, in rare cases the wolf in Russian narratives is replaced by a dog. This motif must be recognized as having heritage of the most ancient era, the time of the domestication of the wolf. According to the story, because the boy married a girl not from his village, but from another, the whole wedding train was turned into a ‘dog wedding’ (Orlovo, Kargopol district, 1997).65

60 AlEkce

B. Balov, ‘Oqepki obozpenie, kn.51 (1901), № 4, 116.

Poxexon

.

Bepovani ’,

tnogpafiqeckoe

61 Cbopnik velikopycckix ckazok Apxiva Pycckogo geogpafiqeckogo obwectva, v 2 vyp. Izdal A.M. Cmipnov, vyp. 1 (Petpogpad 1917), 503–504. 62 Ol gA A. Qepepanova (coctavitel i avtop kommentapiev), Mifologiqeckie pacckazy i legendy Pycckogo. Cevepa (Cankt-Petepbypg 1996), 87, 89, 111. 63 QepepAnOvA, Mifologiqeckie pacckazy, 172. 64 Ibid., 88. 65 Andpe B. Mopoz (ed.), Znatki, vedyny i qepnokni bytova magi na Pycckom Cevepe (Mockva 2012), 196.

niki. Koldovctvo i

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There are many motifs in Russian stories associated with the transformation into a wolf that are familiar from other places. For example, the motif that under the skin of a dead wolf human clothing was found: ‘It happened the wolf is shot, and in the wolf’s skin, there is a man’ (Khoroshevo, Novgorod, 1990).66 That on the body of the former werewolf remains a lock of wolf hair: ‘We had an old man, he still had a lock of wolf hair, for memory. He told how they lived’ (Khoroshevo, Novgorod, 1990).67 That werewolves had human properties: ‘There they run, run, so what, they but want to eat, so, they come, and wolves like… cry, [people] feel what they need … I’ve heard this: people will carry out something, either bread for them to eat or… (Sloboda, Kargopol, 2001).68 A notable feature of the mythological tales of the Russian North is isofunctionality in plots about shapeshifting into a wolf or a bear. In many cases, they are considered to be equal hypostasis of a turnskin: ‘Previously, they walk as bears and ran as wolves here, those yeretics. Our dad even saw it. There they knew it. Shapeshifted into a wolf, changed. And walked as a bear. It used to be previously, people believed’ (Komi, Usˇt-Tsil., 1987).69 The motif of turning into a wolf can be found also in North-Russian fairy tales, as well as in tales of other Slavic peoples.70

Conclusion: Centre for the Formation of the Mythological Image Legends and beliefs about werewolves among the Slavs were recorded mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, analysis of geographically diverse material compensates for the lack of the chronological depth in the Slavic data, because new elements in the spiritual culture do not replace each other, but are accumulated in it, preserving

66 QepepAnOvA, Mifologiqeckie pacckazy, 87. 67 Ibid., 56. 68 Mopoz (ed.), Znatki, 195–196. 69 QepepAnOvA, Mifologiqeckie pacckazy, 89. 70 CkAzki i ppedani Cevepnogo kpa . B zapic x I.B. Kapnayxovo

191, 290.

(Mockva 2009),

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evidence of a certain time. In other words, wrote Nikita Ilyich Tolstoy, this creates the possibility of observing diachrony spread in space.71 Evaluation of all existing Slavic material, its volume, distribution, density, and motifs, considered in geographical and structural aspects, shows that the epicentre of these beliefs was the northern Slavic area: the Belarusian-Ukrainian zone (Polesye), where they form a stable and fairly uniform complex. For the Polish territory, the core of the belief in werewolves is supposed to be the area of the Bialsk-Podlaski province and the adjacent Białostok province, that is, the Podlasie zone.72 The second important centre that retained a number of archaic features, although it absorbed a number of innovations, is the region of the Eastern Carpathians. This is the territory where the Slavs stayed for a comparatively long time and from where they moved to the Balkan peninsula. During the migration to the Balkans during the sixth to seventh centuries, Slavic tribes retained beliefs about the werewolf, which were active and stable, since, according to the research of the linguists, the word vlkodlak was borrowed into languages of almost all peoples that the Slavs came into contact with: in Greek (new-Greek βoυ ϰ o´ λαϰας, β oυϰ o´ λαϰας etc.), Ablanian (vurkollák, vurvollák, dial. vrkollak), Romanian (vîrcolác, v˘arculác, virgolác and Arumanian (vurculák, vircólac, vurcólac), Turkish (vurkolak), although now they have different meanings.73 By the time of the recording of Slavic beliefs the semantics of this character almost entirely changed under the influence of substrate beliefs, and therefore, having saved the name (vlkodlak/vukodlak) it merged with beliefs surrounding the vampire. But beliefs which frame the werewolf as a man-wolf have been still preserved so far in the Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian traditions.74

71 HikitA I. Tolcto , zyk i napodna kyl typa. Oqepki po clav ncko mifologii i tnolingvictike (Mockva 1995), 46. 72 Tadeusz Marguł, Motywy wiary w wiklołaka, Lud 65 (1981), 56. 73 UtE Dykova, Haimenovani demonov, 91. 74 In Slovenian: vołkodlàk ‘werewolf (a person who has been cursed to be a wolf until he is released)’ (Maks Pleteršnik, Slovensko-nemški slovar, t. 2 [Ljubljana 1895], 785), in Bosnian vukodlak, Slovenian volkodlak ‘werewolf’ (Anna A. Plotnikova, Clav nckie octpovnye apealy: apxaika i innovacii [Mockva 2016], 199–200, 634–645), as well ˇ Radenkovi´c, in beliefs and legends from Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and as, according to L. Herzegovina. For example, in the belief from Trebinja to turn into a wolf, the woman ‘put the ropes in a circle, took off her clothes and threw it inside the circle, then turned

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To consider the primary meaning of this nowadays folklore image, it can be supposed that it might have been formed on the basis of shamanistic and totemistic ideas transformed on the Slavic soil into the idea of magical ability of a ‘person or a power’ (sorcerer) to turn into various animals; later this idea was modified, too. Further discussions of this issue is possible through comparison of ethnolinguistic material from other Slavic as well as non-Slavic traditions, first of all, Baltic and German, but also other European traditions.

over three times over her head. In the same way, later she turned back into a woman’ (Padenkoviè, ‘Bampip—vykodlak - v pkolak’, 276–278).

CHAPTER 7

The Werewolf as the Slavic and Germanic “Other”: Czech Werewolf Legends Between Oral and Popular Culture Petr Janeˇcek

The werewolf is a rare and strange beast of Czech legendry. The Czech lands belong to the areas of Europe where werewolf references are almost absent. A similar situation can be found in geographically and culturally close Bavaria, but also in the more distant Austrian and Swiss Alps, Greece, most of the Iberian peninsula, Ireland, and the British Isles.1 This scarcity applies not only to the werewolves of Czech oral legends and similar folkloric texts, documented in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but also to earlier cultural concepts of werewolves found in medieval romances and subsequently early modern demonology. The 1 Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 17.

P. Janeˇcek (B) Institute of Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_7

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Czech folklorist Frank Wollman (1888–1969), who devoted much effort to the comparative research of vampiric and werewolf legends in Slavic and German-speaking Central Europe, concluded that ‘werewolf’ as a concept and even as a term is, when compared with the neighbouring countries of Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia, very rare in Czech oral culture.2 One of the possible environmental reasons for this scarcity could be the low number of wolves in these areas. Sightings of the animals could possibly increase the diffusion of werewolf narratives perceived by contemporary audiences as realistic—legends, rumours and memorates. Since the early modern period, wolves became extremely rare in the Czech lands and ceased to be regular part of everyday life experienced by Czech vernacular culture. During the nineteenth century, the period when first oral legends started to be systematically collected, the animal was almost

2 Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 16, No. 1 (1923), 145. Wollman´s extensive survey of Central European vampiric and werewolf traditions (with frequent excursions to other areas of Europe) was published in the 1920s, includes a short type-index of the seven most popular European types of these narratives, and still represents one of the best comparative texts devoted to the subject in the region, see: Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 14, No. 1 (1920), 1–16; No. 2 (1920), 1–57; 15, No. 1 (1921), 1–58; 16, No. 1 (1923), 80–96, 133–149, 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 133–161. The same conclusion was also drawn by the majority of previous authors who investigated Czech werewolf traditions, including the nineteenth-century mythologists, see: I. J. Hanush (= Jan Ignác Hanuš), ‘Die Wer-Wölfe oder Vlko-Dlaci’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde. IV. Band (Göttingen 1859), 193–198; Josef ˇ Jireˇcek, ‘Studia z oboru mythologie cˇ eské’, Casopis Musea Království cˇeského 37, No. 1 (1863), 12–15; Jan Máchal, Nákres slovanského bájesloví (Prague 1891), 180–182. More recent texts which analyse Czech werewolf legends are derivative; they mostly follow Wollman and bring in almost no new data and/or interpretation of local folklore tradition ˇ (Giuseppe Maiello, ‘Lykantropové a vlkodlaci’, in: Ríše prastará, mocná i zkrocená. Les na Kravaˇrsku mezi stˇredovˇekem a industrializací (Nový Jiˇcín 2017), 124–134; Giuseppe Maiello, Vampyrismus a Magia posthuma: Vampyrismus v kulturních dˇejinách Evropy a Magia posthuma Karla Karla Ferdinanda Schertze (první novodobé vydání) (Prague 2015); ˇ Peter Bystrický, ‘Sympatický vlkolak’, in: Daniela Dvoˇráková et al. (ed.), Clovek a svet zvierat v stredoveku. Svet vedy; zväzok cˇ. 35 (Bratislava 2015), 305–319). For a short general overview of Czech werewolf folklore, see the entry ‘Werewolf’ in the Ethnographic Encyclopaedia of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (Dagmar Klímová, ‘Vlkodlak’, in: Stanislav ˇ Brouˇcek – Richard Jeˇrábek (eds.), Lidová kultura. Národopisná encyklopedie Cech, Moravy a Slezska. 3. svazek (Prague 2007), 1145). The recent index of Czech demonological legends includes a single reference to werewolf motif: 2.D.75 Man turns himself into a wolf and harms people, see: Jan Luffer, Katalog cˇeských démonologických povˇestí (Prague 2014), 97.

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extinct and regarded as an almost mythical wild being, living in more eastern parts of Europe such as Poland or Russia.3 Nevertheless, there are some Czech popular texts about werewolves, most of them appearing as late as the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The reason for their appearance was primarily connected with popular concepts of ‘national’ folklore and the cultural politics of the period. An investigation of the connection between Czech werewolf references and this wider discourse is the primary subject of this chapter.

The Czech Werewolf: Invented or Borrowed Tradition? According to some scholars, there are three references to werewolves in high medieval texts from the Czech lands, but all of them are isolated, unclear and problematic. The first is found in the Latin Homiliarum quod dicitur Opatovicense, a collection of sermons from the first half of the twelfth century, written for the bishop of Prague and used in churches all over the country. In the Sermon of St. Bonifatius, which lists forbidden pagan beliefs, there is a reference to the belief in ficti lupi (‘fictive wolves’), which could possibly refer to werewolves; no details about them are given, save their connection to the striga (a witch, or possibly, according to later sources, a female vampiric revenant).4 The second is a

3 The last wolf in the Czech lands living close to settled countryside was shot as early as 1825; the last one living in the remote mountains of the western, more industrialized part of the country, Bohemia, was shot in 1874. A few isolated wolves lived in the remote mountains of Beskydy in the north-eastern part of the country (the only region where werewolf legends had supposedly been collected) as late as until 1914 (Ludˇek ˇ Bufka, Marco Heurich, Thomas Engleder, Manfred Wölfl, Jaroslav Cervený, Wolfgang Scherzinger, ‘Wolf Occurrence in the Czech-Bavarian-Austrian Border Region – Review of the History and Current Status’, Silva Gabreta 1, 11 (2015), 27–42). It is interesting to compare this with regions of Europe with richer werewolf folklore, e.g. Estonia; in 1827, just two years after death of the last wolf living in the settled Czech countryside, 935 wolves had been shot in the Riga Guberniya alone, see: Merili Metsvahi, ‘Estonian Werewolf History’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 208. 4 Jiˇrí Dynda, Slovanské pohanství ve stˇredovˇekých latinských pramenech (Dolní Bˇrežany 2017), 256. The passage about fictive wolves can be found in part I, 104 Ammonicio sive predicacio sancti Bonifacii episcopi de abrenunciacione baptismatis. It is worthwhile to note that the audience of the original sermon of St. Bonifatius were people in Germany, not the Czech lands, and the text probably refers to the pagan beliefs there (the original

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reference to vˇedi, beings who devoured the moon during lunar eclipses, found in a Czech version of the Alexandreis epic poem from the end of the thirteenth century; this, however, clearly refers to witches, not werewolves.5 The most detailed reference can be found in the Czech version of the Latin dictionary Mater verborum. This was originally written in the ninth century in the monastery of St. Gallen, and the Czech version dates from around 1240. In it one can find several Czech comments attached to the main Latin text, which were supposedly inserted by a scribe named Vacerad.6 These medieval comments equate the Czech term for werewolf, vlkodlak, with the ancient Roman faun, a god and later a demon connected with love making and the fertility of meadows and pastures. The connection is supported by the faun’s titles of lupus (‘wolf’) and lupercus (‘god of shepherds’). Specifically, the werewolves were supposed to be the same type of beings as Roman fauni ficarii, lustful forest and

is also much older, from the eighth century). For more details about the possible folkloric content of the source (and for the first interpretation of the passage as referring to werewolves), see Miloš J. Pulec, ‘Homiliáˇr opatovický jako pramen národopisného bádání’, ˇ Ceský lid 45, No. 3 (1958), 101–102. See also Dennis M. Kratz, ‘Fictus Lupus: The Werewolf in Christian Thought’, Classical Folia 30 (1976), 57–78. 5 Václav Vážný (ed.), Alexandreida. Památky staré literatury cˇeské sv. 28 (Prague 1963), 105, 169 (the references are found in two manuscripts: Zlomek svatovítský 2352–2353 and Zlomek jindˇrichohradecký 446–447 ). The Old Czech term vˇedi means, with no discussion, female vˇeštkynˇe or cˇarodˇejnice (‘seeress’ or ‘witch’)—Václav Vážný (ed.), Alexandreida. ˇ ek Památky staré literatury cˇeské sv. 28 (Prague 1963), 247; detailed interpretation in Cenˇ Zíbrt, Seznam povˇer a zvyklostí pohanských z VIII. vˇeku = (Indiculus superstitionum et paganiarum): Jeho význam pro všeobecnou kulturní historii i pro studium kulturních pˇrežitku˚ v nynˇejším lidovém podání: se zvláštním zˇretelem k cˇeské lidovˇedˇe (Prague 1891), 115–118. Other references to witches eating the moon could be found in several other important high medieval Czech sources, e.g. The Chronicle of Dalimil or the play The Ointment Seller. The incorrect werewolf interpretation of this passage uses a false ethnographic parallel of vampiric werewolves devouring the moon and sun during the eclipse, known in Serbia since the thirteenth century (Lubor Niederle, Život starých Slovanu. ˚ Dílu II. Svazek I. (Prague 1917), 43–45) and known also from Russian sources; for this ˇ Profantová, Martin Profant, Encyklopedie slovanincorrect interpretation, see e.g. Nada ských bohu˚ a mýtu˚ (Prague 2004), 234. Some contemporary authors even wrongly refer to these beings as devouring people, not the moon (e.g. Peter Bystrický, ‘The Image of the Werewolf in Medieval Literature’, Historický cˇasopis 63, No. 5 (2015), 809). 6 Josef Virgil Grohmann, Sagen-Buch von Böhmen und Mähren: Sagen aus Böhmen (Prague 1863), 110.

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field spirits who entered women’s beds, because of which they were also called incubi.7 This interpretation by the Czech medieval scribe, equating werewolves with fauns and incubi, is very interesting. The problem is that the text itself is false. It is mere Ossianic mythological forgery, created by Czech Romantic Nationalists in the beginning of the nineteenth century, most probably in 1827 by the poet and falsifier of Czech national epics Václav Hanka (1791–1861) from Prague, with the help of the German professor E. G. Graf from Königsberg.8 Hanka did not stop at werewolves: to the original 339 authentic Czech entries in the medieval dictionary, he added 900 other fake quasi-medieval Czech terms, many of them mythological from the imagined Czech Slavic pagan past. Often, Hanka added the Czech equivalents of demonic beings from ancient Roman mythology, such as zlí duchové a trapiˇci or bˇesi (‘daemones’), lesní nymfy (‘dryades’) or domácí skˇrítci a bužci ˚ (‘penates, intimi et secretales’), among others. Most of these terms were taken from the Czech vernacular language and oral legends of the early nineteenth century and forcefully transplanted back in time to the high medieval period. The reference to the Czech werewolves, vlkodlaci, was not one of these. That entry was completely artificial, with no ties to Czech vernacular culture of any period. This can be guessed by the mythological mess created by Hanka; during his period, Czech Romantic Nationalists knew almost nothing about werewolves.9 One of the most important proofs that the concept of werewolf is not native to Czech culture is a linguistic one. The Czech term for werewolf, vlkodlak, is an ‘artificial’ word which was used in neither vernacular nor elite Czech language before the mid-nineteenth century. The term was invented, based on model words from South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian), in the beginning of the nineteenth 7 Grohmann, Sagen aus Böhmen, 119–120. For the original, see Václav Hanka, ‘Mater ˇ verborum. Nejstarší slovník s cˇ eskými glosami’, Casopis cˇeského Museum 1, 4 (1827), 69–71. 8 Vˇenceslava Bechyn ˇ ová, ‘Kontext Erbenova bájeslovného díla (pˇredchudci, ˚ souˇcasníci a ˇ následovníci)’, in: Vˇenceslava Bechynˇ ová, Marcel Cerný, Petr Kaleta (eds.), Karel Jaromír Erben: Slovanské bájesloví (Prague 2009), 17–18. These texts were regarded as authentic until the late 1870s with advent of modern methods of textual criticism. The first positivist ˇ critique was Antonín Baum, Adolf Patera, ‘Ceské glosy a miniatury v “Mater verborum”’, ˇ Casopis cˇeského Museum 51 (1877), 120–149, 372–390, 488–513. 9 Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 134.

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century by the creators of the modern Czech language.10 The reason for this invention of tradition was political: the Czech national movement, similarly to other national movements of the period in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, drew heavily from folklore and mythology to support its cultural and political claims.11 During this process, mythical beings such as werewolves played a special role. Due to the importance and popularity of the Grimmian Mythological School for contemporary thought, and given the general nineteenth-century fascination with mythology and the search for the Indo-European linguistic and mythological roots of European nations, the proof of existence of an elaborated ‘national’ mythology played an important role as evidence of the ancient historical roots of the newly defined Czech nation.12 In service to this, some concepts of folkloric demonic beings such as the vlkodlak have been directly borrowed. These were usually from the languages of Slavic nations which were thought to be closer to the imagined Pan-Slavic mythological past, especially South Slavic or Russian languages, than the supposedly overly Germanized Czechs, or from those which were close culturally and geographically, especially Polish and Slovakian. The names of other folkloric demonic beings, which were native to Czech oral culture, have been at least renamed, usually to sound more Slavic and less Germanic. This was the case of the two most frequent actors of demonological legends of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and now also two of the most popular literary fairy-tale characters, the víla and the vodník. The first was a forest dwelling, child-stealing female fairy, originally called divá žena or divoženka (‘wild woman’) who was renamed based on South Slavic term and concept of vila to the more poetic and harmless víla, which is now the most common term to designate a generic fairy in contemporary Czech elite and popular culture.13 The second was probably the most popular Czech demonic being, a water spirit or 10 Václav Machek, ‘Vlkodlak’, in: Etymologický slovník jazyka cˇeského (Prague 1971), ˇ 695; Jiˇrí Rejzek, ‘Vlkodlak’, in: Ceský etymologický slovník (Prague 2001), 717. 11 William A. Wilson, ‘Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism’, Journal of Popular

Culture 6, No. 4 (1973), 819–835. 12 Kurt Hartwig, ‘The Incidental History of Folklore in Bohemia’, The Folklore Historian. Journal of the Folklore and History Section of the American Folklore Society 16 (1999), 61–73. 13 Nada ˇ Profantová, Martin Profant, Encyklopedie slovanských bohu˚ a mýtu˚ (Prague 2004), 232; Dagmar Klímová, ‘Divoženka’, in: Stanislav Brouˇcek, Richard Jeˇrábek (eds.),

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water gnome named the hastrman, whose name was also slavicized. The original name of this water spirit, which since the fourteenth century in both literary and vernacular language had been called by various names derived from the German term Wassermann (such as hastrman, vaserman, hasrman, vastrman, bestrman, etc. all meaning ‘water man’) was changed by Romantic Nationalists to sound more Czech, to vodník or vodní muž.14 However, reimagining the vlkodlak was a much bolder move, as there were no well documented Czech references to the werewolf before the nineteenth century.15 Nationalistic mythologists, who from the midnineteenth century were followed by folklorists, tried to rectify this and to prove by finding oral werewolf legends, that the Czech tradition was definitely Slavic, and definitely as old as the mythological traditions

ˇ Lidová kultura. Národopisná encyklopedie Cech, Moravy a Slezska. 2. svazek (Prague 2007), 140. 14 Jan Máchal, Nákres slovanského bájesloví (Prague 1891), 140. For overview of folk narratives about the vodník, see Dagmar Klímová, ‘Vodník’, in: Stanislav Brouˇcek, Richard ˇ Jeˇrábek (eds.), Lidová kultura. Národopisná encyklopedie Cech, Moravy a Slezska. 3. svazek (Prague 2007), 1147–1148; Dagmar Klímová, ‘Vodník v cˇ eském lidovém podání (Aktuální ˇ problémy jeho historického studia)’, Ceský lid 59, No. 3 (1972), 130–153; Pavel Šidák, Mokˇre chodí v suše. Vodník v cˇeské literatuˇre (Prague 2018), 15–66. 15 A single isolated instance of a trial which in some ways resembles the early modern

German and Livonian werewolf scares took place in June 1600 in the town of Lipník in north-eastern Moravia. There, the shepherd Jakub from the village of Lazníky, litigated against for the theft of three horses, revealed during torture that two years ago, he bought from another shepherd a demon in a flask in the form of a big black fly named Kaspar and forced it—in wolf form—to kill the animals of other shepherds and steal their meat, and later to destroy their crops by summoning a rainstorm (Miroslav Marada, Smolná kniha mˇesta Lipníka. Sborník státního okresního archivu Pˇrerov 2 (Pˇrerov 1994), 29–30; Jindˇrich ˇ Fracek, Carodˇ ejnické pˇríbˇehy (Prague 2005), 85). Interestingly, the trial took place in the same region where Czech werewolf legends were later documented by folklorists. Also, one victim of werewolf trials which took place in 1579 in Livonia was from the Czech lands: the burgher from Gabell in Behmen (Deutsch-Gabel/Jablonné v Podještˇedí) was accused of turning himself into a wolf during his wedding night and eating his wife, and had to be shot (Joseph Klapper, ‘Wampir, Werwolf, Hexe’, Mitteilungen der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 12 (1910), 184; Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 16, No. 1 (1923), 147). From the seventeenth century, there are also unclear references to psí mura ˚ (‘dog nightmare’) by Comenius (= Jan Amos Komenský), but this probably refers to the common Czech ˇ ek Zíbrt, Staroˇceské výroˇcní obyˇceje, povˇery, slavnosti vampiric demonic being of mora (Cenˇ a zábavy prostonárodní, pokud o nich vypravují písemné památky až po náš vˇek. Pˇríspˇevek ke kulturním dˇejinám cˇeským (Prague, 1889), 212).

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of other European nations. In the 1860s, one of the most important Slavic mythologists of the time, Karel Jaromír Erben (1811–1870), who firmly believed in the authenticity of fake demonological entries in Mater verborum, published three Slavic folkloric tales (two from Croatia and one from the Ukraine) about werewolves in the first-ever Pan-Slavic collection of one hundred folktales and legends in original languages. He was, however, unable to produce any authentic local Czech legends.16 Still, he was, like most mythologists of his time, firmly persistent in his belief that there had to be some Czech werewolf legends.17 More successful was his contemporary Josef Virgil Grohmann (1831–1919), a Germanspeaking mythologist from Prague, who in 1863 published Sagen aus Böhmen (Legends of Bohemia), the first academic collection of Czech folk legends, which included the earliest Czech werewolf narrative as follows: The Werewolf. Once, a forest fairy fell in love with a gamekeeper. He, however, resisted her advances and she thus swore that she would revenge herself. When she met him, she told him that next time he fired a gun, he would turn into a werewolf. The gamekeeper paid no heed to this and one day, when he met a nice stag, immediately shot him. In that very moment, he turned into a werewolf, but did not lose his appetite for human food; he scared away shepherds and woodcutters and ate their bread and cheese. Because of this, the gamekeeper’s fiancée was sad for a long time. One day, when she was sitting at the village inn and watching how other people danced, the horrible wolf entered the inn and took her away. He lived with her in the forest for one year, until the sad girl died of grief. And so, the werewolf roamed the forest for thirty-three years. One day, when he woke up, he found out that he was human again. He immediately went to the village where he lived before and mingled into a crowd who were celebrating at the time. Nobody recognized him because, in the meantime, he had aged considerably. In the end, he revealed his identity

16 Jiˇrí Horák (ed.), Karel Jaromír Erben. Slovanské pohádky. Díla Karla Jaromíra Erbena svazek 4 (Prague 1940), 132–136, 351. Originally published as Karel Jaromír ˇ Erben, Sto prostonárodních pohádek a povˇestí slovanských v náˇreˇcích puvodních. ˚ Cítanka slovanská s vysvˇetením slov (Prague 1862–1863). 17 Karel Jaromír Erben, ‘Abecední slovník slovanského bájesloví’, in: Vˇenceslava ˇ Bechynˇ ová, Marcel Cerný, Petr Kaleta (eds.), Karel Jaromír Erben: Slovanské bájesloví (Prague 2009), 430–431. For an investigation of werewolf folklore by other Czech mythologists of the period, see e.g. Primus Sobotka. 1872. ‘Vlkodlak’, Riegruv ˚ slovník nauˇcný. Díl 9 (Prague 1872), 1196–1197.

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to his friends, and when he disclosed his story, he changed back into a wolf and, howling, ran away back to the forest.18

Although Grohmann usually cited his German and Czech speaking informants and place of collecting, the earliest narrative lacks both and remains obscure. It is also worth noting that Grohmann, similarly to Erben, firmly believed in authenticity of the falsified Czech entries in the Mater verborum and therefore preferred its correlation of women-kidnapping Roman fauns and imagined Czech werewolves. He supported this connection not only through the presented legend, but also by pointing out its similarity to other Czech legends about forest fairies kidnapping people in his commentary.19 The narrative is also probably influenced by a similar Polish tale published in 1839 by Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki, who was known to the author.20 Grohmann mentioned Czech werewolves one more time in his collection of Czech folk beliefs published in 1864, where he noted a South Slavic connection between werewolves and vampires and tried to suggest that: In the Czech lands, there are people who sometimes, by themselves or by means of some spell cast by others, turn to wolves and in this form, they roam the woods.21

Again, no exact source or locality for this supposed belief is given, and it remains as questionable as the aforementioned werewolf legend.

18 Josef Virgil Grohmann, Sagen-Buch von Böhmen und Mähren: Sagen aus Böhmen (Prague 1863), 120–121 (translated from German by Petr Janeˇcek). 19 Grohmann, Sagen aus Böhmen, 120. 20 Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki, Polnische Volkssagen und Märchen (Berlin 1839), 48.

The motif of ‘vegetarian werewolf’ stealing cheese and bread from people working in the forest can be also found in several Polish werewolf legends (Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 16, No. 1, (1923), 148–149) as well as other motifs found in the story published by Grohmann: that of turning a man into a werewolf by means of a curse triggered by one-sided love from a witch or fairy, abducting a girl from a village inn during a dance party, and returning to a home village after many years spent in wolf form (Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 141–142). 21 Josef Virgil Grohmann, Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen und Mähren (Prag 1864), 24 (translated from German by Petr Janeˇcek).

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We can possibly add a few more similar nineteenth-century references to Czech werewolves both in Czech and German; however, they are largely alike, most probably directly inspired by the traditions of other Slavic nations without any clearer data about their origin, and therefore highly suspect. Before presenting supposedly more authentic Czech werewolf legends collected in the twentieth century, after the fall of the Mythological School, the advent of modern folkloristic fieldwork, and, more importantly, after the time when the Mater verborum fakes ceased to be regarded as authentic, it is necessary to at least briefly touch werewolf traditions in two neighbouring countries which could possibly influence Czech legendry—Poland and Slovakia.

The Werewolf in Neighbouring Poland and Slovakia Both Polish and Slovakian verbal folklore traditions possess a greater number of werewolf references than those of the Czech lands. The Polish and Slovak traditions also seem to be more complex; along with several legend types, we can also find folktales, folk songs, proverbs, and other vernacular genres which explicitly use the figure of a werewolf. The Polish vernacular werewolf tradition seems to be quite old; the first explicit reference to these demonic beings can be found as early as 1459 in the popular sermons of the Franciscan monk Piotr of Miłosław. Polish werewolf legends incorporate narratives similar to the German and Livonian ones where the werewolf is depicted as an evil human being able to turn into a wolf, as well as stories similar to the South Slavic ones with the vampiric werewolf sharing traits with local types of revenants such as strzyga or upiór.22 The werewolf legends in Poland generally seem to be more prominent in regions close to German speaking areas.23 The Polish national folktale index registers four narratives with werewolves, including a version of the international folktale type ATU 706 The Maiden without

22 For a recent overview of the South Slavic tradition of vampiric werewolves, see Maja Pasari´c, ‘Dead Bodies and Transformations: Werewolves in Some South Slavic Folk Traditions’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 238–256. 23 Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 16, No. 1, (1923), 147–149; 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 133, 137–138. For more recent short overview of Polish werewolf tradition, see entry ‘Wilkołak’, in Julian Krzy´zanowski et al. (eds.), Slownik folkloru polskiego (Warszawa 1965), 439–440.

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Hands in which the father of the persecuted heroine is a werewolf.24 The last documented incidents where people were accused of being werewolves took place in eastern Poland, in 1876 near Lublin and in 1901 near Dukla.25 A similar relative abundance of werewolf folklore can be found in Slovakia.26 The aforementioned version of ATU 706 was also known there and was collected from the oral tradition as late as the 1930s.27 According to Wollman, Slovak tradition often conflates the figures of the vampire and the werewolf into one specific undead being similar to the South Slavic vampiric werewolves, but also retains traces of the Western European notion of the werewolf as a human shapeshifter, most often a witch. One of the few Slovak memorates about the werewolf was collected in June 1858 at Rožˇnavské Bystré by the famous folktale collector Pavol Dobšinský (1828–1885). According to his educated inforˇ mant, the biblical scholar Andro Markuš Cipúr, that year a werewolf came to the valley where he lived and killed six sheep. The informant told the collector that a true werewolf never eats domestic animals, only kills them, and presented the following philosophical remark about the nature of the beast: God created all living beings, and a mere human is not able to understand them all; and there are also ghosts we maybe do know nothing about, and also vlkolák or vlkodlák.28

24 Julian Krzy´zanowski et al., Polska bajka ludowa w układzie systematycznym. Tom 1. (Watki ˛ 1–999) (Warszawa 1962), No. 706; Julian Krzy´zanowski et al.: Polska bajka ludowa w układzie systematycznym. Tom 2. (Watki ˛ 1000–8256) (Warszawa, 1963), No. 4005. For a more general discussion of the connection of this tale type to werewolf folklore and popular culture, see Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Case of the Cut-off Hand: Angela Carter’s Werewolves in Historical Perspective’, in: Hannah Priest (ed.), She-Wolf. A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester 2015), 148–165. 25 Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 134. 26 For an overview of Slovak werewolf tradition, see the entry ‘Vlkolak’, in: Ján Botík,

´ Peter Slavkovský (eds.), Encyklopédia ludovej kultury Slovenska 2 (Bratislava 1995), 309. 27 Dagmar Klímová, ‘Vlkodlak’, in: Stanislav Brouˇcek, Richard Jeˇrábek (eds.), Lidová ˇ kultura. Národopisná encyklopedie Cech, Moravy a Slezska. 3. svazek (Prague 2007), 1145. 28 Pavol Dobšinský, Prostonárodnie obyˇcaje, povery a hry slovenské (Turˇcianský svätý Martin 1880), 116–117 (see also 111). Translated from Slovak by Petr Janeˇcek.

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In some Slovak folktales, the werewolf changes into a generic evil sorcerer who only uses the name Vlkolak.29 Interesting and potentially regionally specific is one heroic legend collected by Samuel Reusz in the midnineteenth century in the region of Gemer, whose main actor is the famous social bandit (and Slovak national hero) Juraj Jánošík (1688– 1713) who defeated the king of the werewolves. The werewolf king resided in Oltárne hill near the village of Klenovec and, by means of a magic whistle, forced all the local werewolves to steal money for him; he became very rich and guarded a great treasure hidden in the cave. One day, brave Jánošík with his merry band attacked the cave, and killed all the werewolves (the king included) with Jánošík’s magic hatchet. Part of the werewolf treasure was hidden underground in the nearby Vepor hill, and part remained hidden in the cave where, during every Good Friday, it could be seen and possibly dug out.30 Also popular was the humorous naming of a drunkard as a werewolf because, in his intoxication, he sometimes sank to an animal level. This was published, along with one version of the aforementioned Slovak werewolf folktale (originally published in German by Ignác Jan Hanuš) in chapter eight of the famous (but often mistaken) The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring Gould.31 There was also a popular Slovak folk song, collected for the first time in the 1830s, mentioning the personal qualities of a metaphorical werewolf: My mother, mother, this is great injustice to me, you wanted to give me a husband, but gave me a werewolf (vlkolak) instead. He is not working all day long, doing nothing, swearing and complaining,

29 Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4, (1925), 135, 137, 145–146. 30 Andrej Melicherˇcík, Jánošíkovská tradícia na Slovensku (Bratislava 1952), 246. 31 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (London 1865). For the original

version of the tale, see I. J. Hanush (= Jan Ignác Hanuš), ‘Der Werwolf (Vlkodlak)’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde. Band IV (Berlin 1859), 224–228.

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he is eating in the pub all night long, beating me in the morning.32

But was something similarly authentic collected in the territory of the Czech lands?

The Werewolf in Czech Oral Legends The only Czech region with a presence of werewolf legends is the most north-eastern part of the Czech lands, in the border areas of the northeastern Moravia, more specifically the regions of Silesia (Slezsko) and Lachia (Lašsko). The reason for this is probably strong Polish, Slovakian and German influences on the regional language and culture, combined with the fact that only in this remote region were wolves were sighted as late as 1914.33 The only Czech vernacular term for werewolf which ˇ can be regarded as authentic, vylkodlak, was also used there, in the local 34 dialect of Lachia. Even this term, probably influenced by the Polish term wilkołak, was not used very frequently and mostly metaphorically: not to denote a preternatural shapeshifting being, but rather a greedy, grumpy, ruthless and miserly person, i.e. a person possessing the personal characteristics of the imagined monster. It was also used there as a curse; to say to someone: ‘Ty vlkodlaku’ (‘You are a werewolf’) was supposedly

32 Ján Kollár, Národnié zpievanky cˇili písnˇe svˇetské Slováku ˚ v Uhrách jak pospolitého lidu, tak i vyšších stavu, ˚ sebrané od mnohých, v poˇrádek uvedené, vysvˇetleními opatˇrené a vydané (Budín 1834), 11. Translated from Slovakian by Petr Janeˇcek. 33 This could be potentially supported by the notion espoused by Wollman, according to whom the presence of werewolf legends in most of Eastern Central Europe is restricted mostly to culturally and linguistically diverse border areas, where they represent localized import from traditions of other cultures: Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 148. For a similar theory about Estonia, see Merili Metsvahi, ‘Estonian Werewolf History’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories, 215, 217. 34 Václav Machek, ‘Vlkodlak’, Etymologický slovník jazyka cˇeského (Prague 1971), 695.

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one of the strongest ones.35 Isolated references to the qualities of a preternatural werewolf in the region describe only a basic belief core about the existence of a greedy man able to turn himself into a wolf by somersaulting across a log, and, by doing it in reverse, to turn back into his human form.36 Even this reference is questioned by academic folklorists: instead of being a culture loan from neighbouring Poland (more specifically. from either the Polish- or German-speaking vernacular culture of the region Silesia) or Slovakia, it is highly possible that it is a fake, created by collaborators of the regional antiquarian Vincent Prasek in 1888 to add an interesting cultural peculiarity to their beloved region.37 More elaborate Czech narratives about werewolves seem to be either literary or heavily influenced by elite or popular culture. A typical example of this is the legend about a greedy shepherd who turned himself into a wolf by means of a magic collar, published in 1907 by the amateur folklorist Antonín Blažek from the town of Chrudim.38 The narrative is an almost mechanical reproduction of the popular broadsize ballad Pˇríbˇeh neslýchaný, kterak jeden pastýˇr skrze své cˇarodˇejnictví v vlka se obcoval, z této písnˇe se vyrozumí (Story Unheard-Of How One Shepherd By Means of His Witchcraft Turned Himself Into a Wolf. You Will Get Acquainted By This Song).

35 Vincent Prasek, Vlastivˇeda slezská. Díl I. Podání lidu (Opava 1888), 47. The expres-

sion ‘You are a werewolf’ is also featured in Swedish werewolf legends. There, however, it does not seem to have been used as a curse, but as a way to make a werewolf human again and release him from his curse (Type Q 33) ‘You are a werewolf’; Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend (Helsinki 2010), 306. Cf. Chapter 2 of this volume. 36 Vincent Prasek, Vlastivˇeda slezská. Díl I. Podání lidu (Opava 1888), 46–47. 37 Academic critique in Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’,

Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 135. For a more recent critical overview of folkloristic fieldworks conducted in the region, see Antonín Satke, ‘O slezských pohádkách a jejich vypravˇecˇ ích’, in: Pohádky, povídky a humorky ze Slezska (Ostrava 1984), 7–46. 38 Antonín Blažek, Povˇesti a obrázky z Chrudimska. Rada ˇ III. (Chrudim 1907), 177.

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Front page of Czech werewolf broadside ballad Pˇríbˇeh neslýchaný, kterak jeden pastýˇr skrze své cˇarodˇejnictví v vlka se obcoval, z této písnˇe se vyrozumí. Printed in Kutná Hora by Jan Jeˇrábek, third quarter of the 18th century. Courtesy of the Library of the National Museum, Prague, signature KP 1074 This was printed first in the third quarter of the eighteenth century in Prague and then in Kutná Hora by Jan Jeˇrábek, in which publication it was located in the fictional village of Boˇrkov near the fictional town of Rychnov in the Bechynˇe region of Southern Bohemia.39 This ballad was, during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, reprinted several times under similar titles such as Pˇríbˇeh neslýchaný, kterak jeden pastýˇr skrze 39 Pˇríbˇeh neslýchaný, kterak jeden pastýˇr skrze své cˇarodˇejnictví v vlka se obcoval, z této písnˇe se vyrozumí, Library of the National Museum, Prague, signature KP 1074.

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cˇarodˇejnictví ve vlka se promˇenoval ˇ (Story Unheard-Of How One Shepherd By Means of Witchcraft Turned Himself Into a Wolf) or Pastýˇr promˇenˇen ve vlka (Shepherd Turned Into a Wolf), printed in 1782 in the town of Jindˇrichuv ˚ Hradec.40 This sensational account describes the story of an evil communal shepherd who acquired a magic collar from the Devil himself. When he put the collar on his neck, the shepherd transformed into a wolf and in this form he stole sheep and calves from pastures of his neighbours. He did this for four years and his family got rich. One day, he sold a nice calf to the local reeve. When the village butcher took the animal to the reeve, the shepherd transformed into a wolf, attacked them in the woods, and took the calf back home. The angry reeve did not believe the butcher’s story about a wolf stealing the calf; he thought he spent the money in a pub, so they both went to the shepherd´s house to check if the deal was really made. Neither the shepherd or his wife was at home, but their naive seven-year old daughter divulged her father’s secret to them. After they gave her some money, she showed them the magic collar. They, however, did not believe in its magic properties, so the butcher tried to put it on his neck. Immediately, he turned into a wolf, jumped from the window and was lost. The song ends with the reeve searching for the butcher and asking local gamekeepers not to shoot wolves with collars but to try to take them off instead. The song concludes that the fate of the revealed werewolf remains unknown. The story fits well into Czech werewolf discourse while showing traits similar to the aforementioned narrative about the vegetarian werewolf published by Grohmann in 1863. It is an improbable, fantastic tale bordering on farce, focusing not on the shapeshifting sheep killer, but on a mere greedy rustler. The shepherd of the narrative never killed anyone and only tried to enrich himself and his family, showing ‘werewolfish’ personal traits in the process—avarice, greediness and ruthlessness, as shown in the aforementioned Lachian curse or Slovak folk song. The motif of a magic item able to turn people into a wolf was recorded in Germany as early as 1589 and was especially common in the north and east of the country, the same regions with a relative abundance of werewolf legends; the song is probably inspired by a similar German

40 Josef Jedliˇcka, ‘Pastýˇr promˇenˇen ve vlka’, Ceský ˇ lid 30 (1930), 218–220. See also Luboš Antonín, Bestiáˇr. Bájná zvíˇrata, živlové bytosti, monstra, obludy a nestvury ˚ v knižní ilustraci konce stˇredovˇeké Evropy (Prague 2010), 159.

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narrative.41 However, the item in question was usually a belt. The motif of the shape-shifting collar could be thus possibly be peculiar to the Czech lands; possible interpretations of its meaning could range from the common sense connection between dogs and their collars to a symbolical allusion to the collars used by Catholic priests. In 1906, Antonín Blažek published a full-length article about Czech wolf and werewolf legends from the region of Chrudimsko in the folkˇ loristic journal Ceský lid, where he boldly claimed that: ‘Even legends about werewolves, people who are able to turn themselves into wolves which are still spread amongst South Slavs, were diffused to our lands where they are only more rare’.42 He supports his claim by the two following legends. The first one is about a haunted water mill called Kalousovský mlýn near the village of Tunˇechody. Every night, the mill was visited by a large she-wolf who killed everyone in the vicinity; because of that, the miller and his helpers had to spend their nights in the neighbouring village. One day, an old war veteran named Koˇrínek visited the mill and heard about the local troubles. He insisted that he would spend the night in the haunted mill and try to lift the curse. He locked himself upstairs, drilled a small hole in the floor to see what happened downstairs, and waited for the night to come. At eleven, he was woken up by a wild storm and loud noises; downstairs, a large and ugly she-wolf was running around the mill and searching for him. Several times, she even searched outside, but did not find him. Suddenly, she stood up on her hind legs, looked out of the window and shouted three times in a human voice: ‘Skin, go down!’ Immediately, the wolf skin fell down and the she-wolf turned into a beautiful young maiden, who entered the other room and started to sing. This was the moment that the veteran was waiting for. He quickly jumped down, grabbed the wolf skin and nailed it to the water wheel. Then, he calmly opened the door to the other room and greeted the girl: ‘Good morning, pretty maiden!’ When she saw him, she shouted angrily three times: ‘Skin, go on me!’, but the skin was nailed to the wheel and it did not happen. Instead, the girl smiled and thanked the veteran for her salvation. The werewolf curse was lifted, and the veteran married

41 Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 16, No. 1 (1923), 146; 148; 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 139. See also Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie. II. Band. Fourth Edition (Berlin 1876), 915–918. 42 Antonín Blažek, ‘Vlci a vlkodlaci na Chrudimsku ‘, Ceský ˇ lid 15 (1906), 238.

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the girl.43 The authenticity of the legend was supported by the real location of the mill and the descendants of the Koˇrínek family who were regarded as skilled mill labourers. The fairy-tale ending and lengthy, elaborated style suggests a literary origin for the narrative. Indeed, the tale has almost precisely the same structure as the first part of the Croatian legend ‘Vlˇcice’ (She-Wolf), published in Prague by Karel Jaromír Erben in the 1860s, save its localisation to the Czech countryside.44 If the tale represents a folklorised oral version of the published Croatian tale—or if it was made up by Blažek or his collaborators who desperately wanted to find a werewolf legend in their beloved region—is not clear; but the fact is, that there are no other variants of this tale collected anywhere in the Czech lands.45 The general structure of the legend and several of the motifs used are, on the other hand, quite popular in Czech oral legends. The main antagonist of the veteran in the haunted mill narrative is, however, more often the most typical Czech demonic being, the water sprite vodník, or the devil.46 The other supposedly authentic werewolf legend published by Blažek tells the story of a young apprentice serving a farmer in the village of Svídnice. One night, the apprentice followed the farmer outside and watched him as he jumped across a log, turned himself into wolf and ran into a forest. The apprentice tried to imitate him and also transformed into wolf, but he was unable to revert back into human form. He was forced to roam the forests with the other wolves and eat cadavers. One day, he was fed up with this miserable life and ran back to the village, where he tried to greet his former employer. He was unable to speak; instead of human speech, he only howled like a wolf and barely escaped with his life

43 Ibid., 238–242. 44 Jiˇrí Horák (ed.), Karel Jaromír Erben. Slovanské pohádky. Díla Karla Jaromíra

Erbena, svazek 4 (Prague 1940), 135–136. 45 Again, Frank Wollman is sceptical as to the oral authenticity of the legend, although he notes similarity of some motifs to those found in several Flemish and Dutch werewolf legends (Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 139–140). Note of the editor: the similarities are more with Flemish and Dutch nightmare legends; female werewolves are extremely rare there. 46 According to the recent index of Czech demonological legends, this type of narrative is indexed as 5B.245 Man nails hand of the water sprite (Jan Luffer, Katalog cˇeských démonologických povˇestí (Prague 2014), 185).

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when the villagers sent the dogs after him. The farmer, however, recognized him, caught him, and threw him back across the log. The wolf turned back into the young apprentice, emaciated, gaunt and bitten by the dogs. The farmer took pity on him and employed him again, with a warning never to do anything again that he did not understand properly.47 Similarly, this legend is an almost verbatim (only localized) version of the literary story published by Erben in the 1860s; the original, which probably served Blažek to create this narrative, is the legend ‘Vlkodlak’ (Werewolf) from Ukraine.48 The story also uses motifs and the sequence of events from the popular international migratory legend ‘Following the Witch’.49 There are also a few more recent Czech werewolf legends which resemble Western and Eastern European narratives about bloodthirsty werewolves. All of them are literary legends, usually written by local authors trying to attach a peculiar story to their beloved region or locality, or by castle guides who wanted to entertain tourists and other visitors by a good scary story. Most of them could be thus defined as folkloresque, i.e. popcultural texts trying to appear as genuine folklore, and possessing ‘…the hazily alusive quality that infuses certain popular creations, that sense of folklore’.50 A typical example of this cultural process is one legend located in the castle of Potštát, in the same north-eastern region of the country where other Czech werewolf legends were supposedly collected. According to the legend, once, several children had been found murdered in the locality. During the investigation, it turned out that the 47 Antonín Blažek, ‘Vlci a vlkodlaci na Chrudimsku’, Ceský ˇ lid 15 (1906), 242. 48 Jiˇrí Horák (ed.), Karel Jaromír Erben. Slovanské pohádky. Díla Karla Jaromíra

Erbena, svazek 4 (Prague 1940), 134; Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 141–142. 49 The Czech catalogue of demonological legends designates this narrative as 1.A.175

Stableboy flies while following the farmer´s wife to the sabbath of the witches (Jan Luffer, Katalog cˇeských démonologických povˇestí (Prague 2014), 64). For uses of this sequence in which legends in other parts of Europe, see e.g. Reidar T. Christiansen, Migratory Legends. A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants (Helsinki 1958), 46–48 (Type 3045); Marjatta Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index of Finnish Belief Legends. Revised and Enlarged Edition of Lauri Simonsuuri’s Typen- und Motivverzeichnis der finnischen mythischen Sagen (Helsinki 1998), Type D1791; Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legends (Helsinki 2010), 275–276 (Types N1-N5). 50 Michal Dylan Foster, Jeffrey A. Tolbert (eds.), The Folkloresque. Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World (Logan 2016), 3.

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local bailiff was a werewolf—at night, he somersaulted across a log and turned himself into a wolf. One day, he was caught in his wolf shape and killed. Immediately after his death, he reverted back to human form. The local people were unable to bury him because the earth always threw the body up, so they had to behead him, cut off his limbs and bury him in the cemetery of suicides at Smolná.51 ˇ Another literary werewolf legend attached to the castle of Cerná Hora (‘Black Mountain’) near Blansko in Moravia uses—in a clever method of folkloresquese integration of motifs from various cultural backgrounds— a Polish connection. According to the narrative, in 1683, the castle was visited by a Polish noble named Zikmund Laský who was on his way to fight against the Ottoman Turks besieging Vienna. He fell in love with a local girl. When the noble returned from battle, he wanted to take her back home to Poland. During the feast day of St. Stanislaus, the Polish national saint, he turned into a wolf and was shot by the locals. The moral of the story was, however, positive. His transformation was an ancient curse—one of his ancestors took part in the assassination of St. Stanislaus, and every year, during feast of the saint, all the male members of the family transformed into wolves and rampaged about the countryside. His ˇ death in Cerná Hora was then fortunate—because of it, the curse of the Laský bloodline finally ended.52 Geographically exceptional, due to its location in Northern Bohemia near the border with Saxony, is the German literary legend connected with the ruins of castle Falckenburg (Starý Falkenburg) near DeutschGabell/Jablonné v Podještˇedí. The narrative describes the adventures of a local knight who robbed a nun; because of this sin, he turned into a wolf and was forced to roam the countryside for several years until he was rescued.53

51 Martin Stejskal, Andrej Marenˇcin, Labyrintem tajemna aneb Pruvodce ˚ po tajemných ˇ místech Ceskoslovenska (Prahue 1991), 316. 52 Martin Stejskal, Andrej Marenˇcin, Labyrintem tajemna aneb Pruvodce ˚ po tajemných

ˇ místech Ceskoslovenska (Prague 1991), 103–104. 53 Theodor Hutter, Nordböhmische Sagen (Warnsdorf 1883), 29.

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The Werewolf as a Symbol of the Mythical Slavic Past What was the source of the obsession of Czech authors with (probably non-existent) local werewolves, and what impulse led them to borrowing, copying and sometimes even inventing legends about these mythical beings? Starting with the early nineteenth-century Romantic Nationalists, followed by the academic mythologists of the mid-nineteenth century and later the academic folklorists, the Czech nationalistic intelligentsia were fascinated by Slavic culture and tried to did their best to prove the cultural affinity of the Czech nation with the Slavic ones. Many scholars, from Grimmian mythologists such as Karel Jaromír Erben or Ignác Jan Hanuš (1812–1869) to comparative philologists such as Frank Wollman or Jiˇrí Polívka (1858–1933), one of the authors of the monumental Bolte-Polivka Anmerkungen zu den Kinder und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm,54 investigated the folk traditions of South and East Slavs where they met werewolves—and hinted that there could be Czech legends about them. Regional and local antiquarians and amateur folklore collectors and enthusiasts followed and tried to prove, sometimes by direct forgeries and sometimes with the help of a little wishful thinking, that there were at least some Czech werewolf legends. This nationalistic longing for a mythical Slavic past full of wonder, including werewolves, played a role, albeit different, in Czech elite culture. Here, mostly in literature and journalism, it took the form of a specific type of orientalism targeted at the eastern Slavic lands to which the aspects of irrationality, superstition, and mysticism, but also a close affinity to nature, especially animals, were attributed.55 The prime region for this construction of the idealized ‘Slavic noble savage’ was the westernmost part of contemporary Ukraine (Carpatian Ruthenia, Carpatho-Ukraine or Zakarpattia, located in contemporary Zakarpattia Oblast). This region and its werewolf traditions were already well known to Czechs from

54 Johannes Bolte, Georg (= Jiˇrí) Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. 5 volumes (Leipzig 1913–1932). Polívka also investigated legends about the ‘wolf shepherd’ which sometimes present similar traits to werewolf narratives (Jiˇrí Polívka, ‘Vlˇcí pastýˇr’, Sborník prací vˇenovaných prof. dr. Václavu Tillovi k 60. narozeninám (Prague 1927), 159–179). 55 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York 1978).

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the period of Austrian rule.56 In 1918, after the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia, this region suddenly became much closer and more accessible, because it became the part of Czechoslovakia known as the Podkarpatská Rus (the Subcarpathian Rus’). This ‘colony’ of the more industrialized Czech lands, existing between 1919 and 1938, was described by the majority of contemporary writers and journalists in true orientalising fashion as a fascinating Slavic land of virgin forests, high mountains and peculiar backward people with strange folk costumes, customs and beliefs—including the belief in werewolves. By obtaining this mythical ur-Slavic land, the dreams of generations of Czech nationalists longing for access to authentic ‘ancient Slavic folklore’ came true. Probably most popular at the time were the adoring works by folklorist and publisher of Subcarpathian folktales Josef Spilka (1899–1986) who described the local customs as being identical to ‘Old Slavonic’ ones,57 ˇ by the famous Czech writer Karel Capek (1890–1938) who set several of his texts in this mythologised land, and especially by the writer Ivan Olbracht (1882–1952) whose popular novels portrayed this region as possessing fluid borders between myth and reality, where ancient and mythical werewolves, fairies and witches coexisted with contemporary and realistic Hobsbawmian social bandits, impoverished rural shepherds and picturesque communities of Orthodox Jews.58 The orientalistic spell of the Subcarpathian Rus’ influenced even down-to-earth Czech authors such as Jaromír Tomeˇcek (1906–1997), the writer of hunting stories and realistic prose depicting animal life. Tomeˇcek´s famous short story ‘Vlkodlak’ (Werewolf) depicts his supposed real-life experience. According to the narrative, the author, for several years stationed in the region ˇ as a lawyer, met a local citizen named Jura Tuch, who wanted to litigate against his neighbour who accused him of being a werewolf. At first, the sceptical lawyer had several strange experiences connected with the strange appearance and behaviour of the aforementioned local. One night, a friend of the author shot a great wolf and the very next morning ˇ Jura Tuch died. The author concludes that what is not possible in the industrialized Czech lands—that a man could change into a wolf—is fully

56 František Rehoˇ ˇ r, ‘Vlkodlak v podání haliˇcských Rusínu’, ˚ Lumír 33 (1890), 395–396. 57 Josef Spilka, Ivanko z polonin (Prague 1958), 18. 58 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London 1969).

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possible in this untamed eastern ‘land of the eleventh century’.59 The short story, which uses the international folklore motif of the ‘Witch Who Was Hurt’60 is exceptional in the otherwise realistic Tomeˇcek’s prose— and for Czech readers, it helped to support the orientalistic notion of the Subcarpathian region as a magic place full of werewolves.This tendency is still largely alive even now, as evident in the language of contemporary Czech fiction as well as of some recent Czech folklore surveys conducted in the region.61 Czech elite culture also occasionally revives the notion of the ancient Czech Slavic werewolf—e.g. in ‘all time best Czech movie’ Markéta Lazarová by František Vláˇcil (1967), a monumental historical film set in the medieval Czech lands which includes ‘Povˇest o Strabovi’ (‘Legend of Straba’), which is deliberately built on the ancient notion of the werewolf as an outcast from human society.62 The concept of the werewolf in Czech culture was delegated either to the ancient pagan Slavic past or to the ‘less civilized’ but highly idealized and ‘culturally purer’ Slavic lands in the east, reminiscent of the ancient past. But there is also an alternative, contrasting concept of the werewolf in the Czech culture; the werewolf conceptualized as an evil, bloodthirsty and alien Germanic human beast, connected with Nazi Germany and the events of the Second World War.

59 Tomeˇcek, Jaromír, ‘Vlkodlak’, in: Lovy beze zbraní (Prague 1976), 101–111 (first published in 1969 in Ostrava). 60 For other uses of this motif in European werewolf legends, see Frank Wollman, ‘Vampyrické povˇesti v oblasti stˇredoevropské’, Národopisný vˇestník cˇeskoslovanský 18, No. 3–4 (1925), 144–146. 61 For a recent rendition of werewolf motif in contemporary Czech fiction, see e. g. Jáchym Topol, Andˇel (Prague 1997), 69 (first published in 1995). For a contemporary partly romanticized ethnography of the region, see Andrea Preissová Krejˇcí, Jana Máˇcalová, Jasna Skotáková (eds.), Mýty a povˇery v každodennosti obyvatel ukrajinského Polesí a Zakarpatí (Olomouc 2015). 62 Petr Gajdošík (ed.), Markéta Lazarová: Studie a dokumenty (Prague 2008). The ‘all time best Czech movie’ title was awarded to the movie by a jury of film critics in 1994 and 1998; respectively. For the most popular Czech pseudohistorical literary legends and novels featuring werewolves, see e.g. Miloslav Švandrlík, Praha plná strašidel (Prague 1970), 134; Radovan Krátký, Bubáci aneb Malý pˇrírodopis duchu, ˚ pˇrízraku˚ a strašidel ˇ (Prague 1961), 319–322; Josef Váchal, Dáblova zahrádka aneb Malý pˇrírodopis strašidel (Prague 1992), 100.

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The Werewolf as the German Other The connection between werewolves and Nazi Germany in modern Czech culture has its roots in the popular mythology surrounding the Nazi organisation Unternehmen Werwolf (Action Werewolf). This was established in the final months of the Second World War in order to create a volunteer resistance force operating behind enemy lines and waging guerrilla war against the Allied forces and local populations loyal to them.63 Although in reality they were neither important nor effective, supposed and more often imagined attacks by this organisation became the subject of fantastic contemporary legends and rumours, whose dissemination was increased by the fact that post-war Czech media, helped by Allied propaganda and general post-war anti-German sentiment, tended to exaggerate threats posed by this heavily mythologised organisation.64 Relatively common in the borderlands with Germany from the end of the Second World War until the early 1950s, these legends and rumours overstated the numbers and danger of the few isolated incidents of supposed Werwolf attacks or the imagined hidden depots full of weapons. These narratives also influenced popular culture, e. g. popular comics Tajemství Žlutých skal (Mystery of the Yellow Rocks) about a Czech Boy Scout troop camping in the borderlands and threatened by an imagined Werwolf terrorist, published in 1946.65 Some of these narratives blended the figure of the Nazi Werwolf terrorist with the more fantastic figure of pérák/Spiralhopser, a jumping suburban phantom inspired by the British Spring-heeled Jack legend and popular in Czech oral culture since the 1920s.66 From the 1970s, more fantastic Werwolf narratives, influenced by the books of popular Czech Forteana and science fiction writer Ludvík Souˇcek (1926–1978), started to use motifs of the Nazi Aryan mysticism 63 Perry Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944– 1947 (Stroud 2004). 64 See e.g. contemporary documents of the Czechoslovak State Police, Archiv bezpeˇcnostních složek, Prague, fond 310, Velitelství Státní bezpeˇcnosti, signatures 310–24–4; 310–24–5; 310–81–1. 65 Josef Starec, Václav Rízek, ˇ ‘Tajemství Žlutých skal’, Junák 29, No. 17–48 (1946). 66 Petr Janeˇcek, ‘The Spring Man of Prague. Czech Versions of Spring-heeled Jack Narratives between Folklore and Popular Culture’, Fabula. Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung. Journal of Folktale Studies. Revue d’Etudes sur le. Conte Populaire 59, No. 3–4 (2020), 223–239.

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which had been revived during the Second World War.67 The notion of a connection between Nazi Germany and werewolf mythology is evident in the following oral narrative collected in 2001 from the inhabitants of Czech-speaking villages in region of Banát, Romania. During an interview, the locals recollected the fates of their countrymen who were, during the Second World War, drafted in the Nazi SS troops: And why had they entered the SS? They did not know what they went into. They thought they would just go to Germany to work. And when they arrived there, they put them in jail, they gave them uniforms and they had to swear oaths, or they would shoot them. So, they swore. Just one of them told them that he would not swear, and he did not. And they did not hurt him. And what happened to him? He fought without the oath… and one from our village was there too. Then, he moved to the Czech lands. Once, after the war, they say, he went around some Romanian town, I do not know which one, Or¸sov or elsewhere. And there he saw two Romanian guys fighting each other. The stronger one was punching the one who was weaker, so he jumped at the stronger one and started to beat him, without thinking. He was not afraid at all. I do not know if this is true or not, but people say so, so it has to have at least some grain of truth in it. They say they infused wolf blood into their veins. To make them fearless. To fight and not to be afraid. And they just ran forward like wolves do and did not pay attention to anything.68

Conclusion: Czech Werewolf Legends Today There are almost no historical werewolf oral legends in the Czech lands; the Czech werewolf is more a phenomenon of elite and popular culture than of the vernacular one. The folk legends, themes, motifs— even the very name of the werewolf—seem to be imported from other

67 Ludvík Souˇcek, Pˇrípad baskervillského psa a další pˇríbˇehy (Prague, 1972). For recent popcultural rendition of evil Germanic werewolf, see e.g. popular Czech fantasy novel Bratrstvo krve: Vlci (Brotherhood of Blood: Wolves ); František Kotleta, Bratrstvo krve: Vlci (Prague 2015). 68 Interview with two (anonymized) Romanian Czechs from village of Eibenthal. Or¸sov train station, Romania, June the 16th 2001. The interviewed was conducted by folklorist Adam Votruba, translated from Czech by Petr Janeˇcek.

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parts of Europe, where werewolf traditions were more prominent. The few recorded Czech werewolf legends are either forgeries created by Romantic Nationalists, products of the wishful thinking of nineteenthcentury mythologists, or suspicious texts documented by local amateur folklorists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The Czech werewolf is thus the product of cultural diffusion. In this way it is similar to other concepts of folkloric beings of contemporary Czech culture originally diffused from other cultures such as the mining spirit permoník (Gnome) and the banshee-like female ghost bílá paní (White Lady) which were transmitted during the High Middle Ages from Germany, the suburban jumping phantom pérák (Spring-heeled Jack) transmitted at the beginning of the twentieth century from the United Kingdom, or the children’s ghost figure of Bloody Mary, transferred at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the U.S.A. In the later literary legends of Czech elite and popular culture, the werewolf stands in an interesting, albeit precarious, cultural position. On the one hand, it represents an imagined and fascinating survival of the idealized Slavic past, and on the other hand, it represents an alien, hated Germanic beast. The notion of the evil Germanic werewolf can be found in Czech culture even today. Especially since the early 1980s, the werewolf became one of the most important demonic characters of Czech campfire legends. Along with generic vampires, ghosts and zombies, these modern werewolves—in very similar way to their predecessors in the nineteenth century—owe much to globalised popular culture, especially horror movies, novels and, since the early 1990s, also computer and role-playing games such as Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1991).69 These narratives mostly use the modern Hollywood cinematic concept of werewolf as a shapeshifter, connected with the full moon, and serve several cultural functions, ranging from pure entertainment to peer pressure and social control by camp counsellors.70 Similar stories can be also found in contemporary children’s folklore and the ghost stories of teenagers.71 Interestingly, 69 For a similar process in global cinema, see Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Werewolf Pack:

A Cinematic Metamorphosis’, Contemporary Legend Series 3, No. 6 (2014), 59–74. 70 Petr Janeˇcek, ‘Dˇetský numinózní slovesný folklor a jeho mezinárodní paralely’, Dˇetský folklor dnes (Promˇeny funkcí). Sborník pˇríspˇevku˚ z 23. strážnického sympozia konaného ve dnech 15. – 16. bˇrezna 2007 (Prague 2007), 90–105. 71 Contemporary Czech werewolf lore is heavily influenced by these two popular books: Václav Jamek, Kniha básnˇ u˚ pˇreveršovaná (Prague 1995), 97–99; Pavel Houser, Vlkodlaci

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some of them still retain their peculiar ‘Germanic’ label; these contemporary folkloric werewolves sometimes have German-sounding names or are identified with former German-speaking inhabitants of the Czech lands. A similar process can be observed in even more recent invented werewolf ‘legends’ popular on Czech internet sites devoted to Forteana, cryptids and similarly mysterious phenomena. This new stratum of generic global werewolf folklore is also sometimes parodied by Czech popular culture. An interesting example is the popular short movie Byl jsem mladistvým intelektuálem (I Was a Teenage Intellectual ) from 1998 (its name being an allusion to the famous movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf from 1957) whose main hero, a consumer-oriented and troubled teenager who loves cheap horror and martial arts movies and who, after being bitten by the ‘werewolfish’ leader of a nocturnal coven of Prague intellectuals, suddenly transforms into a bespectacled intellectual with a Franz Kafka T-shirt quoting Hegel, Heidegger and Adorno.72 Today, the werewolf represents a stable motif in Czech vernacular, popular and even elite culture; however, the majority of contemporary werewolf ‘legends’ owe more to the globalised imagery of a modern cinematic shape-shifting beast than to more local, albeit rare, Czech werewolves of the past.

(Prague, 2005). The actors, locations and plots of these texts were reimagined as historical ‘authentic legends’ by many derivative sources found online, especially those made by neopagan and Fortean communities. 72 Marek Dobeš, Štˇepán Kopˇriva, Byl jsem mladistvým intelektuálem (1998); Gene Fowler Jr., I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957).

CHAPTER 8

Werewolves as Social Others: Contemporary Oral Narratives in Rural Bosnia and Herzegovina Mirjam Mencej

When I first came to Bosnia and Herzegovina to conduct fieldwork in 2016, my aim was to research narratives about the dead, in particular to find out how the war that had taken place from 1992 to 1995 affected traditional notions and narratives on the subject.1 As stories about the 1 Funded by the European Union (ERC project DEAGENCY, No 101095729). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

M. Mencej (B) Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_8

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dead, ghosts or revenants and haunted places form the most numerous groups of traditional legends.2 It therefore took me very much by surprise that when asking questions about the returning dead—on which subject in the Slovenian countryside, for instance, where I was doing fieldwork a few years earlier, almost everyone had a story to tell—people would usually only shake their head, claiming that the dead simply do not return. While I soon learned not to ask the question any more, at the same time I learned that the dead nevertheless sometimes did ‘return’, but that they tended to do so in a disguised way. They could be recognised in ‘werewolves’, ‘vampires’ or ‘apparitions’ that people allegedly saw or heard when walking alone outside at night, in the ‘tombstones’ that appeared to drivers in the middle of the road and triggered traffic accidents, or in the ‘damned’ that lingered in particular places, for instance under bridges, at crossroads, in graveyards, and in other similar locations. Their return was sometimes confirmed by dreams, or their agency recognised by various phenomena that ensued when their graves were disturbed, such as sudden hail, rain, misfortunes and other problems. Emic terms that the narrators use for the returning dead are multiple— not only people living in different regions, but also those living in the same community and even individual narrators will sometimes use different terms. The religious affiliation of the narrators to some extent plays a role in how the returned dead are perceived and consequently in how they are referred to: in a central Bosnian region, for instance, where the Catholic Church has been extremely influential, and Catholic discourse prevails, all alleged encounters with the supernatural, the dead included, are understood as encounters with the Devil and considered to be the consequence of a sin committed by the person experiencing them. The situation I was facing consequently meant that my research on the dead could not be restricted to discussion of what people explicitly called the ‘(returning) dead’, the ‘souls of the dead’, ‘ghosts’, or ‘revenants’. Instead, various emanations and various terms people use when referring to the returning dead had to be taken into consideration. My aim in this paper is therefore to discuss narratives about werewolves as part of the general category of narratives about the dead, and 2 Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington and Indianapolis 2001), 100–101.

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about the supernatural in general, from within their cultural and social context, in particular from the point of view of the functions that these stories fulfil in the communities in which they are circulating. Insofar as the term ‘werewolf’ in one particular region also pertains to living individuals, those narratives will be brought into consideration as well. My research is based on the fieldwork conducted in various parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2016 and 2018.3 My interlocutors were from all three main ethnic groups, related to the cultures of Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, i.e. Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs respectively. In addition, I interviewed some Roma people of Muslim or Catholic religious affiliation. In my discussion I shall first show the overlaps between the term ‘werewolf’ and other terms. I shall proceed to discuss how the appearance of a werewolf reflects cultural concerns related to the transgression of social and religious norms of behaviour. Finally, I will demonstrate how werewolf narratives can be used for didactic purposes to reinforce these very norms within the community and how they can be manipulated to serve the teller’s purpose.

Terminology and Notions About Werewolves The werewolf, or vukodlak, is a rather well-known figure in traditional belief narratives in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as generally in the Balkans. While the term typically describes a human who is able to shapeshift, turning into a wolf (or being turned into a wolf by a third party), narratives about living shapeshifters are rather rare in Bosnia and

3 Altogether I conducted fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina for about five months, mostly in the countryside and in small towns. I conducted 223 interviews with 396 informants in 99 places. The majority of my informants were between 50 and 80 years old. Most of them had a rather low formal level of education and were unemployed; female narrators were more numerous than male. The approximate length of the interviews varied—typically they lasted from 30 to 90 minutes. Due to the delicacy of the topic the exact regions and names of interlocutors are not given, and all personal names mentioned in the transcripts of the interviews are pseudonyms. The recordings and transcripts are stored in the archives of Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest. F in the transcripts refers to the Folklorist (me), and I to the Interlocutor; the number in the brackets indicates the number of the Interlocutor in the archive.

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Herzegovina, as they are in the rest of the Balkans.4 First- and secondhand memorates and fabulates about people who turned into werewolves after death by far prevail, and were told by members of all three main ethnic groups that I interviewed. Indeed, as has already been emphasised by a number of authors who have studied werewolves in this part of the world, the term ‘werewolf’ among South Slavs more or less entirely overlaps with the term ‘vampire’.5 The same applies for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Additionally, as suggested by researchers since the beginning of the twentieth century, in this region people make no distinction between the terms.6 When the term ‘werewolf’ refers to the deceased returning from the grave, the conflation between the two terms is indeed so complete that it is by no means possible to treat vampires and werewolves as separate categories of the dead, or as distinct supernatural agents.7 While Croats in Herzegovina exclusively used the term ‘werewolf’ (vukodlak) for both the living shapeshifter and the returning dead, 4 Only a few legends about living people transforming into a wolf, usually in order to slaughter others’ sheep, were recorded in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina (cf. Emilian Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen aus Bosnien und der Hercegovina’, Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen aus Bosnien und der Hercegovina 8 (1902), 271; Rade Rakita, ‘Narodna vjerovanja u predjelu Janj, vezana na cˇ ovjekov život i rad i njegov pogled na svet’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja BiH 26 (1971), 70–71. While I too recorded several narratives about werewolves as living shapeshifters (some also about their slaughtering others’ sheep), the circulation of such narratives was strictly limited to the Herzegovinian region under research, inhabited exclusively by the Croat population. 5 Tihomir R. Ðord-evi´c, Veštica i vila u našem narodnom vjerovanju i predanju. Vampir

i druga bi´ca u našem narodnom vjerovanju i predanju, Srpski etnografski zbornik 66 (Belgrade, 1953), 150; J. J. Levkievska, ‘Vukodlak’, in: Svetlana M. Tolstoj and Ljubinko Radenkovi´c (eds.), Slovenska mitologija. Enciklopedijski reˇcnik (Belgrade 2001), 105; Maja Pasari´c, ‘Dead Bodies and Transformations: Werewolves in Some South Slavic Folk Traditions’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 239ff. 6 Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 271; Tomo A. Brati´c, ‘Iz narodnog verovanja.

(U kotarima Nevesinje i Gacko)’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja BiH 14 (1902), 288– 295; Milenko S. Filipovi´c, ‘Pogledi na svet’, in: Ernest Grin (ed.), Lepenica. priroda, Stanovništvo, privreda i Zdravlje (Sarajevo 1963), 346. Filipovi´c wrote that only in Podastinje did people seem to make an explicit distinction between the two terms: where vampire refers to a living being, entering houses, but also to a sleep-walker, a werewolf is said to only ‘appear’. 7 Researchers thus usually either chose one of these terms to refer to the same notion, or interchangeably used both; when presenting ethnographic data, they chose the terms used by the members of the community they had researched. When discussing in general, I shall in this paper use the term werewolf, but when I will refer to or cite what particular authors and narrators said I shall use the term used by them.

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Bosniaks and Serbs in the regions under consideration used both terms; werewolf (vukodlak, kudlak, kodlak, kuzlak) and vampire (vampir, lampir) were used interchangeably for the returning dead. Moreover, the same narrators often switched from one term to the other, even within one and the same narrative, or answered my question about ‘werewolves’ with a story about ‘vampires’, and vice versa: Well, I also heard that if someone turns into a werewolf, if someone turns into a vampire, that werewolf… [You need to take] that hawthorn stake, you can’t stop them from coming, from coming out [from the grave] otherwise, in any other way. You must stab them with the hawthorn stake. (101) F: And what is the difference between a vampire and a werewolf? I: Believe me, they are the same to me. (188)

When one thinks of a werewolf, alias vampire, especially under the influence of popular culture, a fearsome picture of a re-animated body rising from the grave at night in order to suck blood from people immediately crops up. Indeed, both Tomo Brati´c and Emilian Lilek, authors of the most thorough studies on werewolves and vampires in Bosnia and Herzegovina published at the beginning of the twentieth century, started their discussions by defining the ‘werewolf or vampire’ as ‘the revived dead who during the day sleeps in the grave but at night goes around the houses and sucks people’s blood’ (emphasis mine),8 or as ‘the deceased who the devil entered into within 7–40 days after death and revived them, so that they can leave their grave at night in order to choke people from their house and village and drink their blood, and they especially like blood of small children’ (emphasis mine).9 Yet, apart from a few brief references or stories recorded by ethnologists throughout the twentieth century that refer to werewolves sucking blood of their victims,10 or to their shape like that of a

8 Brati´c, ‘Iz narodnog verovanja’, 292. 9 Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 269. 10 Tomo Dragiˇcevi´c, ‘Narodne praznovjerice. (Žepˇce)’, Glasnik zemaljskog muzeja BiH 20 (1908), 459; Vlajko Palavestra, ‘Narodne pripovijetke i predanja u okolini Lištice’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja BiH 24–25, No. 66 (1970), 357–358.

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blown up goatskin (mješina) full of blood,11 which also might hint at the idea of the werewolf as a blood-sucking creature, the act of sucking blood has generally remained uncorroborated by folk narratives in Bosnia and Herzegovina. My own fieldwork has certainly not confirmed the notion that werewolves suck blood. Only a few narratives that I recorded might possibly, but not certainly, point to this idea. For instance, I recorded narratives about a werewolf who was raised from the grave and stabbed with a stake, at which point blood sprung out of his body.12 Even the notion of a werewolf’s physical body, implicit in the motif of their sucking blood, is seldom hinted at in the narratives and, when it is, they are usually fabulates.13 The notion of a werewolf/vampire as a reanimated body sucking blood in Bosnian and Herzegovinian folklore may have thus been unduly put forward by the antiquarians in the early twentieth century, perhaps under the influence of stories from the neighbouring regions, for instance Dalmatia,14 or of growing amounts of scientific and journalistic literature on blood-sucking vampires from around the middle of the eighteenth century onwards.15 In any case, it is safe to argue that by the beginning of the twenty-first century such notions have already more or less completely vanished. The correlation between the terms ‘vampire’ and ‘werewolf’ has been regularly pointed out and discussed in scholarly literature. However, the correlation between the term ‘werewolf’ (or ‘vampire’) and ‘apparition’ 11 Cf. Brati´c, ‘Iz narodnog verovanja’, 292; Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 269;

Milenko S. Filipovi´c, Život i obiˇcaji narodni u Visoˇckoj nahiji, Srpski etnografski zbornik LXI (1949), 211; Radmila Kajmakovi´c, ‘Semberija’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja BiH , Etnologija, n.s., 29 (Sarajevo 1974), 101. 12 When the gender of a werewolf and other subjects in this and other legends is not indicated, I use the male gender as typically used by the narrators. 13 In the third-person narratives about people’s alleged personal experiences of werewolves riding them astray at night, the body of the werewolf seems palpable from their weight, as they are becoming heavier and heavier to carry, and are sometimes also communicating with people they ride. Such acts, however, are not only ascribed to the agency of the werewolves, but also to fairies and other superhuman entities and belong to the stock of widely spread motifs in European folklore (cf. de Blécourt, Chapter 13 in this book). 14 Cf. Stjepan Banovi´c, ‘Vjerovanja (Zaostrog u Dalmaciji)’, Zbornik za narodni život i obiˇcaje južnih Slavena 23 (1918), 185–214; ‘Vukodlaci’, Zbornik za narodni život i obiˇcaje južnih Slavena 26 (1928), 347–357; Ante Liepopili, ‘Vukodlaci’, Zbornik za narodni život i obiˇcaje južnih Slavena 23 (1918), 277–290. 15 Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power. The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge 1990), 180.

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(pri(je)kaza, privid, utvara), also expressed in the phrase ‘it appears’/ ‘it appeared’ (privid-a se, prividilo se, prikazuje se, ukaziva se, ukazalo se, priliˇci se), although it proved much more frequent and consistent than the correlation between the terms ‘werewolf’ and ‘vampire’ in my fieldwork, has been rather overlooked by ethnologists,16 even in the most recent book on the dead in Muslim culture in the region.17 While in the fabulates werewolves may have occasionally figured in their corporeal form, or it was at least hinted at, in the memorates the narrators typically correlated werewolves with ‘apparitions’. That is, they described the werewolves as sudden visual sensations or invisible entities which could only be recognised as such by the sound they were causing. Indeed, the terms ‘werewolf’, ‘vampire’ and ‘apparition’ regularly appeared interchangeably in my interlocutors’ narratives and people were generally unaware of a conceptual difference between the three: F: Did you hear people talking about werewolves ? I: Indeed, such things were being told. F: What exactly? I: I don’t know, I have no idea, they say, when a werewolf … they say an apparition … (5) F: And how would one know that the deceased turned into a werewolf ? How would one suspect this had happened? I2: Well, it appears . They would come, they would usually come to their family.

16 One wonders whether the significance of the term apparition has gained in the last decades when compared to the terms werewolf/vampire due to of the notion of a physical shape of a werewolf/vampire, or it has been because it seemed a less blatant sign of ‘superstitiousness’ than a notion of a blood-sucking body.

importance the demise overlooked reanimated

17 Cf. Aiša Softi´c, Obe´cani cˇas. Obiˇcaji bosanskohercegovaˇckih muslimana vezani za smrt (Sarajevo 2016). Softi´c, contrary to other dead, discusses werewolves as “the dead transformed to otherworldly beings” (see pp. 64, 279).

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As a visual apparition, the undead werewolf was typically described as having the shape of a human or an animal; in a few cases the werewolf was described as ‘something white’, ‘like smoke or wool’. When he appeared in human shape, he was occasionally depicted specifically as being draped in a white veil or shroud,18 or as being much taller or smaller than an average human being. I1: They would appear. I2: To someone who they knew. F: In the shape of that person, or of an animal....? I2: In the shape of that person. […] This means, their image, it appears. (101)

The werewolf was also sometimes described as taking the shape of a human with animalistic features, such as cow’s ears or a hairy belly. Moreover, the human and animal shapes of the werewolf sometimes intermingled. Where the animal shapes in which the werewolf appeared were specified, a ram, a goat, a cat, a horse, a bird and even a hen figured in the narratives (cf. inf. 33 below). In none of the narratives, however, was the animal shape of the returning deceased that of a wolf, in spite of their name vukodlak, literally meaning ‘wolf-hair’, which would suggest the wolf shape being the main shape in which the werewolves appeared to people. I: Here, I shall now tell you something that I personally experienced. It was a high night. Dark. I was walking on the path towards my home. I went, and just before me something started to run. And this was the place that people always said something happened to them there, that people got frightened, that they were afraid to pass, no one could go there alone, but I was alone. And right in front of me something started to cross [the path]. I continued on the path but I was walking for the whole night, although I could have come home 18 According to sher’ia law, deceased Muslims must be wrapped up in a white linen shroud (´cefin) when buried. Cf. Dragiˇcevi´c, ‘Narodne praznovjerice. (Žepˇce)’, 458; Sinanuddin H. Hfz. Sokolovi´c, Islamski propisi o cˇ uvanju zdravlja, posjeti bolesnika i o sahrani umrlih muslimana (Sarajevo 1972), 40–44; Softi´c, Obe´cani cˇ as, 156ff. The same motif, however, is also present among the Orthodox population.

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in twenty minutes. I was walking and walking, until the rooster started to sing. When a rooster started to sing, when I came to my senses [to realize] where I was, [I was] in some hills, in some forest. Well, this is what people say: Praise Lord and that bird as the werewolf would choke you [otherwise], you know. F: So you think that it was a werewolf that was in front of you? I: What else? Something was in front of me. Some say this is an apparition. F: And what did it look like? I: What did it look like? It looked just like a hen. But it was running, just running! (5) I1: Before, there used to be werewolves, and yes, it appeared to me. A horse. The horse appeared to me. At midnight. I don’t know, I didn’t know, I opened the door and saw the horse snorting, snorting. In moonlight, like the day. […] My father shouted that I should take the shoe and hit it. […] They don’t allow people to curse, you know. (34)

While the animal or human shape of a werewolf in the memorates might at first glance support the notion of a werewolf as a corporeal being, there is a crucial difference between a real human or animal and the apparition. The main criterion by which people distinguish an apparition from a real human or animal is the instability and the temporariness of their existence: I1: Well, if you talk about turning into a werewolf, these can be a cat, a ram, a goat, they can be this or that. He doesn’t need to be a man. F: So, this means that a werewolf is a man who died and then turned into a cat, or a ram or a goat? I1: Exactly. (…) F: But how could you recognise a real ram or goat from a werewolf? I1: Now, if I go out at midnight and I see a ram – where did the ram come from? When no one has a ram. He is a ram for a second and a sheep in

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the next second. […]And he can be a bird in no time. [Then] he leaves. (33) F: This is what old folk used to say, they said that the deceased turned into a werewolf, this happens three times in the dead of the day and three times in the dead of the night… F: What – this? I: Well, this is what we assume, either the Devil, or the apparition, they walk and this appears for two seconds. If you went somewhere, you always took a light with you… (…) when you go out at the dead of night or day, as I said – [you see them for] a second or two, now you see them and in the next moment they are gone. (95)

When they were invisible, werewolves as a rule were recognised by the sounds that they caused. Their presence was typically deduced from the sounds of banging around in the house, in the attic or on the roof, by their rattling, calling, shouting, swearing, clattering chains, stamping, messing up, moving, or throwing things around, especially dishes, opening cupboard doors, by the sound of washing dishes at night, the sound of tap water running, or by what sounded like an ‘explosion of a grenade’.19 F: If a cat or something else jumps over a body – what would happen, why they are not allowed to jump over? I2: Well, they say that a person can transform into some… I don’t know what would that be. I1: Into some spirit. I2: Into some spirit, some spirit and well, it would come to your house […] and [go] to your attic and ramble, call, I don’t know… (19) I2: Well, of course a werewolf cannot be seen. He is invisible! Because he is an evil spirit. He cannot be seen. He can only be…, they said that he would 19 Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 269; Radmila Filipovi´c-Fabijani´c, ‘Narodne pripovetke i predanja iz Bosanske Posavine’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja 20–21 (1965– 1966), 152.

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climb to the roof and tramp and frighten people in the house from which he was taken to the other world. (166)

The immaterial, incorporeal nature of werewolves becomes even more obvious when one takes into account werewolf narratives that refer to the werewolf as a dreaming experience (cf. inf. 103): F: Did people say that if something jumps over the dead body, the deceased may turn into a vampire? I1: He can. […]You dream about him, you dream him all the time. F: You mean that if you dream about the dead, this means that he turned into a vampire? I1: He comes to your dreams. F: Does he do something or does he only approach people? I1: Well, he frightens you [smile], because when [he comes] into your dreams, you are afraid. (32) I1: My mother was always telling tales about people turning into werewolves, but this was in those times, now in our times we haven’t heard this. Here, thank God, I heard no one talking about this, it wasn’t heard of. People take precautions – they took precautions in those times too – and it surprises me that this is still being told. It is said that they come to your dreams and haunt you. Grandfather Stojan was saying – he had a good relationship with people – and he said that they [the deceased] came to his dreams but they didn’t threaten him. He said he was totally sweaty, he had no strength. They came to him and then he went to the church, he prayed to God and lit candles a few times and then they didn’t come to his dreams anymore. (117)

In western Bosnia, among the Serbian population, the signs of werewolves also occasionally overlap with phenomena that are usually ascribed to the supernatural entity called drek(avac). The name derives from the verb ‘to scream’ (dreˇcati, dreknuti) as this supernatural entity is typically recognised by their loud screaming, bawling, and crying, believed to be heard at the moment of someone’s death:

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I3: … when someone dies, they say that a cat must not cross them, they say that this is not okay, that if it crossed the deceased… such a deceased can come to you. This means, he can turn into a werewolf (…) how do they say, to that drek, that apparition (…), this is how old folk said. (102)

A reference to the Devil as the incarnation of Evil was occasionally used interchangeably with the notion of a werewolf as well (see also inf. 95 above). Again, the difference between these terms was not always quite clear to the narrators as is obvious from the following heated discussion between my two Croat interlocutors: F: Have you ever heard talk about werewolves? I: Of course, like I was just saying [referring to a ritual of exorcism on a person possessed by the Devil that he himself had witnessed]. F: About werewolves? I: Indeed, werewolves. F: But that was not a werewolf, or was it? I: What else than a werewolf! F: You mean the woman into who the Satan …? I: It is not her that is a werewolf, but that what entered into her. F: So a werewolf entered … I: Entered into her, yes. I3: No, this is not correct! The Satan entered into her, not a werewolf! I: The Satan? But this is it: werewolf, Satan. I3: No, Satan is one thing and a werewolf another! I: Oh, this is all the same!

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I3: Common, what’s wrong with you, Marko?! I: The Devil is the Devil! I3: But this is not the Devil, what’s wrong with you? The werewolf is one thing, and the Satan is another. F: And what do you think that a werewolf is? I3: Well, this is something else that is going on, what do I know what is going on – they rise. But the Satan has been something else from the time immemorial. F: Right, but what is it that rises? I3: For instance, what do I know where this comes from, some souls, some… I: A werewolf is .. I3: They ask for something… F: [Souls] of the dead? I3: Of the dead, of course. These are werewolves, but [the Devil] is something else… F: And can you see them? I3: Other people say, they talk, one hears saying: I saw this, I saw that. What do I know… […] These are two different things, Satan and werewolves, these are two different things! (180)

While werewolves as apparitions are in all aspects reminiscent of ghosts in the folklore of some other Slavic as well as Western European countries,20 the latter term is, as mentioned above, only used rarely in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A few narrators did explicitly refer to werewolves as the “souls” (of the dead) (see also above 19, 166): 20 Lawson claims that in Greek folklore the werewolves (vrykolakes ), on the contrary, are not ghosts; see: John Cuthbert Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study of Survivals (New York 1964), 376.

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F: What does it mean “to turn into a werewolf”? I2: Well, like a soul that walks. It has no peace. It has no peace, you know… I1: The soul comes. It comes to this house and frightens it. It would bang and [enter] the house and everything like this, you know… This is it. (197)

From the interviews, conducted with my interlocutors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it therefore became obvious that there was no justification to exclude discussion of werewolves from discussion of the dead in general. Moreover, it proved impossible to draw a line between the accounts of werewolves and accounts of some other supernatural entities. For my interlocutors, werewolves, vampires, apparitions, drek(avac), Satan and even dreams about the deceased could all be obviously associated with the souls of the dead who, for various reasons, were believed to have returned from the otherworld and to haunt the living.

Werewolves as Social Others Werewolves in Bosnian and Herzegovinian narratives are therefore mainly conceived as the deceased who did not properly proceed to the other world and are thus stuck between the worlds of the living and the dead. There were several reasons for the dead to return to the world of the living as werewolves that I was repeatedly told by my interlocutors and have been regularly reported by earlier folklorists in Bosnia and Herzegovina. All of them are related to some sort of transgression of social norms. One of the most commonly given reasons for a person’s transformation into a werewolf after death is their evil deeds, that is, the sins that they committed during their lifetime. These were sometimes specified as cursing, stealing, dealing with magic, being miserly, or performing an abortion.21 I: Plenty of things have happened so far. It happened that if someone did something, and then died, it was said that they could ... return.

21 Cf. Brati´c, ‘Iz narodnog verovanja’, 292; Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 269; Dragiˇcevi´c, ‘Narodne praznovjerice. (Žepˇce)’, 460; Filipovi´c, Život i obiˇcaji narodni u Visoˇckoj nahiji, 210; Filipovi´c-Fabijani´c, ‘Narodne pripovetke i predanja iz Bosanske Posavine’, 152.

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F: And what was that they did? I: Well, now, if they stole something, or didn’t do something, or when they did something wrong... Let it be that I will be able to rest in peace! (182) I1: Well, this is what old folk used to say. Mostly when a person dies in a house, that they turn into werewolves or how this goes, and then they say here that obviously this person appears, he appears. If there was a sin, if he was sinful or something, then he would appear and come, he would return home for several times. (102)

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where religious affiliation is closely related to ethnic identity, conversion to another religion is considered the transgression of social norms and can likewise trigger the turning of the deceased into a werewolf after death: F: And what are the reasons for someone to turn into a werewolf? I: Well, restlessness ... In a man, yes, in his soul, in everything. (…) It happened to him [referring to the Catholic who converted to Islam and after death returned as a werewolf – op. M.M.] because... he abandoned his faith, he was turkicized,22 he betrayed Christianity. That’s why that happened to him. (...) (153)

Similarly frequent reasons for the deceased to turn into a werewolf were related to deviation from the social norms on the part of the deceased’s family, and of the community at large. If during their lifetime someone assaulted, insulted, or swore at them, or had not settled their debts with them in time, the dead could turn into werewolves and haunt the living23 : If you owe something to somebody [who died], that person can [after death] turn to a werewolf and harass you. Yes. There’s a case that people know. (33) F: […] And why did this aunt turn into a vampire? 22 Meaning: to become a Muslim. 23 Brati´c writes that the turning of a person into a werewolf could also be the conse-

quence of the ‘wrong’ timing of their conception, such as on the eve of Good Friday and Lilek writes that it was believed that people would turn into a werewolf upon their death if they were cursed; Brati´c, ‘Iz narodnog verovanja’, 292; Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 269.

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I1: Perhaps someone owed her something, if you know what I mean. Or if someone did something wrong in their love, attitude, in behaviour [towards them], in something, this can happen too, as we say. I2: When you sin… I1: This is what we say. When I shout at you without reason. Or I hit you or whatever. And then you return to me. (114)

When the living did not want to forgive the dead (halaliti)24 before or during the funeral, the dead might haunt them as werewolves too: My mother told me that if someone dies and they bring him to hodja [Muslim priest] and he asks them to forgive him, and if they don’t, this soul wanders around the cemetery and has no peace in the grave and then it walks and annoys those who haven’t forgiven him until they do. When they do, it leaves. (222)

The most commonly stated reason for the deceased to turn into a werewolf, however, was related to a mistake made by the living while carrying out funeral rituals: animals (cats in particular) had to be prevented from jumping over the corpse while it was lying at home prior to the burial, or else it was believed that the deceased would turn into a werewolf. Some narrators even claimed that not animals but all other objects, even a hand, should be prevented from crossing the corpse. If this happened, it meant that the family had failed to fulfil their obligation towards the dead, in that they did not take good care enough of the corpse, and that in return, the dead would fail to fulfil their obligation to withdraw completely from the world of the living. While traditionally this used to be the most commonly stated reason for the deceased to turn into werewolves,25 it is increasingly

24 From Arabic halal, -a, m. (ar.), permissible; (1) which is allowed by religion; (2)

blessed; (3) farewell (oprost ) (Škalji´c, 1957: 313), usually understood in terms of forgetting and forgiving insults, debts etc. to the dead. 25 Luka Grd-i´c-Bjelokosi´c, ‘Narodno sujevjerje. Vila, aždaja, zmaj, mora, vještica, vukodlak’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja 8 (1896), 533; Lukas Grgji´c-Bjelokosi´c, ‘Volksglaube und Volksbräuche in der Hercegovina’, Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen aus Bosnien und der Hercegovina 6 (1899), 631; Emilian Lilek, ‘Volksglaube und volksthümlicher Cultus in Bosnien und der Hercegovina’, Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen aus Bosnien und der Hercegovina 4 (1896), 418; Lilek, ‘Ethnologische Notizen’, 270; Brati´c, ‘Iz narodnog

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a thing of the past: mortuaries have been built in almost every village, so there is no opportunity to break the taboo. * As with the reasons given for the appearance of dead werewolves, the ascription of werewolfery to a living person that my Croat interlocutors in Herzegovina sometimes narrated about is strongly associated with the transgression of social norms. Meanness, insincerity, and asocial behaviour, as well as sarcasm and bluntness in communication with others, and his unbridled imagination, brought a man with the ominous nickname of Lucipher the reputation of being a werewolf in his community.26 I: Oh, and this also, how do they say, allegedly they are men during the day whereas during the night they transform into a beast or… F: Is there a person in your village that can do that? I: Yes, it could be, they were telling you about Lucipher,27 you know? This was a man who was fundamentally bad. I knew him. Like, I saw him, and he had some fantasies, like that he travelled to America the evening before, in a casserole dish. He sits down into a casserole and leaves.

verovanja’, 292; Dragiˇcevi´c, ‘Narodne praznovjerice. (Žepˇce)’, 458; Filipovi´c, Život i obiˇcaji narodni u Visoˇckoj nahiji, 176, 178; Abdulah Škalji´c, ‘O obiˇcajima i vjerovanjima u srezu jajaˇckom’, Bilten instituta za prouˇcavanje folklore 2 (1953), 223; Radmila Kajmakovi´c, ‘Narodni obiˇcaji. (Žepa.)’, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja BiH 19, etnologija (1964), 202; ‘Neki arhaiˇcni elementi u pogrebnim obiˇcajima muslimana u Bosni’, Rad Xi-og kongresa Saveza folklorista Jugoslavije u Novom Vinodolskom 1964 (1966), 357; Semberija, Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja BiH, etnologija, n.s. 29, (1974), 101; Rakita, ‘Narodna vjerovanja u predjelu Janj’, 70. 26 If the subject of these narratives had indeed narrated the stories which obviously stem

from the stock of witchcraft folklore, in first person, with himself being the main subject, as my interlocutors claimed he had, one may assume that he may have deliberately worked on his reputation, perhaps in order to trigger fear or admiration of his extraordinary abilities in other members of the community; cf. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester 1999), 176–177; Laura Stark, ‘Narrative and the Social Dynamics of Magical Harm in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Finland’, in: Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies (eds.), Witchcraft Continued. Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester 2004), 73, 76; Mirjam Mencej, Styrian Witches in European Perspective: Ethnographic Fieldwork (London 2017), 191–192, or in order to benefit from his reputation in any other way. 27 The narrator is referring to the interview 164, see below.

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F: This is what he himself was saying? I: Yes. Then he was saying that women attacked him at night and then … do you know what arar [a bag for potatoes] is? And he said how he had bound these women who entered, who came to him through a keyhole, you know […], how he took that arar and held it and they fell into it and then he bound it. […] F: But did the village talk about him? I: Yes, yes, that’s why they called him Lucipher. Lucipher is the Devil. (165)

Lucipher’s son, partly due to his father’s reputation and partly due to a sleep-walking condition, acquired the label of a werewolf too. As the narrator himself emphasises, people were not aware that sleepwalking was a medical condition, and thus found his behaviour strange and consequently suspicious. The fact that walking and making noise on the roof, actions common during his nightly sleepwalking, are typically actions ascribed to werewolves must have additionally paved the way for his acquisition of such a reputation. A further additional factor contributing in this case may have been his wandering outside in the dead of night: anyone seen outside during the night was typically considered highly suspicious, as this was considered to be the time dominated by supernatural powers. According to general conviction, the only possible reason for a person to be outside at that time would be the intent to use supernatural powers to their benefit and at others’ expense.28 Given that animals were traditionally ascribed stronger intuition than humans, a person that animals feared was likewise considered suspicious as regards their true character, which in turn could lead to the reputation of a werewolf: I3: My aunt who died, I don’t even remember which year she was born, I think 1928. She said that there was that man, he was not far away, he was their neighbour, they even knew his name, but I forgot it, this was long ago. Well, [she said] that he could allegedly transform in the evening, that the

28 A woman met outside at night would similarly face gaining a reputation as a witch, or sihirbasica, i.e. the one who deals with magic; cf. Mirjam Mencej, ‘Magic and CounterMagic in the 21th-Century Bosnia’, in: Jonathan Barry, Owen Davies, and Cornelie Usborne (eds.), Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe: Middle Ages to the Present (London 2018), 258.

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horses were not allowed to see him, that he could transform. But you know, the horses would get frightened when they saw this man and most probably they assumed that because they got frightened that he was [able to] transform into a werewolf… (166)

The term ‘werewolf’ therefore applies either to the deceased who, due to their own, or others’ transgression of the norms of social behaviour, could not properly progress to the otherworld and thus returned to haunt the living, or to the living person who also gained such a label due to their transgression of the social norms of behaviour. The parallel between the notions of living and dead werewolves implies that deviation from social norms of behaviour was understood in terms of deviation from the world of humans, and the deviant person understood as alternating between the two realms. The behaviour of a socially deviant person is described in terms of animals’ (wolfish) behaviour—they are said to behave wildly, ‘animal-like’, or ‘wolf-like’—and thus associated with behaviour that belongs to the otherworld, as the wolf, and wild animals in general, belong to the ‘outside’. With just one step further, due to their deviant and socially unacceptable behaviour, such individuals could find themselves labelled as werewolves. Werewolves, due to their transgression of the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead, are thus conceived as in themselves uniting the characteristics of both worlds. Their dual identity is reflected in their very name vukodlak (lit. wolf-hair) as well as occasionally in their wolf-like image.29 I2: There is a general belief that there were werewolves. F: And what do people believe about werewolves? I2: That was [meant] in the sense that these were people in animal shape, with wolf’s hair, that’s why they were called werewolves [vukodlak] and their behaviour was wild, wolfish, animal-like .... And such people are dangerous, but they can look like normal people, only for other people...

29 Cf. Richard Buxton, ‘Wolves and Werewolves in Greek Thought’, in: Jan Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London and Sydney 1987), 62–63, 69; Evgenia Troeva, ‘Magical Interaction with the Other World: Dealing with Demons’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 54, No. 2 (2009), 395–407; Éva Pócs, ‘Shirts, Cloaks and Nudity: Data on the Symbolic Aspects of Clothing’, Studia mythologica Slavica 21 (2018), 57–60.

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I3: ....it is not good to have any business with them. I2: One feels a certain distrust towards these people. Are they truly what they are, or are they something else? And for people for who you can‘t be sure whether they are open enough, sincere enough, whether they are honest, or could they do you harm and so on …. [people believed that] they could be werewolves. This means that they transform into another being at night. (164)

Strategic Uses of Narratives About Werewolves As is the case with legends about the supernatural in general, once they belong to the stock of the traditional repertoire, they are imparted with authority that cannot be easily dismissed. As such they can be mobilized by individuals for various purposes.30 People can, for instance, intentionally spread rumours about someone being a werewolf to lower the prestige of a rival or to take revenge upon people with whom they are on bad terms.31 Moreover, these narratives proved particularly useful when social pressure needed to be exerted upon deviant individuals to make them conform to moral and behavioural norms. As encounters with dead werewolves are generally understood to be the result of a deviation from the social norms, intentionally spreading rumours about a person’s encounter with a werewolf could lower their social status too. In this way the community could also indirectly express disapproval of someone’s behaviour. Those who initiated the circulation of rumours about their relative’s encounter with their deceased mother-in-law, in the shape of a snake with a human head, obviously intended to reprimand the young couple for their inappropriate behaviour which had presumably triggered the mother-in-law’s return as a werewolf. At the same time, however, the circulation of the narrative served as a warning to all prospective sons and daughters-in-law to conform to the expected norms of conduct

30 In respect of witchcraft accusations cf. Vassos Argyrou, ‘Under a Spell: The Strategic Use of Magic in Greek Cypriot Society’, American ethnologist 20, No. 2 (May 1993), 267–268; Ágnes Hesz, ‘The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative’, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 37 (2007), 19–34; Mirjam Mencej, ‘Discourses on Witchcraft and Uses of Witchcraft Discourse’, Fabula 57, Nos. 3–4 (2016), 248–262. 31 Cf. Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind, French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London 1987), 73.

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towards their parents-in-law and to reconsider and correct any potentially inappropriate behaviour: I1: They say that a werewolf comes if you committed a sin towards them. Here, I heard that the deceased turned into a snake with a human head, but I haven’t seen her myself, I only heard about it. Her son and daughter-inlaw were evil. They were no good to her. Not that they would quarrel with her, they just didn’t want to accept any food from her. Like every mother she prepared food for them, left it in a bag for them but when they saw it, they left it where it was. And then she lamented and lamented and swore. And when she died, they say, good Lord, they hardly escaped. A snake came out from her grave when they were lighting a candle for her … F: It came from the grave? I1: Yes, it came out right at the place where she was buried. This is what they were telling. Now, I can’t say whether it is true or not as I haven’t seen it. F: Were they sorry, did they do anything afterwards? I1: Yes, they were sorry, they regretted it. Later. When you do evil… I always say: God help, I say, let me never ever do evil to anyone, not to my family, and especially not to others! Not even to that black Gipsy, poor he, he is not guilty either. … (117)

Given that my informants, the majority of which were elderly females, usually lived together with their son and his family under the same roof, many of their concerns were related to their relationship with their daughters-in-law, on whom they, especially when old, feeble and helpless, entirely depended. It should therefore be no surprise that the story about the disrespected mother-in-law turning into a werewolf after death and reprimanding her son and daughter-in-law was narrated to me by a female narrator whose own situation precisely resembled that of the subject of the legend: she too was living with her son’s family in the same house. While narrating the story she continually emphasised how well she had treated her own mother-in-law, who she had lived with in the same household since her marriage. At the same time, she bluntly admitted that she often reminded her daughter-in-law, who was present during the

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interview, that the way she was treating her then would be the way her own daughter-in-law would treat her in the future: I1: And the son, how he loved his mother…. You know. He loved his mother, but the daughter-in-law… As if this daughter-in-law of mine and my son would… Like they would not love me, respect me, didn’t give me anything to eat and so on. Like I was a sow, or something, and she the same… After she [mother-in-law] died, so it goes, it has passed, one year has passed. He [the son] was pouring [food], people say, oh God [mumbling], it was some old huge sow, weak, which ate everything. And on the first night, then the second night, he was just about to pour [food] to the sows, it was enough. (…). [Suddenly, there is] nothing. And after five, six days when the son came [home] in the evening, so it goes, his wife poured [food] to the sows and she said that some old huge sow came and ate everything. You know. Fine. The son got out in the evening and carried a small wooden stake.32 A small wooden stake, you know. So that he could kill that, there was that bitch that came, sow, bitch, I don’t know what it was. And nothing. She [daughter-in-law] poured to the sows and she left, he came down, and he came back to hit her [sow]. Then she said:” Oh, my son. I am your mother. Don’t kill me. Why are you killing me? The two of you didn’t respect me, you didn’t give me anything, I was hungry all the time, and now I came on this trough to eat.” And there you go, she turned into a werewolf. And that is that. That’s all I can tell you. And so on, the son came, and he carried a stake, and he [wanted] to kill that… sow, that bitch. So it goes: “Oh, my son, that is your mother!”. F: And why did she actually turn into a werewolf? I1: Well, I don’t know why. She didn’t …, they didn’t respect her, she didn’t [get enough to] eat, they didn’t take care of her, something crossed her and... F: And from whom did you hear that story? I1: I heard it from my mother. From my mother. That it happened like that. That’s wrong. A mother-in-law, if you have one, [you should] respect her – you don’t need to love her. If you have a mother-in-law, you don’t need to love her, don’t need to love her. This daughter-in-law of mine [pointing at her], she doesn’t need to love me, [but] she should respect me. Because she also has

32 Presumingly this was a hawthorn stake, the well-known protective means against werewolves (see below).

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children. She will get back what she earned. And you see, that daughter-inlaw, she was a kike [lit. cˇifut],33 and she was rude, and she didn’t give her to eat, nor did she love her. She didn’t respect her, nothing. She didn’t give her food. And then she came to eat with the sows. And he [son] came to kill her. (…) I always served my mother-in-law. I served her for eight years. I gave her whatever she needed, and my father I [served] six years. My father was paralyzed. And I did everything and for everyone. And I say: Thank God, so far I am fine, my kids are fine, everything is fine. That’s the reason I am telling to my daughter-in-law … By [helping] my mother-in-law, I earned for everything to be [fine] … And I am always saying: God help me die, to die when I can still take care of myself. And I always say that to my daughter in law [pointing to her]: you will get what you deserve. Everybody reaps what they sow. (97)

When living relatives did not pay enough respect to their dead ancestors, if they did not light candles, tend their graves, pray and pay for masses for the deceased, erect tombstone and so on, werewolf stories could also function as a means of pressure on them to take better care of their deceased kin. The narratives sometimes communicate the message that the dead return as werewolves when they are not satisfied with the care given to them by their descendants: they request to be prayed for, their grave to be visited, candles lit and flowers brought to their graves. Werewolf narratives can also be used as a means of pressure on particular professions upon whose honesty people depended but which at the same time could never be entirely under control, or trusted not to take advantage of the situation. By discussing the dire afterlife of a dishonest miller, the following narrative served as a warning to the representatives of this profession to accurately and honestly measure the quantity of ground flour they received in exchange for their work, or else they too would share the destiny of the miller in the story, and turn into a werewolf after death.34 I3: To the devil, there were stories about the werewolves, indeed. My own grandfather, my mother’s father. I heard it from my mother, and mother knows for sure. My mother was a girl then. He [grandfather] carried cereal into the mill there, where there was a watermill and this was called the 33 Cifut, ˇ c´ ifut is a pejorative name for Jews, used also for non-Jews. 34 Similarly, I very often heard narratives about priests who haunted their communities

after death because they did not give masses they were being paid for.

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cylinder. And that miller was a sort of a godfather. A gunsmith. And he came there late at night and now he didn’t want to go to the house to overnight, but led the mare there, as she was carrying cereal. But that godmother that was in the mill, she says: He died, [when] he asked her where the godfather is. Her father-in-law. He died. When did he die? A few months ago. Aaaaah. And then she [insisted that] he goes to sleep to the house, not to the mill. But he didn’t want that at all. And now she didn’t want to say what would happen. She just wanted him to go… I4: That she would save him. I3: But he wouldn’t, the old man, he wouldn’t. And this was my own grandfather! My mother’s father. And when…. In the night, he says, there comes some sort of fairy, some sort of a man, he wrapped himself up. I am sitting in front of the mill and smoking, my mare is bound, and he [the deceased miller] is thrashing with a stick, thinking that someone is coming to grind the grain. [Grandfather:] Where are you going? Mine is being ground, I don’t let anyone in, my cereal is being ground! The old man feared that he [the miller] would steal his cereal. Then, he said, I saw I was in trouble and I took some hammer, and then… The mare, says, started to neigh and he disappeared and I have no idea what happened. And now in the morning, he was not indifferent, when the morning rose, when there was a dawn, that daughter-in-law came. She was asking him: Godfather, how was your night? [He:] Well, alright. [She:] And nobody bothered you? [He:] Well, I came, and there was some devil [dressed] in white but somewhat with the hammer, somewhat the mare with her legs – and he disappeared. And then she said: This is my father-in-law. Since he has died, he comes every night. We have to leave the dinner in the kitchen [for him], he tramps around the house, he goes to the mill. And it was said that he [the miller] took his part, that which one had to pay for what they ground – you grind hundred kilograms and he takes five of them (…) – and then he was wrongly taking his part and then it was said that he has had no peace, that he is coming. F: Did they say that he was a werewolf or something else? I2: No, like some apparition… I3: Indeed, a werewolf, when he had no peace!

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I2: They’d say that he did wrong, so I heard, that he measured wrongly, measured wrongly and then he was appearing there. You know. Something comes. (...) I3: You had nothing [to live] from. Here there is not much [to live from]. He had a mill and ground flour and there was a crisis. I4: Thief! He found something… I3: This was always with the merchants. They measured, and what they measured, they measured wrong. Some say that who measured wrong, measured up their souls. This is a proverb. I5: This is how they used to frighten millers! (142)

In addition, the threat of werewolves, like the threat of other supernatural beings, could also be used as a disciplinary measure in the upbringing of children, to prevent them from wandering into dangerous areas, or as a warning to adults to stay within certain socially accepted temporal and spatial boundaries, to prevent them from thieving, or from entering into illegal sexual relationships or other actions that deviate from social norms.35

Conclusion It had been demonstrated that narratives about werewolves in Bosnia and Herzegovina only exceptionally referred to shapeshifters—instead, they were usually about the dead who, due to their own or the community’s mistakes, could not properly proceed to the other world. Moreover, it is notable that the animal shape of a werewolf bears no relation to that of a living wolf, at least as far as dead werewolves are concerned. In narratives about living werewolves their association with the wolves’ image, on the other hand, seems to have been an expression of their wild nature. When people behave in a manner that is not in accordance with how humans are supposed to behave, that is, when they transgress culturally prescribed norms of behaviour, they are related to wolves, the representatives of wild 35 Cf. Devlin, The Superstitious Mind, 77–78; Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 106,

170–172; Luka Šešo, Živjeti s nadnaravnim bi´cima. Vukodlaci, vile i vještice hrvatskih tradicijskih vjerovanja (Zagreb 2016), 173–182; Mencej, Styrian Witches, 394.

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animals par excellence. They are marked by animalistic features, the sign of their otherworldly nature. ‘Wild’, primarily referring to what has not been changed or tamed by human beings, by extension applies to everything that is outside the rules, deviant behaviour included.36 Transgression of the boundaries of socially accepted norms of behaviour in one’s lifetime furthermore mirrors the transgression of the boundaries between the worlds after death. As the living werewolf defies the boundary between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable behaviour, so the dead werewolf defies the boundary between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead, and where a living werewolf who, due to their deviant behaviour, is conceived as neither a human nor animal, and as belonging neither to the community of humans nor to the wilderness beyond, the dead werewolf too is conceived as neither completely dead nor completely alive, and belonging neither entirely to the realm of the dead nor any more to the realm of the living. Overall, the Bosnian and Herzegovinian narratives about werewolves are fundamentally about transgression and deviance from socially accepted norms of behaviour. As such they can be appropriated to condemn deviant behaviour, and used as a means of pressure on individuals to conform to the social rules. The term vukodlak which points to the wolf-like nature of (living) individuals thus seems above all to refer to their socially deviant nature.

36 Cf. Emilie Maj, ‘The Civilising Hero, a Question of Domestication of Yakutia’, in: Tiina Peil (ed.), The Space of Culture—The Place of Nature in Estonia and Beyond (Tartu 2011), 155; Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 180.

CHAPTER 9

When the Other Is One of Us: Narrative Construction of Werewolf Identity in the Romanian Western Carpathians at the End of the Twentieth Century Laura Jiga Iliescu

‘In Izbuc, a village in the Apuseni Mountains, people believe that Grat, ian is a werewolf (pricolici de lup)’. This is how a documentary made by Thomas Ciulei (1995) started, allowing the public to see and hear a werewolf speaking.1 His tales were only partially concurrent with those that nine other local people recounted about him; he talked about numbers, life and death, while the other people talked about Grat, ian and his uncommon condition of being a werewolf. This film and its stories will 1 The film Gra¸tian: The Real Life of a Romanian Werewolf won two important awards: The German Comission prize at the Festival of Duisburg (1995) and the Joris Ivens prize at the Cinéma du Réel Festival, Paris (1996).

L. J. Iliescu (B) University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_9

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represent a large part of the material for our investigation into the process of constructing the self-image of a werewolf, which takes place at the intersection of his own philosophical and ontological quest and the religious and cultural code of the community. Gra¸tian Florea died in 2001 at the age of 77. Even when discussing such a specific case, we cannot completely extract it from the context of other local werewolves, as they have been described by other sources. Two more texts will provide this information. Firstly, an article including three photos and four accounts about David Gheorghe, a werewolf who lived in Potingari, 64 km from Izbuc, and also in the Apuseni Mountains, Romania. The journalist could not meet David Gheorghe personally, as he had died just a few months before, but spoke with local people who knew the werewolf and recounted different experiences with him. Based on four interviews and the journalist’s additional comments, the article was published in 2010 in Formula As. This is a popular magazine in Romania, ‘mainly read by women, but without explicitly targeting them’,2 with eclectic content combining social and medical topics with new-age trends, Christian spirituality with autochthonous pagan exoticism, and a tempered but constant message of patriotism. In this regard, local traditions—narratives about werewolves included—play an important role, being more or less adjusted according to the magazine’s purpose and direction. Secondly, a recording taken by Claudia X, an ethnologist who conducted fieldwork in Poiana R˘achi¸telii (in the Poiana Rusc˘a group of mountains, also part of the West Carpathian Chain as the Apuseni Massif), 75 km from Potingari and 133 km from Izbuc, in which two people remembered Ionu¸t Marcu, their fellow villager who had walked with the wolves for seven years. This interview is combined with five recordings about another werewolf, Pascu Negru from Gurahon¸t, 50 km from Izbuc and from C˘arpinet, Gra¸tian’s village. Four characters and three discourses: an artistic documentary, a literary reportage, and a transcription of ethnologic field recordings. Each has their specific poetics, generic conventions, rigors, demands, author, and destinations. Besides the werewolf topic, what do they have in common? They all articulate original folk narratives recorded in the same area, namely the Apuseni Mountains, a range of the Romanian Western

2 https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_AS#cite_note-a2010-09-14-1.

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Carpathians whose forests, deep valleys and plateaus are considered one of the most picturesque and archaic regions of Romania. Nowadays the high plateau, where hamlets have previously been settled around 1400 m above sea level, is almost abandoned by its inhabitants and nature covers the old houses and villages and the paths to them. Another point shared by the three discourses is that the original interviewees speak in the first person: I , the werewolf, and I , the one who relates my personal encounter with the werewolf. ‘Yet, everywhere, the narrators-interlocutors spoke about the concrete experiences of some events they had witnessed, directly or indirectly (narratively mediated), that they retold using the hermeneutical keys of the cultural tradition they had grown up in’.3 Next, none of the three texts consists of a single story, but of a group of memorates (and a few fabulates, too) handed down by various people. Each story reveals different details about the werewolf in his human and presumed animal posture, such as that he speaks with an owl, knows all the cattle in the village, punishes people, and so on. It results in a collective (but not necessarily consensual), multiform and diffuse portrait of each wolf-man. Finally, this portrait is delivered to an outsider who reconstructs it through new combinations of the original folk narratives, with personal comments or complementary images added to the verbal expressions (Fig. 9.1), so that the final discourse represents an auctorial interpretation of the first-hand stories, and not a representation of the communities’ views of the events. In each situation, we deal with a process of fictionalization, defined by Bogdan Neagota as: ‘the process through which a liminal human experience is transformed in a totally new, fictional document, adapting the lived experience to a culturally transmitted narrative pattern.4 Coming back to Gra¸tian, the fact that we have seen a werewolf in the flesh—although obstructed by the screen and mediated by the eyes of the film director and the cameraman, does not make us more convinced of the truth of the existence of humans who metamorphose into animals (of course, the presumptive episode of transformation is not witnessed). Nor was Thomas Ciulei more trustful: ‘I don’t believe in such things and

3 Bogdan Neagota, ‘Cultural Transmission and Mechanisms of Fictionalization and Mythification in Oral Narratives’, Journal of Ethnography and Folklore (REF/JEF), Nos. 1–2 (Bucharest 2013), 63–88. 4 Neagota, ‘Cultural…’, 66.

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I did not want to confront him (Gra¸tian) with this question’.5 We are convinced that each storyteller, along with their audience, evaluates the truth of the werewolf’s reality both at the inner level of individual private beliefs and at the social level actuated during the storytelling performance. In both cases, the tangible presence of the werewolf forces people to reinterpret their inherited knowledge and traditions. My initial goal was to debate the epistemological values of truth as an intrinsic part of the multi-voiced portrait of each werewolf, articulated at the flexible junction between attitudes of trust and doubt. This intention was not discarded, but rather included in the larger topic of the ‘traditional’ werewolf as reconstructed at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first through new legendary expressions (namely documentaries, journalistic literature and, to a lesser extent, folkloristic anthologies) that are not folklore sensu stricto, but that provide the original narratives with new transmission channels and therefore with a second life.6

Romanian Werewolves The typological profile of the werewolf, at a certain moment, represents a synthesis of its previous interrelated hypostases, functions and meanings configured and reconfigured in line with successive and also coexistent ideologies, concepts, expectations, needs and ways of viewing the relation between human and non-human (here including the animal and the supernatural) nature, between body and soul, from very old times to contemporary ones. Undoubtedly, we speak about a layered and dynamic entity which cannot be described through a unique, frozen or inflexible portrait. The oldest Romanian attestation of folk belief in the existence of a being who might be a werewolf comes from the book Descriptio Moldaviae written by the learned prince Dimitrie Cantemir between 1714 and 1716: ‘Tricolici. It corresponds to the French le loup garou. They7 say 5 “Eu personal nu cred în a¸sa ceva s¸ i nu am vrut s˘a-l confrunt nici pe el cu aceast˘a

întrebare”. Evenimentul Zilei, 29 noiembrie (2005). https://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-arh iva-1198853-varcolaci-nebuni-cinema.htm, last accessed: 2 February 2019. 6 The second life of the folklore—“outside the ‘system of communication’ which maintains folklore in its original setting”. Lauri Harvilahti, ‘Textualising an Oral Epic—Mission Completed’, Approaching Religion 4, No. 1 (May 2014), 6. 7 It is not clear who this they refers to: the French? The Romanian peasants?

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that thanks to the art of witchcraft, people can transform themselves into wolves and other wild animals and that they can assimilate the animals’ character so deeply that they attack people and cattle and tear them apart’.8 It is not my goal to exhaustively describe the legendary figure of the werewolf, as it was configured in the Romanian pre- and early modern tradition through oral, written and figurative expressions, but to situate a few concrete werewolves (Gra¸tian, David Gheorghe, Pascu Negru and Ionu¸t Marcu) within the unpersonalized portrait of the generic werewolf as described by the oral record spanning from the end of the nineteenth century—when the first systematic collections of folklore were initiated— to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Therefore there are almost 300 years between the oldest mention of the werewolf and the more or less contemporary Gra¸tian and David Gheorghe, who died at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We cannot prove either continuity or discontinuity in the werewolf figure between these two temporal references, we can only put its different hypostases together in a synchronic approach. The main corpus of data I am going to use in describing the Romanian traditional werewolf profile consists of responses to the ‘linguistic and mythological’ and ‘juridical’ questionnaires launched in 1878 and 1884 by Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu across all territories inhabited by Romanians through postal correspondence; the project was funded by the Romanian Academy. The answers were organized by Ion Mus, lea and Ovidiu Bîrlea in The typology of folklore,9 first published in 1970, with second edition 2010.10 For the area of the Apuseni Mountains, there

8 Dimitrie Cantemir, Descrierea st˘ arii de odinioar˘a s,i de ast˘azi a Moldovei, translation from Latin and critical edition by Dan Slusanschi, introduction by Valentina and Andrei Esanu (Bucharest 2007), II, 221. Its Latin title was Descriptio antiqui et hodierni status Moldaviae; it was also translated in German and Greek. 9 Ion Muslea, Ovidiu Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului din r˘ aspunsurile la Chestionarele lui , B.P.Hasdeu (foreworded by Ioan Talos, ) (second edition) (Bucharest 2010). 10 In the Tipologia folclorului volume, the answers to Hasdeu’s questionnaires are to

be found between the pages 217–223 of the Tipologia folclorului…corpus. In order to avoid overcrowding the footnotes, I will indicate directly in the text, between brackets, the paragraphs excerpted from this book. Therefore, each time the reader meets such quotation—‘the werewolf is a being who transforms in animal’ [219], it indicates a bibliographical reference to the mentioned book and page number.

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are two more recent contributions to the topic, both coming from post1989: Otilia Hede¸san’s chapter ‘Between men and wolves. The Master of the Wolves’,11 and a 1998 study conducted by Bogdan Neagota in Gurahon¸t (the study is currently unpublished, but it was briefly presented by the author).12 Some interviews in Otilia Hedesan’s book are also taken from Gurahon¸t and point to the same character, namely Pascu Negru, as in Bogdan Neagota’s report. In addition to these new materials, I will use an anthology of folk narratives recorded in the 1970’s and 1980’s by Maria Ionit, a˘ , in which memorates and fabulates about werewolves and other figures related to the wolf are well represented.13

Terminology The various genuine Romanian terms for werewolf are commutable, but not totally identical: pricolici, with its variant tricolici, goglinte, and strigoi; the last also designates a living wizard and a restless dead or revenant who may or may not take an animal shape. For Romanians, in the past vârcolac (with the Slavic root vluku = Ro. lup = En. wolf) predominantly designated a supernatural entity who eats the sun and the moon. Under the impact of cinematography, and of the fact that the English ‘werewolf’ or the French ‘loup-garou’ are invariably subtitled in Romanian as vârcolac, it has become the urban substitute for the obsolete and almost forgotten pricolici. As for our characters, Gra¸tian is referred to as pricolici or, simply, wolf ; David Gheorghe is called lupar (from Ro. lup, wolf) and vâlva lupilor, Ionu¸t Marcu and Pascu Negru are both called vâlva lupilor. They all turned into a wolf. This is why our focus will also be on transformations into this animal. Generally, vâlva means a spirit of a place, such as a house, body of water, mine et cetera, which may take the physical form of an animal or of a human being, whether old, young, child, man, or woman. Gra¸tian spoke about such a spirit as a presumptive materialization of his parents’ souls14 : 11 Otilia Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie difuz˘ a (Timi¸soara 2000), 106–139. 12 Bogdan Neagota, ‘Cultural…’, 73. 13 Maria Ionita˘ , Cartea Vâlvelor. Legende din Apuseni [The Book of the Vâlve. Legends , from Apuseni Mountains] (forewarded by Ion S, euleanu) (Cluj Napoca 1982). 14 Gratian is the single werewolf speaking on his own behalf. In order to delineate this , particular voice, we use italics when quoting his words.

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I have had this spirit (vâlva, L.J.I) for about 10 years. Back then it came rarely, but now it appears daily. It comes at night, when I go to sleep. Beats me over my legs and pushes on my chest. Could be from my parents, too (...). It knows me. (...). Well…an evil spirit. (...). It also can take the shape of a snake. It can take all sorts of shapes. Yes.

On another occasion, Gra¸tian identified an owl he was speaking with as the soul of his mother. In the area of the Apuseni Mountains, the collocation vâlva lupilor refers to the Master of the Wolves, a man able to communicate with wolves and to wield authority over them. Despite their partial isomorphism, vâlva lupilor should not be confused with The Shepherd of the Wolves, the saintly entity which commands the wolves and feeds them with miraculous bread or establishes what each of them can eat. ‘In Eastern European tradition especially, saints, spirits, God or even wolves fulfilled this role. The Wolfsbanner (banner of wolves), who is the human version of the wolf herdsman, has been considered a “weakened form” of the werewolf (…). This supposes the priority of the werewolf, whereas the relation may very well have been the other way around: in some (rare) cases wolf banners morphed into werewolves’.15 Often, the quality of being master of the wolves as vâlva lupilor is combined with the ability to take the shape of a huge wolf and to command the other wolves in this hypostasis rather than as a human.16 Well-attested in the nineteenthth-century questionnaire, the pricolici is ‘an old man who walks in the night and foreordains the wild animals, the wolves, what to eat each of them’ [218], which is also the case for David Gheorghe from Potingari: ‘The last vâlva lupilor from the Apuseni Mountains. A man who commanded the wolves and who turned himself

15 ‘Interlude. The Shepherd of Wolves’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 205. 16 On the relation between werewolf and the Master of the Wolves, see Mirjam Mencej, ‘The Christian and Pre-Christian Conception of the Master of the Wolves’, EthnoAnthropoZoom 5 (2005), 238–285. http://www.iea.pmf.ukim.edu.mk/EAZ/EAZ_ 05/EAZ_2004_PDF/Mencej_Mirjam_Eng.pdf, last visited November 2018. Romanian legends about the wolves’s shepherd (Ro. p˘astorul lupilor) usually assign St. Peter (actually known as St. Peter of the wolves) in this role. Less often, the role can be fulfilled by St. Andrew.

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into a wolf’.17 Laz˘ar S˘ ¸ aineanu derived the Romanian vâlv˘a from the paleo-Slavic vluh ˘ u, ˘ meaning ‘vates, magus, incantatory, veneficus’.18 The meaning is consonant with the second signification of both pricolici and vâlva lupilor, namely ‘magician, sorcerer’ [221].

Deeds and Behavior ‘D113.1.1. ‘A man changes periodically into the form of a wolf. He is usually malevolent when in wolf form’.19 The metamorphosis motif reveals its meaning only as part of the corpus of belief assembly that describes, in its integrality, the figure of the werewolf. This is why, for the clarity of our interpretative description, we deem it appropriate to revert to the topic of transformation each time we approach the different characteristics of the pricolici, and to be very concise at this point of our analysis. In Romanian folklore, the most frequent animal for a human to metamorphose into is the wolf. In addition, the dog and almost any other animal, except the sheep and the bee, might be in this position. The transformation may be reversible or irreversible, for a short time or for a few (especially seven) years; it can be independent of the werewolf’s will and happen under certain spatial and temporal conditions—‘when his months/his time/his stars’ come [220], ‘in the summer’ [221], or it might be controlled by the werewolf, who might ritually roll head over heels three times in order to transform. In some cases, the informants specify that the werewolves takes off their clothes before transformation, and that they need to put them back on in order to regain human shape. In the animal hypostases, there are two categories of werewolves which act in a contradictory manner: those who cannot control the metamorphosis and those who can. In its turn, the first category includes two subclasses, one of those who might attack people and cattle, as in the

17 Bogdan Lupescu, ‘Valva Lupilor’ [The Master of the Wolves], Formula AS (Bucharest 2010), No. 928, http://www.formula-as.ro/2010/928/societate-37/valva-lupilor-12695, accessed: August 2018. 18 Laz˘ar Saineanu, ¸ Ielele sau zânele rele. Studii de Folclor [The Iele or the evil Fairies. Folklore Studies ] (Bucharest 2012), 117. 19 Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, JestBooks, and Local Legends. Revised and enlarged edition (Bloomington 1955–1958), 510. Romanian attestations are not included.

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case of any common wolf, and who were separated from their human consciousness during the transformation period, while the other class are those whose attacks are controlled by their own human wish (see below). This happens especially outside of villages, but within the domestic and cultivated space belonging to humans; included in the second category are the pricolici who come to men’s fires as a human being. Such encounters occur deep in the forest, particularly in the wild uncultivated space belonging to the wolves. Protections against werewolves include: ‘to know the Mother of God’s Dream and other prayers’ [219]; and ‘to have bread with you all the time for offering it to the lonely wolf that comes to your fire in the forest’.20

What Are They? What Is Their Nature? According to some Romanian beliefs werewolves might be dead revenants with human origins (strigoi): ‘the one who, during her/his life was very evil, goes out from the grave in the shape of a pig, but doesn’t hurt anybody. It stops being a pig when Lord forgives his sins’ [219]; ‘It is an animal in human shape’ [219]. In this regard, being a werewolf seems to be a chance for individual salvation. Mostly, werewolves are seen as liminal beings placed between humanity and animality, in both cases they are in-between beings. This condition is expressed through visible or hidden body marks—‘a man born with a tail, who has the devilish power to turn into a wolf’ [219]; ‘with hair on the neck and a small tail’ [220]; ‘hairy, as the wolves’ [220]. The Formula As article backs the idea of human anatomy marked by animal signs, but it articulates it as following the new trends of paranormal explanations and pseudoscientific data, which strategically legitimize a certain truth of the werewolf’s existence: This David Gheorghe from Potingari was sane and strong until his death. A few days before, he went to a doctor in Brad for some routine medical tests (…). His blood pressure was…30! The maximum of the tonometer scale. Strokes usually appear over 17. The doctor couldn’t believe it. She 20 Ioni¸ta˘ , Cartea…, 184.

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checked once again. And then once again. The old David felt perfect. “His blood was boiling. That was not the pressure of a human”, said the doctor, almost terrified. “That was the blood pressure of a beast”.21 There are no such accounts about Grat, ian and Ionu¸t Marcu.

Also defined as ‘a human who was cursed by God to be unable to keep his human nature’ [220], the pricolici seems to be characterized by a fundamental instability which imprints onto the werewolf a certain impure, inferior status of humanity: it is neither human, nor animal. Speaking about himself, even if not explicitly as a pricolici, but as a man who was cursed by his parents, Gra¸tian said: Do you know what the Jesus Christ Gospel says? To one man Lord God gave one piece of gold. To the second one, He gave two pieces. And to a third, He gave five. I mean that to the smallest of them, He gave only one piece. I mean there are three kinds of people on this earth: the one who has five pieces is super-human; the one with two pieces is human; and the one with one piece is infra-human, you know? Well, I was one of those with only one piece of gold. Infra-human.

When thinking about a werewolf, we should not just mean a man or a woman who changes their form, but also a wolf which encloses or hides a human individual. Not only is the human appearance marked by the presence of the animal component of the werewolf, but also the wolf hypostases of a pricolici is made distinct among other wolves by anatomical marks: over-large sizes, white or grey colour, or infirmity (very often in the Romanian folklore, the lame wolf under the command of the Shepherd of Wolves is a werewolf). In the communities where a known werewolf is living, certain attributes of a distinct wolf turn people’s attention to their pricolici neighbour: despite his wolfish shape, they recognize him. Here is the memorate delivered by one of Grat, ian’s fellow villagers filmed by Thomas Ciulei: One night, me and Marcu Sebii were in the stall, with the cows. At midnight, two calves appeared. They weren’t mine. They belonged to the neighbor Ceprigari (?). There was a smaller heifer and a larger one. Suddenly I saw two wolves – where did they appear from? I don’t know – pouncing on the calves. Then Marcu shouted at them: ‘Grat, i, is that you? 21 Lupescu, ‘Valva…’.

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Get out of there!’ And then Marcu noticed that one of the wolves has… an abnormal….ass. And he said: ‘this can only be Grat, i’. And the wolves went away the very moment when we said ‘that is Grat, i’. Then we put the calves in the stable and kept them till the morning.22

Werewolves are also framed as symbiotic beings, simultaneously human and animal. Their nature is double, not transitional, as in the previous case. Regarding a corpus of French legends, Fabio Armand asserted that ‘cette ambivalence n’est pas oppositive: l’homme et animal forment un être unique qui presente deux natures, mais jamais en meme temps’.23 Such situations are exemplified by those legends in which the werewolves cannot control their moment of transformation, but can feel it coming; they move away under some pretext and, as wolves, attack their family or the family’s cattle, when returned to their human form they do not remember anything about the episode. While they were a wolf, no element of their human nature was active. The action of removing clothes before transformation, and their putting back on in order to return to human shape, further shows the werewolf’s separation from the human condition. The woman turned into a wolf and ate a cow. Had they found her clothes, then she couldn’t have gotten back to her human form. If women remain like that (as wolf) and find little children in the forest, they don’t eat them. They raise them and love them.24

However, at least in Romanian folklore, the last sentence in Fabio Armand’s assertion (‘deux natures, mais jamais en meme temps’) is questionable. There are also legends, well represented in the Apuseni Mountains, that indicate the concomitance of human/animal identities: while in wolf shape, a certain class of pricolici might still preserve their human inner nature; they want to escape from their wolf condition and, in this context, come to men’s fires as human being on the inside, but

22 Sequence from the film Gra¸tian. 23 Fabio Armand, ‘Le loup-garou: de sa liminalité dans le patrimoine narratif gallo-

roman à sa parenté neuroanthropologique’, Le patrimoine oral: ancrage, transmission et édition dans l’espace galloroman (Actes du colloque international «Le patrimoine oral: transmission et édition dans l’aire galloromane») (Bern 2016), 175–192, 179. 24 Ionita˘ , Cartea..., 176. ,

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in a wolf shape. They expose themselves to possible attack by humans (who have to defend themselves when faced with the wolf’s presence) with the goal of being hurt (according to beliefs, losing blood will cure them) or to get human food, especially bread, which will cure them too. So, they cannot turn back by themselves, but they can indirectly ask for a human’s help. Consequently, they act as humans and nurse children, fight against their own ferocity or seek out human company. This is the type followed by Ionu¸t Marcu: while transformed, he retained the human ability to speak and to avoid hurting his father. One night, his father entered the stable with a lamp.25 And he saw a big wolf between the oxen. And then he took the gun – he had a gun because he was a forest ranger – and wanted to shoot the wolf. And then the wolf said: ‘Father, don’t shoot, because it’s me! (...) And I am punished for seven years (...)’. And then the wolf went away.26

Another example comes from a man interviewed for the Formula As article, a forest ranger who recounted an incident when he shot a female wolf. You’ll regret this [said Gheorghe David]. Because she was The Little Girl. You shouldn’t have shot her, because she was good, and she had not even had puppies. She was my dearest girl from all across these mountains.27

In other words, while in human shape, he had the same feelings as when he turned to his wolfish shape. The above narratives suggest that at the very least Ionut, Marcu and David Gheorghe had a unique experience, displaying double bodily hypostases with spiritual stability, rather than two parallel existences that were successively active. The hypothesis of Claude Lecouteux, according to which the European beliefs in werewolves are based on the conception that each individual has a body and three souls and that one of the souls—the Double—might take an animal form and leave the body in this hypostasis, is not expressed in the nineteenthcentury answers, nor in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries narratives 25 Being mediated by a third storyteller—the episode is not confessed to the field ethnologist by its protagonist—the variant is more formalized and impersonal. 26 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie..., 106. 27 Lupescu, ‘Valva…’.

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we deal with.28 However, the account of one of our characters is not far away from this concept. Undoubtedly, as they are narratively expressed, beliefs about the werewolf informally assert a metaphysical concern over the relationships between body and soul, humanity and nature, but not a unique collective theory. As an underlying idea, we can abstract that the soul has a materiality with its own consistency and whose form is influenced by the very body it inhabits. Based on the observation that the stories about the werewolves who lose their human nature while metamorphosed refer to anonymous pricolici, who remain unidentified by the storytellers, whereas the narratives in which the werewolves keep their human nature refer to specific pricolici, known to the storytellers, we might suspect a sort of mental strategy whose effectiveness is revealed when people face the dangerous situation of living in the same community with a werewolf. People can accept the presence of a pricolici among them only if they remain human in their nature and hence can be trusted not to suddenly attack humans. The final type of Romanian werewolf is represented by a non-human being with a supernatural nature: ‘the devil metamorphosed into a dog or a cat’ [218], ‘an evil being who lives in the soul of a human’ (spirit possession) [218]; an animal nature.

Why and How Can a Human Be, or Become, a pricolici? There are two categories of werewolves: those who have been born as werewolves (as a predestination), and those who became pricolici at some point during their life or after their death. Overlaying these categories are other factors; in cases where the subject becomes a werewolf as a consequence of exterior preconditions or agents, we identified four complementary variables. In the first case, the pricolici is the victim and represents divine punishment of their parents, because they have violated religious or social laws. The new born child is marked by impurity, being characterized as an inferior human, or even as having a devilish aspect (see above). The main rules defied by parents in this context are as follows. The marital institution: ‘a pricolici comes from a child who was born

28 Claude Lecouteux, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages (Paris 2003).

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to an unmarried mother who, in her turn, was born to an unmarried mother and so on, for seven generations’ [219] a condition shared with the impure strigoi. Closely related to this is the incest prohibition: ‘the pricolici is the one whose parents married even if they were close relatives: cousins, father and daughter, mother and son’ [219]. The rule of sexual abstinence during religious fasting periods also applies, as in the case of Ionut, Marcu, who blamed his parents: ‘You are to blame for my situation, because you had sexual contact and conceived me on the Saturday before Easter’ (meaning during the fasting period).29 Secondly, as part of the divine plan, the pricolici ‘is a man who was destined by God to metamorphose into a wolf, even during his life’ [218]. Under the command of the highest authority in Christianity, these werewolves are understood to also be part of the Christian community: He (Ionut, Marcu) joined our parties.30 Concerning their role in the community, werewolves might act as guardians of the divine will. Their aggressions is directed at people who do not observe religious holidays or who break hospitality and charity laws. The vigilante attacks are only sporadically recorded as being against human beings, as they are mostly directed against the offender’s cattle. Consequently, the werewolves protect flocks whose owners obey religious laws. All these functions are explicitly manifested in the beliefs woven around Grat, ian, David Gheorghe and Ionut, Marcu. In those times he (Ionut, Marcu) used to come to our village and ask for cigarettes. My father offered them to him all the time. And he said: “let the boy take the sheep wherever he wants in the forest, without being afraid, because nothing will harm them”.31

The accounts about Gratian are almost the same: “People are afraid to refuse him, so they give him this or that: candles, newspapers, milk, sugar…Basic stuff. Those who had refused Grat, i, after a day or two, had some trouble with their animals. They were eaten by wolves”, asserted the teacher in the villages where Grat, ian was begging.

29 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie…, 106. 30 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie...., 107. 31 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie…., 106.

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In all of these cases, the wolf-man interventions resemble ritual punishments, where the pricolici work as mediators between divinity and human beings. Fear of these werewolves is also a fear of the transgression of divine law. Despite being marginal members of the community on the normal social level, in this context werewolves gain a central place in the imaginary of the communities they live in, and consequently a central role in the process of memorate formations.32 In the last example, fear is used to construct verisimilitude in regard to Gra¸tian’s werewolf’s nature. Other more doubtful voices pointed that he exploited people’s fear in order to get everything he was begging for, and it is worth noting that similar opinions have been recorded about all wolf men. Both strategies are deeply and simultaneously involved in the process of memorate creation. The priest expresses the Christian view of the presence of Grat, ian in the community as a divine instrument for people’s salvation: The fact that Grat, ian became a beggar, here, in our two villages, I consider as God’s benevolence for the people. Because through his gesture… I mean that although he could live with his brother and have a more comfortable life, he prefers to live in his shack, isolated like a hermit, and to beg, so that through the good and mercy of people who take pity on him, they shall be rewarded by God, when He calls them to account. Because “I was hungry, and you gave me to eat. And I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink. And I was naked, and you gave me clothes. And I was alone, and you came to me”, and so on. We, as Christians, must feel compassion for those who suffer.33

I think that the comparison with a hermit is neither accidental nor meaningless. I will develop this association a little later. For now, it should be noted that the comparison of the pricolici with a hermit enriches the multivalent figure and role of the werewolf with a religious dimension. Thirdly, the pricolici can be a victim of a malevolent magic act, a spell or a curse: ‘they walk together with the wolves in the pack until the time of the curse ends, and they turn back into a human’ [219].

32 Lauri Honko, ‘Memorates and the Study of Folk Beliefs’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 1 (1964), 5–19. 33 Sequence from the film Gra¸tian.

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In Grat, ian’s case, there are two folk ‘explanations’ of his condition: one, delivered by the community, strongly asserting that he is a predestined werewolf; the other one, delivered by himself and supported by some voices in the community, stresses his polluted condition, but without any explicit suggestion that he might be a pricolici. Here is the first one, narrated by a man: When women give birth and …. or even when a cow gives birth…she has a sack, an envelope (the placenta). And the custom is that the midwife, the one who cut the umbilicus, the navel – yet nowadays they go to the hospital -, so before she cut the navel she predicts: let she/he be a good singer, or a good worker, or beautiful, or loveable, or wise, learned…Then she pulls on and breaks the umbilicus. Or, for other one, she says that… for example, we refer to Grat, ian: people say that when his mother, the priest’s wife gave birth to him, the sack didn’t break open. The midwife meant him to be learned, to be good working, even to be a thief, singer, anything. But it ripped only when she meant him to be a werewolf. Then his head came out and he was born.34

The motif of the unborn child chosing his destiny is well known in the Romanian folklore and almost universally assigned to a boy: the child refuses to emerge and cries in their mother’s womb until she promises what he asks for (eternal youth, golden apples, etc.) or the child accepts one of the midwife’s proposals as in the case of Gratian. The choice will place the newborn in a marginal position in common society, but with major importance revealed in the supernatural realm. He will be a charmed thief, a wanderer for eternity, a werewolf. In this regard, Grat, ian embodies the metaphysical anxieties of the community regarding the relation between predestination and free agency. The second version of this origin is narrated by him as follows: My parents have cursed me, you know? My parents were evil, both of them. And the parents’ curse was efficient; it came on me. This version was also subscribed to by an old lady in the village:

34 Sequence from the film Gra¸tian.

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I don’t know if there is any salvation for him. All this comes from his mother. She’s also punished in the other world. Because of that curse. His mother, yes. Because this body dies, but the soul doesn’t.35

According to Romanian folk beliefs, the parents’ curse brought against their child is totally effective and without any possibility to counteraction. Thus, the narratives about Grat, ian as a victim of his parents’ curse not only legitimize him as a marginal man, but serve as a strong warning to the wider community. Fourthly, the pricolici can be a victim of his/her lack of vigilance: ‘if he drinks, by chance, the wolf’s urine, then he becomes werewolf’ [219]. The fifth means through which a human turns to be a werewolf is represented by magic abilities they acquired following some rituals: ‘the man who drinks from his blood or from other human’s blood’ [220, 268]; ‘adult who sucks a woman’s breast’ [220]; ‘if the man (…) would drink his urine and also the blood from his little finger of the right hand, then he turns into a pricolici’ [219, 220]. Having supernatural power, control over the metamorphosis situations and, often, control over wolves, this type of werewolf is a sorcerer, isomorphically interrelated with the vâlva lupilor (see above). This aspect is discussed further later in this analysis. The above paradigmatic description of the werewolves, as articulated mostly through the answers given by the questionnaire respondents (dominantly rural priests and teachers) at the end of the nineteenth century and through field recordings taken 100 years later, allowed us to highlight which of the pricolici’s features might be found to still be active, or which of them have been changed over time in the particular cases of the werewolves witnessed at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. We will now change the paradigmatic direction of this analysis to a syntagmatic approach, with a focus on the specific narratives dealing with Grat, ian Florea, David Gheorghe, Pascu Negru and Ionut, Marcu. The interviewees’ experiences with a disguised supernatural being (the werewolf), together with the storytellers’ stance towards their fellow villager, express a regional pattern of lycanthropy, which is delivered to a non-regional audience by means of the film, the reportage, and the ethnologist’s field recording transcriptions. Putting together the behavioral particularities shared by our characters, we discovered that: they all live in a small house placed outside the human 35 Sequence from the film Gra¸tian.

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settlement, but not far away from it, a reality which can be easily interpreted as an expression of their domestic-wild condition; they practice a kind of ritual begging around a small area of two or three villages, which provides their living; they are dirty and bad smelling; they walk a lot and for long distances: ‘he traverses seven or nine estates’ [222]—permanently walking around is a habit that suggests a wolfish nature and also a certain degree of insanity. Writing about Pascu Negru, Bogdan Neagota drew a portrait that is very similar to this pattern.36 As Daniel Bernard pointed out, ‘s’íls ne sont pas des saints, les meneurs de loups ne peuvent être que des sorciers’.37 Indeed, a certain type of wizard might be recognized in the local profiles of Gra¸tian, David Gheorghe, and in part of Ionu¸t Marcu. In fact, it is not clear whether the storytellers refer to them as werewolves (pricolici), masters of wolves (vâlva lupilor) or both. Our analysis will not separate these two legendary figures either.

Knowledge First of all, they all know something which remains obscure and impenetrable for common people.38 This something encompasses a certain multileveled knowledge that recommends them as specialists in sacredness. In the case of David Gheorghe, the journalist rewords the conclusion of a woman who directly knew the vâlva: ‘This man knew everything on earth and in the universe’. That ragged and dirty man, who looks like a beggar, was, in fact, a great learned person, holding huge amounts of information about history, geography, theology, esoteric literature, foreign languages, physics, chemistry and even alchemy. And when she entered his hut, she understood why: (...) she saw a huge quantity of books, hundreds of books, some of them

36 Neagota, ‘Cultural Transmission…’, 75. 37 Daniel Bernard, ‘Charmeurs et meneurs de loups, d’hier à aujourd’hui’, in: Christian

Aby and Alice Joisten (eds.), ‘Le fait du loup. De la peur à la passion: le renversement d’une image’, Le Monde Alpin et Rhodanien. Revue régionale d’ethnologie (Grenoble 2002), 164–178 (166). 38 In the emic language of Romanians, the expression points to a person who is suspected to be a charmer.

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very old, which have been read by this taciturn old man of whom, at a first glance, one’s impression would have been either of an illiterate person or of a madman whose powers and aspects frightened everybody.39

Under the journalist’s pen, the old and traditional view of sacred knowledge, which confers supernatural power to those who gain it, turns towards science, philology and esotericism as well. With regards to Grat, ian, none of his fellow villagers, at least none of those who were captured by the film camera, assigned him any highly literate education. Neither did he assign such a quality to himself: …my brothers could learn at school and went to school and became gentlemen. But I couldn’t. So, I remained at home.40 However, the manner in which he expresses himself, his vocabulary, and the special interest in counting and speculation about numbers and infinity, bear witness to a certain propensity for philosophical speculation, reflexivity and the intense practice of reading. He was an autodidact, mysterious hermetic in the eyes of his fellow villagers. Here is just one example: Do you know what the sextillion is? No? I am going to tell you the numbers that go up to the sextillion; even those that are bigger than the sextillion. First comes the thousand. Then the million, the billion, the trillion… you know? (...) vintelion.41 And the cinclon. This number is the number I have got. It’s a huge number. Has up to a hundred of zeroes after the one. And they went as far as 200 sextillion km…in their astronomical distance and observations.

In any case, the main characteristic does not consist of a high level of scholarly education, but of the possession of a peculiar knowledge which distinguishes them from common people, and which, at the imaginary level, also grants Grat, ian and David Gheorghe supernatural power. Therefore, in addition to bookish knowledge, they are imagined as the owners of sacred knowledge, gained under ritual circumstances, that empowers them with the art of transfiguration and with authority over wolves and humans.

39 Lupescu, ‘Vâlva…’. 40 He was not illiterate. At some point in the film, Gra¸tian is shown reading a

newspaper. 41 He invents words for the big numbers. It’s interesting to note that vintilion probably comes from vingt, the French word for twenty.

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Initiation As it was retold by the journalist, who in her turn, learned it from Monica Du¸san, the local librarian who got the story from the wolf-man,42 David Gheorghe’s initiation was terrible: he was taught ‘to talk with the wolves when he was young, by an old vâlva of the region (…), who whispered to him the secret and asked him to swear that he should reveal it to a single apprentice, when the time will come’. We recognize the classic pattern of charm transmission. But the ritual did not stop here: ‘the man who shared the secret with him, left him alone face to face with three hungry wolves (…).43 He felt his heart boiling, as if it had grown and would not fit into his body’. In a few moments, ‘his whole head was covered with bumps of various sizes, which he claimed corresponded to his home mountains’.44 It is not my goal here to evaluate the truth of this story but point out the process of journalistic fabrication of the werewolf image, as it expresses a certain identification between the local environment and the vâlva lupilor, who embodied it. He is the map of the Apuseni Mountains. The long distances covered by David Gheorghe—‘he knew all the backwoods, all the rivers, all places’ far away from his native village—not only allude to his wolfish hypostases, but also represents a question of territoriality and authority over the entire areal of his ancestors. Linked in the chain of transmitting the ‘ancestral’, secret, exotic, and traditional knowledge, David Gheorghe, the wolf, metonymically encapsulates the ancient and pagan inhabitants of the Apuseni Mountains, namely the Dacians, as if they are still alive, although invisible, in present times. This fictional strategy of inventing an autochtonous realm for vâlva lupilor is consonant with an active trend in Romania to fabricate and contemporize a legendary Dacian past, in its turn marked, at the imaginary level, by the presence of the wolf. Previous writings by Mircea Eliade legitimise the process: ‘Hence, Dacians called themselves wolves, or those who are like wolves ’.45

42 We already have a series of three voices involved in the process of transmitting the story to the Formula As readers. 43 This might suggest that the initiation took place under conditions of space, namely in the forest. 44 Lupescu, ‘Valva…’. 45 Mircea Eliade, De Zalmoxis à Genghis-Khan (Paris1970), 8.

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In the case of Grat, ian, whose narrative file consists of original stories directly recorded from local people, such speculations are not put forward. There is no account of Grat, ian’s initiation in becoming a werewolf (since from the beginning he was born as a pricolici), although one of his younger fellow villagers recalled that Grat, ian was interested in transferring his role. One day, we were alone, it happened to be just him and me46 (...) and Grat, i told me: “Wouldn’t you like to take over my job?” “Oh, no, I replied. I am young, you are an old man, it doesn’t suit me, it’s not for me”. “You get to be like me, he said, a wolf.” “Why?” I replied. “People will fear you. If someone won’t give you food, he said, you scare him”, Grat, i said. And then I replied: “No, Grat, i, not me. Try to find somebody else”.47

In fact, some beliefs recorded in Western Romania asserted that the pricolici must reveal their secret before dying, otherwise ‘the soul cannot get out of the body’ [223]. As initiated persons living outside human, domestic communities, but in contact with sacredness, these werewolves evoke another figure who could be met in the flesh in the wilderness and who had a privileged relation with divinity: the hermit, with his ambiguous image constructed at the border of holiness and sorcery. Certainly, the pricolici and/or vâlva lupilor is not similar to the hermit; there is not any confusion between them. However, at the imaginary level, they share some interesting characteristics. The hermit voluntarily renounces his human nature as a social being in order to be closer to God: he enters the wilderness not only as a space of living, but as an initiation process into a new, superior (still humble) condition, as well, marked by corporal transformation. One of the most well-known monastic songs which circulates among Orthodox Christians both through written and oral means says: ‘Oh, most beautiful wilderness/Receive me in your thick forest/I will be a wild beast/ (….) /Leaving the bitter world’.48 The wild beast transformation is not a simple metaphor; the ascetic life turns the hermit into a mystic other, 46 As in the case of the transmission of charms. 47 Sequence from the film Gra¸tian. 48 The song was incorporated in the popular romance Barlaam and Josaphat and well

spread over the entire Christian space (Ro. Varlaam ¸si Ioasaf , firstly translated from Slavon in 1648). It is attested in a Romanian manuscript in 1784.

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whose alterity is expressed by a body all covered with hair: this is how it is described in medieval hagiographies, in Dyonisius of Furna’s famous Hermenia manual of icon paintings compiled between 1730 and 1734,49 translated into Romanian in the middle of the eighteenth century,50 on the painted walls of monasteries and it is also narratively reiterated in legends about contemporary hermits.51 The furry body became a distinctive sign of eremitic asceticism and, at least at the imaginary level, the wild representation of the hermit is still active. It should be highlighted that the werewolf-hermit contiguity is expressed in the texts we deal with here. One recalls the priest’s words about Grat, ian: ‘…he prefers to live in his shack, isolated like a hermit’. David Gheorghe is described in similar terms: ‘This is how he lived, at the top of the mountain, as a monk’. Another example comes from Gurahon¸t where, speaking about Pascu Negru, a young man said: ‘We call him just vâlva. I don’t know his lay name’.52 Otilia Hede¸san discussed the term ‘lay’ (Ro. mirean) and concluded that ‘being vâlva, [Pascu Negru] entered in a realm of sacredness (…) and that he must be approached first of all in his hypostasis’.53 In my opinion, the informer pointed to Pascu Negru’s special status which derived from his affiliation to a category of initiated people who gave up on their previous (lay) identity.

Journeys More than an image of cruelty and danger, the wolf represents a multivalent figure in the traditions and beliefs of Romanians; for example, a ritual funeral song expresses its psychopomp functions of guiding the human soul through and out of a labyrinthine liminal forest. Its quality of being an agent of journeys to other worlds is assumed by the werewolf too. In the case of Grat, ian, having access to other realms is expressed by the ability to communicate with his dead parents.

49 Its roots come from eleventh century Byzantium. 50 Dionisie din Furna, ‘Erminia Picturii Bizantine’, tip˘arit˘a cu binecuvântarea ÎPS

NIcolae, Mitropolitul Banatului (Bucures, ti 2005), 5. 51 Between 2011 and 2018, I recorded such legends in Romania. 52 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie…, 123. 53 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitoligie…, 131.

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I suddenly heard him talking. I look over there and see an owl in a beech tree. It resembled an owl, but it was too big. I didn’t go over there, I kept listening, but I didn’t understand any words. So, after he finished talking (...) I went after him and say: “Grat, ian, what, or who were you talking to?” “To my mother”, he said. “Well, where was your mother?” I asked him. “Didn’t you see that big owl? That was my mother.” “What did you two talk about?” “I don’t, know”, he said. He didn’t want to say and went off. I stood there stunned.54

Speaking about the specific act of metamorphosis, the gesture of somersaulting three times brings the question of space to our attention again, but in a different manner. Mirjam Mencej proposed looking at the circular movement as ‘a way of communication with the other world’,55 and as a ritual vehicle for supernatural journeys. In this respect, the pricolici’s ceaseless wanderings and long travels might be the visible sign of a mystic ability: they have access to larger spaces than the mundane plane, invisible and forbidden for profane people. In his original and philosophic manner, Grat, ian pointed to the cosmic space as a means for gaining access to infinity. Light travels at the speed of 300 000 km/s. This means that during one year, it travels ten trillions km. So, to get to a sextillion kilometers, it takes a billion light years. And to get to 200 sextillions km, you need 10 billions years. Yes ... This life in the world is temporary. And then follows the other life, the spiritual one, which is eternal. Will live as long as God, becoming the giants of the time (...). To the infinity. This is why it’s good to know these astronomical numbers, whose core is infinitely high: millions, billions, and so on, which in time might grow to the infinity.

In the narratives about David Gheorghe, mystic travels are translated in more contextual terms, as a strange ability to go beyond the iron curtain: ‘Sometimes he told us about certain places (…) from all the mountains 54 Sequence from the film Gra¸tian. 55 Mirjam Mencej, ‘Sem vso noˇc lutal v krogu. simbolika krožnega gibanja v Evropski

tradicijski kulturi’ (Abstract translated by Peter Altshu), Studia Mythologica Slavica, Supplement 7 (Ljubljana 2013), 229, 230.

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in Europe; he knew them very well. How? How to cross the border in Ceaus, escu’s time, as “a human”’?56 The account also serves to certify David Gheorghe’s power of metamorphosis.

Disorder of Mind ‘If circular movement can be understood as a sort of technique which induces altered state of consciousness (ASC), it could shed light on numerous European folk legends about werewolves, (…) people who were capable of reaching a state of ecstasy’.57 In profane terms, ASC is a deviance which might be mistaken for insanity. ‘When such a human grows to adulthood, he feels like he has committed a folly and runs away. While he remains alone, he rolls three times over his head and metamorphoses into a wolf or other wild animal’ [219]. In the corpus of memorates we deal with, the idea that the pricolici speak with invisible interlocutors, as in the episode of Gratian and the owl, clearly emerges and that their speech, almost incoherent, cannot be understood by chance witnesses. ‘It seems that he speaks with somebody. And it frightens you. You don’t want to go closer…. It seems that he is never alone. Probably he sees somebody, or, I don’t know; with whom is he speaking?’.58 At the real and observable level, the dirty body and its ugly smell might be further symptoms which suggest insanity. At the imaginary level, this aspect represents a decline from humanity towards the animal world. One more detail caught our attention: the smell of urine. Apparently, this is a consequence of uncleanliness, but we also know that territorial animals like wolves micturate to mark their territory. As mentioned above, that those who want to become werewolves drink their urine or they drink, by chance, wolf’s urine, and as a result the structure of their own body changes. Consequently, the smell of urine is an indicator for the pricolici’s identity, itinerancy and territoriality. In this context, the fact that Grat, ian himself was diagnosed with urinary incontinence in his youth might have encouraged the community to consider him a pricolici and also might

56 Lupescu, ‘Vâlva…’. 57 Mencej, ‘Sem vso ...’, 230. 58 Hede¸san, Pentru o mitologie..., 131.

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have urged him to behave in a peculiar manner in order to be perceived as werewolf. ‘I know that he had a malady (…), a problem of urinary incontinence which psychologically disturbed him, so that he chose to live in wilderness’.59

In Conclusion When the supernatural is embodied by a specific person with a familiar face, the numinousness becomes palpable and, in the case of a such violent expression of sacredness as the werewolf might be, uncontrolled fear might be replaced by a range of feelings including restrained fear mixed with attraction, admiration, repulsion, desire to understand an Otherness that belongs both to the wild forest and to our community, or, in metaphorical terms, to our pack. While exploring the figures of the wolf-men (both werewolves and the Master of Wolves) as shaped by memorates and beliefs recorded at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first in Romania, in the area of the Apuseni Mountains, we highlighted which of the features involved in the construction of the general, ideal profile of the werewolves are still active and which are consistent across the very specific cases of four men determined by their peers to be werewolves. In addition, they are portrayed on two levels: the original level consists of a multiform image created by the communities in which these men lived, an image that actuates different aspects of the pre-modern wolfmen paradigm; the second level is represented by three types of discourses (cinematographic, journalistic, and ethnologic), which re-contextualized the original narratives and interpreted them in line with the expectations and ideology of our post-postmodern times. They share a common pattern whose main characteristic, in addition to the transformation, consists of the werewolves’ role of mediators between humans and divine law, and also between humans and unseen spaces. In this respect, the absence in the corpus of Romanian folk narratives of the violent episodes against humans by those metamorphosed into wolves, is not meaningless: they are protected by the interdiction against harm. Separate from other human agents of sacred mediation, the werewolves fulfilled this role in their animal hypostases, hypostases derived from a polluted birth or

59 Bursa¸siu, ‘C˘arpinet…’.

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from ulterior magic curses and rituals; in any case their polluted body hypostases are marked by impurity, and confer on them an inferior condition. In Gra¸tian’s words, they are infra-humans. So, we may speak about sacred persons, but with an ambiguous sacredness. Whether in terms of salvation or in terms of justice, the werewolf embodies individual and collective fear. In other words, they represent the externalization of an unbearable anxiety that, once it wears a familiar face, becomes bearable and sane. The werewolf might be understood as a homo sacer, a functional concept which encompasses both the sense of the consecrated and that of the cursed (although not devilish), of violence and indefensibility, of inclusion and exclusion. ‘Divine violence … is put in relation with the state of exception. Sovereign violence opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law’.60

Gra¸tian, screen shot

60 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Standford 1998),

41.

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Postscript As Grat, ian is the only werewolf recorded speaking on his own behalf, I would like to bring to attention his view on the relationship between predestination and one’s own will. Once again, the question of the werewolf gains theological and metaphysical gravity. There were two variants which explained his condition of being a pricolici. He considered himself as having an inferior human status (I am an infra-human), which he accepted as a precondition that marked his life, but a precondition that could be surmounted and exploited through the exploration of the infinite numbers understood as a quest for God both as an instance and as a partner. In this respect, the triad of soul, body and spirit has major importance: according to Grat, ian’s philosophy the soul is an expression of the body’s energy, while the spirit is the substance which ensures eternity and differentiates human beings from animals. These communists, they didn’t accept the existence of heaven and of hell. And they didn’t admit even the existence of God. They didn’t admit the existence of the spiritual world, whose centre is God. They say the humans do not have souls, only bodies (…). The existence of the soul is proved by the fact that humans have dreams. And that beside the matter there is one more substance, which is the spirit, you know? The spirit has different qualities than matter. And the soul doesn’t depend on the body, but the body depends on the soul. And the human does not die like an animal, which has only one life. But human has two lives: one as the animals and the other one as the angels and God have. This life in the world is temporary. And then follows the other life, the spiritual one, which is eternal. They will live as long as God, becoming the giants of the time. They will live as long as God lives. To the infinite. This is why it’s good to know these astronomical numbers, whose core is infinitely high: millions, billions, and so on, which in time might grow to the infinity. When people will become the equal of God, at the infinity. God equal with them, them equal with God.

The existence of the soul is proved by the fact that humans have dreams. These words might be interpreted as a subtle suggestion that dreams are images perceived by the soul during its journey through altered realms. Gra¸tian’s self-image expresses a certain sense of superiority over other humans, derived from his knowledge, that replaces his inferior status (the infrahuman, in his words) with a haughty one.

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I will be mentioned among the greatest scientists of the world… after I would have discovered this infinity. In about 10 years. I already have discovered many qualities it would have and until then I will find out all of its characteristics. And after I will be able to answer to all the questions somebody would ask me: what is life, what is spirit, soul…, everything

Gra¸tian’s interrogation concerns his direct ontological relation with God in terms of existence and potentiality; his inferior precondition represents the chance for becoming and to progress. So, the sense of superiority is not directed towards his human fellows, but directly towards the perfect and immutable God. Well, I will become equal with God. By essence, not by nature. But morally I shall surpass Him. My superiority over God reveals itself in the fact that I am not changeless, as God expresses Himself, but I am reversal, from evil to good. From the moral regress to the moral progress. From evil to good (…).That’s why I will be superior to God. Morally speaking (…). Then people will say: Gra¸tian is mighty and strong. Then I’ll be somebody! Maybe in 10 years from now.

CHAPTER 10

A Strange Kind of Man Among Us: Beliefs and Narratives About Werewolves in Southern Italy Vito Carrassi

The belief in the existence of werewolves is widespread and deep-rooted in the oral culture of Southern Italy.1 What is more, this belief is related to a variety of narratives, as demonstrated by several texts collected by folklorists, scholars and writers during the 150 years. As a native and inhabitant of this region, rather than as a researcher, I think the ‘werewolf

1 All the translations from Italian here included are mine.

V. Carrassi (B) Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_10

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complex’ can function as a significant means of exploring and understanding some of our distinctive features from a traditional-cultural point of view. Since my childhood I have been used to listening to legends or, more frequently, ‘true’ stories about encounters with supernatural beings, and the werewolf (lupo mannaro) was one of the most frequent subjects, although it was regarded as a man—often a person known to the teller and to the listeners, identified by his name and surname and/or a nickname—more than as a bestial and/or wicked being. Indeed, the werewolf was generally described as a sick and suffering man, whose ‘wolf’s’ nature was displayed through his gestures and actions, such as screaming or howling and wandering alone at night in the streets, rather than through an actual metamorphosis, which usually only slightly altered his appearance. Accordingly, the existence of werewolves was lived as a more or less ‘common’ issue, something real or credible which, if properly managed, essentially did not disturb or threaten the communal life. Building on one of the ‘true’ stories about a werewolf, recently retold by my mother, as well as on other oral narratives I have collected in the field (to be compared with the aforementioned written materials), I propose an overview of the main beliefs, attitudes and practices related to the werewolf in our Southern Italian tradition, such as the connections with the Christmas season and the full moon, the devices and the strategies used to protect oneselves from the werewolf’s attacks, the role of blood and water in the healing of lycanthropy, and the godparenthood linking the former werewolf and his saviour. All these motifs will be analysed in light of the oral testimonies and narratives selected here, as well as of the cultural, social, religious, ethical and pedagogical meanings and values they take on within the popular contexts of Southern Italy, particularly in Apulia. Finally, the goal is to explore and understand the historical evolution of a hybrid and typical figure, the werewolf, as embodying a sort of ‘light’ otherness coexisting with us, the ‘normal’ people.

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Vanishing Narratives I retain two different pictures of the werewolf2 from my childhood. One comes from a story told many times by my mother, regarding a direct experience of her father, my grandfather; the other arises from a horror movie watched on television, An American Werewolf in London.3 On one hand, an oral narrative dealing with something extremely close to me, both in the identity of the narrator and that of one of the characters, and in its spatial setting of my hometown, Castellaneta, in Apulia. On the other, a visual fiction created by the fantasy of a filmmaker, supported by the tricks of special effects. In both cases, I was led to take into account the possible existence of a weird, disturbing and quite frightening creature, a hybrid figure partly human and partly wolfish; in other words, a monster. For me as a child, to know or simply to imagine that such a monster could be seen not only beyond the TV screen, but along the streets of my town, was certainly not something reassuring. In fact, stories like that told by my mother, often based on alleged firsthand experiences of known people such as my grandfather, were also (but not exclusively) narrated by the adults to warn and, if necessary, scare their children, as an educational tool.4 This was rendered all the more effective in that those stories, unlike folk and fairy tales from books, were related to familiar people and places. However, amongst all the oral narratives concerning supernatural and more or less fearsome creatures, commonly told in my town and in the rest of Southern Italy for several generations, at least until mine, those featuring werewolves had something that made them more striking and bewildering than others, such as those referring to witches, ogres, fairies or ghosts. The werewolf was related to the wolf, the fierce and dangerous subject of a great number of folk narratives,

2 In Italian we call it lupo mannaro, a term deriving from a Vulgar Latin form, lupus hominarius, arguably meaning ‘human wolf’ or ‘man-eater wolf’. An almost synonym, more erudite and polished, is licantropo, deriving from the Greek λ ´ κoς, ‘wolf’, and νθρωπoς, ‘man’. 3 Released in 1981, this movie was written and directed by John Landis. 4 The pedagogical function of werewolves is extensively documented, both by the

written sources and the testimonies I found in the field. See, for instance, Giuseppe Pitrè, Usi e costumi, credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano (Bologna 1980), 229: ‘[…] the mothers used to threaten their children saying […] they would have called the werewolf to eat them; sometimes a family member raised his voice to make them believe the beast was close’.

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and almost a stereotype of wickedness and cruelty; yet, unlike the animal ‘wolf’, normally associated with the forest or more generally with a wild and distant nature, the werewolf, as a man transformed into a wolf—and, quite frequently, as a man with a more or less recognizable identity—the werewolf was perceived as an inner element of our world, as a human or animal danger belonging to our own space–time. Witches, ogres, fairies and ghosts, though sometimes related to known people and places (I am thinking, in particular, of those ghosts believed to be revenants of individuals who died violently, or some strange women who were identified as witches), came from a spatial outside, immanent or transcendent, but also from a literary or cinematographic imaginary that, as it were, kept them at a safe distance. The werewolf was mostly perceived instead as a disquieting yet familiar figure, as an awful yet homemade scarecrow, one might say. The state of affairs lasted until comparatively recently, when the fictional werewolves, such as that portrayed in the aforementioned movie, have been widely spread by the mass media and have gradually prevailed over local and traditional werewolves, joining a group that also includes vampires and zombies,5 which are so popular today among youths and teenagers.6 In this chapter, however, I shall remain in the local and traditional domain, analysing folk beliefs and oral narratives concerning the werewolf in the cultural and social contexts of Southern Italy. To do so I have turned to a selection of written sources by folklorists, scholars and writers, whose materials were collected between the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. In addition, I have conducted field interviews with people from different towns in Apulia, in order to examine the current state of traditional beliefs and collect a handful of narratives concerning the werewolf, to be compared with those published in the last century and a half. Indeed, the latter task proved to be quite difficult. Whilst I found it reasonably easy to elicit information and testimonies

5 A motif that has become almost a classic in fantasy literature and horror movies is the rivalry and clash between vampires and werewolves, as shown, for instance, by the two renowned twenty-first century sagas, Underworld and Twilight. 6 According to Piero C., one of my informants, today the young generations have completely forgotten or overlooked the local and oral narratives, so that they have an image of the werewolf essentially shaped by the models coming from fantasy literature, comics, TV serials and movies.

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about beliefs related to the werewolf—beliefs showing a substantial similarity with those recorded in the written sources—I found it harder to obtain fully-fledged narratives and even harder to obtain veritable legends, since the collected material largely consists of stories that the narrators heard directly from the protagonist or via the medium of an earlier narrator.7 Thus, a few beliefs, widespread and deep-rooted, have survived, still retaining sufficient vitality (at least among people aged 50 or more). In contrast, the narratives seem to have gradually vanished or been undermined, in particular, I argue, because of the decline or loss of ritual moments devoted to their telling, and the failing of the educational and/ or entertainment value they had in the past. On the other hand, I agree with the view expressed by Michèle Simonsen, for it is exactly what I have sometimes inferred during my fieldwork: ‘Maybe most legends have never been told from beginning to end as a full-blooded narrative. Maybe they live mostly an underground life, as a pool of motifs and collective mental representations and a simple allusion in the conversation suffices to make them efficient’.8

The Werewolf in the Folklore of Southern Italy Within Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index the werewolf is present as an independent motif at the number D113.1.1, where it is described as follows: ‘A man changes periodically into the form of a wolf. He is usually malevolent when in wolf form’. According to this description, the werewolf is essentially an individual characterized by a periodical metamorphosis and malevolent attitude. What is more, this metamorphosis changes their human nature into an animal nature, that of a wild and threatening animal, the wolf, perhaps the wild and threatening animal par excellence,

7 I have approximately found in the field, on a smaller scale, the same situation reported by Willem de Blécourt about Belgian field research: ‘The Differentiated Werewolf: An Introduction to Cluster Methodology’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 13–15. 8 Michèle Simonsen, ‘The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, in: de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories, 235.

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at least from a European standpoint.9 This is enough to explain why the werewolf is usually depicted as a malevolent being. We can picture the werewolf not simply as a wild and malevolent individual looking like a wolf, but as a really cruel and frightful man behaving as a bloodthirsty beast. Despite its bestial, brutal, and delirious attitude, this man does not lose his human appearance and remains essentially a man like us. A sick, lunatic and irrational kind of man, but regardless a man. More precisely, they are a four-legged man, completely bent double and crawling on the ground and only interested, as it turns out, in what deals with the ground, or even with the underground.10 Accordingly, he—and not ‘it’, if we agree that a man is before us, after all—seems to ignore the sky above him, and his head and his concern are all turned below, in order to make room and unleash the malevolent and animalistic nature acquired through the metamorphosis.11 His long ears and hair and the posture of his hands and feet certainly make him similar to a wild beast, but if we look at his face and at the expression of his eyes, this is the picture of a suffering and deranged man.

9 Cf. Gianfranca Ranisio, Il lupo mannaro. L’uomo, il lupo, il racconto (Roma 1984), 16: ‘The wolf is the fierce animal par excellence, not only in the northern regions of Europe, but also in the southern ones, and it has all the features able to make it a significant piece of a very extended and territorially differentiated ecosystem. […] In the southern folklore the wolf is a matter of beliefs, sayings, legends which show the importance ascribed to this animal, regarded as the most fearful enemy of the shepherd. Nevertheless, the fear caused by the wolf, as well as the belief in its powers, are not restricted to the traditional culture of shepherds, but extend to a larger cultural context including people connected with isolated places and, more generally, people living in rural areas, who like to make the wolf the prototype of the bogeyman with which to scare the children’. 10 Cf. Pitrè, Usi e costumi, 230: ‘[…] they [the werewolves] go walking like wolves or dogs. At night they wander through the graves, unlock them, tear off slices of corpses and hang them at their neck […]’. 11 Cf. Michele De Filippo, Oglio di cranio umano. Magia, medicina e religiosità nella tradizione popolare garganica (Foggia, 2010), 321: ‘He was considered irrational, irascible, violent and dangerous for the humans, because his superhuman strength was coupled with a boundless aggressiveness’.

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Lucas Cranach, early sixteenth century: melancholy, also known as the werewolf According to the canonical description given by the Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè, the werewolf is a sick man ‘walking on four legs like a wolf or a dog. […] He is characterized by the pale face, the hollowed

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eyes, the weak sight, the dry tongue and a very strong thirst’.12 In the same vein, as with many other sources, is the picture sketched by another Sicilian researcher, Ignazio A. Trombatore, who highlights: ‘His appearance becomes distorted, his hair instantly get longer and the nails grow so much so that they look like claws’.13 Among my informants, only one (Angela V.) expressly referred to a werewolf as a ‘monster’ with long nails and thick hair. A second informant (Pietro A.) emphasized his bloodshot eyes, while a third one (my mother) stressed his voice, which is so grave as to be mistaken for a howl, and his terrifying screams due to the pains suffered. To summarise, rather than being thought of as a man transforming into a true wolf or something similar, in Southern Italian folklore the werewolf is seen as a sick man—often linked to or confused with other, special categories of unhealthy people, such as the epileptic, the asthmatic and the melancholic14 —who believes himself to be a wolf and/ or behaves like a wolf. Whilst in some folktales we find actual metamorphoses from man to wolf or quasi-wolf,15 most of the legends and memorates collected by folklorists are characterized by seeming transformations which sketchily affect the physical appearance of the protagonists. As explained by Giovanni B. Bronzini, the folk mentality perceived the transformation of a werewolf as the ‘revelation’ of his double nature, human and animal, rather than as an actual metamorphosis, which he refers to as a learned and literary understanding of this phenomenon.16

12 Pitrè, Usi e costumi, 230 (my emphasis). Interestingly, one of my informants reported that two people had been witnesses (about ten and two years ago, respectively) to a man running on four legs at night through the streets of Grumo Appula (Bari). 13 Ignazio Arturo Trombatore, ‘I lupi mannari’, Rivista delle tradizioni popolari italiane, 1 (1893–1894), 282. 14 See, for instance, Michele Gerardo Pasquarelli, Medicina, magia e classi sociali nella Basilicata degli anni Venti (Galatina 1987), 187, 258; Giovanni Battista Bronzini, ‘Il lupo mannaro e le streghe di Petronio’, Lares, LIV-2 (1988), 149–150; De Filippo, Oglio di cranio umano, 322. 15 According to Ranisio (Il lupo mannaro, 134), ‘the stories containing the motif of a total transformation have a fabulous structure’. In fact, two of my informants have made clear that the actual metamorphoses into wolves or bestial beings are untrue and can only be found in folktales and horror movies. 16 Bronzini, ‘Il lupo mannaro e le streghe di Petronio’, 166.

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As a consequence, I would say, the werewolf of our narratives is anything but a diabolic17 or heroic character: In folklore’s testimonies the lycanthrope is not a wizard able to control and cause the transformation, unlike what happened in the European Middle Ages and in the ethnologic tradition. […] But, above all, the werewolf of our tradition is not a kind of diabolic sorcerer […] he is a man who suffers, whose sufferings have nothing heroic; he is a man who merely endures a fate regarded not as a potentiality but as a misfortune.18

The origin of his misfortune19 is rarely ascribed to a wicked person20 ; it is mostly traced back to an impersonal and unmanageable21 source, in particular to the moment and context of birth or conception. To be born (or, less frequently, to be conceived, as related by my informant Giuseppina S.) on the Christmas night, or, more precisely, at midnight between December 24 and 25, is certainly the primary and most widespread reason that the oral tradition advances to explain why a man might become a werewolf. Plenty of written sources and almost all the people I interviewed confirm that a child daring to come into being on the same day as Jesus Christ did is punished through the sad and painful fate of being a werewolf. As argued by Cesare Bermani, to be born on a sacred day—be

17 Notwithstanding, Raffaele Lombardi Satriani, in Racconti popolari calabresi (Napoli

1953), III, 215–216, proposes a legend where the werewolf is depicted as a possessed by the Devil; his salvation comes from Saint Martin, who drives out the Devil by means of few words and three signs of the cross. 18 Ranisio, Il lupo mannaro, 75. 19 Massimo Izzi, in Il dizionario illustrato dei mostri (Roma 1989), 215–216, distin-

guishes three types of human transformations into animals: caused (usually by a wizard or a sorcerer), voluntary (by means of particular gestures or objects), and spontaneous, namely produced by natural sources (such as the moon). 20 In a Calabrian folktale (Lombardi Satriani, Racconti popolari calabresi, III, 216–218), ‘a tall, handsome and strong man’ is transformed into a werewolf by the magic power of an ugly witch, who thus takes revenge for being rejected by him. 21 Unless the mother could manage and delay the moment of childbirth: cf. Giovanni Battista Bronzini, Vita tradizionale in Basilicata (Matera 1961), 46. Otherwise, the father, for three consecutive Christmas nights, must trace a little cross on a foot of his child with a red-hot iron: cf. Gennaro Finamore, Tradizioni popolari abruzzesi (Palermo 1894), 219.

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it Christmas or another22 —implies an ‘involuntary sacrilegious act’.23 On the other hand, the Christmas period was also connected to pre-Christian beliefs and rituals relating to the winter solstice and the transition from an old to a new year cycle; as a temporal and critical watershed in the individual and collective lives, this was seen as a numinous moment during which supernatural events, or prodigia, which were otherwise incomprehensible, might happen, just like the birth or the conception of a hybrid and aberrant creature such as a werewolf.24 Another key element in the traditional aetiology of the werewolf is the moon. According to folklore and the popular culture in general, the influence that the moon exerts on the physiological and psychical life of humans is well-known. More specifically, it is regarded as the origin of some pathologies, among which a prominent place is given to lycanthropy, which in Southern Italy is also called mal di Luna (moon’s sickness).25 As written by Pitrè: A man becomes a werewolf if he was conceived with the new moon, or sleeps outdoor in a full moon’s night […]. He feels the approaching of his attack every month when coming the same lunar phase (Palermo); he is immediately affected by this kind of attack when watching into the centre of the full moon, which has this evil influence exactly on those who are predisposed.26

22 An informant from Rodi Garganico (Foggia), Giuseppina S., reported a different and

unique tradition, which linked the birth of a werewolf to his conception ‘in one of the seven days devoted to the Virgin Mary’, then in one of the festivities connected to Marian worship. In French tradition, on the other hand, a number of Christian festivities—such as Good Friday, Saint John’s Day, All Saint’s Day, and Candlemas—are seen as bringing about the transformation into a werewolf: cf. Massimo Centini, Storia e interpretazione delle superstizioni (Milano 2003), 131. 23 Cesare Bermani, Volare al sabba. Una ricerca sulla stregoneria popolare (Roma 2008),

277. 24 Cf. Ranisio, Il lupo mannaro, 77–78, and 91 (note 72). 25 The belief in a connection between the moon and the transformation into a werewolf

is long-established, as stressed by Centini (Storia e interpretazione delle superstizioni, 131): ‘The moon is regarded as one of the main causes giving rise to lycanthropy: according to Gervase of Tilbury (thirteenth century), staying naked under the lunar rays was the fastest means to transform into a wolf’. 26 Pitrè, Usi e costumi, 225.

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Likewise, Trombatore writes: ‘The werewolf […] is, according to the popular belief, a sick man, whose sickness is closely related to the lunar phases’.27 Pasquarelli argues: ‘A man being born in the Christmas night, once grown up, will endure a pain related to the lunar phases, and will wander through the streets transforming himself into a sort of wolf […]’,28 and De Filippo points out: ‘His crises [of the werewolf] occur from 10 pm to 2 am, during the full moon’s nights’.29 Therefore, the moon appears to be simultaneously one of the reasons a child becomes a werewolf and a trigger for their periodical metamorphoses.30 An ancient and classical model is provided by the story of versipellis, as narrated by the Latin writer Petronius in his Satyricon (first century A.D.; this story, incidentally, is set in a Southern Italian city), in which ‘luna lucebat tanquam meridie’ (the moon shone as if it were noon) when a soldier turned himself into a werewolf. One of the two legends that Pitrè includes in his chapter about the werewolf begins directly with the appearance of the full moon: The story goes that a prince, when the full moon rose, was seized by his sickness. Once he was running through the darkest streets of Palermo (he was Palermitan) shouting desperately; […] another prince was walking on his own; having heard the shout, he leaped upon the bench of a butcher […]. At the time it was customary to carry a small-sword, so he unsheathed his weapon and was alert. The werewolf arrives and stops under the bench; he shouts, roars, grinds his teeth so as to make the bravest man shiver, but he cannot stand up nor savage the other prince who, acquainted with this kind of thing, daringly pricks the werewolf on his forehead: having spilt his

27 Trombatore, ‘I lupi mannari’, 282. 28 Pasquarelli, Medicina, magia e classi sociali, 186. 29 De Filippo, Oglio di cranio umano, 320. 30 Izzi, in: Il dizionario illustrato dei mostri, 215–216, has a peculiar theory to explain the correlation between the moon and lycanthropy: ‘The role played by the moon in lycanthropy is based, in fact, on a double misunderstanding: on the one hand, on a mistake between the Greek word meaning “wolf” and that meaning “light”, which has suggested the hypothesis that, during the periods of the maximum light—the full moon— these metamorphoses can happen […]; on the other hand, on a juxtaposition of a mental disease—already recognized as such by Galen in the second century A.D., and expressing itself through the wandering at night under the moon of a screaming and groaning person—with the veritable transformation into an animal’.

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first drop of blood, the werewolf is released from his sickness; the blood was black like pitch.31

In addition, the moon—and especially the full moon—may act as a troublesome and unwelcome presence. Its glittering light,32 indeed, could become the worst threat for those men who, revealing themselves as werewolves, needed and desired to stay out of sight and remain unnoticed by the people with whom they shared everyday, diurnal life. As a consequence, the night and the darkness, instead, become valuable allies, in that they can help the werewolves to hide their identity. This motif was particularly emphasized by my informant Pietro A., whose sparkling and empathetic account, as we will see, sketched a quite humane and almost touching picture of the werewolf. This was a constant concern for the werewolves as narrated by my informants: to keep their condition secret and, if they were discovered by someone, to make sure that they would not reveal their true identity to other people.33 The werewolves of our folklore are people whose condition is generally known to others and it is precisely this awareness that provides the main means of protecting the community from possible accidents. Hence, werewolves are considered to be wholly human, like us, except in that they are subjected to periodic and nocturnal transformations which modify them from a psychic rather than from a physical point of view. Nevertheless, this transformation may entail fatal and grievous results, as in this Sicilian story collected by Trombatore:

31 Pitrè, Usi e costumi, 227–228. 32 My informant Giuseppina S. explained that the period from November 25 (Saint

Catherine’s Day) to December 25 (Christmas) is the most favourable to the arising of the werewolf’s crises, because during that period the moon is brighter than ever (hence, not only when it is a full moon). 33 According to De Filippo (Oglio di cranio umano, 321), almost everywhere in Gargano (Northern Apulia) there are stories of werewolves who, glancingly wounded by a stabbing, instantly calm down and beg the injurer to keep the secret about their sickness. This gives rise to a lifelong friendship and relationship between them. On the contrary, in the Danish tradition, as pointed out by Michèle Simonsen (‘The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, 231), there are stories in which ‘the werewolf is saved from the curse if someone says aloud to him ‘You are a werewolf!’ while he is in his human shape’. Hence, the return to a normal condition is here subordinated to a sort of public unmasking of the hidden identity of the werewolf, as if the reason of the curse were just its secrecy.

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[…] a farmer from Maletto told me that once a werewolf, feeling himself seized by his sickness, warned his wife before leaving home that, at his return, she should open the door only after his third call. That poor woman, tired as she was from the labour of the day, fell asleep. Later on, awakened by the angry voice of her husband, believing that he had already called her more than three times, immediately rushed to open the door. But, at the same time, she felt the cold nails piercing and lacerating her flesh and heard the lamenting voice of the husband who blamed her fatal oversight and, meanwhile, pushed by an unknown force, gradually tore apart his beloved woman, with whom he had lived for so many years!34

While tearing the woman apart, the werewolf is aware of being the killer of his beloved wife, but he is compelled by an unknown force to do what he never would have otherwise done. Moreover, his lamenting voice is recognized by his wife, whose wretched fate was caused by her failure to observe of the instructions given by her husband, instructions relating to the magic power ascribed to the number three: after the third knock on the door the werewolf has definitely returned to human form and you are safe. The door, as a threshold between the inner and the outer space, the household and the alien, the known and the less known or unknown, performs the function of maintaining distance and separation from that natural and animal otherness—embodied by the werewolf— which threatens the people preserving and wishing to preserve their cultural and human identity. This is famously expressed by a traditional narrative collected in Lucania by the writer Carlo Levi, in which we find interesting details about reversing the transformation of the werewolf—here associated to the category of the sleepwalker35 —from wolf into man: The sleepwalkers become wolves, lycanthropes, in which man and beast blend inextricably. […] Giulia told me that they go out at night when still human, but then they become wolves and gather together, with the true wolves, around the fountain. One must be very careful when they come back home. When they knock on the door the first time, their wife must not open it; if she opened it,

34 Trombatore, ‘I lupi mannari’, 282–283 (my emphasis). 35 When I was a child, I remember that someone told me that a woman born in the

Christmas night was destined to become a sleepwalker. This belief is recorded by Bronzini (Vita tradizionale in Basilicata, 46) in some Lucanian towns.

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she would see her husband still as a wolf, who would devour her and flee to stay forever in the wood. When they knock the second time, again the woman must not open: she would see her husband with a human body but the head of a wolf. Only when they knock the third time may one open, because in that moment they are completely transformed: the wolf is disappeared and the former man is reappeared. Never open the door before they have knocked three times.36

In fact, the werewolf is a danger that is fundamentally manageable for the community and the last caution in this narrative is one of the most frequently recurring devices to keep oneself safe from the violence of a werewolf, especially for women whose husband might be a werewolf.37 Pitrè supplies a clear picture of the actual risk of harm attached to the werewolf: Running here and there, he looks for someone to tear to pieces, because in that moment he has the sharpest fangs and venom drooling from the lips. Ordinarily, however, he cannot harm anybody, since he is audible from a long distance due to his frightful screams; therefore everybody is careful not to go towards him.38

From the last sentence we learn the most obvious and feasible way to escape a possible attack by a werewolf, whom you might come across if staying out at night: simply, you must avoid meeting him, by staying away from the place where you can discern his presence, thanks to the ‘frightful screams’ and wolf-like calls. If necessary, you should change your established itinerary in favour of one that allows you to remain at a safe distance from the werewolf. Otherwise, in the event that one cannot prevent such a dangerous encounter, to climb up and stay in a high place is the most common recommendation in beliefs and narratives drawn from the Southern Italian folklore. As well evidenced by some of the stories collected on the field, this route to salvation is particularly 36 Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Bergamo 1991), 72–73. 37 Cf. Ranisio, Il lupo mannaro, 106: ‘The wife’s condition is more problematic,

because of her relationship with the werewolf, but also in this case, the fatal ending, in the stories, is always preceded by a warning: don’t open the door, don’t go out, etc.’. 38 Pitrè, Usi e costumi, 225 (my emphasis).

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embodied by a set of stairs. To climb up three, seven or more steps of a staircase is usually considered sufficient to protect yourself from a werewolf’s assault. As already implied in the Cranach engraving, the werewolf lives and acts in an exclusively horizontal dimension, completely turned upon the ground, and therefore he is unable to turn his gaze upwards or move in a vertical dimension. In a sense, his animal nature nails him to the ground. As explained by Pitrè: ‘Maybe due to the pains afflicting him, he cannot stand up on his feet; a supernatural influence prevents him from raising his eyes toward the sky: otherwise, he would collapse on the ground. […] he cannot go over the third step of a staircase: here he stops or falls.39 According to one of my informants, Pietro A., a werewolf is unable to reach the seventh step of a staircase: his pain, indeed, is increased by the raising of his legs; that is why he tends to keep a close contact with the ground, preferably staying on four legs. However, beyond these forms of passive defence against a werewolf, are there any active means or strategies by which one could release a werewolf from his sad fate or, at least, restore him to his human condition? To this end, the folkloric sources put into the foreground two primary substances: blood and water. These are two basic and vital elements, both from a physical and a symbolic point of view, not to mention their role in the ritual domain. It is not surprising that they take on major importance in the management or the healing of werewolfery.40 As exemplified by the previous Sicilian narrative about the two princes, according to the Southern Italian folklore drawing blood from a werewolf, by means of a sharp tool (a knife, a dagger, a pin, a needle), is the most common device by which one can release him from his condition.41 Pitrè likens this action to a ‘little bloodletting’; that is to a medical treatment whose efficacy depends on releasing the patient from the ‘bad’ blood responsible for his disease. Indeed, ‘that blood is black and clotted, and is considered as insane’.42 The person who, in facing a werewolf, is able to inflict this kind of bloodletting on him earns the status of a 39 Ibid., 226. 40 That of the werewolf may be an irreversible condition too. In two Sicilian towns

(Chiaramonte and Modica), for instance, ‘the werewolf is incurable and whoever attempts to heal him is doomed to become a werewolf, too’ (ibid., 227). 41 A similar belief is recorded, for instance, in France; see Paul Sébillot, Le folk-lore de France, I: Le ciel et la terre (Paris 1904), 285. 42 Pitrè, Usi e costumi, 227.

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liberator or a saviour, and thus deserves the gratitude of the former werewolf. There are a number of narratives in our oral tradition describing men or women hurting a werewolf and drawing blood, either by directly and boldly facing him or in more cunning and harmless ways, like in the following story: There was a werewolf wandering in the town and the people, as soon as saw him, sheltered in their homes; the werewolf, seeing that they had closed the doors, so as to prevent him from entering, scraped and scratched those same doors. One of the countrymen, nerving himself, took a spit and, running it through a cat-door, pricked the werewolf in the forehead. As soon as the blood started flowing out, he was released from his sickness, then he thanked the man who had pricked him.43

Interestingly, the gratitude of the werewolf towards the person responsible for his wounding, and then for his recovery, often gives rise to a closer and deeper relationship, a veritable godparenthood known as comparatico di san Giovanni (the reference is to Saint John the Baptist). This traditionally created a permanent bond, for instance between a father and/or a mother and the person who baptized their child. As reported by the Sicilian Salvatore Raccuglia, a werewolf, after being wounded, ‘immediately regains his human consciousness and, recovered, embraces and calls “godfather” his injurer’.44 The comparatico functions additionally as a form of official recognition, or a public sign of gratitude, by which the former werewolf gives his saviour credit for his recovery and for other people’s regained safety. Furthermore, as a social and ritual bond connecting the former werewolf with a healthy member of his community, the comparatico marks the reintegration into the community itself and into cultural order of someone who, though periodically and involuntarily, had been banished into natural disorder.45 As for the role played by water, it appears as a purifying and regenerating element, and as a means through which the werewolf, by washing

43 Lombardi Satriani, Racconti popolari calabresi, III, 14–15. 44 Salvatore Raccuglia, ‘Medicina popolare siciliana’, Rivista delle tradizioni popolari

italiane 1 (1893–894), 728. 45 According to some of my informants, the comparatico di san Giovanni may be also used inversely, meaning that the potential victim of a werewolf can prevent an attack by declaring or requesting to himself to be comparatico.

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away his bestial instincts and features, gradually retrieves his human identity. Many of the stories collected in the field include water as a primary motif, usually connected to the werewolf’s return to his human condition. Immersion in water, or simply contact with it, has a clear religious and ritual meaning; in this case, it implies a sort of rebirth or resurrection of the man after his temporary death in the form of a werewolf.46 Bronzini, however, associates water with the founding myth of Lykaon47 and the thirst suffered by the inhabitants of the ancient Arcadia.48 A number of werewolves described by the folkloric sources are characterized by an inextinguishable thirst and an incessant search for water and coolness, which they pursue by drinking from fountains, or else by wetting themselves under their spurts, or by rolling about in puddles and bogs,49 where they can find temporary relief from their pain, as stressed by my informant Pietro A. In many cases, however, according to the testimonies I have collected in the field, the water is provided by the werewolf’s relatives who, aware of what he needs to calm down and regain his human consciousness, leave buckets, tubs or larger containers full of (cold) water outside their homes. The latter is a clear example, alongside those already considered, of how an individual, a family or a community can manage the problem and the danger presented by a werewolf, as long as they are acquainted with the beliefs and the knowledge handed down via oral tradition. The werewolf and lycanthropy are thus framed and justified within and through a symbolical and ritual complex, where the individual crises, ‘being given fixed features and periods’, are raised to a collective and meaningful level. In this way they become an integral part of a shared worldview by which our mostly rural communities sought to arrange a well-balanced relationship between their cultural identity and the calls coming from ‘the wolf

46 See Ranisio, Il lupo mannaro, 134–136. 47 For an extensive and in-depth account of this myth I refer to Richard Gordon,

‘Good to Think: Wolves and Wolf-Men in the Graeco-Roman World’, in: de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories, 34–38, and 53 (note 64) for further references. See also: Daniel Ogden, The Werewolf in the Ancient World (Oxford 2021). 48 Bronzini, ‘Il lupo mannaro e le streghe di Petronio’, 149. 49 Cf. Gabriele Chiari, ‘Il lupo mannaro’, in Mal di luna. Folli, indemoniati, lupi

mannari: malattie nervose e mentali nella tradizione popolare (Roma 1981), 58: ‘A werewolf’s feature, documented in all the geographical-cultural areas, is the rolling about in the mud of bogs and puddles’.

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inside us’,50 that is, from a nature much closer than today, both spatially and psychologically, to everyday life.

Some Stories About Werewolves Collected in Apulia The following records are oral narratives about werewolves that I have collected during the year 2018 and selected with a view to this chapter, so as to provide a sample of the current and local tradition, to be compared with the material found in the written sources. By their diversity and heterogeneity, these stories express the persistence and vitality of some general themes and motifs discussed above, as well as the specificity of certain features characterizing more localized traditions. After being digitally recorded, these oral narrations have been transcribed in their original language and then translated into English; the translation has proven quite difficult, given the peculiarity of some words, phrasings or traditional concepts. Hence, I ask my readers in advance to consider the following texts chiefly as instrumental pieces in refining and deepening this attempt to sketch an overview of the werewolf-complex in the Southern Italian folklore, regardless of the unavoidable gaps and deficiencies due to the translation. Story number one is narrated by Giuseppina M. (my mother), 67, from Castellaneta (Taranto). In addition to the known motifs of full moon and water, here and in some of the subsequent stories we find the motif of dogs joining and escorting the werewolf, something explained by the vocal and behavioural affinity linking the dogs to the wolf-like creature: 1) My father told me his experience with a werewolf, who was a person known to him. Coming back home from his workplace late at night – he did any kind of works – he passed beside a fountain and saw him. He saw this person wriggling within the fountain. He was washing under the fountain’s water; indeed, it is said that, after walking for a long time followed by a lot of dogs – summoned by his howls – he recovers his human nature by washing. My father recognized him, but continued to

50 Ranisio, Il lupo mannaro, 81. Here the author outlines a significant similarity, both conceptual and historical–geographical, between the werewolf-complex and tarantism, famously identified and studied as a symbolical-ritual complex by Ernesto de Martino, in La terra del rimorso: contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud (1961).

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walk on his way, knowing that a werewolf does not attack those who ignore him. Thereafter, every time my father came back home at night, especially with the full moon, he was careful not to head where there might be the werewolf. This is a true story and I have personally known as well three men who were believed werewolves.

Stories two and three are narrated by Angela V., 72, from Castellaneta. The traditional motifs of water and blood are present, as well as that of the stairway as a means to escape the werewolf, although in this case it fails to protect the physical safety of the pursued: 2) Once, a man – today he’s almost 80 and I’m just going to visit him – very early in the morning, having to run an errand, went to the home of a person whom he did not realize was a werewolf. He knocked on the door, but this was already open, as usual at the time, then he could come in without waiting for an answer from inside. Once entered, he bumped into a huge tub full of water, within which a man was plunged. The host addressed the visitor and ordered him not to tell anybody what he had seen. He was a werewolf and had left his home at midnight, when feeling the first symptoms of his sickness. Come back at dawn, he had plunged into the tub in order to get over the last remains of his frenzy and complete his return to normality. 3) I know another story, about a young man, who was pursued by a werewolf along via Carraro [a street in the old town of Castellaneta]. In order to avert the danger, the young man climbed up on the top of a stairway, being aware that a werewolf could not climb over the third step. This time, however, the werewolf reached the fifth step, then the young man, terrified and fearing that it could come further, threw himself from a remarkable height; in so doing he fractured one of his arms. In the meantime another man, who had followed that accident from behind his door, came out and, furtively approaching, pricked the werewolf by a pin, thus bringing back him to his human condition. The day after, the former werewolf, having met in the street his injurer, showed him the scar on his body.

Story number four is narrated by Maria, 59, from Bari. In addition to the water, passing before seven doors (a magic number, of course) is proposed here as a means of recovery. Furthermore, the werewolf is also described as spitting on those who reject him by the sign of the cross:

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4) My grandparents told me that, in the old town of Bari, an asthmatic man transformed into a werewolf with the full moon. He went running through the streets screaming and howling. In order to recover his human condition he should pass in front of seven main doors. Meanwhile, if someone walked on his way, the werewolf attacked him or her, unless the unfortunate person did the sign of the cross; in such a case the werewolf spat on his or her face and ran away. Finally, when calmed down, he came back home, where his family had arranged huge tubs full of icy-cold water, within which the werewolf could recover his human condition.51

Story number five is narrated by Dino, 65, from Grumo Appula (Bari). Here the werewolf is only signalled by virtue of auditory clues (a suspect howling and the barking of many dogs).52 The protagonist/narrator appears to keep his uncertainty about the true identity of the alleged werewolf: 5) When I was 8 or 9 years old, in the summertime, I happened to work in my uncle’s bar. The bar closed at midnight. One night, while coming back home with my uncle and other people, we heard, loud and clear, a howl; however, it did not seem a wolf’s but a man’s howl. Soon after we heard a lot of barking dogs. Those cries seemed to arise from the fountain placed in the square where we were heading. Frightened, we decided to change our route and sought refuge in my grandfather’s home, where we spent all the night. The morning after my grandfather, maybe to relieve my scare, said that the howls had been simulated by a man known in the town for doing such tricks. Nevertheless, nobody could remove from my mind the doubt that we actually had risked, that night, to bump into a werewolf.

Story number six is narrated by Giuseppina S., 67, from Rodi Garganico (Foggia). This is one of the two legends collected in the field. It revolves around the motifs of the husband-werewolf and his recognition by means of a neckerchief.53

51 On this and other beliefs concerning the werewolf in Bari see Alfredo Giovine, ‘U lepòmene’, in Bari dei fanali a gas (Bari 1982). 52 According to Dino, the dogs can feel the presence of a werewolf at a long distance. 53 Cf. de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf’, 15, and Simonsen, ‘The Werewolf in

Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, 235–236. On the ‘Werewolf Husband’, see also Chapter 2 of this volume.

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6) My grandmother used to tell me a story about a young couple. Every night between November 25 and December 25, the husband said to his wife he went to the countryside so as to keep watch over their piece of land. Before going out he warned his wife not to open the door for anybody, neither for himself, during the night. One night, as usual, he got out and came back in the morning. Gone to bed, he fell asleep. He was in such a deep sleep that his mouth was wide open. At the time the wives were used to provide their husbands with a coloured neckerchief: well, the wife saw amidst the husband’s teeth some threads of his neckerchief, as if he had bit it in a moment of sharp pain. Thus the young wife learned that her husband was a werewolf.

Story number seven is narrated by Pietro A., 67, from Rodi Garganico. More than a veritable narrative, this is a sort of life history, a heartfelt and detailed account concerning both the traditional beliefs of his town and his personal experiences with true werewolves. Given its length, this is an abridged version: 7) The werewolves were men suffering heavy pains, who should secretly walk away and go, if possible, to the countryside, so that they, having acquired a brute force, could not harm their family. They went in search for coolness and water, and wallowed in the puddles to find some relief from their pains. They had enlarged and bloodshot eyes, drooled from the mouth and howled to vent their pains. According to our beliefs, if one could approach a werewolf, prick him by a needle and let pouring some drops of blood, the werewolf was delivered and thanked his healer saying: «Brother, you have saved me». Yet it was difficult to approach them, because they did everything possible to walk away and hide themselves. In case you met him on your way, you should climb up seven steps of a staircase, for the werewolves could not reach that height – by raising their legs they increased their pains, then they preferred to keep the contact with the ground, usually on four legs. There were (and there are) friends of mine who were (and are) werewolves, but I may not reveal their names.54 Even now, despite the available medicines, I know that someone still leaves home at night due to the lycanthropy. The community took pity on those suffering from this disease and on their families, then they struggled to keep an utmost discretion about those unfortunate people. Accordingly,

54 Cf. de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf’, 14: ‘Then the werewolf stood naked before him and he knew who it was, “because it were ordinary people. I also know who it was, but can’t tell you”’.

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anybody who happened to meet and recognize a werewolf was committed to keep secret his identity. If you ignore and don’t look at him, you are safe. Often it is the werewolf himself who looks away, so as not to be recognized and put somebody in danger. The full moon disturbed them more than any other thing, because it sharpened their pains and, by its light, made them more visible, compelling them to search for a hiding place, such as a bush. Our parents and grandparents told these stories in order to scare us, and often we could not sleep after we listened to them.

Stories eight and nine are narrated by Pietro C., 67, from Ischitella (Foggia). The first is a variation of the legend told by Giuseppina S., while the second is a first-hand experience told by Pietro’s grandfather: 8) A young couple got married and went to live in a country cottage. It was Christmas time – that is the critical period for the werewolves – in a day of full moon, when the husband, aware of his problem, said to his wife: “Do you know what to do this night? I have to go out, but you must not go to bed; instead, climb up that tree: in the event a wild beast would come here, throw on it this red neckerchief I’m giving you, so that it vents its anger on it”. Once the man left home, the woman climbed up the tree. At one point a werewolf arrived; he started to fiercely scratch the tree trunk, but did not attempt to climb up – it’s well known, indeed, that the werewolves are not able to climb up, hence you are safe in a high place. The woman threw the neckerchief, which the werewolf seized by the mouth and broke into pieces. The morning after the husband came back home and, while he was speaking, the wife noticed some threads of her red neckerchief between his teeth. Thus she discovered that her husband was a werewolf. 9) My grandfather told me about a personal experience of his own. He was coming back home at night when, near the former cinema, in the old town of Ischitella, first heard a prolonged scream, very similar to a howl,55 then he was pursued. In order to save himself, he climbed up the seven steps of the cinema, after picking up along the street a stone to use in case of an attack. Behind the werewolf, however, my grandfather saw the werewolf’s son, who gave assurance that his father would not have harmed him at all.

55 This informant explains that there were also people who feigned the howl of the werewolf to scare passers-by.

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Story number ten is narrated by Nicola P., 61, from Vico del Gargano (Foggia). Here, as in the previous story, the werewolf is followed by members of his family. Furthermore, his identity is revealed in daylight by the wounds earned in the form of a werewolf during the night: 10) The story goes that the grandfather of a man I know – he’s a local poet and historian – one night had a close encounter with a werewolf. This one went wandering around, stopping and screaming above all at the crossroads. Warned about the danger by some members of the werewolf’s family who followed him from behind, the grandfather ran towards a stairway in order to take refuge. Soon after he saw the werewolf tumbling down in the attempt of climbing up the stairway. The next day, this person, whom the grandfather had not previously recognized because of the night darkness, was revealed by his bandaged head, due to the wounds he had suffered.56

Conclusion Believed to be both a threatening creature and a man worth pitying, seen both as a wild source of disorder and as an integral part of an ordered community, narrated both as an appalling antagonist and as an unfortunate protagonist, the werewolf of folklore in Southern Italy seems to fully embody his hybrid nature, showing an ability to make two or more conflicting elements coexist in the same individual or character. More precisely, the werewolf in this region seems to reduce the usual distances separating us from what is (or should be) outside us and our world, and to embody the complexity of the human condition. In so doing, I would argue, he embodies a sort of ‘light’ or ‘inner’ otherness, acting as an intermediate, liminal figure moving between a shared cultural identity and a more or less feared natural, ‘heavy’ or ‘outer’ otherness. Through his periodical transformations or crises, the werewolf temporarily crosses 56 The case of this werewolf resembles what happens in the aforementioned novella from the Satyricon, where the versipellis, being injured in the neck at night, is then treated by a doctor the morning after, once returned to the form of a man. Cf. Bronzini, ‘Il lupo mannaro e le streghe di Petronio’, 172: ‘The wound suffered by the werewolf and found on his body, after recovering his human form, is the most evident and employed sign of recognition in the folktales about werewolves’. See also Gordon, ‘Good to Think’, in: Werewolf Histories, 46.

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the material (his home) and immaterial (his bestial behaviour) boundaries of his common existence, and explores—though unwittingly and painfully—a world already known (those same streets and countryside where everyday and customary life takes place) from a different perspective, namely the distorted and troubled perspective of a suffering and raving man. Significantly, he becomes someone to be avoided, to be left alone (he may be only accompanied by his temporary fellows, the dogs), and to be ignored during his extra-ordinary experience. This is precisely because he enters an extra-ordinary dimension, a sort of enchanted space– time,57 where all the other people, the ordinary people, are not allowed to enter, unless they are willing to endanger their life. The werewolf may only exist as a solitary and nocturnal character who needs a given time span and an open space to perform and complete his liminal plot. His human fellows, therefore, must keep a proper distance from the stage, as it were, and let the werewolf play his own drama to the fullest, because in this way he expresses a distinctive, though unwelcomed, part of his identity. Ultimately, the apt performing of that drama, both by its protagonist, co-protagonist(s) and audience, contributes to protect the community as an ordered and relatively safe microcosm.

57 Interestingly, in the Satyricon the soldier/werewolf, after getting undressed, pissed around his clothes—as if he wanted to place them into an enchanted circle—and soon after ‘became a wolf’.

CHAPTER 11

Werewolves in the Western Alps Fabio Armand When analyzing the complexity of lycanthropic folk beliefs and the introduction of the distinctive figures of werewolves which inhabit Western Alpine narrative imaginaries, it is not useless to dwell on the landmarks1 given by Stith Thompson in his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: D113.1.1. Werwolf . A man changes periodically into the form of a wolf . He is usually 1 For narrative motifs indexing (as for types, a mix of interim deixis and semantics) see: Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, medieval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends, revised and enlarged, Indiana University Press (Bloomington & London 1966). For fairytales, see the international catalogue, started by Annti Aarne, continued by Stith Thompson, then by Hans-Jörg Uther—ATU: Uther, The Types of International Folktales. A classification and Bibliography, 3 vols (2011 [2004]), with a systematic reference to the Motif-Index.

I would like to thank Alice Joisten for her precious collaboration which guided me in the exploration and the interpretation of the narrative documents collected by her husband, Charles Joisten. The same gratitude goes to Marie-Agnès Cathiard and Christian Abry with whom I have built a longstanding collaboration for the development of a transcultural neurocognitive anthropological approach to folkloristics. F. Armand (B) Institut Pierre Gardette, Catholic University of Lyon, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_11

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malevolent when in wolf form.2 In particular, this chapter will focus on the most prominent classical narrative motifs related to lycanthropic transformation processes in the Western Alps: from the metamorphosis procedure (D531. Transformation by putting on skin) to the demorphosis, mainly based on the revelation of lycanthropic nature through injury.3 We will then touch on more specific and regional features, such as the ‘Primarette complex’, which portrays a political and anticlerical figure distinct from intra-alpine werewolves, and which includes the significant demorphosis narrative of the ‘Gift to the Wolf’, with its specific narrative structures, comprising benevolent and malevolent counter-gifts. This general discussion will be enriched through a comparative transalpine outline focusing on the variation of narrative motifs in the French-speaking Aosta Valley and the Waldensian communities in the Piedmontese Alps. Finally, we will question the fluid borders connecting the wild universe to the anthropized one, and which are crossed by these alpine werewolves, in order to reflect on the relation between the domains of nature and culture. Whether we are dealing with ‘supernatural’ werewolves or simply with disguised humans wearing a wolf skin, the figure of the werewolf raises questions about the basic nature of this belief and the narrative structures that it underlies. Werewolf imaginaries help us to disclose that man and animal constitute a relational entity4 : while the werewolf possesses both animal and human forms, it can only develop one of them in a manifest way, while the other will remain in a potential

2 For Wolfmenschen see: Willem de Blécourt, in: Enzyklopädie des Märchens, vol. 14 (2014), 975–986. 3 The Motif-Index does not have a specific entry to classify this peculiar narrative motif: cf. D112.2.1.1. When a wer-tiger is injured, similar marks appears on the human body of man who has possessed it; D702.1.1. Cat’s paw cut off: woman’s hand missing; and G275.12. Witch in form of animal is injured or killed as a result of the injury to the animal. On the invulnerability of the bewitched body, hence its salvation (Erlösung): cf. G229.4.3. Witch’s body does not bleed when stuck with sharp object and G259.3. Witch may be recognized by absence of bleeding when she is pricked with pins. For the ‘dangerous liaisons’ in the Renaissance up to the Enlightenment of Justice and Medicine (still nowadays of psychiatry and justice), see: Stuart W. McDonald, ‘The Devil’s Mark and the Witch-Prickers of Scotland’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 90 (1997), 507–511. 4 Cf. Fabio Armand, ‘Le loup-garou: de sa liminalité dans le patrimoine narratif galloroman à sa parenté neuro-anthropologique’, in: A. Reusser-Elzingre and F. Diémoz (eds.), Le patrimoine oral: ancrage, transmission et édition dans l’espace galloroman (Bern 2016), 175–192.

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state. In this way, we will be able to better comprehend this metamorphic pattern which upholds lycanthropic narrative motifs in the Western Alps.

A Misrecognized Geographical Representation of Lycanthropic Folklore in the French Western Alps Since the development of folkloristic studies in the second half of the nineteenth century, beliefs in werewolves have been considered to be widespread throughout most French territories, with the exception of the Alpine areas. This erroneous identification of the distribution of the narrative folklore of werewolves is related to a remark by Arnold Van Gennep, the master of folklore in the French domain, in his Le Folklore du Dauphiné. He wrote that ‘this belief, which we would gladly consider generally French because it has been spread by the folk and novelistic literature, especially in Berry, Poitou and the Central regions, is likewise unknown in Savoy, except in a few communes not far from the Ain department. It is, therefore, not an alpine belief, but rather a belief of the provinces of wooded lowlands, in an area that goes, basically, from Lower Normandy to Périgord’.5 The same error is made by Lise Andries, who seems to ignore the richness of Alpine narrative folklore, in her incomplete map of French lycanthropy, where she assures readers that Savoy and Dauphiné are almost excluded from this belief. The belief in werewolves, she notes, is mostly diffused through ‘the West, Gascony, Landes, Brittany and Normandy and in the center Berry, Nivernais and then the Massif Central, a large area extended on a loop, from the land of moors and bocage in the West to the mountain and woodland regions of the center’. She adds that ‘the systematic examination of the collections, region by region, has made possible to sketch out this “map” of lycanthropy from which the North, Savoy and Dauphiné seem to be almost excluded’.6 However, from the 1950s onwards, Charles Joisten (1936–1981), the late major folklorist of Savoy and Dauphiné, put together the largest

5 Arnold Van Gennep, Le folklore du Dauphiné (Isère), 2 vols (Paris 1993 [orig. 1932– 1933]), 552. 6 Lise Andries, ‘Contes du loup’, in: Jean de Nynauld (ed.), De la lycanthropie, trans-

formation et extase des sorciers 1615. Étude critique augmentée d’études sur les lycanthropes et les loups-garous (Paris 1990), 197–217, esp. 198.

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French collection of belief narratives. Having read several books written by Van Gennep, including the outstanding essay, Le folklore (1924), a fledgling Joisten began his first fieldwork investigation in the HautesAlpes in 1951. His purpose was to further explore the subjects of Van Gennep’s curiosity, and answer a disappointed consideration which had arisen a few years before, in the mind of his Master: ‘despite my repeated requests’, wondered Van Gennep, ‘there has not been any chance to obtain a single folktale in the Hautes-Alpes region. Would further investigations be more successful?’7 From his first steps in this field as a teenager, it was Joisten who took up the challenge of this supposed negative area in folk narratives by working on ethnographic surveys in Alpine territory, and he succeeded. He collected an immense treasury of folktales and belief narratives—not only the hundreds of folktales published for the Dauphiné and Savoy,8 but the thousands of ‘migratory legends’9 where we can find an impressive corpus of werewolf narratives. Recently, his monumental collection has been fully published at Musée dauphinois by Alice Joisten10 and Nicolas Abry11 (2005–2010): thus, a vital new point of access is available in identifying the narrative motifs composing the mosaic complexity of belief in werewolves in the French Western Alps.

7 Marie-Louise Ténèze, ‘Charles Joisten et le folklore des Alpes françaises: présentation d’une recherché’, Croyances, récits et pratiques de tradition—Mélanges Charles Joisten (1936–1981), special issue Le Monde Alpin et Rhodanien, 1–4 (Valence 1982), 11–18, 12. 8 Charles Joisten and Alice Joisten, Contes populaires du Dauphiné, 3 vols (Grenoble 1996) ; Charles Joisten and Alice Joisten, Contes populaires de Savoie (Grenoble 1999). 9 For belief narratives about fantastic beings, a migratory legend represents a legend which is found repeatedly at different places, having the same plot in every case but with place names and/or topographical details tailored to fit the individual site, as defined in: Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends: A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants (Helsinki 1992 [1958]). 10 Awarded in 2017 with the Europaïscher Märchenpreis by the Märchen-Stiftung Walter Kahn. 11 Charles Joisten, Êtres fantastiques du Dauphiné. I. Patrimoine narratif de l’Isère (2005); II. Patrimoine narratif des Hautes-Alpes (2006); III. Patrimoine narratif de la Drôme (2007).—Êtres fantastiques de Savoie. I. Patrimoine narratif du département de la Savoie (2009); II. Patrimoine narratif du département de la Haute-Savoie (2010).

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A Disguise or a Genuine Werewolf? The use of an animal skin12 (of wolves, bears, calves, etc...) as the means of performing metamorphosis (D531. Transformation by putting on skin. By putting on the skin, feathers, etc. of an animal, a person is transformed to that animal ) represents the lynchpin of the Alpine belief in werewolves. Even though the wolf skin is not the exclusive vehicle of transformation, it is certainly one of the most known and widely used in the oral repertoires of France. Moreover, it offers us the opportunity to underline an important issue related to these morphic processes: as observed by Joisten, the act of wearing an animal hide ‘determines metamorphosis, unless it is not considered as a disguise. The whole corpus would oscillate between these two opposite poles of the belief: from one where the supernatural is admitted, to another where it only played an attenuated role, or even none’.13 The presence of a wide range of verbal syntagmata (“se revêtir d’une peau, [to dress with a skin]”, “s’habiller d’une peau [to wear a skin]”, “s’envelopper dans la peau [to wrap a skin around]”, “se mettre dedans [to put into, to get in]”, “se plier dans la peau [to bend into]”, “se mesurer la peau [to measure the skin], etc.) in the narratives related to this motif contributes to the confusion between these two focal poles. Thus, we can introduce the counterpart of the supernatural metamorphosis motif (cf. D531.): K1823. Man disguises as animal. A very clear example of this polarization concerning the nature of werewolves is given in a set of three belief narratives collected by Christian Abry in the village of Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval (Haute-Savoie): a. They went to take sheep from those of the Déchargeux. They wore a wolf skin to hide. This is why they called them “the wolves”. b. A man from Salvagny disguised himself as a wolf, his wife beat him up.

12 In the Alps, the term werewolf (loup-garou) is also attributed to those individuals who develop the ability to take the appearance of any kind of animal—and, in the Pyrenees, of object too, as noted in Charles Joisten, Les êtres fantastiques dans le folklore de l’Ariège (Portet-sur-Garonne 2000), 84, where a man metamorphoses into a bundle of fern (un brech de hogara). We might almost say that we have to do with ‘were-animals’, at best, rather than specific werewolves. 13 Charles Joisten, Robert Chanaud and Alice Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, in: Les êtres fantastiques dans les Alpes. Recueil d’études et de documents en mémoire de Charles Joisten (1936–1981), special issue Le Monde alpin et rhodanien, 1–4 (1992), 17–182, esp. 49.

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c. Those from Salvagny, they were called “the wolves” because they wore a wolf’s skin. One of them, once, went to Samoëns with his chariot and his horse... Above La Tines he sees a wolf that attacked him. He takes out his knife, he hits him... When he arrives in Samoëns, he meets a man from Salvagny who says to him: “Well, you gave me a hell of a stab!” “Me? But all I saw was a wolf that attacked me, I stabbed it...”14

Thus, are the people of Salvagny real werewolves or are they simply jokers who wear a wolf’s skin to steal sheep from neighbouring hamlets? These three accounts do not help us to clear up the equivocal character of such werewolves… The first account (a) seems to portray the figure of a ‘fake werewolf’, especially because the narrator states that these individuals wore a wolf’s skin ‘to hide’. It would appear, therefore, that in this case the wolf skin is a simple disguise. The second narrative (b) uses the verb ‘disguise’, but we find a specific reference to the fact that the protagonist’s wife hits her masked husband. This noteworthy aspect could be symptomatic of an evolution that occurred in the deployment of the belief; we can thereby highlight the motif of revelation by injury (described below), which characterizes narratives dealing with ‘authentic werewolves’. Indeed, we find, in this same village repertoire a complete attestation of this motif (c), which completes the progressive narrative trajectory between the passages, from the disguise to a supernatural elaboration of the metamorphosis process, and thus confirms our theory about the ambiguous nature of werewolves.

‘We Have to Make Him Bleed!’ A Revelatory Injury Whether it is a formal metamorphosis or a simple disguise, a fundamental narrative motif of werewolf stories in the Western Alps is the revelation of the creature’s nature through injury: the wolf’s wounds persist once the werewolf has recovered or revealed its human form.15 The relevance of this motif in the Alpine repertoires is highlighted by one intriguing instance collected in the village of Abondance (Haute-Savoie): 14 Charles Joisten, Etres fantastiques de Savoie, II, 247. 15 One of the earliest attestations is found in chapters LXI and LXII of Petron-

ius’ Satyricon, where the main character understands that his companion is a werewolf (versipellem) when, once back at his hostel, he found him in his bed, with a deep wound in the throat: after turning into a werewolf, his companion attacked Melissa’s farm, where he killed the cattle but had his neck pierced by a spear.

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the informants used the circumlocution “loup-qu’il-fallait-lui-faire-dusang ”16 [wolf who it was necessary to make bleed] to designate these supernatural beings in lupine form. An extensive analysis of the oral heritage collected by Joisten reveals a vast array of instruments used to wound werewolves. These are obviously measures to actively fight these fantastic ontologies, and of opposing them in an aggressive and violent manner. There are a variety of sharp or piercing metal objects (scythe, axe, knife, etc.) that belong to the rural mountain traditions. In many stories, these ordinary weapons are not sufficient to achieve the purpose for which they are used; it is therefore necessary to use magical-religious rituals to give them the ability to penetrate the werewolf’s skin, which is otherwise invulnerable. The narrative motif D712.7. Disenchantment by shooting reveals changing times and cultures. Where this motif appears, and where the disappearance of werewolves is associated with the appearance of firearms, we are entering the historical context of the rationalization of beliefs.17 We can highlight two different narrative solutions that deal with the motif of the revelation by injury: an immediate revelation, especially when the injury is fatal for the werewolf; and a deferred revelation. In this latter case, after the fight scene between the werewolf and its deliverer, the suspense lingers around the discovery of the identity of the transformed subject. Often, this scene takes place the day after the battle and shows the encounter of the two opponents, one of whom complains about the hit the other gave him when he was in lupine form. In most cases, the werewolf is found to be a member of the community, a reasonably wellknown person, a neighbor or even a relative. We can thus approach this belief in the context of neighbourhood conflicts, where the revelation motif reflects neighbourly relations and a dense connection of proximity relations amongst people who know each other. The village appears as a meaningful unit. An example is the case of Faveraz, a poacher living in the village of Orcier (Haute-Savoie), who disbanded a werewolves’ Sabbat with his rifle, made up of his fellow villagers who clearly recognized him:

16 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 91. 17 As observed by an informant, ‘when people were sufficiently enlightened, they started

shooting at them [werewolves] and everything stopped’, Alice Joisten and Christian Abry, Etres fantastiques des Alpes (Paris 1995), 176 (Saint-Didier-de-la-Tour, Isère 1959).

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At night, the twelve-year-old girl hears noises from the back of the house and, through the window at the rear of the house, she sees some fifteen wolves dancing there. Father Faveraz, a poacher, took his rifle and through the basement window shot into the pile. It was a general flight of werewolves. But Father Faveraz heard one of them saying: “Damned Faveraz, we would never have believed that from you!” This immediately made clear that these werewolves were bad jokers.18

The Gift to the Wolf: A Specific Alpine Tale Type Widely known in the Alpine domain, another method of delivering a werewolf from its condition is the gift to the wolf. While in the previous section we related that the release of a werewolf was essentially achieved through violence, by making him bleed, some documents collected by Joisten suggest an equivalent method: offering him something to eat. A person who wore a wolf’s skin could no longer leave it and had to run in the form of a wolf until someone would give him something to eat or make him bleed.19 The “buttoned wolves” (lao botona) used to pass in gangs through the village of Villarzembron. If someone is baking when they pass by, he has to give them a loaf of bread. A trident blow on the head would free them from their “buttoned wolf” condition.20

Even if this is a well-known theme in French folklore, nowhere in France, it seems, was this lycanthropic motif developed in a composite sequence as it was in the Alps. The narrative structure of this folktale has been organized under an unclassified tale type based on the following main sequence: ‘a wolf follows a passer-by or comes to beg for food. Someone feed him. It leaves, explicitly or implicitly delivered’.21 To this primary sequence two secondary sequences might be added: counter-donation, 18 Charles Joisten, Etres fantastiques de Savoie. Patrimoine narratif du département de la Haute-Savoie (Grenoble 2010), 201–202, from a handwritten note by Georges Amoudruz. 19 Joisten, Etres fantastiques de Savoie, 42 (Abondance). 20 Joisten, Etres fantastiques de Savoie, 185 (Beaune). 21 Charles Joisten collected 21 versions of this folktale in the Alpine territories of

Savoie, Haute-Savoie and Hautes-Alpes. We can find similar narratives in the folklore of

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where a man offers a gift to the food donor, revealing to him that he is the former werewolf; and the evil gift, where a man gives a gift to the wife of the food donor, who had expressed opposition to the original donation.22 From these two sequences, we contemplate four narrative structures: (1) gift to the wolf (alone); (2) gift to the wolf + counterdonation; (3) gift to the wolf + evil gift; (4) gift to the wolf + counterdonation + evil gift.23 As Marcel Mauss has detailed, the concept of the gift is an essential part of human cultures and has three main dimensions: obligation to give, obligation to receive and obligation to return. In this sense, we can interpret this figure of the werewolf as a fantastic ontology which dispenses rewards (counter-gifts) or punishments (evil gifts), in the eventuality that the obligation to give has not been respected. In most cases, the gift offered to the wolf is a piece of bread that can be donated as a whole or split into two pieces.24 However, a thorough analysis of the narratives recorded by Joisten shows the presence of many other types of food that can be given to the werewolf: cheese, milk, matefaim [a sort of pancake], and so on. Through this gift, the werewolf undergoes a demorphosis process and reacquires its original human form. This can be viewed as a first interpretative stage. However, it is possible to consider a Christian interpretation related to the concept of giving as a charitable work, that aims to save the werewolf from damnation. This act of Christian charity helps the werewolf to find his way back to the proper way of behaving and, by the grace of God, to regain his manhood.25 the north-western and central regions of the France where narrative repertories underline the obligation to give bread as a gift to the wolf to avoid being attacked or, in the narratives related to the figure of the “meneur de loups”, to reward the animal for his help. 22 For evil gift, cf. the Melusinian motif of the union with the nightmare, known as

Martenehe: F302.5.5. Fairy mistress tries to destroy mortal’s wife (mother) by sending her a magic belt. 23 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 82–83. 24 Narratives related to the offering of a piece of bread (stuck on a point of a knife)

to a werewolf and prompting his demorphosis are recorded in the folklore of Finland (D 1015, D 1016) and Livonia (161): cf. Marjatta Jauhiainen, The Type and Motif Index of Finnish Belief Legends and Memorates, FFC 267 (Helsinki 1998); O. Loorits, Livische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten, FFC 66 (Helsinki 1926). 25 This Christian motif is illustrated in a narrative collected in Montriond (HauteSavoie), where, on Christmas day in an ancient chalet of Covagny, a child offered a rzulé (fr. rissole, a small cake garnished with kiln-dried pears) to a wolf which came to beg for food: ‘My son, today is Christmas, not only for people but also for animals. Give your

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This interpretation is well represented in narratives that show a baker who breaks a piece of warm bread to give it to the animal: this action symbolizes the act of consecration and the breaking of the host during mass.

The Primarette Complex: The Anti-seigniorial and Anticlerical Connotations of Lycanthropic Motifs While the Eastern French-speaking Alpine territories have developed narrative repertoires characterized by Christian moralizing tones, moving towards the Lower Dauphiné we can find a corpus of stories which relate both a ‘political’, anticlerical and anti-seigniorial, colouration and a ‘rationalization’ of the belief.26 This social connotation of the belief in werewolves is reflected in the Primarette Complex where ‘powerful lords and/or clergymen, having economic interests in the glassworks, send werewolves, their henchmen, to collect fat (or meat) from children to make glass’.27 A number of historical documents from Primarette (Isère), dated to the middle of the eighteenth century, fix this belief in the folklore of the local community. In the parish register of 1747, the priest wrote that ‘carnivorous wolves have devoured three children in Primarette, it is more likely to believe that they are werewolves to whom the priests give permission to do similar hunting to supply glassworks’.28 This narrative motif essentially

rissole to the wolf’, said his grandfather. In the spring, a man came back to this chalet and asked the inhabitants if, last Christmas, a young child gave his rissole to a wolf as a gift. He revealed that he was that wolf, obliged to turn into an animal after he put on a wolf’s skin, a long time before: to reacquire his human nature, ‘a person, instead of treating me like an evil beast, had to do something charitable for me. This is what happened with you and what allowed me to return to my first condition’. Charles Joisten, Etres fantastiques de Savoie, 113 (Abondance). 26 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 135. 27 Christian Abry and Alice Joisten, ‘Trois notes sur les fondements du complexe de

Primarette. Loups-garous cauchemars, prédations et graisses’, in: Le fait du loup. De la peur à la passion: le renversement d’une image, Le monde alpin et rhodanien 1–3 (2002), 135–162, 135. 28 Christian Abry and Alice Joisten, ‘Peut-on expliquer l’absence de récits de catastrophes surnaturelles en Bas-Dauphiné?’, Revue de géographie alpine 86, No. 2 (1998), 11–24, 15.

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stems from the popular milieu. The desire to exert authority over people represents an attitude shared by both nobles and clergy, concretized in the manipulation of beliefs in werewolves to realize stronger control over local communities. A clear example of this control held by secular and religious authorities comes from Joisten’s tracking of a veritable social geography of beliefs: ‘It is said in Septème that werewolves, under the command of the Count of Albon, Lord of Septème, would enter into the houses at mealtimes to make sure the inhabitants did not eat too much; they could only be killed by consecrated bullets, but if you went to the priest for the blessing, he would denounce you to the lord, who would imprison you in the dungeons’.29 This highlights the ‘great Joisten’s mental divide’ which shows a clear belief demarcation around Paladru lake, circumscribing the Western lowland region in the foothills of the Alps, where rationalization processes occurred, in contrast to the supernatural features occurring in Eastern Alpine beliefs. Hence, to the east of this boundary, werewolves and other supernatural beings, such as wild hunts (synagogue) and malevolent tempestarii, are well represented in narratives, while in the Western part, of which Lower Dauphiné is the core, werewolves and goblinlike beings (servan) become henchmen in the service of the powerful.30 Finally, Hopkin noted an interesting geographical distribution of these narratives which marries up with the geography of political choices during the Revolutionary period.31 The lowlands largely accepted the Revolution and particularly welcomed the abolition of feudalism; whereas the highlands, where the seigniorial regime was not so pervasive, were less enthusiastic. In this rationalized landscape, even the motif of revelation by injury, originally intrinsically linked to a supernatural context, assumes a particular connotation. In a narrative collected in Mions,32 a woman 29 Charles Joisten, ‘La légende de la châtelaine ogresse en Bas-Dauphiné’, in: Festschrift für Robert Wildhaber (Basel 1973), 277–282, esp. 282. 30 For a map of this mental belief landscape: Abry & Joisten, ‘Trois notes’, 20. Cf. Christian Abry & Alice Joisten, ‘Fauteurs fantastiques de catastrophe dans la région alpine (Mais où sont passés les tempestaires d’Agobard dans les abords Lyonnais du Dauphiné?)’, in: René Favier & Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, Histoire et mémoire des risques naturels (Grenoble 2000), 219–248. 31 David Hopkin, ‘The Ecotype, Or a Modest Proposal to Reconnect Cultural and Social History’, in: Joan Pau Rubiés, Melissa Calaresu & Filippo de Vivo (eds.), Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke (2010), 31–54, esp. 41. 32 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 119–120.

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creeps into the seigniorial woods to collect firewood and fights against a werewolf. Once back home, she finds her husband covered in bruises: ‘without her knowledge, he used to play the werewolf on behalf of the lord’.33

An Inter Montes Observatory for Alpine Werewolves: Aosta Valley and the Waldensian Communities of Piedmont In order to better understand the spread of lycanthropic beliefs in the Western Alps, we have to cross the Mont Blanc range to reach an inter montes observatory of such alpine metamorphoses: the French-speaking region of Aosta Valley and the Waldensian communities of Piedmont. The volume “Tradizioni orali non cantate”, edited by Alberto Mario Cirese and Liliana Serafini in 1975,34 represents the first inventory of narrative types and motifs in Italian territory.35 As regards the identification of documents related to the werewolf in the Western Alps, we only find a single account classified as D113.1. Transformation man to wolf and D113.1.1. Werewolf. A man changes periodically into the form of a wolf. He is usually malevolent when in wolf form: it is a narrative collected in Aosta Valley, “Il falciatore malpagato taglia la zampa al lupo e scopre il parroco con la mano fasciata” [The underpaid reaper cuts off the wolf’s

33 We suggest a comparison with the tale-type ML 4005. The Werewolf Husband, where the werewolf’s identification is rationally achieved by finding a thread from the wife’s apron between the teeth of her assailing husband. 34 Alberto Cirese and Liliana Serafini (eds.), Tradizioni orali non cantate, primo inventario nazionale per tipi, motivi o argomenti, Discoteca di Stato (Roma 1975). 35 This first attempt to promote the development of a regional movement for the collection of traditional narratives and, later, to organize studies based on an interregional or national level did not yield the expected results. In the years 1968-1969 and, subsequently, in 1972, the Discoteca di Stato launched a ‘systematic investigation for the survey of narrative materials that are disappearing more rapidly, within the broader framework of narrative forms that each area can offer’. More precisely, the project called for the organization of a program to collect different types of oral traditions—from folk tales to proverbs, wellerisms, lullabies, etc.—all over the national territory. This collection— carried out by two researchers, Oronzo Parlangeli, for the regions of Emilia Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Liguria, Piedmont, Puglia, Trentino Alto Adige and Aosta Valley, and Alberto Mario Cirese for the remaining regions—resulted in 125 corpora of folktales covering eighteen out of the twenty Italian regions.

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paw and discovers the priest with his hand bandaged]—which is also classified in G252. Witch in form of cat has hand cut off. Recognized next morning by missing hand. It is quite remarkable that only a single attestation of this narrative motif has been collected in the Western Alps while on the other side of the Mont Blanc range, there is an extraordinary variety of motifs related to the figure of the werewolf. With regard to the organization and publication of Aosta Valley narrative corpuses, we must point out that interest in oral literature has developed very late in this region. As observed by Giuseppe Giacosa in 1886, ‘it is generally believed that the alpine valleys, and more so the Aosta one, are a seedbed of alpine legends and popular traditions. On the contrary, there are very few and discolored. The place would be appropriate, but not the people, whose imaginative faculties are almost barren by too many and too harsh labors’.36 Moreover, the first folklorists, such as Joseph-Siménon Favre, were not much interested in these topics and consequently the first collections of popular narratives did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, when folklorists began to deal with these subjects, they started a process of literarization of narratives collected from the voices of informants. We have therefore lost the narrative richness that characterized oral enunciations of these narratives in obtaining texts that were perfectly revised and corrected by the collectors and even rewritten in a literary form. Despite this mediocre beginning for the development of folkloristics on the southern side of the Western Alps, oral narratives survived until the present day. Interestingly enough, the majority of narrative motifs documented in the Aosta Valley refer to the revelation by injury.37 They also include a strong anticlerical context, closely linked with an anti-seigniorial

36 Giuseppe Giacosa, Novelle e paesi valdostani (Milano 1905), 196. 37 We found two versions related to the narrative motif of the gift to the wolf (and

counter-donation): cf. Francesco Favre, L’immaginario come forma di strutturazione del territorio nella bassa Valle d’Aosta, Master’s thesis at Politecnico di Torino (2002–2003), 32; Clorinda Vercellin, Racconti e proverbi della valle del Lys (Perloz et Lillianes) (Ivrea 1958), 80–83.

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attitude,38 which creates a particular narrative structure.39 A priest asks reapers to work his field by promising them a payment only if they work until sunset; before sunset, a werewolf approaches the field, terrorizing the laborers and making them run away. The pact not being honored, the priest refuses to pay the reapers. The following days the same scene takes place, until one of the reapers decides to cut the werewolf’s paw with his scythe, at which point he finally finds out that the werewolf is the priest.40 Two examples of this motif are illustrated below:41 Did you hear that story about the priest of Introd... did you hear it? He hired laborers to prune vines and, when it was time to pay, he used to hide and he didn’t pay them. They were standing there with no money... And one day, when they were waiting, a wolf came to scare them away, so they would have returned home and he wouldn’t have had to pay them. And then, one day, they cut off its paw and then they discovered that he was the priest, his hand was bandaged...]. (Arthur Martin, collected in Rhêmes-Saint-Georges by F.A., 2007) I listened this story at Ville-sur-Nus, I was told that the priest had some laborers to harvest the field and then these workers did not work properly and stood there doing nothing, and he [the priest] said “Ah! They have to be paid and they do not work so much!” So he disguised himself as a wolf

38 Related to an anti-seigniorial context, a narrative, in the form of a legend, shows a castellan girl, who once lived in the castle of Fénis, transformed into a wolf by a witch. After taking refuge in an abandoned cottage along the road from Septumian to Thuy, she is overcome by hunger and starts hunting for food. The inhabitants of the neighbouring villages give chase to this ferocious wolf and, once they killed it, they discover, after a process of demorphosis, that it was the princess of Fénis. Cf. E. Del Montechiaro, ‘Le cento leggende dei cento paesi valdostani’, Augusta Praetoria, July 10 July 1940. 39 For Aosta Valley narratives: cf. Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 176–178; Alexis Bétemps and Lidia Philippot, Merveilles dans la vallée. Le Val d’Aoste conté (Genève 2006), 74–77 (Oyace); Tersilla Gatto Chanu, Saghe e leggende delle Alpi. Tra diavoli e santi, nani, fate, streghe e folletti, alla scoperta del magico mondo dell’immaginario alpino (Roma 2002), 51–53; Jean-Jacques Christillin, Légendes et récits recueillis sur les bords du Lys (Aoste 1970), 154–155 (Gressoney: Walser linguistic domain). 40 An interview we conducted in February 2020 revealed an account, set in the Great Saint Bernard valley (Aosta Valley, Italy), related to this narrative structure where the priest took the form of a bear. 41 For a francoprovençal transcription system, see: Fabio Armand, Petit dictionnaire du francoprovençal valdôtain (Aosta 2013).

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and went to frighten them, to make them run away. Then he approached them and some workers escaped; and one continued to harvest and this wolf came closer and closer, as the worker cut off one of its paws. Then we knew it was the priest. Because we no longer saw the priest; he no longer had his hand and he was hospitalized. (Martina Chabloz, collected in Messigné by F.A., Nus, 2004)

In the folklore of the Waldensian Alps,42 the motif of the revelation by injury is once again the central pivot. However, if a radical refusal of Purgatory had a strong influence against any belief regarding wandering ghosts,43 we find a strong association between the werewolf and the sorcerer,44 which indicates a strong process of demonization of the belief. The collection compiled by Marie Bonnet allows us to highlight the figure of a witch transformed into a black cat: My grandmother used to go out and tend her cows in a big meadow. With one of her friends’ young daughters. As they were eating bread and chestnuts under a chestnut tree one evening, a long black cat with a tapered tail came to rub against them, meowing insistently. My grandmother pushed him away more than once, but as he always came back, she handed him half a chestnut. To her surprise, the cat arched his back, furiously bristled the fur on his tail, and began to growl in a hoarse voice. And the other girl, laughing at his funny face, gave him a big slap on the head. The cat, suddenly calmed down, said in a begging voice, “Another one more

42 The most important narrative collections for the Waldensian Alps are: Marie Bonnet, Tradizioni delle Valli valdesi del Piemonte (Torino 1994) (cf. Werewolves: 314–320); Jean Jalla, Légendes et traditions populaires des Vallées Vaudoises (Torre Pellice 1926). For werewolves, see also: Tersilla Gatto Chanu, Saghe e leggende delle Alpi. Tra diavoli e santi, nani, fate, streghe e folletti, alla scoperta del magico mondo dell’immaginario alpino (Roma 2002), 53; Maria Savi Lopez, Leggende delle Alpi (Torino 2007), 267–268. 43 Fabio Armand, Marie-Agnès Cathiard & Christian Abry, ‘Death Divination within a non-Delusional Myth: The Procession of the Dead from the Alps to Himalayas… When a Theoria of “Phantom-Bodies” meets its neural veridiction theory’, TricTrac: Journal of World Mythology and Folklore 9 (2016), 1–28. 44 The type-tale ATU 333 has clear roots in sorcery in Dauphiné and in Trentino: Christian Abry and Alice Joisten, ‘Cappuccetti rossi trippali, selvaggi e stregoneschi dal Delfinato a Šebesta e oltre…’, in: Giuseppe Šebesta e la cultura delle Alpi (Trento 2007), 257–270.

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hit, please!” “You’ve had enough, go away, witch!”, cried my grandmother excitedly. Indeed, the cat ran away.45

While the narration is mainly focused on the revelation of the diabolical nature of the talking cat, the theme of the gift to the werewolf may have influenced, in some ways, the repertories of the Waldensian Valleys: is the refused offering of the chestnut to the ‘were-cat’ perhaps a relic of the motif of the gift to the wolf? Finally, we can also mention here the loup ravart 46 of the Waldesian Alps, a peculiar type of werewolf which stops the nighttime traveler by placing his paws on his shoulders and measuring him. If the unfortunate is smaller than him, he bites him, and otherwise he lets him through.

A Lycanthropic Liminality: From Culture to Nature… and Return These werewolf narratives allow us to explore the permeable frontier between human nature and the wild, and to reflect on the intersections between the universe of culture and that of animality and savagery. The following account represents a clear example of this dichotomy: In a house of Mégevette, a beggar had been sheltered for one night in the barn and, next morning, the young boy of the family was sent to call him to drink coffee with milk. As the beggar was still sleeping, the child was intrigued to look at the contents of his bag. He found a nice wolf skin like a coat, and he rushed to try it on, thinking, “It’s probably a werewolf skin, I’ll see if I turn into a wolf”. As soon as he put it on, he became a real wolf and could no longer get rid of it. The family, alerted, woke the beggar. The child turned into a wolf was running in the nearby fields, but he had not yet moved too far away. The beggar succeeded in catching him and spoke the required words to deliver him, and then he said to him: “Luckily I was there; otherwise you would have stayed a wolf and run the forests for the rest of your life. Never look in the beggar’s bag”.47

45 Marie Bonnet, Tradizioni delle Valli valdesi del Piemonte (Torino 1994), 314 (told by Pasquet, Prarustin). 46 Sometimes mistaken for the “loup chaloun” (fr. loup-cervier, Aostan frpr. loë serveillon), the linx. 47 Joisten and Abry, Etres fantastiques des Alpes, 176 (Mégevette, Haute-Savoie 1965).

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In this narrative, the skin got the upper hand over the child who has donned it recklessly by transforming him into a wild animal. He becomes a being of nature and escapes from the humanized world represented by the village and by the domesticated fields and the pastures, in short from all the aspects of the environment that remind him of his human condition. He wishes to join the wild world and runs through forests and mountains. However, ‘he had not yet moved too far away’. This statement creates a gap in the narrative: while running like a werewolf, the child is still within the limits of the village, within the boundaries of the civilized world to which he belongs. He has not yet tasted the wild nature of the wolf. This geographical distance symbolizes the rejection of the condition of social being, of the instinctual dimension that human societies seek to manage within the framework of the social and legal system of rights and duties. Since the wolf transformation is linked to the breakdown of the social norms of the human community, which prohibit taking and using objects belonging to other people without their prior authorization, the child’s transgression represents the root cause of his loss of humanity and subsequent fall into the world of savagery.48 The second part of the narrative focuses mainly on the owner of the skin and his intervention to liberate the child. He is the only one who knows the secret of the wolf’s skin and, through this knowledge, he succeeds in freeing the child before he could move too far from the village and, consequently, from his human condition. The beggar thus perfectly performs the role of a bistable being. With his dual nature, human and animal, he can dominate the instinct of the wolf; he does not passively suffer the power of the skin, but is able to control it and feel the benefits that it offers him. This character lives in a liminal world that allows him to 48 We find an interesting motif concerning the imprudent person who wears a werewolf skin in the narrative folklore of the Waldensian Alps. Once the skin is put on, it can no longer be removed and causes a change in the person’s behavior, leading him to become wild and giving rise to a desire to eat human flesh. Two peasants, while mowing a meadow, found a wolf skin hidden behind a bush. After looking at it with curiosity, the youngest, aged eighteen, wanted to put it on. ‘No! It’s a bad skin, leave it!’, said his companion cautiously. But the young man did not want to hear anything, and throwing himself on all fours, he inserted his head and both arms into the front part of the mysterious skin. Suddenly he cried out in a muffled voice: ‘Please, take it off, take it off, or I will eat you all!’ When he was freed from the skin, he confessed to having felt a violent passion for biting and tearing human flesh through his teeth. Marie Bonnet, Tradizioni delle Valli valdesi del Piemonte (Torino 1994), 318 (told by Etienne Buffa, Pount’d Barfé, Angrogne).

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consciously move throughout the boundaries, from the cultural universe of humanity to the one of animality and nature. This perspective gives us the opportunity to highlight a space of liminality that links the sphere of wilderness and the anthropized sphere of culture. This ‘in-between’, inhabited by fantastic ontologies of various kinds and crossed by men, becomes a place of exchange between the two universes.

Cyclopean Lycanthropes in Prealpine and Alpine Wilderness By staying on this fluid border between nature and culture, the immense treasury of tales and belief narratives collected by Joisten (2005–2010) in the Dauphiné allows us to consider a unique werewolf figure. In one Pre-Alpine area, between the municipalities of La-Tour-du-Pin and Rochetoirin (Isère), the figure of the werewolf acquires a specificity of its own, integrating features typical of wild beings inhabiting the wilderness of mountains and forests (F567. Wild man. Man lives alone in wood like a beast ). The first narrative document considered here is extracted from a text written around 1850 by Romain Bouquet, “Des sorciers en général et des loups-garous en particulier” [About general sorcerers and, in particular, werewolves], where the author interprets the Nuéton, a kind of wild man, as being a werewolf. The Nuiton is not presented as be a real werewolf, but this innovation influenced the lycanthropic narrative folklore of this specific area. The information presented by Bouquet provides some very valuable insights about this being, which overlap with the documents collected a century later by Joisten in Rochetoirin, the current “epicenter” of the Nuiton belief. We can read that: Two different species of werewolves could be distinguished: the actual werewolf and the Nuiton werewolf. The latter had only one eye in the middle of his forehead, and more human than his fellow werewolf, lived only on plants and fruits, making his home in one of the rock caverns or holes he dug in the earth. Very fond of women, he took them away from their husbands or families, not to devour them, but to make them the companions of his solitude. The legend adds, in its naivety, that among these new Helens, there were some who, although they were able to go back to their husbands, preferred to stay with their captors.

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This document highlights the strange morphology and behavior of this vegetarian werewolf. It is a ravisher of women (T471.2. Wild man as ravisher of women), whom it hides inside a cave (R45. Captivity in mound (cave, hollow hill ), and it has a single eye in its forehead (F512.1.1. Person with one eye in center of forehead). Similar interactions between the folklores of werewolves and wild men49 are confirmed by some documents collected by Joisten in June 1959 in the nearby area of Saint-Jean-de-Soudain and Rochetoirin, where the Nuiton, represented as a man who has two horns on his head and one eye in the middle of his forehead, comes out from a rocky underground passage, the Goulette du Nuiton, to tan his body and comb his long hairs. The latter is a specific trait of the fairies, but Joisten observed that, in the mountains of the Maurienne and Tarentaise (Savoy), two feminine werewolves were said to comb their long hair, even if traditional Savoyard werewolves are not linked to such fairies’ behaviours.50 Leaving the Dauphiné, the centre of this specific belief, and moving towards the Hautes-Alpes, we can find a homologous cyclopean werewolf figure: the daruc.51 In Valgaudemar, the pastoral theme often associated with wild man folklore is integrated with a typically lycanthropic narrative motif we have already analyzed: D531. Transformation by putting on skin. By putting on the skin, feathers, etc. of an animal, a person is transformed to that animal. Thus, such cyclopean daruc put on a sheep skin in order to mix with the flock of the shepherd and steal food from his hut.

49 Cf. Wild imaginary beings with one eye in the middle of their forehead: Gogwärgi (dwarf) from Swiss German-speaking Alps, as a specific type of Polyphemous Wild Man, shepherd and lord of animals, and many other supernatural beings of the French-speaking Alps. See, in particular, a wild man in Albanne (Maurienne) with one eye in the middle of his forehead and a small horn on his head that allowed him to suspend himself from the branches of the trees to rest: he uses to steal tommes (cheese) in the mountain pastures and kidnap girls. Christian Abry & Alice Joisten, ‘Le nuiton n’a qu’un œil au milieu du front… Ou le sauvage ravisseur de la fille du seigneur en Bas-Dauphiné’, in: Tradition et Histoire dans la culture populaire. Rencontres autour de l’œuvre de Jean-Michel Guilcher, Documents d’ethnologie régionale, vol. 11 (Grenoble 1990), 219–226. 50 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 102–103. 51 Cf. Fabio Armand, ‘Le dahu: imaginaire narratif d’un animal chimérique’, La

Beidana. Rivista di cultura e storia delle valli valdesi 98 (2020), 57–58.

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There was a shepherd who used to go up into the mountains every day to tend to his sheep. While he was herding in a pasture far from his hut, in the mountain of Chératsou, lou Daruc came to steal his food from the hut. My poor mother always told me that he was a demon, a devil with only one eye in the middle of his forehead; he wore a kind of sheepskin on his back and he walked on all fours like a sheep. He hid under a stone with his skin. Then in the evening when the sheep arrived, he would mix with them, he looked like a sheep. From time to time the shepherd counted his sheep and he had spotted the daruc out of the corner of his eye, he was wary of him. Once, while he was sleeping, the shepherd tore off his skin and my mother told me that he put his skin in the fire. And he ran away at full speed in front of the daruc’s paws! And his roasting skin made a terrific noise, like the greatest thunders there are, it was awful! And the shepherd reached Navette shouting for help. And it seems that the daruc had been killed one day and buried in the Aup mountain pasture, under the peira dou daruc, a large block of stone near Navette.52

New Lycanthropic Perspectives: From Feminine Werewolves to Nightmarish Siblings In this chapter, we have moved across the spatial and metamorphic liminality of werewolf beliefs in order to understand the representations of the complex narrative mosaic which underlies the nature of these supernatural beings, such ‘transitional beings (…) [who] are neither one thing nor another; or may be both; or neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere (in terms of any recognized cultural topography), and are at the very least “betwixt and between” all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification’.53 We have highlighted a dynamic polarization concerning the ambiguous nature of our transalpine werewolves, from what we called a ‘fake werewolf’, an individual who simply wore an animal skin, to narratives dealing with ‘authentic werewolves’, characterized by a supernatural elaboration of the metamorphosis process. As an epilogue for this discussion of Alpine werewolves, we would like to suggest an innovative perspective and provide an opening for further

52 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 158. 53 Victor Turner, ‘Betwixt-and-Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, in:

The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York and London 1967), 97.

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interrogations of these narratives. Even though the bulk of Alpine narratives depict male werewolves, it is possible to detect the presence of rare cases of feminine werewolves. Joisten et al. note the presence of only seven narratives about feminine metamorphosis into wolves collected in mountainous regions. All of them give rise to extensive reports, which can be divided into two groups: in Chablais and Faucigny, the main characters are women from ‘elsewhere’ (a woman from Valais; an old woman from Alsace identified in her distant country by a hawker during his tour: ‘the werewolves (leu-garou) came from Alsace to decimate the herds of Mégevette [Haute-Savoie]’.54 In Maurienne and Champsaur, they are young and pretty girls, whose real nature is discovered by their lovers. These adventures mostly take place in the evening, in mountain chalets.55 As an example of these feminine narratives: There were three girls in the old Mourinou mill. One evening, they wore wolves’ costumes and warmed themselves around the stove. And young men from the neighboring villages came to see them at the evening. It seems that they were pretty girls! So, before coming in, they looked out the window to see if anyone was there and they saw the three werewolves. One of the young men said, “We have to go back and we will come singing”. So when the girls heard them singing, they quickly got out of their wolf skins and the young men came back. But the girls did not have time to lock up their belongings in the closet, a wolf’s paw or tail was poked out. So the young men asked: “Hey, what’s this?” Then one of them said: “If you came a moment earlier, then we were wolves and we would have eaten you!”56

In an attempt to place these Alpine narratives in a broader folklore context, we can reference a passage from the trial of old Thieß, the werewolf of Livonia, where the defendant said that ‘women were certainly among the werewolves, but girls were not. Rather, they were of use to the flying sprites [Puicken] or dragons and were sent out to take away

54 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 146. 55 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 48. 56 Joisten, Chanaud and Joisten, ‘Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné’, 160.

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the yield of milk and butter’.57 As we have already observed,58 this reference allows us to broaden the horizon of our findings and brings us back to the question of the relationship between werewolves and other imaginary beings, in particular regarding supernatural parent-child or sibling relationships. There is a recurrent semantic core concerning the parentage of the werewolf in a Danish corpus of 63 narratives analysed by Michèle Simonsen: ‘the child thus born [i.e., from a young girl who realized a magic ritual with a foal’s placenta in order to give birth to their child with no pain] would become a “mare” if it was a girl (a female supernatural being that rides on men’s chests during their sleep and oppresses them, and which can also be found in the English word “nightmare”), or a werewolf if it was a boy. This is the only way a man becomes a werewolf in Danish tradition’.59 These elements bring us back to the ancient reference of the garou and the cauquemare as siblings, attested in the Evangiles des Quenouilles: «Se un homme a tel destinée d’estre leu vvarou, c’est fort se son filz n’en tient, et, se filles a et nulz filz, volentiers sont quauquemaires », if a man has the misfortune to be a werewolf, it is most likely that his son will be too, and, if he got girls and no boys, they become willingly nightmares.60 How to deal with these supernatural werewolves, which are clearly not simple kinds of humans who put on a wolf skin? Or, more generally, how does one comprehend the transculturality of these animal metamorphoses which enrich human narrative imaginaries, even so far beyond our Alpine regions? To cope with narrative and ethnographic data about our transalpine lupine beings, we would like to suggest an innovative perspective, which allowed us to bridge field folkloristics and neurocognitive sciences, in order to highlight the fundamental core elements of such very 57 Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective (Chicago 2020), 18. 58 Cf. Fabio Armand, ‘Le loup-garou: de sa liminalité dans le patrimoine narratif galloroman à sa parenté neuro-anthropologique’, in: A. Reusser-Elzingre & F. Diémoz (eds.), Le patrimoine oral : ancrage, transmission et édition dans l’espace galloroman (Bern 2016), 175–192. 59 Michèle Simonsen, ‘The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 231. See earlier on this topic: Simonsen, Michèle, ‘La variabilité dans les légendes. Les récits danois sur les loups-garous’, in: Veronika Görög-Karady, (ed.), D’un conte… à l’autre. La variabilité dans la littérature orale (Paris 1984), 181–190. 60 Evangiles des Quenouilles, Quatrième série (Paris 1855), 156.

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specific types of werewolf. Recognizing that a neurocognitive approach could bring new insights to folkloristic narrative materials,61 we focused mainly on the special sibling relation between werewolves and nightmares. As we have already shown,62 it is not uncommon for very distinctive werewolves to take on the function of an incubus (F471.1. The Nightmare), even outside the relationships we have outlined above. For this reason, we propose that this type of werewolf can be considered as a phantombody generated in the dissociated state of the brain called sleep paralysis.63 In this brain-culture nexus, we could enrich the comprehension of the composite figures of werewolves—and other were-animals—widespread in the Alps and far beyond.

61 Fabio Armand, Marie-Agnès Cathiard, and Christian Abry, ‘Neuronuminous-like Experiences within the BRAINCUBUS Framework for Cognitive Folkloristics: Present Promise and Limits’, in: Numinoses Erzählen: Das Andere—Jenseitige—Zauberische (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 2019), 57–65 (http://lhbsa.de/blog/publikati onen/numinoses-erzaehlen-das-andere-das-jenseitige-das-zauberische/). 62 Armand, ‘Le loup-garou’, 184–188. 63 We can just refer here to BISO theory (Brain Incubator of Supernatural Ontologies)

and its heuristic framework, constrained in our neurocognitive anthropological model BRAINCUBUS: cf. Marie-Agnès Cathiard & Fabio Armand, ‘Braincubus: vers un modèle anthropologique neurocognitif transculturel pour les “fantômes” de l’imaginaire’, in: P. Pajon & M.-A. Cathiard (eds.), Les imaginaires du cerveau (Fernelmont 2013), 53–87. Moreover, we further implemented this neurocognitive approach in order to apprehend the merging formal processes realized by Himalayan shamans (jh¯akri) of Nepal in their rituals of incorporation of their tutelary spirit: cf. Fabio Armand, ‘Chamans du Népal, passeurs intra mundi bistables. De la liminalité d’un “entre-deux” dans la métensomatose’, IRIS (revue fondée au CRI, Centre de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire, Grenoble-Stendhal), L’entre-deux et l’imaginaire, 37 (Grenoble 2016), 177–192; Fabio Armand, ‘Ontological Transformations in Hindu Tantric Ritualisms of Kathmandu Valley: A Neurocognitive Perspective about Self and Bodies’, Religions of South Asia, 14 (2021). 41–62.

CHAPTER 12

Running the Fate: Portuguese Belief Narratives About Werewolves Paulo Correia

Portugal covers a rectangular area of 92,212 km2 and, despite its relative smallness, has a rich and diverse culture, varying from north to south and from east to west. The werewolf, as a supernatural figure, is a belief shared across the entire Portuguese territory.1 As evidenced below, these beliefs are more pronounced in rural areas and among older people, notably those with less contact with formal education. Due to some sociopolitical and cultural restrictions, for a long time the Portuguese nation kept the majority of the population at a low formal education, living in small villages, working in agro-pastoral and fishing-related activities, and existing under the Catholic faith framework.2 1 The exception to this rule is the Madeira archipelago, where I do not know of any werewolf narratives. 2 As opposed to Protestantism, Catholicism has not until recent times promoted the literacy of the common people, and even the mass ritual was celebrated in Latin, rather than in Romance language.

P. Correia (B) Algarve University, Faro, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_12

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Nevertheless, those restrictions led the people to use their memory and oral forms of transmission as the principal sources of cultural knowledge. As a product of syncretic conservative mentality, the Portuguese lower classes were the bearers of a very rich oral literature, made of folktales, legends, folk beliefs, and so on, which began to be collected in the late nineteenth century, and is still present nowadays in people’s memories. In spite of this, there are only a few published works on the subject of the Portuguese werewolf. For source materials in this study, we will use two kinds of narratives: those collected by folklorists since the last decade of the nineteenth century and already published in books (even though there are a very small number of editions published before 1990), and unpublished materials recorded by students from the University of the Algarve. The latter have been conducting folkloristic fieldwork since 1994, recording the texts digitally or on audio tape, and have used the free interview method in order to obtain explanations of the meanings of folk beliefs from the mouths of the people. By virtue of this approach, they are more accurate and richer in information than the preceding published works. In all we have assembled a corpus of 235 werewolf narratives, as told by 55 women and 21 men. The majority of the narrators came from the Algarve, the southern region of Portugal.3 The narratives, in the form of legends or memorates, differ locally but they are quite homogenous, reflecting a unitary tradition. We aim to give a comprehensive picture of Portugal’s werewolf legends, while at the same time analysing those belief narratives in close detail. As much as possible, the emic approach predominates, using the informants’ own words to assemble a puzzle of meanings across social practices, religious beliefs and psychological aspects. Throughout the corpus, a common characteristic of all the narratives is the concept of the werewolf itself. There is a consensus among the informants that a werewolf is a man who has the capacity to change into animals, an ability considered the product of fate, a mysterious force independent of the will of the creatures affected. Beyond this, there are some exceptions, where this power is triggered through magical means or through a curse uttered by the victim’s father.4

3 The number of versions gathered per region are as follows: North—49; Center—39; Lisbon and Tejo valley—29; Alentejo—24; Algarve—87 and Azores islands—7. 4 In Galicia, a Spanish province bordering northern Portugal, we find the same motif.

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Map of Portugal and neighbouring Spain. Portugese regions in sanserif. In italic bold upper case are the names of the regions of the western Iberian Insula during the Roman occupation

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The Werewolf in the Iberian Peninsula If we want to find similar werewolf stories or beliefs outside Portugal, the northwestern Iberian province of Galicia and the western parts of Asturias, León and Extremadura are the only regions in Spanish territory where a significant corpus of werewolf legends is encountered. This commonality has an explanation, in that Portugal and Galicia are twins in their language and culture, the roots of which can be found in the late Middle Ages. In spite of their proximity, the nature both of the werewolf and the narratives around it in Galicia is a little different from that of the Portuguese legends. The first and most important difference is that the Galician werewolf changes from a man into a wolf in all the versions that I could find. This transformation is due to a curse uttered by the victim’s mother, father or lover. Generally, the creature is obliged to wander in the mountains for a fixed number of years—usually seven—before regaining his human shape. During this liminal period, the werewolf behaves like a real wolf: he attacks flocks and eventually eats human flesh (it is worth mentioning that the main reason for the parents cursing their son is that he liked eating meat too much). It is possible to break the curse before its term if someone hurts the werewolf and sheds his blood or burns his wolf skin, or if the one who performed the curse repents and demands pardon. Associated with this belief, the fear of wolves is real and widespread in the rural population; in fact, the northwest area of the peninsula—which includes the north of Portugal—is even now the habitat of many wolf packs. The gender of the werewolf can be male or female, and his local name is lobisome (litt. wolfman) or lobo da xente (litt. people’s wolf). The peeira or lobeira is another legendary figure in Galicia and the north of Portugal. It is a girl (or a man, in Spain) who is cursed to live among the wolves, providing them with medical care, helping them to find food, and generally assuming the leadership of the pack. The main difference is that a peeira is not a shapeshifter; she (or he) always remains in human shape. It seems that this character is more frequent in Spain, for we have seen narratives of this kind in Galicia, Asturias, the Basque Country and Catalonia (where it is always a man named Pare Llop—litt. father wolf). In Portugal, the peeira is always a girl and their narratives circulate only in the Minho and Porto regions, i.e. in the northwest part

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of Portugal neighboring Galicia. For these reasons I do not agree with including this figure in the werewolf legendary cluster.5 More stories about shapeshifters are found in the western half of the Spanish province of León, where a curious version is found of La Muchacha Lobo (the wolf-girl),6 and on the western side of Asturias, where there are some similar stories.7 In those provinces, the metamorphosis always occurs because of a parent’s curse. Finally, there is another Spanish province that borders the eastern part of Portugal, Extremadura, where there seems to exist a great tradition of lycanthropy cases and werewolf legends.8 In the area bordering Portugal, the werewolves are given the same name of Iobisome or lobusome as in Galician-Portuguese traditions, reserving rabisome for men who transforms into donkeys. These werewolf beliefs in Extremadura tend to coincide with those of the western side of the peninsula in general, stating that the seventh of a succession of male children, without any female, is born fated to transform into a wolf every night of San Juan, or in some cases every Friday night or every night of the full moon, attacking people or animals indiscriminately. The victim can also acquire werewolf status due to a curse. They can be reshaped into human form before the sun rises by cutting off their right paw or burning their wolf skin. This fate can also be avoided if the child is baptized by their older brother and given the name Antonio. Otherwise, in the rest of the regions of Spain we have found only scarce versions of ML 4005, where the shapeshifter is called hombre-lobo (litt. wolf-man). I have described the werewolf tradition in Galicia and Extremadura in some detail because I am convinced that this tradition is heir, in some way, to the Roman division of the Iberian Peninsula in late antiquity, and 5 For both werewolves and peeiras in Galicia, see: Xosé Ramón Mariño Ferro, Lobos, Lobas e Lobisomes (Vigo 1995), 47–64. 6 This is referring to the folk narrative nº 94 of Julio Camarena, Cuentos Tradicionales de León, I (Madrid 1991), 192. The story is similar to some others collected in Galicia with a girl transformed into a wolf by her parents’ curse. In this case, she grows a wolf skin but can return to human shape by taking off the skin. In the end, a boy comes along who burns her wolf skin and marries the girl. 7 See the chapter ‘Maldiciones que transforman a los hombres en lobo’ (curses that change men into wolves), in Alberto Álvarez Peña, Mitos Y Leyendas Asturianas (Gijón 2003), 183–191. 8 See José María Dominguez Moreno, ‘La Licantropía en Extremadura’, Revista de Folklore 10a, No. 113 (1990), 170–174.

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to the local cultures that grew up there. In fact, nowadays we mainly find this tradition in the area once occupied by Gallaecia and Lusitania. From the fifth century onwards, during the invasion of Germanic tribes, Gallaecia was occupied by the Suevi and Lusitania by the Visigoths. Those civilizations, their beliefs and cultures, surely made their contribution to the shaping of the werewolf as a supernatural figure, as well as reproducing their variation throughout the territory, notably in the differences between the north and the south.

Contemporary Collections of Werewolf Stories in Portugal Despite the ancient werewolf beliefs, it was in the Romantic Era that the interest began in collecting oral literature directly from the mouths of illiterate people. The earliest mention of werewolves in this period came from a writer and historian Alexandre Herculano, one of the most highlyacclaimed forerunners of Romanticism in Portugal. In the article ‘Crenças Populares Portuguesas ou Superstições Populares’ (Portuguese folk beliefs or superstitions), published in 1840, the author included the following passage about the werewolves of the Beira-Baixa region: The werewolves are those who have the fate or fortune to undress at night in the middle of any road, mainly a crossroads, and make five turns sprawling on the ground in a spot where an animal has been doing the same, and by virtue of that to become that animal. These poor people do no harm to anyone, and they only have to fulfill their fate, in that they carry a stout stick, because they do not pass by any road or street where there are lights without giving great blows and whistles to extinguish it. Because of that it would be the easiest thing in this world to catch werewolves in flagrante, by lightning the places where they are detected. It is true that none of those who tell such stories actually had this experience.9

Herculano did not perform folkloristic fieldwork, because as an historian he only had faith in written documents. However, this description is precious because it attests to a belief that we will encounter later in the folk materials collected by the turn-of-the-century ethnographers and folklorists like Teófilo Braga, Adolfo Coelho, Consiglieri Pedroso and 9 A. Herculano, Opúsculos, IX (Lisbon 1909), 176–177.

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Leite de Vasconcellos, as well as in their ‘theoretic’ annotations about the phenomenon.10 During the twentieth century, a few other less famous folklorists included some werewolf legends in their published collections. However, the real boom in the collected materials of oral tradition came from the universities of Coimbra and Lisbon in the 1960s. Following the establishment of new degree courses in Romance philology, students were encouraged to leave the protective walls of the university and do fieldwork within rural or fishing communities. Although the purpose of these collections was to serve dialectology more than ethnography (or oral literature), many of the thick monographs of this period have, as a rule, a section with folktales and legends, among other traditional genres, collected directly from the mouths of rural people and faithfully transcribed, sometimes using the phonetic alphabet. Knowledge about the nature of oral tradition, and the new technical means of tape recording, prepared the ground for a new era in the collection of oral literature in Portugal. This combination of new knowledge and new researchers made possible the boom of publications that began in the late 1980s. To complete this overview, a school of Oral Literature and a research center dedicated to this area began to function in the mid-1990s at the University of Algarve. Since then, universities, town halls and so on have published many books of folktales and legends, but many versions remain unpublished. Among many other genres, the werewolf legends constitute a body of record still increasing year after year. This paper is the first attempt to make an overall conclusion on the matter.

Diversity and Social Functions of the Werewolf Figure in Portugal The character of the werewolf shares some common traits across different cultural areas, notably its capacity to shape-shift. The name of the supernatural creature, lobisomem (litt. wolfman), is common to the entire Portuguese territory despite the phonetic diversity and many local dialects. Thus, we find labusome, labusomem, labisomen, labisome, lambisome, lubisomem, lubisome, lambusão, lagrisomem, belishomem, and so on. 10 The most famous and influtential Portuguese article about werewolves is Zoófimo Consiglieri Pedroso ‘O Lobisomem’, O Positivismo 3 (1881), 241–256, republished later in a book: Contribuições para uma Mitologia Popular Portuguesa e outros ensaios etnográficos (Lisbon 1988), 183–200.

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In some regions, the creature is known by a different name such as corredor (litt. runner, in the North), or zargão (pop. lazy, in Beira Baixa). Despite the creature’s nomenclature, the Portuguese werewolf is seldom a wolf11 ; as a rule, it is a horse in the northern half of the country and a donkey or dog in the southern half, and could also be a pig,12 a goat, or another animal. The reason for this, in my opinion, is linked to the fact that—excepting the dog—these animals have hoofs,13 a motif that betrays the devil’s disguises in many legendary materials.14 Another possible commonality is that they are all domestic animals. It may be for this reason that the wolf, as it is a wild animal, appears rarely. What is the function of those legends in Portuguese society and what lies underneath the surface of their supernatural narratives? As we know, many supernatural legends are warnings against dangers lurking in everyday life, using fantastic creatures generally demonized by the Church. Nevertheless, under the mask of Catholic ideology, those stories express real problems, like social tensions within a community or the necessity to draw a line between right and wrong by classifying—often with metaphors—the perception of the world within a specific culture. Maintaining the social order within small rural communities is another need of people who share such narratives. Many accounts tell us about suspicions that someone is a werewolf; the ‘truth’ criteria to reinforce those accusations was often the vox populi (many people having the same verdict) and/or proof obtained by doing something to the creature in 11 Only five versions in our corpus mention a wolf: three in the Algarve, two in the North. 12 In Brazil, the pig werewolf is more common than in Portugal (it is only popular in the Azores). 13 This key characteristic is reinforced by other animals used, like the sheep, the goat and the pig. Other chosen animals like the cat, hen or duck seems more likely to be a cross-contamination of witch legends. The duck werewolf exists only in Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain in Central Portugal, and this kind of creature specialized in stealing water to irrigate agricultural fields. 14 This fact is explained by a dichotomy in Christian ideology: according to the Catholic doctrine, the world is divided into two realms, one governed by God and the other by the devil. The werewolf, as with other supernatural creatures like witches, is then considered to be inspired by the devil, and in some cases even as an allly of the devil. This way of thinking is also present in the other choice—the dog—since this animal is a popular substitute for the devil, especially if it is black. That said, it is also true that the oral tradition does not place much emphasis on the diabolic nature of the Portuguese werewolf. On the contrary: often people considered them ‘poor creatures’.

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animal shape and then observing the consequences in a human person. The stigmatization of some specific person inside the community seems to derive from the need to mark out deviant people. We cannot forget that the traditional societies are conservative, with a tendency to maintain the core of society within the official social order. Since the most important beliefs are those expressed by the Catholic doctrine, the most efficient way to ostracize a person is to accuse them of being a supernatural creature, since Christianity considers all those creatures to belong to the realm of evil. Although it looks oversimplified, this dichotomy of good and evil is, in people’s minds, one of the best ways to maintain the social order among the ‘good people’, or those who follow the ‘good percepts’ of the Catholic faith. Of course, problems with neighbors or even with relatives are also reflected in these stigmas. Once a person is identified as the ‘outlaw’, the next step is to put a story about them into circulation. These stories are made more effective through their use of traditional beliefs in the supernatural in the form of traditional narratives, following simple plots in order to ensure everyone in the community can understand and identify with them. To reinforce those narratives, the narrators tell them as true stories and assume the role of eyewitnesses or even judges of the deeds described. In addition, the need of communities to find an internal enemy to strengthen their cohesion and provide a culprit for their misfortunes must be taken into account. Last but not least, there is an underlying impulse to reintegrate hybrid creatures in the natural social order.

Werewolf Legends in Memorate Form In Portuguese folk legends, the role of the witch is structurally attributed to women and that of the werewolf to men.15 As the Catholic doctrine implies misogyny, witches are seen as more dangerous than werewolves. With few exceptions, the latter are not dangerous in Portuguese tradition, and are even considered to be worthy of commiseration. To be a werewolf is primarily considered a birthmark, something that the victim cannot change, or a relentless destiny. The first thing described in the majority of narratives is the precise cause of this fate, usually centered 15 The homology between these two supernatural creatures begins in their origins, because, as with the werewolf, a witch is the seventh daughter in an uninterrupted group of sisters.

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on the well-known belief that the seventh son in a line of brothers with no sisters is a werewolf16 as well as the corresponding countermeasures (his elder brother must be his godfather; he must be baptized with a special name: e.g. Adam, Geronimo). The baptism is of course the child’s entrance into the Christian world, and is believed to be the best way to protect someone from evil. This is the reason why babies are at the mercy of the supernatural until their baptism occurs. However, if this ritual is not properly done, the life of the person could be affected in the future.17 In short, the baptism gives a spiritual and social identity and prevents the body from being occupied by evil spirits. Therefore, in this sense, to be a werewolf is to be a body without or with an unwanted soul, belonging to the realm of the Other, an animal, not a human. Furthermore, the symbolic number seven may have something to do with the number of days in the week. As the week closes the circle at the seventh day, a brotherhood also wishes symbolically to close the circle of baby boys’ births. I suggest that this could be a sign that traditional communities have somehow incorporated their perception of the imbalances in nature and society into these narratives, which must be corrected, even symbolically. It is not normal to birth only boys, or indeed only girls. By this logic, the werewolf or the witch could be a warning of an anomaly in that family. Someone could also become a werewolf if he was born from illicit sexual intercourse between a godfather and his goddaughter or between a godmother and her godson.18 Those sexual relations were considered incestuous, as were those between compadre and comadre.19

16 This cause of werewolfery is the most common throughout Portuguese territory, albeit sometimes omitted in the narratives. Nevertheless, some legends mention different numbers: the second son in the Center; the sixth, the ninth or the eleventh son in the Algarve; the eighth or thirteenth son in the Azores. A very in depth study of this matter is given by Francisco Vaz da Silva in his article ‘Iberian Seventh-Born Children, Werewolves, and the Dragon Slayer’, Folklore 114 (2003), 335–353. 17 In Brazil, babies are baptized for fear they will be changed into werewolves on Friday during Lent (and from then on, every Friday). 18 See: Consiglieri Pedroso, “O Lobisomem”, in: Contribuições para uma Mitologia…,

186. 19 The compadre relationship between the parents and godparents of a child is an important bond that originates when a child is baptized in Iberian culture.

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Finally, someone could become a werewolf because of witchcraft or an unkept promise.20 Those beliefs are stronger in the northern regions.21 Once the cause of the curse is stated, the narratives generally depict the nocturnal life of the creature, starting with his metamorphosis into an animal and ending with his return to human shape. The first concern of the story is to describe the different means of transformation and the various animals that emerge in substitution of the human person. Although fate is the primary cause of someone’s capacity to become a werewolf, there are specific triggers for this potentiality to take effect. Among them is the influence of the full moon,22 or contact with a place where an animal would usually wallow (espojar-se). The metamorphosis also occurs in a specific time and place: on certain days of the week,23 at midnight and at a crossroads. If the full moon motif seems to recall ancient beliefs in astrology, the transformation of a man into an animal, mediated by a ‘contaminated’ spot, seems to point to a continuity between the realms of humans and animals, or, at least, to the possibility of a human freeing his ‘inside animal’, or his ‘true nature’ in a symbolic way. This aspect leads us to think of these shapeshifters as creatures with a double nature, and therefore with a double life. This implies that these legends could also be a warning that things are not always what they seem to be at first sight, and that one must pursue the ‘truth’ in the dark side of things. This explains the importance of the night in these stories, where the most important event is the encounter between a ‘normal’ human and a ‘double-sided’ human. This encounter, like other subjects in legends, 20 See: Leite de Vasconcellos, Tradições Populares de Portugal (Lisbon [1984]), 298. 21 Ernest Jones, in On the Nightmare (N.Y. 1971), summarizes: ‘The popular idea

about the reasons why anyone became a werewolf (…) is the belief that such transformation can come about in two quite different ways according as the person in question brought it about voluntarily or was forced into it against his will. In the latter contingency, there were three causes: Fate, magic and sin; with the first two of these it was his misfortune, with the third his fault’ (Chapter 5, 138–139). 22 The full moon seems to be the main motif in Portugal pointed to as the direct trigger of periodic werewolf metamorphosis. I do not exclude the possibility this motif came from the film industry, or even from comic books, which more than television or movie theatre provide daily entertainment among the common people, but there is no proof of this correlation either. 23 There are hardly any mentions of metamorphosis during the weekend. Apart from that, the specific days change a lot. In the northern half of the country, the most commonly cited day is Tuesday and in the southern half Friday. Wednesday only appears in the center.

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implies an order in the passage between this world and the ‘other’ world. That is why they occur in an appropriated liminal time–space, where one thing is no more and the other is not yet, like the day at midnight and the road at a crossroads. The process of shape shifting, then, accompanies a change of the creature’s nature. The dehumanization occurs when, finally, the human removes his clothes.24 Cultural artefacts par excellence, they symbolically represent the human side of man, because animals do not wear dresses.25 Finally, when the man is naked, the metamorphosis happens.26 Then he must run, in a very small amount of time,27 through seven parishes, castled villages or crossroads.28 This activity, associated with a specific animal (the horse)29 may symbolize some unusual sexual performance, such as arriving at climax seven times. Some stories tell of the sparks made by horseshoes and the noise of the cavalcade.30 This cluster of imagery is particularly common in the north of Portugal.

24 In the north of Portugal, the werewolf hangs his clothes in the tallest tree available. This ancient motif (remnant of the Celtic tree cult?) is mentioned as an Arcadian tradition by Pliny the Elder: someone “hangs his clothes on an oak tree, swims across a marsh and is transformed into a wolf for nine years; then he swims back, resumes his shape, and gets back the same clothes”. Apud Vaz da Silva, op. cit. 345. Italics mine. 25 This fact is interesting, because in different werewolf traditions the process is quite the opposite: the human changes into an animal wearing his skin. 26 There is little information about the age of the fated man when the first metamorphosis occurs, but the ethnographer Adolfo Coelho says that ‘certain versions’ tell that it is 13 years old, or, in other words, the beginning of adolescence, when sexual drive began to appear. See: Vasconcellos, op. cit. p. 298. 27 Often one hour; seldom five minutes or even one. This motif explains why people say that a werewolf must run his fate. Moreover, the reason why the werewolf is called sometimes ‘corredor’ (runner). 28 Of course, here those places are all from the realm of the sacred, or at least human. Why, then are those places necessary steps in the werewolf’s run? The answer is simple: the division is not spatial but temporal, and the night is the absolute realm of supernatural creatures. Many legends stated this fact and its corollary: human beings must stay at home at night. This is another effective way to maintain order in the human community. 29 In Portuguese slang, garanhão (stallion) means an exceptional sexual performer. 30 All these hints: noises, cavalcade, castled village (=a well-guarded girl) denote the

metaphor of sexual activity.

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Then a human, often the narrator himself, enters the scene and the narrative reaches its core motif: the encounter between a man31 and a werewolf. This episode is sometimes the most frightening but also the most important, because it includes the countermeasures that will free the creature from is fate, and/or the marking that will identify the werewolf in its human shape. As I said above, taking off of human clothes is crucial to the metamorphosis. However, one of the possible countermeasures is to destroy the werewolf’s clothes by fire, often in a special place like a bread oven.32 In the region of Lisbon it is only necessary to turn the clothes inside out. There is an element of sympathetic magic in this ritual. The clothes represents the werewolf because they were in contact with his body. Acting on them has immediate results on the creature: to destroy the clothes is to destroy the werewolf. Below is a full version of a memorate including the oven motif: This story was told at my parents’ house, my mother used to tell it. In a certain place, a family had a son. The mother felt great disgust at what was happening with him: on Friday nights (it seems that it was Tuesday and Friday), he left home and only returned at dawn. People began to say that the son of the woman was a werewolf. She, poor dear, felt great disgust and then she was taught a cure for her son. However, she had to do it carefully, because it was like this: she had to light the oven the day he left. She already knew the day he was going out at night. She heated the oven and he, in a certain spot, took his clothes off to become a werewolf. He undressed and his mother or his father, working with somebody; they ought to be close enough to reach for the clothes. But they had to do it very fast close all the doors and windows, and lock the house up as tightly as possible. Then they must throw his clothes into the oven that she had already heated. Automatically the virtue he had, the one of turning into a werewolf, was broken. When they burned his clothes they burned him, they destroyed his virtue. Then what happened? He returned furiously, in madness, because they took away his power. He came back furiously, howling, and kicked all the doors and windows. If they were not well locked, he would kill whoever was inside. He devoured everything he saw

31 Sometimes it is a woman, notably in The Werewolf Husband legend. 32 Apart from the symbolic action of purification by fire, the oven is more efficient

because there is some sacred power coming from the fact that bread is baked there, and bread is “the body of Christ”. Note that the countermeasure of burning the clothes is parallel to that of burning the wolf skin in other traditions.

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in front of him. People say that’s what the parents did, and thank God the son got well.33

In this kind of story, we find the motif of home as a protective human space, opposed to the wild where supernatural creatures wander. Beyond its functional role in the story, home is also a symbol of the most ‘sacred’ element of society: the family. It is the best metaphor to show the right side of things, especially in the night when the contrast becomes more sharp. In all those stories, the characters move far from home and into the darkness.34 The other way to cause the werewolf’s disenchantment is to hit him with a sharp iron object,35 hard enough to provoke bloodshed. On one hand, tradition says iron is a good weapon against supernatural creatures.36 On the other hand, Galenic medicine (which survived as official medicine until the eighteenth century, and is still present in popular medicine) used bloodshed to cure many diseases. This is probably the reason why this practice is used as a countermeasure, because it is believed that it is necessary to cast away the evil (the animal spirit) that is supposed to be in the werewolf’s blood. In some versions, the creature’s blood is also feared because contamination could occur, and then the person would inherit the werewolf’s fate. Below is a full version including the prick with iron motif: In ancient times, large families were usual, since mortality was high and the arms [to work] were few for the size of the land. However, it was believed that if a couple had seven boys, one of them would be a werewolf. Alternatively, if a couple had seven girls, one of them would be a witch. The werewolf is a man who, during the day, is a normal person, but has a fate: every Friday night he has to run through seven places in the parish 33 Told by Armandina da Conceição Carvalho, 63 y.o., in Portimão, in 27/04/2008; CEAO folk archive, University of the Algarve; collected by Catarina Nascimento in 2008. 34 Curiously, some informants say that nowadays werewolves have ceased to exist

because of electric light. 35 For that purpose, the most used device in the northern half of the country is the aguilhão, an instrument used to sting the oxen to make them walk when they pull agriculture carts. In the south, the knife is the more used object and in the Azores the needle (or holy water). 36 We can find this motif abundantly in witch legends.

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(Amoreira Fundeira, Amoreira Cimeira, Ribeiro, Folgares, Padrão, Trinhão and Indioso) with the rattles of all the animals in the villages making noise. The next day, he wakes up all “crushed” without remembering anything, and if there is no one to take that curse away from him, he walks all his life through the mentioned seven places. Our great-grandparents used to say that there were once seven brothers in Amoreira and that one of them was a werewolf. Every Friday the sound of rattling cut through the quiet of the night, breaking through the sidewalks and paths. The dogs barked loudly when they passed, and no one had the courage to go out on the street during those nights, as it was said that the creature beat those who crossed its path ferociously. One of those nights, someone more courageous decided to put an end to that fate. As he knew that the werewolf always passed under the walkway (close to where the square is today) every Friday, he decided to wait there for him, in the darkness, armed with a sting for oxen because, it was said, it was the only way to end the spell. It was already late at night when, at a certain time, he heard the hellish noise of rattles, accompanied by the furious barking of dogs. Shortly after, the man saw the shape of the werewolf. As he prepared to pass under the bridge, the man suddenly pricked him with the sting. From that point on, the fated person lived every Friday night as a normal person and was always very much grateful to the brave man who put an end to that fate of his.37

Besides this, the moment of disenchantment is also considered dangerous because if the countermeasures fail (the bloodshed does not happen or the werewolf enters his home before his clothes are destroyed), the werewolf could kill the person trying to release them. Another precaution stated in the stories is not to gore the creature in the eyes; otherwise, the disenchanted werewolf will go blind. Another motif present in many versions is the goal of the human to mark the creature when he is in animal shape, for example hitting a leg or cutting a paw, and then looking out for the results when the werewolf turns back into a human. This is a means of proving someone is a genuine werewolf, which reinforces the stigma, because the sign will be visible to the entire community. Sometimes it is not even necessary to tell a story to mark someone with the reputation of a werewolf: the suspicious person 37 Told by António Amaro Rosa, in Portela Do Fojo, Pampilhosa da Serra, Coimbra, s.d.; source: Pampilhosa da Serra - Crendices, cultura e tradição, http://tradicao.com. sapo.pt/contos.htm (5-6-2020).

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just needs to show some strange physiognomy or behavior, such as to always be sad, pale or lean, to have hairy hands or to make noises similar to howls.38 Having a good reputation is important for acquiring social prestige in a small community, so the reputation of being a werewolf is somewhat tragic for the victim. That is why there is a cat-and-mouse game between concealing and disclosing the secret life of a werewolf. In some cases, the stigma of being a werewolf acquires the function of a nickname, or even family name, or remains as a place name (see below).

Some Specific Memorates a. The werewolf’s belt or handkerchief Legends with this motif are only known in the south of Portugal: four versions are recorded in Lisbon and the Tejo valley, five versions in Alentejo and four versions in Algarve—thirteen versions in all. The object is a common belt or handkerchief, never an enchanted one which might trigger the transformation. Its function in the story is always to denounce some man in the community as a werewolf. In those narratives, it is the human who usually rides the werewolf, but in some versions there is a contamination of the back-rider motif, and then it is the human who carries the animal, as in the following example: In a land in the county of Beja, there was a werewolf, who usually changed into a goat. One night, when the werewolf took the animal shape, a man passed by and found him. As soon as he saw the goat, he said, “I’ll take you home.” He took off his belt and put it around the goat’s legs so he could carry it on his back. The man began to walk with the goat on his back, but it started to weigh more. Not able to stand the weight, he pulled the goat off his back to see what was going on. The goat, very quickly, gave him a good kick and ran. The next day the man was in his place of work and a young man from the village, who had a reputation of being a werewolf, passed by. To his

38 Very rare but interesting signs are the following: born with teeth, crying in her mother’s womb.

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surprise, that boy had around his waist the same belt with which the man had tied the goat.39

b. The back-rider This story is considered here only because, in the south of Portugal, there are some versions where the creature is identified as being a werewolf, and in Alentejo the story is contaminated by the motif of the werewolf’s belt (see the full version above). Otherwise, in the central and northern regions, a heavy creature in animal form (goat or ram) is always identified as the devil, not a werewolf. In any case, the creature jumps onto a man’s back; it is the man who, greedily, catches the animal and puts it over his shoulders. Then the animal shows signs of being a supernatural creature: it increases its weight, talks, laughs or urinates over the man. c. The nocturnal pursuit These kinds of legends tend to be expressed as the memories of a third person, or as narratives of someone’s experiences. Here, the supposed werewolf (a dog or a donkey) follows a human until he reaches his home. I have identified such stories only in the south of Portugal40 (nine versions), and some of them mention that this ‘werewolf’ is a kind of guardian angel. The following fragments were taken from a long interview: […] They didn’t hurt anyone, they simply accompanied people in the dark or argued among werewolves […] They didn’t hurt people. They simply protected people. […] Werewolves… I know stories of them always

39 Told by Isilda Bárbara Palma, 81 y.o., in Castro Verde, Beja. December 2004; CEAO folk archive, University of the Algarve; collected by Vera Lúcia Efigénia Cabrita in 2004. 40 Curiously, there are similar versions to those found in the French Alps. See Charles

Joisten, Êtres Fantastiques: Patrimoine Narratif de L’Isère (Grenoble 2005), 490, and, by the same author, Êtres Fantastiques: Patrimoine Narratif des Hautes-Alpes (Grenoble 2006), 152–153. In this region, werewolves are disenchanted by giving them food, particularly bread or milk. See also Chapter 11 of the present volume.

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meeting people in the same place and taking the person home.41 […] And they transformed and didn’t realize it. […]42

In another version: I heard in my childhood that once a boy went every night for a date with his girlfriend, and a dog used to accompany him. Whether it was a dark or clear night, the dog accompanied him, but during the day he could not be seen anywhere. Then people began to say, “Look, the dog could be a werewolf”. After hearing so much that his dog was a werewolf, the boy picked up a knife and, at night, cut off the werewolf’s tail. The next day he saw a man of his acquaintance with his fingers cut off. People said this man was the werewolf.43

d. Invisible or ghostly werewolves Some stories in the centre of Portugal relate that this creature is invisible; people can only hear his noises. (…) They were wandering around those streets and making noise. The people who were at home heard that noise, but when they came out, they did not see anything. They had no power to see.(…).44

The noises were, in many narrations, kicks at the doors in houses that kept the lights on inside, because that kind of werewolf did not like light. In spite of their invisibility, the sparks made by their horseshoes are sometimes said to be visible and go along with the loud noise in the 41 In one of Joisten’s versions it is said that ‘They wandered in that form [wolves] by paths and forests and every time they met passers-by they walked beside them without do them any harm. ‘Joisten, Êtres Fantastiques (…) des Hautes-Alpes, 152. 42 Told by Ivone do Rosário Correia, 65 y.o, in Moncarapacho, Olhão, Faro, at 7 November 2010; CEAO folk archive, University of the Algarve; collected by Laura Patrícia Oliveira Valério in 2010. 43 Told by Zulmira Patrocínio Martins, 74 y.o., in Vila Nova de Cacela, VRSA, Faro, in 7 January, 2010; CEAO folk archive, University of the Algarve, collected by Nuno João Gonçalves de Jesus. 44 Told by José Garcia in Alvôco das Várzeas, Coimbra, in 09-09-2008; http://www. aldeiasdememoria.com/media/pardieiros/pr-02/doc/pr-02-livro.pdf, pp. 20–21.

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lonely streets. In those stories, we have a contamination of ghost legends, which in the Portuguese tradition appear as wandering souls who could not enter Heaven, but in werewolf narratives the supernatural creature is not dead. The fear the werewolf will kick down the door and enter the home is another way to reinforce the need to properly lock the doors at night. e. Cannibalistic werewolves Anthropophagy linked to werewolfery is rare in Portugal. However, there are three versions from the center of Portugal where it is said that the werewolf must eat ‘seven living hearts’; in one of these versions, the heart of his own son. Besides these versions, there is also a unique and strange version from the north of Portugal that shows a case of necrophagy: People say that an atheist man said every day of his life that when he died he wanted to be thrown to the wolves. When he finally died and was buried in the cemetery, every day his grave was found open. The population closed it and the next day the story repeated. Intrigued, some men decided to hide to see what was going on. Astonished, they saw a werewolf jump over a wall, open the grave and eat some of the atheist man’s remains. The story only ended the day the animal ate the body completely.45

The Three White Caps In Portugal, we also find five versions of the folk tale type ATU 327B The Brothers and the Ogre, where the ogre is replaced by a werewolf. Although we are no longer in the realm of legends but of folktales, which are pure fiction, we cannot forget the allusion to the social reality of mistreated children by hunger and by bad people. Again, the werewolf is represented as a cannibalistic ogre, who devours children. The following full version has an ending surely contaminated by legends.

45 Collected by Suzana Guerra Campos in Vilarelho da Raia, Chaves, 2000; Literatura Portuguesa de Tradição Oral, Projecto Vercial – University of Trás -os-Montes e Alto Douro, 2003, CD Rom, CF8.

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It is said that three boys, brothers, who were hungry at home, decided to travel around the world in search of a place of abundance. They walked from one place to another until nightfall caught them out, lost, in the middle of a forest. When they no longer knew what to do, they saw in the distance a light in an isolated house, and went there to ask for food and a place to sleep. A woman attended them, and she had three small children like them. Filled with pity, she welcomed the three boys as she could, fed them and then laid them down in bed, together with their children. Meanwhile, the husband, who was a werewolf, had gone out to run his fate. The woman was afraid that when he returned he would not recognise the children and would hurt some of them. Then she put three white caps on her own children’s heads to be able to distinguish them in the dark. The werewolf arrived late, and soon smelled strange flesh inside the house. His instinct took him to the children’s room and, seeing three of them with caps and three without them, he did not hesitate to eat those who did not have them. Then he went to sleep. At dawn, when the woman went to the bedroom to wake the children, she saw that only three were there. Soon she discovered that her husband had eaten the others. Worse than that, she also saw that the three boys who had the caps on their heads were not her children but the others, because they had swapped them during the night. The werewolf had therefore eaten his own children. When the woman noticed the exchange, she started screaming around the house, and the three brothers took the opportunity to flee from there, going into the woods again. The man, who was woken up by the woman’s screams, was desperate to learn what he had done to his children and ran after the three boys in order to take revenge on them. The boys ran and ran all day, and, late at night, already tired, went to knock at the house of a woodcutter. When he saw them still with the white caps on their heads and shaking with fear, he took pity on them and welcomed them. “Help us, please, because a bad man is behind us coming to kill us!” they said. “A bad man?!” exclaimed the woodcutter. “Well then, let him come and I will bump him!” The woodcutter sat the boys by the fireplace and fed them. At midnight, when he was trying to find a place for them to sleep, he heard strange roars at the door, which, once again, made the boys tremble with fear. “Don’t be afraid! I’m going to see what it is” said the woodcutter, and went towards the door with an axe in his hands. When he opened the door, the werewolf jumped on him, ready to kill him and the boys, but he did not succeed. The woodcutter hit him with the axe, wounding him. Upon falling to the ground, the werewolf transformed himself into a person and returned to looking like the father of the three children he himself had devoured. The woodcutter’s blow caused the

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end of the werewolf’s fate for good. He became a normal man, bearing, however, the bitterness of having lost his children. As for the lost boys, the woodcutter took them to his parents’ house and promised to help them so that they would not be hungry again.46

f. The witches—werewolves companionship In the Portuguese oral tradition, witches and werewolves appear in different legends, although they share some common motifs. However, there are some residual versions which include the two characters in the same narrative. In such stories, sometimes the werewolf carries the witch on his back; sometimes they dance together at the crossroads. As both are symbolically outlaws, their actions may denote a kind of forbidden sexual activity, performed outside marriage and even outside the home, in the wild. The following story is an example of this: A person, who lives on a street that is part of a square with seven streets, says that her grandmother told her that on Tuesdays and Fridays, witches and werewolves went to that square after midnight. It was there that they danced around, sang and even began to fight, because the werewolves transformed themselves into dogs, donkeys, various animals and the witches did the same. The next day people knew who they were, because they showed up in each other’s clothes […].47

At the end of their narrations, people used to stress their belief in werewolves, albeit sometimes with some skepticism, independently of the disenchantment (or not) of the supernatural creature. When asked, some informers tell also about their feelings during the experience, notably fear. g. The werewolf as a woman It is very rare to find someone telling a story of a female shapeshifter in Portugal, as, normally women were cursed to be peeiras or witches.

46 Told by Maria Emilia Mota Moreia, 77 years old, in Sabrosa, Vila Real, 1990; Source: Alexandre Parafita, Antologia de Contos Populares, 1 (Lisbon 2001), 198–199. 47 Told by Maria Odília Rodrigues, 67 y.o., in Tavira, Faro, in 23 January 2008; CEAO folk archive, University of the Algarve; collected by Ana Isabel Afonso.

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The very few werewolf legends with a female protagonist are formally witch stories or strange unique narratives, without more versions in oral tradition. I think witches and werewolves are specular creatures divided by gender. As with the werewolf, a witch is a cursed by being born the seventh girl in a sisterhood, leaves home at night on certain days of the week, sometimes flies,48 passes the crossroads, and is also susceptible to shedding her curse through similar countermeasures. Therefore, in a society that only recognizes two genders, the male/female stereotypes are also reflected in the werewolf/witch division.49 h. Anthroponymical and toponymical legends It is well known that legends tend to be linked to places, particularly if they are local legends. In the case of werewolf legends, we find this characteristic at two levels: anthroponymical and toponymical, both normally in memorate form. The former type gives legitimacy to the nickname Lobisomem, when used as a surname and to stigmatize some men. Practically all the recorded occurrences of this type are found in Algarve, because the inquiries made there were more specific. Below is the story of a fisherman who fished for tuna in Tavira, in the east side of Algarve: It happened to a neighbour: he was eighteen years old, went to the sea and found a tiny little goat. He took the little goat and took it to his crewmates. Then he walked, walked and the animal grew until it reached a big height: “So, you were so small and now you are so big?” The paws were already on the ground. “So look, there it is!” It stayed in the middle of the path. The goat later became a dog and the dog followed him to the end of the harbor, where the boat was about to go to sea. Later, he was going to get on the boat, he saw the dog turn into a man, a man who was a very close to him, and who had passed away recently. They really were close friends. That is when he learned that

48 These homologies are interesting: while werewolves run, witches fly. A very visual metaphor of displaying different ways to perform one’s sexuality. 49 In the Scandinavian tradition, this division is between werewolf and nightmare. See John Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales (Berkeley 1978), 176. But, as Lindow says ‘the line between nightmare and witch is not always clearly defined’, 181–182. Note of the editor: cf. the Frisian tradition in which one of seven girls is a nightmare, not a witch, see Chapter 13.

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his friend was a werewolf. The next day, they told the family of the man. Later, the family cut him in the face and broke his fate. He did not hurt him, because when he turned into a dog and then into a man, the man was naked. The man’s name was Joaquim Lobisomem. Was known by Joaquim Lobisomem because he had been a werewolf.50

Another one from Portimão, on the west side of Algarve: In Ribeiro do Pereiro there was a man named João Estrudes who had the nickname of João do Serro and the people also called him João Lobisome. The man always had the reputation of being a werewolf. Some people even said that he had bewitched my father, because he was the same age as my father, they performed military service together (…).51

Finally, we have records of a street on the island of Armona, opposite Olhão, that holds the name of the first inhabitant of the island—Manuel Lobisomem—another man who had the reputation of being a werewolf. In this case, we have an anthroponym linked to a toponym. However, it is in the North region that we find more toponymical references. The fist of them even has a toponymical plate in Caminha, near the border with Galicia. In Cambra de Baixo (Vouzela) people named a local cave as the Werewolf’s Cave.

50 Told by Maria Odília Rodrigues, 67 y.o., in Tavira, on 23 January 2008; CEAO folk archive, University of the Algarve, collected by Ana Isabel Afonso in 2008. 51 Told by António Branco, b. 1929 in Ribeiro do Pereiro, Mexilhoeira Grande, Portimão; Margarida Tengarrinha, Da Memória do Povo (Lisbon 1999), 36–37.

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Toponymic plate: Werewolf’s Cave This place has a legend associated with it, as described below: The Cova do Lobisomem (Werewolf’s Cave) is a prehistoric cave, located in the village of Cambra de Baixo in the parish of Cambra, on the right bank of the Alfusqueiro River. About this cave, there is a legend: people said there was a ghost that stayed on the riverbank during the day and at night ran through seven parishes.52

The mention of the night run through seven parishes is a common feature in werewolf legends. The most unusual thing is the fact that this supernatural creature is described as a ghost. However, this motif can also be traced in some stories related to invisible noisy werewolves, as we have seen before. In Tabuaço (Viseu) there is also a frightening crevice that the villagers are afraid to visit: The Fraga do Lebisomem (Werewolf’s Cliff) is at the end of Tabuaço, when one leaves the village and goes towards Fradinho, in front of the farm of Saínça. It is an inaccessible place. This cliff has a huge crevice in the middle that everybody fears. Why do people call it Fraga do Lebisomem? Because on one occasion this is more than 150 years ago - a very strange man appeared here, and 52 Collected by Andreia Pinto in Cambra de Baixo, Vouzela, Viseu; Julio Cruz, Lendas Lafonenses, (Vouzela, Clube de Ambiente e Património da Escola Secundária de Vouzela/ ADRL, 1998), 29.

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only walked at night. Then someone saw him go down below, but when he reached that cliff, he disappeared. No one else saw him again. It was, therefore, within that cliff that he stayed overnight. (...) Therefore, he could only have a pact with the devil. That is why it was given the spot the name Fraga do Lobisomem.53

Werewolf Legends in Fabulate Form In Portugal, the only werewolf fabulate legend in circulation is ML 4005, The Werewolf Husband. At present, we have in the archive the following number of versions: five from the North; eleven from the Center; three from Lisbon and the Tagus Valley; three from Alentejo; seven from Algarve and three from the Azores, in total thirty-three versions. Below is one full version: A beautiful girl married a man who was a werewolf. Every Wednesday, at midnight, he left. One day the woman, wanting to know what the man was going to do, went to follow him. She wore a red skirt. The man came to a crossroads, undressed, stiffened and became a horse. The woman, who had observed everything, climbed up a wall. The running horse snapped at her skirt with his teeth. When the husband arrived home, the woman pretended she knew nothing. The next day they went to work and they started joking. He laughed, and the woman saw red thread between his teeth. “You have some thread of my skirt in your teeth!” said the woman, and told him what she had witnessed. Her husband scolded her, because she should never have approached him at such a time. He could have killed her. “But as soon as you ventured to get close to me, you ought to have stung me, as long as it was not in the eyes. You would have lifted the curse from me...”.54

53 Told by José Celestino Machado Moita, 65 y.o., in Tabuaço, Viseu. August 2007; Alexandre Parafita, Património Imaterial do Douro, 1 (Peso da Régua: Fundação Museu do Douro 2007), 206. 54 Collected by Paula Maria Soares de Carvalho, in Gondomar, Viseu; Beatriz Campos et al., Tarouca, Folklore e Linguística (Tarouca: Câmara Municipal de Tarouca 1985), 33–34.

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In this story, the woman is usually the wife of the werewolf, but there are two versions where she is his girlfriend. She never previously knows the true nature of her dear one. The werewolf attack triggers the action: he bites the woman’s red skirt, petticoat or shawl. This piece of clothing is occasionally wrapping a child, the couple’s son, who is sometimes abducted or killed by the werewolf. The shapeshifter appears in the form of a horse (in the north), a dog (in the south) or a pig (in the Azores), or much less frequently as a donkey, a wolf or a goat. Once the danger has passed, the man arrives in human shape and betrays his double nature by showing threads of the fabric between his teeth. In about half of the versions, there is a third moment in the narrative where the werewolf is disenchanted. In other cases, like this one above, he remarks that she could have broken his fate. Sometimes nothing is said or done. In the end, the couple always remains together, despite the discovered secret. Despite the story seeming to display a rape attempt, the Portuguese versions do not have any feature that point to this action as a need of the werewolf to disenchant himself or to go back into human shape, as, for instance, happens in the Danish tradition.55 It seems to be more of a cautionary tale, calling on girls and young wives to note the need to know their fiancées and husbands better. The key question this story raises is a very important one—that of violence and sexual harassment during courtship or even after marriage. Even today, in Portugal, many women silently endure these mistreatments because of the macho cultural tradition. The stories seem to corroborate the cultural and religious traditions of Portuguese society,56 for, in the end, the couple remain together, although the girl’s awareness of the situation is improved.

Final Remarks Belief narratives including werewolves are socio-cultural constructs, and therefore they change as the historical frameworks of societies change. In contemporary Portuguese urban society this supernatural creature has lost the functionality that it had in the recent past, for example in rural 55 See Michèle Simonsen, ‘The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark’, in: Willem de Blécourt (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 228–237. 56 According to the doctrine of Catholic Church, the rite of marriage proclaimed by a priest is indissoluble; because of an agreement with the Vatican, the civil government before 1974 could not give divorce.

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Portugal before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. Nevertheless, it is still possible to gather stories and beliefs relating to werewolves from the memories of older people and to try to complete a complex puzzle, which by nature is fragmentary, full of gaps and subjective. My conviction is that the concept of the werewolf serves to magnify the perception of the Other, the stranger, the outlaw, and the deviant in traditional conservative societies. This cultural construct functions like a GPS, with the purpose of separating the normal from the abnormal, and the natural from the supernatural, serving also as a provider of cautionary tales for the common people, particularly young people. It is not by chance that many people, when questioned, said that they heard those stories from old people when they were children. The transmission of those belief narratives was made principally within the little community of neighbours, friends and relatives. The main characters of the stories are, in general, known people belonging to the community. The stories have, then, a practical function of meddling in people’s daily lives, and I argue that this existing in order to exact social control upon deviance. The process is symbolical enough to keep a potential touchy, or even dangerous, situation hidden. Shameful situations inside the family, like vagrancy, sexual deviance or domestic violence, are serious events in a traditional society and touchy enough to not be handled directly, at the cost of fracturing the community. To be a witch or a werewolf, or to have the devil inside the body, are metaphors used to deal symbolically with deviant behavior in those societies, especially if the stories have the capacity to identify the problem and provide the right solution for it—the countermeasures described above. As a complex symbol, the werewolf has various functions beyond those mentioned above. Sometimes he is the scapegoat of the community, sometimes its guardian angel, and sometimes a poor fellow abandoned by chance. As a part of the legend genre, they are normally linked to reality by a specific cultural bias, in this case the Portuguese rural culture. However, the Portuguese werewolf is only a particular cultural construct of a universal symbol: the belief in the transformation of men into animals. To understand all the pieces of this puzzle, it is necessary to understand many other legend traditions, and to perform comparative studies.

CHAPTER 13

From Type to Cluster: Werewolf Legends in the Netherlands Willem de Blécourt

In my introduction to Werewolf Histories, I have drawn the reader’s attention to clusters of expressions, around the werewolf, without elaborating much further. In the section on local werewolf legends there, I primarily analysed texts from one 1970 collection from the Belgian province of Limburg.1 These texts show the werewolf as a man in diguise, jumping onto people’s backs. Hitting him with a knife revealed the werewolf behind the disguise. As they originated from different informants with different points of view, the Limburg texts also suggested discussions among narrators and public. In the present analysis, I will leave Flemish-speaking Belgium and trace this cluster into the Netherlands. Again, the prominence of the werewolf’s appearance as a so-called backrider (Aufhocker in German) should be emphasized. It was described as a 1 Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf. An Introduction to Cluster Methodology’, in: idem (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 1–24, esp. 13–15.

W. de Blécourt (B) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_13

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creature that jumped on someone’s back and did all kinds of nasty things there. Back-riders came in many names and shapes, but only in some regions, especially in homogenous Catholic ones, did they take on the semblance of the werewolf. Werewolves in the two northern provinces of the Netherlands, on the other hand, were unrelated to back-riders. There the concept of the werewolf as one of seven sons was part of a hypothetical older werewolf culture, even if that culture was diminishing by the time it was recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within the context of the Netherlands, I will thus be comparing northern and southern werewolves, more specifically werewolf clusters, groups of legends and accompanying cautionary notions such as the Bogeyman. This geographical contrast was first and foremost defined by religion. Like all legends, werewolf legends were religious expressions; ‘superstition’ was a religious category, and religion determined the nature of so-called ‘folk-belief’. This does not mean that the content of the legends was derived from the Bible or the works of the church-fathers, but that the legends were encapsulated in the daily religious practice of their narrators and their believers. The advisory role of a priest in the ‘Burned Skin’ legend, for instance, could only appeal to a Catholic population, and represented such a vital part of the legend that the narrative hardly ever crossed into Protestant territory.2 Religion shaped the way people talked about the creature, and how they kept silent about it. In the words of a Protestant farmer in the village of Zwartebroek in the province of Utrecht when asked about the werewolf: ‘When they had seen it, then misfortune would strike the farm. People were afraid of it. It was something like the devil’. A werewolf was a ‘very godless’ person, according to another farmer, a few miles away in Maarn. A woman in ‘s-Gravenland, near Hilversum, had heard people talk about werewolves. She had forgotten the details, but it entailed a lot of evil things; ‘It was in no way Christian’, she concluded.3 Differences within Catholic or Protestant regions, however, indicate that religion was not the only factor that framed and steered the contents of werewolf legends. There were Catholic regions without back-riding

2 ENGELS058; LYST017. 3 Examples taken from: E. Heupers, Volksverhalen uit Gooi- en Eemland en van de

westelijke Veluwe, I, II (Amsterdam 1979, 1981), #1095, 1368, 1853.

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werewolves, which suggests that when it came to tradition, the local experience was more important than religion in and of itself. People in the western parts of North-Brabant, for example, talked about the flodder, a kind of beast which was ascribed similar characteristics to the werewolf, only the flodder was not personalised.4 The populace were not markedly less Catholic there than the people in the east of the province were. Something similar can be argued for Protestant regions, some of which had werewolf legends, such as Frisia (at least the eastern part) and Groningen, and some of which did not, such as most of the province of North-Holland.

Dutch Legend Research As the texts of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century werewolf legends which form the basis of this chapter were generated by legend collecting, it is necessary to take this provenance into account in order to observe the development in approaches to ‘superstitions’ or ‘folk-belief’, to debate the ways of thinking of the folklorists, and to build onto these ways of thinking going forward. In Dutch legend research, several discrete phases can be discerned. From the late nineteenth century to the 1940s individual reports of legends appeared, mostly ordered by or within the context of one of the Dutch provinces. This research was captured in Jacques Sinninghe’s Katalog of 1943, especially in its legend section.5 During those years, Sinninghe was employed by the folklore ‘Bureau’ in Amsterdam (the present-day Meertens Institute), which coordinated folklore research throughout the Netherlands. In Sinninghe’s legend index, between the numbers 801 and 850, eleven type numbers were dedicated to ‘Werwölfe’, but not every number is relevant to this chapter. Some types identified were too similar to existing witchcraft types, or based 4 J.R.W. Sinninghe, ‘Flodder, de west-Brabantse kwelgeest’, Brabants heem 1 (1949), 154–157; idem, Noord-Brabants sagenboek, II (Schiedam 1978), 29–32. Cf. Commentaar Volkskunde-Atlas, I (Amsterdam/Antwerpen 1959), 38 where only the ‘Lodder’ and the ‘flodderduivel’ are mentioned.; Commentaar Volkskunde-Atlas, II (Amsterdam/Antwerpen 1965), 134, where the ‘flodder’ is featured as a warning against water. 5 J.R.W. Sinninghe, Katalog der niederländische Märchen-, Ursprungssagen, Sagen- und Legendenvarianten (Helsinki 1943), 103–105. The Katalog appeared in German, not only because it had to be in a major west European language but also because it was made under German occupation. Cf. Willem de Blécourt, ‘De volksverhalen van J.R.W. Sinninghe’, Vokskundig bulletin 7 (1981), 162–193.

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on too few examples. When such instances are removed, four types of werewolf legend remain: • ‘A werewolf let [a person] carry him’, has eight entries, six from the province of Limburg and two from the province of Gelderland (#801). I consider the ‘Back-rider’ a memorate, especially because of the quantity of attestations to its existence, which is not visible in the Katalog. One of the subsequent types is another Huckauf or back-rider legend from Limburg, with only one entry (#821). • ‘A werewolf is hit and changes back into a human (and is released or dies)’: eight entries, seven from Limburg, one from Gelderland (#822). The hitting with a knife constitutes a reaction to the werewolf’s action, it is often connected to the back-rider motif. • ‘The thorn cloth. A werewolf attacks someone and tears apart a cloth that is thrown at him. Later, as a human, he still has the threads of the cloth between his teeth’. There are nine entries in the Katalog, six from North-Brabant, two from Sealand, and one from Limburg (#823). Internationally this legend is known as the ‘Werewolf Husband’ (ML 4005), as discussed in Chapter 2; as the marriage is invariably called off following the werewolf’s exposure in the Dutch versions, I have renamed it the ‘Werewolf Lover’ in this context. • ‘The burned skin or belt’. There are eight entries for this type, four from North-Brabant, one from Sealand and three from Limburg (#824), which is also known as the card-players legend. I will give an extended description of this type below. These are the four types which Alfons Roeck later recognised in his Ph.D. on the werewolf which was largely based on Flemish material.6 The last two types, especially the ‘Werewolf Lover’, are fabulates or migratory legends. According to the Katalog, the majority of Dutch werewolf legends were found in the provinces of North-Brabant and Limburg, with none found in Holland or the northern provinces of Frisia and 6 F. [=Alfons] Roeck, De Nederlandse weerwolfsage in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw (Leuven, Universiteit van Leuven, unpublished Ph.D. 1967), 291. Catalogued as: De weerwolf in de Nederlandse volkssage van de negentiende en twinigste eeuw. On Roeck, see: Stefaan Top, ‘In memoriam Em. prof. dr. Alfons Roeck’, Volkskunde 116 (2015), 69–72.

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Groningen. In contrast to Roeck, Sinninghe ignored the one German fabulate, the ‘Hungry Farmhand’, in which a werewolf is seen to devour a foal and is confronted about it afterwards by his friend. This legend was occasionally told in the two northern provinces and in Dutch areas bordering on Germany.7 While it can be raised in Sinninghe’s defense that in the 1940s the ‘Hungry Farmhand’ had not yet appeared in the Dutch material, the same cannot be said for the Frisian notion of the werewolf as the seventh son or as one of seven sons. As an inhabitant of NorthBrabant, Sinninghe left the northern provinces to other folklorists, such as Ko ter Laan and Sytse van der Molen. Useful though the types are in organising vast numbers of legend texts, they are still constructs of the researchers, especially when the variants are grouped in ways unimagined by the original narrators. One can object that most werewolf types were still about werewolves, but that would presume werewolves to be the same everywhere. Even within the Netherlands, they were not. Was there then a kind of unity of werewolf images in different localities? In other words, is it possible to proceed beyond the concept of types and to discern clusters that may more effectively illustrate local concerns? The second phase of the research would provide the beginning of an answer to that question. From 1934 to the 1950s, this second phase was carried out through folklore questionnaires, which were issued by the ‘Bureau’ and which had the explicit purpose of being turned into maps for the folklore atlas. They were sent to people who were expected be especially knowledgeable regarding events and beliefs in their villages, such as school teachers. Although it yielded the occasional fabulate, this material is especially important to obtain a view of the memorates, the daily-life notions of, in this case, the werewolf. Responses were again fragmented and, although the respondents seem to have been generally sincere, they only provided more relevant comments some of the time. It can only be suspected that these texts sometimes represented elements of a larger indigenous construct. However, the questionaires did record some of the constitutive elements of such constructs. At the time, it was accepted opinion that, when it came to subjects as werewolves and witches, the respondents could be reticent in order to protect the good name of their

7 Gottfried Henßen, Überlieferung und Persönlichkeit. Die Erzählungen und Lieder des Egbert Gerrits (Münster 1951), 166, recorded in 1935.

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village, and that salient details would only emerge from oral research if it was carried out for a long period of time in the same place.8 Nevertheless, during the third phase in the 1960s and 1970s direct oral interviews were held in imitation of Flemish Belgium, where students had been delegated to collect legends in designated parts of the country since the 1940s. In the Netherlands, folklore lacked academic status and the ‘Bureau’ had to resort to volunteers, who worked for much longer and generally across larger areas than their Flemish counterparts. Earlier objections crumbled under the mass of material that these students, who were assigned their regions because of former contacts there, brought back. In my view, the argument of reticent informants was still valid, and the Dutch did not get every interviewee to talk freely and openly any more than the Flemish had. What interviewers did stumble across was the concept of the verb ‘to werewolf’, weerwolven, or ‘to be able to werewolf’, thus framing it as an activity. In my view this takes the werewolf concept beyond mere sigmatization, as the werewolf himself acquires agency. As the collector Dinnissen, a former headmaster in Gendt, north of Nijmegen, remarked, ‘people still use the verb weerwolve. For instance, when someone goes out late, it is said: “Are you going out to werewolf again”. Or in answer to the question of where someone had been: “Oh, I was busy werewolfing”’. Dinnissen did not think the word had any specific meaning other than perhaps, ‘mind your own business’.9 He was a little naive, and the question remains as to what kind of activity was meant. These phases appear as symptom of a developing sophistication in the Dutch approach to legends and folklore research, although it never reached the stage where the legend telling and the exchange between narrators, or between narrators and public were analysed, or where the role of the researcher was discussed. The oral interviews were primarily a kind of oral history rather than a record of the present situation. As there were no case studies carried out into particular legend figures either, this development was hampered and certainly not formulated to overcome the earlier objections to field work. This history is nonetheless important, as it reveals the assumptions behind the research. Here, my attention is not so much on the speculations made about the pre-Christian ancestry of the werewolf, as it is on those regarding what constituted a legend.

8 P.J. Meertens, in: Commentaar Volkskunde-Atlas, I, 9. 9 M.H. Dinnissen, Volksverhalen uit Gendt (Amsterdam 1993), 100, comment to #255.

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As an outsider’s concept, the legend often had to be explained and separated from the ‘superstition’ that people thought would give them or their community a bad name. In this contribution, I will therefore be in search of werewolf clusters, which would better represent an insider’s approach, although the negative connotations of the werewolf are hard to avoid. A legend cluster can be described as the combination of different characteristics and narratives about a particular legend figure within a particular place and time. Ideally, it should include points of discussion or debate. Sometimes these characteristics are clearly related: for example, that one can only defend oneself against a werewolf if one has been attacked first. This implies that a cluster is formulated on the level of a memorate, within daily practice. The fabulate may have been told in the same locality, but is a less intrinsic part of the cluster, although it can still be considered as connected to it, especially if it is told by the same narrator who related the more practical elements. The distinction between two types of legends, the fabulate and the memorate, represents my approach to the Dutch material. The memorate, omitted by some folklorists from legend analysis, thus becomes the most important element of the legend. It trancends narrative research and is more closely linked to historical research. In other words: I consider the back-rider not just as a story, but as referring to an action, complete with counter-action.

Werewolves in the Northern Provinces In the second instalment of his Frysk Sêgeboek, published in 1940, Frisian folklorist and newspaper editor S.J. van der Molen included one brief text on werewolves.10 It contained the notion that they were seen as seventh sons. As mentioned above, Sinninghe did not deem this concept important enough to list in his Katalog, although it was one of the major characteristics of the northern werewolves. The idea had also been noticed by Waling Dykstra, who added a remark about the dual nature of the creature. In his view, it was someone who was both bricklayer and carpenter at the same time.11 10 S.J. van der Molen, Frysk sêgeboek, II (Assen 1940) 190: ‘Under saun broerren is ien in wjerwolf’, from H.G. v.d. Veen, De bitsjoende wrald of de nije wylde lantearne (Hearrenfean 1880), 33. 11 Waling Dykstra, Uit Friesland’s volksleven van vroeger en later, II (Leeuwarden 1896), 229–230.

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The 150 werewolf texts recorded by Dam Jaarsma, an assistant minister and the most prolific folk-tale researcher in the Netherlands, who actively collected texts between 1965 and 1978, were mostly rather short, only consisting of one or two lines each. His informants emphasised the werewolf as a seventh son, or more often as a boy from a family in which there were seven brothers. They also reported that a werewolf had to tear things, had to bite into everything, and had an insatiable appetite. They mentioned several werewolves by name. These characteristics can all be classified as memorates. The only back-rider story discovered by Jaarsma was told by a woman whose brother lived in Hoensbroek, in the south of the province of Limburg.12 In Jaarsma’s reports the notion of the seventh son leaps out, as it appears in about half of all the texts where werewolves are mentioned. It was definitely the most important feature of the werewolf in the Frisian Weald. The werewolf’s appetite follows behind, with over 20 mentions; this feature can be related to the English expression ‘wolfing down food’. This was slightly different from the notion of biting and tearing, as that extended to non-edible objects. The werewolf was an animal in the shape of a human, and he had the nature of a wild beast; or, as an informant remarked, ‘it was a man just as we, but he had a different nature’.13 Of the characteristics that were only seldom mentioned, some can be linked to similar occurrences from outside Jaarsma’s territory, such as the werewolf troubling children14 ; others are unique expressions of the werewolf, such as that concerning a wjerwolvin (female werewolf) who hates men, which has not been recorded anywhere else.15 The idea that one of seven girls in a household was a werewolf was clearly a mistake; what was meant was that one of the girls became a nightmare.16 The notion that werewolves were queer is more difficult to assess. Although Jaarsma only recorded it once as a direct expression, it may have had wider validity.17 There is some corroboration for this concept in the text in which a

12 CJ082301. The CJ numbers refer to the Collectie Jaarsma in the Dutch Folk-tale bank, www.verhalenbank.nl. 13 Respectively CJ113048; CJ046811; CJ019728; CJ008111. 14 CJ009710; CJ045512; CJ083118; CJ110029. 15 CJ064407. 16 CJ052418. 17 CJ048503.

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man, known locally to be a werewolf, visiting another man at night as a nightmare, but it is not conclusive.18 Named werewolves were not local celebrities with lots of rumours and tales circulating about them. Instead there was talk that a werewolf, in this case one of a pair of twins, would not beget any children, or that a werewolf was half man, half woman.19 Queerness may also have been the subtext when people said that a werewolf was forced to do it and could not act otherwise,20 although that may also have applied to other characteristics, such as his appetite. Homosexuality would, however, explain why no one could tell in advance which of the seven brothers would become the ‘werewolf’. Some of the werewolf expressions would have gone together; there would have been some overlap between the different characterisations of the werewolf. On the basis of two or three lines from those informants who had anything to say about the beast, which was about one fifth of Jaarsma’s total number of informants, it remains difficult to find much coherence. The dual nature of the werewolf was worded as either man–beast, or as man–(wo)man. But how is sexuality connected with the voracious hunger that is also identified as characteristic? It is, of course, possible to interprete ‘hunger’ as a metaphor for lust, but Jaarsma did not record discussions, or even enough differences of opinion to reconstruct a possible discussion. Any further reading thus has to remain hypothetical. In the 1960s, werewolf fabulates had become rare in Frisia,21 and Jaarsma only came across a few truncated versions of the ‘Werewolf Lover’ (which will be discussed below), and one ‘Hungry Farmhand’.22 To situate the Frisian werewolf, it is perhaps expedient to move one’s gaze slightly eastwards to the province of Groningen, where no Frisian was spoken. The eight werewolf legends collected by HuizengaOnnekes seem to present a reasonable overview of those available there in 18 Cf. CJ080807 with CJ017108. 19 CJ097014; CJ010706. 20 CJ039609; CJ044305. 21 Cf. Ype Poortinga, De foet fan de reinbôge. Fryske folksforhalen (Baarn/Ljouwert,

1979), 124–125. Here are recorded versions of the ‘Werewolf Lover’ and the ‘Hungry Farmhand’, probably inspired by the work of Huizenga-Onnekes (see note 23). Poortinga’s books were very successful but atypical for Frisian stories, cf. Jurjen van der Kooi, Volksverhalen in Friesland (Groningen 1984), 70–71. 22 Cf. Jurjen van der Kooi, De nachtmerje fan Rawier: Fryske sêgen oer it boppennatuerlike (Ljouwert 2000), 151.

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the 1920s.23 They include the fabulates —one version of the ‘Werewolf Lover’ and two of the ‘Hungry Farmhand’—and a number of general notions that can be classified as memorates, although their degree of local popularity remains unknown. Narrators from Oterdum, as well as from Sint Annen and Overschild, mentioned that in a household with seven boys, one of them was sure to be a werewolf. ‘It is terrible if you’re born as a werewolf’, commented the one from Oterdum, ‘because you cannot do anything about it’. The notion of becoming a werewolf through birth was nevertheless joined in one case with the notion of the werewolf’s skin or belt. The same text from Oterdum, presumably from a single informant, mentioned the seventh son and immediately continued with ‘he could witch and when he put on a skin or a belt, on his naked skin, then he is a werewolf’. A particular boy in Lalleweer, a village along the mouth of the Eems, was said to have a belt, but no one saw it. ‘They say that he hid it in the rafters’. Another story from Tolbert told of a farmhand who was observed rolling naked in the snow in the middle of the night and changing into a big black dog, apparently without any material aids. The man, or the dog, never did any harm to anyone, ‘but it was still scary’.24 If the mention of the skin is considered to be atypical, as it did not occurr elsewhere in the northern provinces, then the findings of Huizenga-Onnekes and Jaarsma sketch the same picture: someone became a werewolf by birth and had to live with it. Much more than belonging to local narratives, these concepts were a part of local culture. The legends in Oldenburg, which predated those in Groningen by more than half a century (and Jaarsma’s by an entire century), also contain the notion that one of seven sons was a werewolf.25 In East Frisia, just across the border from Groningen, the tale of the ‘Werewolf Husband’ was printed in 1876, featuring a wife who died shortly after the werewolf had revealed his secret.26 Defence against a seventh son was not recorded, although Huizenga came across what might have been a trace of naming. To designate her 23 E.J. Huizenga-Onnekes, Heksen- en duivelsverhalen in Groningerland, 173–175, 264. 24 E.J. Huizenga-Onnekes, Groninger volksverhalen, edited by K. ter Laan (Groningen/

Den Haag 1930), 35–37. 25 Ludwig Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogtum Oldenburg, I (Oldenburg 1867), 390–393. 26 ‘Was sich das Volk in Ostfriesland von Werwölfen und Waalridern erzählt’, Globus. Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde 29, 9 (1976), 140–141.

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unruly son, a mother in Oterdum used to say: ‘Bis ja net ‘n weerwolf ’ (you’re just like a werewolf), but she may have only compared him to a werewolf, without intending to reveal him as one.27 The werewolf as one of seven sons can be connected to the wider occurrence of becoming a werewolf through birth, such as in Denmark where expectant mothers were said to try to avoid the pains of birth by crawling through a foal’s afterbirth, or the notion of werewolves being born on a particular day.28 This situates the northern Dutch werewolf among the werewolves of northern Germany, Denmark and the southern part of Sweden. In the rest of the Netherlands, the creature had mostly different characteristics.

Questionnaires The 1954 map of the werewolf’s behaviour in the Netherlands, based on the questionnaires of 1937 and 1953, showed very few responses for the northern Dutch provinces. There were a few entries for the province of Groningen, along the border with Drenthe, about werewolves bothering people, with only one back-rider. The 1954 edition was, however, divided into three, with two other maps showing records of the werewolf’s name and of his appearance; the latter has eight records of the werewolf as a seventh son in the northern provinces, along with six depicting the werewolf as looking like an animal, or as wrapped in an animal skin. The animal category was not uniformly applied and in some places indicated the wearing of an animal skin, but this was not the case in the north.29 The division into three separate maps was probably executed because one map would have made the province of Limburg over-crowded; it certainly provided further indications of the stark difference between Limburg and the rest of the country. It also corroborates the notion of the werewolf as a seventh son in the northern provinces.

27 Huizenga-Onnekes, Heksen- en duivelsverhalen, 174. 28 See Chapter 2, note 69; in this book. 29 Volkskunde-Atlas voor Nederland en Vlaamsch-België. Commentaar. Aflevering I (Antwerpen/Amsterdam 1959), 40. The northern provinces are located in the squares B, C, F, and G.

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Dutch folklore atlas, kaart 12019: weerwolf verschijnt als

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The slightly later map of 1960 on the subject of the Bogeyman (Kinderschrik) only showed the werewolf once in the province of Drenthe and four times in the more southerly province of Overijssel. Children were frightened with many other figures, for instance in Frisia with bernedieven or Hantsje Pik, thieves of children or Stealing Hans.30 The werewolf was much more virulent in its capacity to lure or frighten children in the province of Limburg and in the area between the big rivers in the province of Gelderland. This included three werewolves between all the boelekerels in the south-eastern corner of the province of Gelderland, which had not appeared on the werewolf map. It remains curious, however, that considering all the places which were deemed dangerous and all the figures children were warned of (including all kind of men and even naked men), sexual predators were never referenced explicitly.31 In the early 1960s oral folktale research was initiated because it was thought to yield better results than the folklore questionnaires, but in the end the maps remained largely accurate and the idea that the interviews could lend themselves to mapmaking was soon abandoned. The fact that oral research was never able to reach the same intensity over the whole of the Netherlands contributed to this decision. The maps, however, were not employed in the folktale research or analysis, inso far as it was undertaken beyond the collecting of legends. Only Piet Meertens wrote an article, in a popular publication and without footnotes, in which he gave an overview of legend figures, with one and a half pages on the subject of the werewolf.32 The most logical approach would have been to compare the maps dealing with figures of ‘folk belief’ with the geographical distribution of different religions in the Netherlands, but all the energy of Han Voskuil, Meerten’s successor at the ‘Bureau’, was aimed at arguing against the concept of continuity which was still espoused by a number of his foreign colleagues. Without historical research it was imposible to conclude anything about how tools or

30 The verb ‘pikken’ means to steal; the noun ‘pik’ also means penis. Hansje Pik was

also one of the names of the devil, with ‘pik’ as a corruption of pek, pitch. 31 Cf. on the ‘Weerwolf’, ‘wolf’ and ‘korenwolf’ the articles by J.J. Voskuil in: Volkskunde-Atlas voor Nederland en Vlaams-België, Commentaar, II (1965), 106–108, 175–180. 32 P.J. Meertens, ‘Volksgeloof en bijgeloof’, in: Tj.W.R. de Haan (ed.), Folklore der Lage Landen (Amsterdam/Brussel, 1972), 206–244, esp. 240–241.

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customs maintained the same form or adapted to new circumstances.33 After his work on the Bogeyman Voskuil had lost any interest in ‘immaterial culture’ but his conclusions were also applicable in that field.34 In principle, maps represented the situation at the time of the recording of the underlying data. Had someone looked at them in earnest, it would have become apparent that the maps also largely showed common concepts, which I have called here memorates (more or less in line with folklore practice), rather than any narratives. Instead, in the later research the memorates were filtered out, a proces still noticeable in the current folktale repository (volksverhalenbank), in which only the more narrative texts from the questionnaires are incorporated. Initial analysis of the approximately 230 replies to the 1937 questionnaire shows that for a number of respondents the concept of the werewolf had become alien. This was either expressed directly by admitting that no one in the village had any idea about it, or did not want to talk about it, or indirectly by explaining the figure as an instance of bad weather (‘weer’ in Dutch also means ‘weather’). Someone who looked rough, unwashed, or had loose hair, would, according to a number of respondents, look like a ‘werewolf’. Not all of these replies made it onto the map. About fifteen respondents referred to the beast as a Bogeyman.35 In my view, the responses to the questionnaires and the subsequent maps did not differentiate enough between mere notions of the werewolf, that is to say memorates, and more or less complete narratives. The two most remarkable characteristics of the werewolf were that he was human and that he behaved like a back-rider. The human part of the werewolf was expressed in remarks about their appearance and, more significantly, that they were dangerous, that they attacked people and animals and that it was unwise to pass their house at night. On the maps, these were shown under three

33 J.J. Voskuil, ‘De beperkingen van de geografische methode’, Volkskundig bulletin 10 (1984), 111–125. 34 Voskuil failed to make any sense of the Bogeyman (kinderschrik), as a derivative figure the most difficult to assess and analyse, see his: ‘De kinderschrik in het korenveld’, Volkskunde-atlas voor Nederland en Vlaams-België. Commentaar, aflevering II (Antwerpen 1965), 139–191. 35 See also: J.J. Voskuil, ‘Kinderschrik’, in: Volkskunde-atlas. Commentaar aflevering II , 91–123, esp. 106–108.

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difference symbols.36 It was a term of abuse for miserly or cruel people. They ate children. They were men who could do whatever they wanted, as in the case of a man who buried all his children just after birth. It was generally known who the werewolf was, wrote the respondent from Giesbeek in Gelderland. In Soerendonk, North-Brabant, the werewolf was described as obstinate, moody and annoying. In over 60 of the responses, he was considered to be a back-rider; the amount of back-riders in the survey vastly surpassed the eight that Sinninghe incorporated under type 801, even though it contains six (rather than sixty) entries taken from the questionnare. In real life the Dutch werewolf, at least as it was reported in the southern half of the country, was an eccentric and a back-rider. I have interpreted him as being a sexual deviant.37 It is unlikely, however, that the respondents to the questionnaires in the 1930s were very open about sexuality. Until the late 1960s talking about human sexuality was taboo, although the elderly inhabitants of the countryside visited by the folklorists were well aware of how animals procreated.

Oral Interviews The space on the Dutch werewolf maps between the northern provinces and the Rhine is virtually empty; only a few symbols are scattered about. The answers as rendered in the Comments on the maps clarify very little; and not every answer was selected as suitable for the map. The way the answers for the province of Utrecht are presented contributed to this, including notions such as a beast lifting someone and putting him down some distance away, or of a man in the shape of a dog frightening someone. Both are more akin to a meeting with the devil than to an encounter with a werewolf. In Utrecht and the adjacent areas, Engelbert Heupers and his informants clearly struggled with the questions: ‘What do you know about the werewolf?’ or ‘Do you know any stories about him?’ Although he asked it more than a hundred times, no one was very satisfied with the results. In that sense the answers he received in November 1963 and January 1964 and again in mid-1969 were more revealing than those

36 Cf. J.R.W. Sinninghe, Hollandsch sagenboek (‘s-Gravenhage 1943), 131; idem, Verhalen uit het land der Bokkenrijders en der Teuten (Heerlen 1978), 75. 37 De Blécourt, ‘I would have eaten you, too’, Folklore 118 (2007), 85–105, esp …

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he elicited when he started his interviews. In the words of a farmer in Leersum, interviewed in early November 1963: ‘Old people talked about it when they gathered. It must have been something very bad, but I don’t know anymore what it precisely was’. ‘I actually don’t know anything about it, but elderly people said that in former times there were werewolves’, a day labourer at Soest admitted three months later.38 It echoed through the interview reports. ‘I don’t know it precisely. It was so long ago that it was talked about’, said a nightwatchman from Doorn in May 1969, one of the very few interviewees who identified the werewolf as a back rider in Heupers’ research. ‘What it was, I don’t know very well. I don’t know much about it’, said a woman in the same place two weeks later. A gardener, again in the same place, only remembered: ‘My parents talked about it. That was again something I never found out precisely. I only know that people found it terrible’.39 In Heupers’ first interviews in 1962, people had talked about the activity weerwolven as a lot of noise being made, tools being misplaced, or mills turning on their own, as a kind of secret rough music.40 They confused it with bewitchments and called the priest to counteract it.41 In some cases, they mixed werewolves up with black dogs.42 It is impossible to determine whether these narrators used a strategy of avoidance or whether they genuinely did not possess the information; it was probably a mixture of both. Folklorists, who only dropped by for a couple of hours to talk about ‘legends’, did not always inspire complete confidence. Already the term ‘legend’ (Dutch: sage) itself was unfamiliar and had to be introduced by asking about stories of ‘the past’ in general. In the course of time, Heupers’ investigations took him further away from Soest, his place of residence in the province Utrecht, or at least as far as he could reach by bicycle. Eventually he would record a handful of versions of the ‘Werewolf Lover’ and one or two back-rider memorates.43

38 Heupers, Volksverhalen, II, #1601, 1839. 39 Heupers, Volksverhalen, III, #3640, 3664, 3675. 40 Heupers, Volksverhalen, I, #5, #59, #266, #1021. 41 Heupers, Volksverhalen, I, #214, #815. 42 Heupers, Volksverhalen, I, #633, #636, #712, #722, II, #1095, #1272. 43 Back-rider: Heupers, Volksverhalen, II, #1695; III, #3640. For the ‘Werewolf lover’,

see below.

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His most important finding, however, concerned the place of the werewolf in the world-view of some of his informants. He only reported this from October 1964 onwards, but over his entire area and from all religious denominations. It was worse than witching, they said in all kinds of modalities. ‘It was un-Christian and it would have been worse than witching’, a Catholic farmer said. According to a Protestant farmer’s wife: ‘It was terrible, my father always said, much worse than witching’.44 Heupers did not seem to ask why this would be the case, and his Amsterdam supervisors were not interested enough to ask him to find out. As it concerned religious informants, in my opinion the answer should be sought in the Bible. To werewolf was worse than to witch because in Exodus (22: 18 and 19) the ban on bestiality followed the one on witchcraft.45 The range of Henk Kooijman, Heupers’ much younger colleague who operated south and south-west of Utrecht, was slightly bigger and also more erratic due to the terrain. Kooijman’s mostly brief reports contain a number of sayings about entangled hair, eating and bad weather, and some informants depicted the werewolf as a figure to frighten children with. Back-riders were rare.46 He travelled away from Haastrecht in South-Holland where he lived on his hired moped, and he met his narrators largely in the area between the rivers Rhine and Meuse. The most eloquent ones when it came to werewolves were in the North-Brabant part of this region. This group of around ten interviewees assured him that werewolves dressed up; they wrapped themselves in a white sheet or put on an animal skin and went out to frighten people.47 This was a confirmation of what can be observed on one of the werewolf maps for a somewhat larger area.48 Kooijman’s research may have been more extensive, but it hardly surpassed the replies to the earlier questionnaires.

44 Heupers, Volksverhalen, III, #3384, #3279. Also reported by Henk Krosenbrink,

80.5. 45 “I Would Have Eaten You Too”, 38. 46 Henk Kooijman, Volksverhalen uit het grensgebied van Zuid-Holland, Utrecht,

Gelderland en Noord-Brabant (Amsterdam 1988), #1272, #1683, #2124. 47 Kooijman, Volksverhalen, #1183, #1218, #1426, #1470, #1523, #1643, #2059, #2445, #2449. 48 Volkskunde-Atlas, Commentaar, I (1959), 41, under the category werewolf as a ‘random person’.

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The Werewolf Cluster South- and eastwards from the province of Utrecht werewolf legend clusters became more noticeable. Alongside the few traces noted by Kooijman, the notes of Adriana Hol, a pensioned teacher who was one of the volunteers sent out by the Bureau, are revealing in this respect. In the early 1960s in Ingen, in the Betuwe, just south of the area covered by Heupers and east of Kooijman’s area,49 she found a farmer who was afraid that a man (mentioned by name) would jump onto his back as a werewolf. This werewolf was dressed in a specific kind of leather shirt. Here the idea of meeting werewolves was so strong that when an occasional dog showed attention it could be interpreted as a werewolf too.50 If one cut the beast with an old coin, or with a knife with soil on it, one could recognise him, although sometimes only on the next day.51 Other informants in the region mentioned the legend of the ‘Burned skin’, or how a man who jumped on someone by way of a joke had to pay for it with his life.52 According to the informants of Dinnissen in the tiny town of Gendt, north of Nijmegen, the werewolf was mostly defined as a back-rider. To wound him one needed a knife that had some earth on it or that had been used to cut bread, and once he was wounded, one could see who he was.53 The teacher Arnold Tinneveld did not have any connection to the Bureau. Shortly after the Second World War he started to record folktales and legends in the Liemers, south-east of Arnhem. He recorded the most extended Dutch version of the ‘Hungry Farmhand’, although no other werewolf stories were recorded from this particular narrator; his focus was on stories and there is only one back-rider in his collection.54 The collectors Hol, Dinnissen and Tinneveld each worked in a relatively

49 Heupers did not conduct any interviews in Elst or in Amerongen, at the other side of the Rhine, cf. his Volksverhalen, II, #1681. 50 Archive Meertens-Instituut, collection Hol, account 3. 51 Collection Hol, accounts #8.25, 9.15, 14.20; Cf. Willem de Blécourt, in: Verhalen

van stad en streek, 231–233. 52 Collection Hol, account # 53 Dinnissen, Volksverhalen uit Gendt, 30 (#26), 31–32 (#30), 37 (#47), 91 (#215),

110–111 (#293), 134 (#390), 141 (#406). 54 Tinneveld, Vertellers uit de Liemers, 63 #78.

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small area and their harvest of stories and memorates was of corresponding size; it does not seem to have influenced the quality of their research much, and in the case of werewolves they found more coherency than their colleagues operating further north. I can only conclude that notions about werewolves among their informants were more lively. To put this differently: even if some of these ‘field workers’ were not always as thorough as Jaarsma or Heupers, they were fortunate in talking to people in places with a vibrant werewolf tradition. This can also be seen from the area in which Tinneveld operated. It overlapped with that of Henk Krosenbrink, who covered the whole of the Achterhoek and adjacent Twente for the Bureau, but whose werewolf tales mostly originated from the south-western part of it, in an area coinciding with and only marginally bigger than the one in which Tinneveld worked. There are seven elements of the werewolf clusters as they manifested in the south-eastern regions of the Netherlands. Werewolves werewolved: their activity was expressed in a verb. These werewolves concerned mundane people, who dressed up in an animal skin or a sheet and jumped onto someone’s back. They were counteracted by stabbing them with a knife. There was a discussion about the wisdom of back-riding and of dressing in animal skins, which mostly took place in the form of local stories (rather than migrational ones). Moreover, children were warned against the werewolves.55 The discussion was concentrated around two legends: the ‘Burned (wolf) skin’ and ‘Playing werewolf’. The latter, was essentially a ghost story that overlapped with the werewolf stories through the motif of dressing up.56 It contained the elements previously mentioned, and warned the prospective player against such activities on penalty of death. One example is the tale published by Graad Engels from Kessel in the Dutch province of Limburg, about a farmhand complaining to the farmer that he had to carry a werewolf every night. The farmer gave him a gun, and along his way the farmhand met an acquaintance who reloaded it for him. He shot the werewolf and the following day it turned out that he had killed his own farmer. A man from Maasbree, also in Limburg, told 55 These elements are a re-ordering and combination of those found on maps 6 and 7 of the Volkskunde-Atlas, see: Commentaar, I (1959), 40–45. 56 VdK1676F*. Cf. ATU1676, ‘Was tot ist, soll tot bleiben’, ‘The pretended ghost’ EM 13 (2010), 801–804; Reimund Kvideland, ‘Legends Translated into Behaviour’, Fabula 47 (2006), 255–263.

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Engels about a werewolf who was hit on the head with a piece of wood and did not survive either.57 A story from Budel, just over the provincial border with North-Brabant, recorded by Thomas Daniels, related how a man had strangled the werewolf who jumped onto his back.58 Daniels was one of the Leuven students who crossed the border to the Netherlands in 1965. In the south of Limburg collectors came accross stories of werewolves who were beaten to death.59 Informants of Gerard Linssen, a pensioned head teacher in Swalmen, mid-Limburg, talked about whimsical and boisterous fellows,60 who the stories would have been addressed to, predicting their terrible fate if they ever tried to act like a werewolf. Their curse was only lifted in another story, that of the burning of their skin. As recorded by Dinnissen, a group of men was playing cards when, at midnight, a wolf’s skin fell down the chimney. They grabbed the man who it was intended for and did not release him until the skin was burned to ashes. Only then did the man calm down and express his relief: ‘Thank God, now I am rid of it’.61 A version of the story found by Tinneveld, a couple of kilometers eastwards, omitted the card players. In this case, a belt had been found in the hollow of a willow; on the advice of the priest, the suspected farmhand was set a task as far away as possible and the belt was cooked. The farm hand appeared suddenly and had to be held by seven men but, as in the other version, was still grateful afterwards.62 In another version recorded by Engels, a chaplain found a magic book in the werewolf’s clothing and burnt it, with the same effect as the burning of the skin.

57 Graad Engels, Det dank ’tich d’n duvel. Volksverhalen tussen Peel en Maas (Maasbree

1978), 46–47; NVB ENGELS059; Meertens-Insituut, collection Engels, account 32. 58 Thomas Daniels, Onderzoek naar de sagenmotieven in Budel, Maarheeze, Stramproy, Weert, Kinrooi, Molenbeersel, Ophoven (Leuven 1965) 280, #651. 59 Meertens Institute, collection Brouwers, accounts 7.31; 22; collection Eggen, account 18.9. 60 Meertens-Institute, colletion Linssen, accounts 6.3, 11.5, 79.10. 61 M.H. Dinnissen, Volksverhalen uit Gendt (Amsterdam 1993), #28, 89, 190, 324. 62 Tinneveld, Vertellers, 211, #236. This narrator from Dijk (Didam) only told two

werewolf stories. The two versions Krosenbrink collected of this narrative were both lapidary; collection Krosenbrink, account #219.2; 228.4.

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Other informants of his talked about a skin falling down the chimney, or a coat that was given to the flames.63 A nineteenth-century version from Blitterswijck, in north-Limburg, depicted a skin descending via the chimney, and had already been published by the Catholic clergyman Henri Welters.64 Before that, the Protestant minister Ottho Gerhard Heldring recorded the legend in the Betuwe, in this case with the card players; it may be significant that the Catholic version, published in a book meant for children, lacked the card players. These two stories evoked discussion due to their divergent content, in contrast to the more quotidian notions of the werewolf in the memorates. If a werewolf was usually only wounded and thereby revealed, ‘Playing werewolf’ literally represented overkill. The notion of a skin falling down the chimney was as fantastic as that of a witch leaving the house on her broomstick through the same opening, as was the instantaneous relocation of the farmhand whose wolf-skin was being annihilated. His sigh of relief that everything was now over was probably more an element of the story than a reference to an actual solution to his problems. At the very least, a farmer from Kessenich in Belgium Limburg remarked that werewolves might have broken the habit, ‘but sometimes they became crazy and even the priest could not change anything about it’.65 Meanwhile, a considerable number of werewolves still jumped on people’s backs, at least according to the people interviewed. In the area south of Roermond, in Limburg, Linssen recorded it about twenty-five times; in southern Limburg, museologist Coen Eggen recorded it around twenty times. Some of these werewolves were stabbed, lost their disguise and remained forever known as a werewolf; the collector was not always told the entire story, as in contrast to Frisia or the Betuwe people in Limburg were careful mentioning names. The people interviewed by Thomas Daniels on the border of Dutch Limburg, Belgium Limburg and Dutch North-Brabant, also emphasized the back-rider. One of them licked his victims, another one slavered on them, and yet another one

63 Engels, Det dank ’tich d’n duvel, 43, 46. 64 Henri Welters, Limburgsche legenden, sagen, sprookjes en volksverhalen (Venlo 1876),

27; from a manuscript by W. Hermans, teacher, ca. 1874; published in: Willem de Blécourt, Volksverhalen uit Nederlands Limburg (Utrecht/Antwerpen 1981), 28. 65 Daniels, Onderzoek, #667.

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put his head so close to his victim’s that he took his breath away.66 The slavering werewolf, reported in Ophoven, received a cut on his forehead, implored his victim not to betray him and went to the friars for help to get rid of his affliction.67 Priests were also said to be able to recognise werewolves in church by a red flame that appeared over their head.68 Similar characteristics can be found in other Limburg collections, also from the western side of the river Meuse.69 These fitted seamlessly with recordings from the Rhineland.70 Only the notion of warning children against the werewolf was absent in the collections discussed in this section. Informants were either simply not asked about it, or the collectors found it too insignificant to write down; it will have to be added to make the image complete. To postulate a werewolf cluster, it is necessary to assume a certain degree of local collectivity or at least communication between the different narrators and informants. In all likelihood such a community will include those not interviewed, who doubted or even denied the concept of werewolves.

The Werewolf Lover At the end of the nineteenth century the fabulate about the werewolf lover began to be recorded in several places in the province of NorthBrabant.71 A Catholic schoolmaster in Westerhoven, south of Eindhoven, a likewise Catholic schoolmaster in Nederwetten, north-east of Eindhoven, and a Protestant manufacturer of cigars in Bladel, south-west of Eindhoven, all reported how a woman had broken off her engagement after her fiancé had been exposed as a werewolf, betraying himself by the

66 Daniels, Onderzoek, #649: ‘en dan hield ie zijne kop langs de mens zijne kop en

deed ie niks anders dan hem zijn adem afsnijden’. 67 Daniels, Onderzoek, #650. 68 Daniels, Onderzoek, #653. 69 Cf. Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Differentiated Werewolf: An Introduction to Cluster

Methodology’, in: idem (ed.), Werewolf Histories (London 2015), 1–24, esp. 13–15 on Maasmechelen. 70 Wilhelm Bodens, Sage, Märchen und Schwank am Niederrhein (Bonn 1936), 173–

181. 71 See for a discussion of the international distribution of the tale, Chapter 2 on Sweden in this volume.

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threads of her apron or handkerchief left between his teeth.72 Any original narrator had long since disappeared. The most divergent element was that in the Bladel tale the boy had given his beloved his own handkerchief to be ravaged by the beast.73 Along with its localisation and the link with the ‘Burned skin’ legend, this made the story recognisable in the subsequent republications and retellings, including a 1973 radio broadcast.74 In the oral interviews in the 1960s only fragments were remembered.75 The combination of the story with the legend of the ‘Burned wolf-skin’ was somewhat forced; in no versions of the ‘Werewolf Lover’ was it mentioned that the boy possessed a belt or a skin. This made the ‘Werewolf Lover’ stand apart from local werewolf lore: the boy confronted the woman at her front, not at her back, and it would have damaged the teeth motif had she used a knife. The Limburg version that the poet Pierre Kemp published in the 1920s was unique among the Dutch-language ‘Werewolf Lovers’, in that the couple was already married and in that the end was twisted to save the marriage. By ripping apart a cloth in which their innocent child had been wrapped, the werewolf husband was liberated.76 Catholic clergy could hardly object to that; priests were involved on all levels of the tale. In one version, told by a woman in Maastricht, a girl was warned beforehand that the boy she was interested in was a bit ‘strange’ sometimes and she went to the local priest who gave her a red handkerchief to ward off any threat.77 Another version from Weert was allegedly contributed by a Franciscan friar.78 At the other end of the Netherlands, in the Catholic

72 Willem de Blécourt, Volksverhalen uit Noord-Brabant (Utrecht/Antwerpen 1980), 66–67 (P.N. Panken), see also: 67–68; 113–114 (J.H. Poulusse). 73 Theo Meder & Cor Hendriks, Vertelcultuur in Nederland. Volksverhalen uit de collectie Boekenoogen (Amsterdam 2005), 283–284; 719–720 (J.F.C. Schaap). 74 J.R.W. Sinninghe, Noord-Brabantsch sagenboek (Scheveningen 1933), 127–128; Noordbrabants sagenboek (Den Haag 1964), 128; Ben Janssen, Het dansmeisje en de lindepater. Volksverhalen uit Kempen, Meierij en Peel (Maasbree 1978), 95–98; NVB VODA_ 008_12; Eelke de Jong & Hans Sleutelaar, Sprookjes van de Lage Landen (Amsterdam 1972), 115; Eelke de Jong, Sagen en legenden van de Lage Landen (Bussum 1980), 18. 75 Meertens Institute, collection Van Oirschot 20.4; NVB, KUSTERS04003. 76 Pierre Kemp, Limburgsch Sagenboek (Maastricht: Van Aelst, 1925), 207. 77 Meertens Institute, collection Eggen 28, 8. 78 Jacques R. W. Sinninghe, Verhalen uit het land der Bokkenrijders en der Teuten

(Heerlen 1978), 75–77; cf. LYST004.

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part of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, the ‘Werewolf Lover’ was also narrated to include the services of a Benedictine monk.79 Almost every major Dutch ‘folktale’ collection has at least one example of the ‘Werewolf Lover’. Considered alongside the incongruence of the story with local werewolf lore and the involvement of an occasional priest, this indicates that the fabulate or migratory legend crossed the provincial and religious boundaries and stood somewhat apart from local memorates. If the motif of the woman seeing the threads between the teeth of her boyfriend after a werewolf had bitten in her clothes is taken as the main characteristic of the tale, then Jaarsma collected four of them; half of them involving a husband instead of a boyfriend.80 Within the enormous corpus of tales that Jaarsma collected in the Frisian Weald, these represent a minimal fraction. Without the detail of the threads, and even without female involvement, it becomes hard to recognise the tale; just tearing handkerchiefs is probably not sufficient unless it is seen as the last remnant of a once-vibrant tale.81 One Frisian narrator mentioned that his wife had known a girl whose boyfriend had torn her handkerchief to pieces, and that she eventually broke up with him.82 Here the fabulate may have served as an explanation of a broken engagement. Usually the ‘Werewolf Lover’ would have been a warning legend for girls not to get involved with a werewolf as there was the danger that he would rape them, although this was never made explicit. It was more of a female tale than the other werewolf legends; it was told from a female point of view. Dutch folktale research was dominated by men and they disproportionally favoured interviewing other men; to find a woman in Heupers’ collection relating a story from her grandmother, about a gentleman who asked a girl whether he could borrow her handkerchief, is thus special.83 So was Kooijman’s interview with a farmer who had heard most of his stories from his mother, including one in which a big dog snatched a handkerchief from a girl’s hand.84 Krosenbrink interviewed a

79 Joh. de Vries, Het spookte in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen (Terneuzen 1971), 81–82. 80 CJ017408, CJ052012 (husband); CJ039817, CJ095508 (lover). 81 CJ111717. 82 CJ044011. 83 Heupers, Volksverhalen, III, #3364. 84 Kooijman, Volksverhalen, #1915.

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woman who had heard a similar story from her grandmother.85 Tinneveld’s female narrator had heard the stories from her mother.86 Any identification of the ‘Werewolf Lover’ as a female tale, however, does not sufficiently explain the discrepancy with local male werewolf culture. Occasionally the fabulate may have been adapted to the memorates, but on the whole it stood separate from them. The story also straddled the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic werewolf legends.

Protestants and Catholics As the Protestant minister Heldring wrote in 1838 on the Catholic part of the Betuwe: ‘There is no shack in which the superstition of werewolves does not distress the life of the unlucky man and his children more than a genuine wild animal would do. This winter, less than a hundred paces from my home, a werewolf appeared, and the miserable people trembled’.87 In Heldring’s opinion big dogs were taken as werewolves, yet he only scratched the surface. The Dutch province of Limburg only began to take shape in the nineteenth century; it was formally recognised as a province in 1867. Culturally, it was linked to the Rhineland in the east and the Belgium province of the same name, formerly the County of Loon, in the west. Before the Amsterdam-guided research took place the negative aspects of the legends were either ameliorated or ignored. Ever since a priest compiled the first volume of legends in the province of Limburg and one of his colleagues wrote an introduction to folklore, the Catholic church had had a hand in legend research.88 It served the good name of Limburg and that of the Catholics. The contrasts with the Protestants were striking. The minister Heldring in the nineteenth century, or a century later the assistant minister Jaarsma, did not have to iron out what their predecessors first had promoted, a state of affairs supported by the different nature 85 Meertens Institute, collection Krosenbrink, 110B.1; 224.2; cf. Henk Krosenbrink, ‘Wat het volk smuustert ’. Op verhaal komen in de Achterhoek en Liemers (IJzerlo 2005), 83–85. 86 Vertellers uit de Liemers, 203, #221. 87 O.G. Heldring, Wandelingen ter opsporing van Bataafsche en Romeinsche oudheden,

legenden,1 (Amsterdam 1838), 153–156. 88 Welters, Limburgsche legenden, sagen, sprookjes en volksverhalen, werewolves on 27, 39; Jos. Schrijnen, Nederlandsche volkskunde (Zutphen 1915), werewolves on 73–75.

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of werewolves in the north. At any rate, Dutch Protestant theologians did not carry any remedy against werewolves in their lugguage. However, the different religious denominations in the Netherlands all influenced the way werewolves were being discussed, one movement more than the other. Vague references to rough music by informants of Heupers may indicate that the werewolf belonged to the realm of morality, and was therefore to be locally policed. The conviction that weerwolven was ‘worse than witching’ points in a similar direction. Seen in a (Protestant) Biblical context, the verb may have referred to sodomy. The few queer werewolves found by Jaarsma were probably part of a much wider culture in which ‘werewolf’ served as an expression of sexual deviancy. This was not mentioned lightly; of course it had to be dealt with, but direct language failed. Werewolves, as well as other legendary figures such as the nightmare, filled part of this gap. That these notions were also combatted as ‘superstition’ may have contributed to the formation of a more direct and open discourse on sexuality. It also leads to the tantalizing conclusion that Protestants and Catholics described and experienced sexuality slightly differently, at least in the case of deviant sexuality. Such a thesis leads the research away from legends and, in the end, also from werewolves. The use of weerwolven as a verb and therefore an activity, not just in the Netherlands but far into Germany as well,89 emphasises werewolf practice. This mostly includes the cluster as found in the south-eastern parts of the Netherlands. Here, the werewolf was far from ‘fake’; or to put it differently: the werewolf in diguise was the genuine article. In the Netherlands ‘supernatural’ werewolves, as for instance identified in the western Alps, were merely a function of werewolf narrative types commenting on everyday-life werewolves. The cluster thus encompasses both action and counter-action, and narrative comment. It invites a rethinking of the ‘types’ as discerned by Sinninghe and Roeck, as only one of them, ‘The Werewolf Lover’, as the migratory legend ‘The Werewolf Husband’, falls largely outside the clusters.

89 See Chapter 3 in this book by Petra Himstedt-Vaid.

CHAPTER 14

The Werewolf of Hull Deborah Hyde

In 2016, a peculiar story hit local headlines: a werewolf was loping around Barmston drain, an eighteenth-century canal in Hull, Yorkshire, UK.1 Under the headline ‘Beast’ of Barmston Drain ‘seen killing German Shepherd’, the article recounted how a couple had seen something ‘tall and hairy’ eating a dead German Shepherd dog. They had then told their story to their friend of a couple of years, local historian Mike Covell, who loves the unexplained and has appeared on Most Haunted and Most Haunted Live. According to the piece, another woman had seen ‘something bounding along the drain on all fours, then stopping and raising 1 Benjamin Blosse, ‘“Beast” of Barmston Drain “Seen Killing German Shepherd”’, The Hull Daily Mail, 6 May 2016 (updated 24 May 2017); https://www.hulldailymail.co. uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/beast-barmston-drain-seen-killing-73245. Retrieved 11 March 2019.

With thanks to Mike Covell, Kaja Franck, Sam George, Mark Norman and Ian Topham. D. Hyde (B) The Skeptic, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_14

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up onto its back legs’, and yet another woman had seen a ‘half-man, halfdog’. Such tabloid gold couldn’t stay local for long. An article by freelance journalist Mark Branagan for a national publication, The Express, followed a week later.2 It recounted the original couple’s German Shepherd experience and provided more information about the two others. There was more detail from the second woman—the one who had previously seen something on its back legs. She had ‘… seen it turn from man to beast’ as she stood quaking on a bridge above. ‘It was stood upright one moment. The next it was down on all fours running like a dog. I was terrified…It vaulted 30 ft over to the other side and vanished up the embankment.’ The third woman who had seen the ‘half-man, half-dog’ in the distance had, it turned out, been walking her own dog, which had been so terrified that it had refused to go any further along the path. The article continued that some locals now planned a werewolf hunt at the next full moon. Branagan wrote another piece about the ‘werewolf’ for The Daily Star on Sunday 22 May 2016. A web-search easily demonstrates that the story very quickly became very popular, even internationally, and that the details became augmented in their repetition. For just one example, in The Huffington Post ’s coverage the creature seen by the couple was cited as being two feet/60 cm taller than the original six feet/180 cm.3 In September of the same year, a follow-up case, written by Leda Reynolds for The Express, revealed that a woman in her twenties and her two friends had also seen the beast from inside their car.4 This time, it was at Halsham, around 18.5 km/11.5 miles from the previous sighting. Equestrian worker Jemma Waller said ‘I looked on my driver’s side and saw this beast on all fours who started to walk straight towards my car on two legs’. Describing it, she said that it ‘looked like a big dog, probably bigger than my car, but it had a human face’. 2 Mark Branagan, ‘Residents Trembling in Terror after Seeing “8 FOOT WEREWOLF” in British City’, The Express, 15 May 2016; https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/670 358/Hull-South-Yorkshire-werewolf-Old-Stinker-full-moon-Barmston-Drain. Retrieved 11 March 2019. 3 Sara Nelson, ‘8ft Tall Werewolf “Old Stinker” Prowling In Hull Industrial Estate’, The Huffington Post, 16 May 2016; https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/8ft-tallwerewolf-old-stinker-prowling-in-hull-industrial-estate_uk_573999d2e4b01359f6872265. Retrieved 11 March 2019. 4 Leda Reynolds, ‘Friends Left Terrified after Spotting WEREWOLF… Near HULL’, The Express, 30 August 2016; https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/705285/Friends-leftterrified-after-spotting-werewolf-near-HULL.

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To understand such a peculiar case, I will start with the specifics of the Barmston Drain Beast, and I will include the context of other folklores that our age sustains. I will look at the relative absence of werewolves in British tradition but their plentiful presence on the Continent, and the communication between those two areas. I will take a close look at British ‘Black Dog’ folklore and see that it, along with modern TV and film fiction, are likely to have influenced the Beast of Barmston Drain narrative. I will conclude with thoughts on contemporary social dynamics, enabled by our era’s technology, which clarify how we could go from just a few hundred words of source material to an international, social-media driven meme.

Black-Eyed Children, and Haunted Hull The events of 2016 have been more fully recounted in Mike Covell’s book The Beast of Barmston Drain.5 The book has lengthy lists, variants of different local folklores, press coverage of historical events and so forth, but is none the worse for them. It is also considerably more sober than the tabloid coverage. Covell had initially been interested in eye-witness accounts of peculiar phenomena in the area after a buildingcaretaker acquaintance had seen and heard ‘black-eyed-children’ singing Ring a Ring o’ Roses on the site of an abandoned sweet factory. This spooky event includes two modern folklore tropes. The first is that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is popularly understood to be associated with the plague— specifically the English outbreak of 1665. Covell points out that a severe cholera outbreak in Hull in 1849 had started nearby. However, the plague connection to the nursery rhyme is disputed by most folklorists.6 The second trope is ‘black-eyed-children’ or ‘black-eyed-kids’—from here referred to as BEKs. These creepy stories, which involve sinister hitchhiking or panhandling children with pale skin and totally black eyes, have been an internet staple since the 1990s. It is thought by most to have started with an account by Brian Bethel about a nominally real encounter 5 Mike Covell, The Beast of Barnston Drain (Hull 2018). 6 Peter and Iona Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford 1997 fifth

impression), 364–365: ‘The foreign and nineteenth century versions seem to show that the fall was originally a curtsy or other gracious bending movement … and the present writers have on several occasions gathered from oral tradition a sequel rhyme for the players to rise on their feet again.’

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with two BEKs in Texas in 1996. The account was initially distributed via an internet mailing list and went viral. An interview with Bethel was televised in 2012 on Monsters and Mysteries in America.7 Snopes categorises the BEK trope as a legend.8 Most commentators regard BEKs as a form of ‘creepypasta’—a type of first-person, micro-blogging, creepy urban legend for the internet age. A 2010 New York Times article described creepypasta as ‘bite-sized bits of scariness that have joined the unending list of things-to-do-when-you’re-bored-at-work’.9 To Covell’s surprise only some of the supernatural accounts he received were related to the BEK stories he had sought. As he put it: ‘shapeshifting wolf men were far from my mind, and I instead concentrated on the ghostly encounters in the area rather than the stories of the beast’. However, the number of ‘beast’ sightings intrigued him, so he redirected his focus.

The ‘Beast’ Sightings The Sculcoates district is a northerly suburb of Hull, around a mile/ 1.5 km from the city centre. It was—like much of the land around the Hull estuary—salt marsh until the late eighteenth century, when engineering works like the Beverley and Barmston Drain, a 23-mile-long canal, were developed to control flooding. The only significant buildings in the parish up to this point were a Carthusian Priory, the Charterhouse hospital and St. Mary’s Church. The newly stabilised land was rapidly developed in the nineteenth century for housing, and industries like brewing, dyeing, brick-making, weaving and sugar-refining.10 In modern times, Hull and its suburbs have suffered hugely from the decline of industry in the north of England in general, and the decline of the port in particular. Sculcoates does have a kind of Gothic quality, albeit that it is of the post-industrial—rather than the haunted-house or lonely-moor variety. There are three graveyards in the parish, all within a 7 Monsters and Mysteries in America. Destination America/Discovery Channel, Season 1 Episode 4. 8 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/black-eyed-children/. Retrieved 2 April 2018. 9 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/fashion/14noticed.html. 10 K.J. Allison (ed.), A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 1, the City of Kingston Upon Hull. Originally published (London 1969), 467–469; https://www.british-history.ac.uk/ vch/yorks/east/vol1/.

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few hundred metres of each other. Charles Christian has written that ‘the banks of the Barmston Drain do have a creepy atmosphere. In parts, they are overgrown with saplings and briar.’ The first account in The Beast of Barmston Drain is already familiar to the reader from those newspaper headlines. It had happened ‘some years ago’ in Sculcoates to a couple whom Covell knows, but who preferred to use pseudonyms. They were driving past the end of Reform Street (about 400 m from Barmston Drain) but saw ‘something’ devouring a German Shepherd dog in the street to their right. They changed direction to take a closer look and ‘were adamant that they saw the creature jump over an eight foot fence with the dog still in its mouth … it (the creature) was about 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, no more’. The obstruction that the creature had cleared while carrying this large corpse was a seven-feet (2.1 m) wall with a one-foot-high roll of razor wire on its top, so a total impediment of eight feet (2.4 m). They had seen the same creature on several occasions and during one encounter it had run after their vehicle.11 The second account in the book is from one of the same pseudonymous witnesses known to Covell, but this event happened many years prior when the witness was a ‘youngster’ in the late 1980s/early 1990s.12 He and his friends used to ride off-road on cheap motorbikes: this was a supervised youth activity at the time. Returning home one night they took a bridge over Barmston Drain in Sculcoates when ‘something large, black, hairy and doglike’ ran from a disused railway embankment and chased them. Although it was night-time, there was plenty of ambient light from the surrounding buildings. He described it as ‘… big, hairy, sounded angry, it was growling, and was muscular, well built, fearsome looking animal’, and, ‘It certainly wasn’t a dog, but looked partly human, but was running on all fours’. Covell’s third account came from a woman who had contacted him after appeals via social media. Emma was clearly interested in the supernatural since they ‘were discussing other ghostly events in and around the city’ when she asked him ‘straight out whether I knew about the “Shapeshifters” in Hull’. Emma had had several relevant experiences: ‘She described seeing a man change into a dog on several occasions along

11 Covell, The Beast, 85. 12 Covell, The Beast, 90.

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the drain, and that he looked vicious, and not to be messed with’. She warned Covell not to spend time at Barmston Drain.13 The fourth account also came via social media. Jane, an office worker, had lived in a street just off Sculcoates Lane and a matter of yards from the Drain. Between nine and ten one evening she drove out of her road and saw something large down by the Drain that terrified her. It was about six feet tall and was bent over on all fours. When she saw it, it looked at her, then ‘she watched as it stood up’ and ‘jump the water in a single leap … that covers approximately 10 feet’. The creature went through thick shrubs on the other side towards one of the parish’s three cemeteries.14 Covell’s fifth account came from an elderly gentleman named Stan who had spent many years around the Drain, having used boats on it and even swum in it when he was younger. In the summer of probably 2014 he was walking along the Drain at around 10 p.m. when he ‘became aware of the feeling of being watched … this niggling feeling was really eating away at me’. He heard some bushes move, then ‘across the track behind me ran what I can only describe as a tall hairy man with the head of a dog! He reminded me of Anubis!’ It made its way down the embankment and ‘vanished into the undergrowth’ but he couldn’t see anything more.15 Covell’s sixth sighting came from a shop-worker called Debbie who in late September 2015 was driving to work after 9 p.m. when she saw something around thirty feet/ten metres in front of her car. ‘It looked like a man bent over, but when she drove toward him he stood up and ran towards the drain … and (she) drove over whatever it was on the road’. He leapt over a wall and disappeared out of sight. He was ‘about six feet in height, muscular, but when he was bent over he was on all fours. He was actually resting on his hands’. Later ‘… she noticed that her left-hand wing and front wheel were splattered with blood’. Debbie had been ‘overcome with fear’ and decided not to use that route to work again, but did consider the mundane explanation that he may have been ‘homeless and eating roadkill’.16 The seventh sighting came from Steve, a restaurant worker who was cycling home from work on a track next to the Drain in November

13 Covell, The Beast, 92. 14 Covell, The Beast, 94. 15 Covell, The Beast, 96. 16 Covell, The Beast, 97.

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2015 at nearly midnight. He heard a commotion coming from his righthand side and something ran directly in front of him. He described it as ‘looking like a large dog, too big to be a conventional dog, but perhaps maybe a hybrid dog of some sort. It had the features of a wolf.’ The creature didn’t look at or acknowledge him. It didn’t have a foul smell, nor glowing eyes nor visible fangs but Steve was intimidated enough to refuse to go back to the site.17 The eighth account came from a man named Mike whom Covell had known for several years over social media. Mike had been driving across Fountain Road Bridge, over the Drain, when he saw ‘something large, dog like, squatting in the allotments’. It was ‘too large to be a normal dog, but this was almost wolf like in proportion … the creature stood up and ran towards the coverage of the trees’. Mike had never seen anything like it before, and he had been scared.18 Covell’s ninth account came from a man who was a former member of Hull City Council’s Dangerous Dogs Department.19 They started to talk when the ex-dog-catcher attended one of Covell’s ‘Amazing Hull Tours’.20 A few years prior, the staff at a local garage had been ‘being bothered by a very large wild dog that was growling, chasing and scaring people along the drain’. They never did find the dog: this meant that ‘it was a strange case as they usually found the dog and took it away’. Covell points out that the sightings were close to sightings number three and four. The tenth account came from the daughter of Covell’s friend. It had happened ‘some time ago’ when the witness was sixteen years old. She was being driven by her mother over Barmston Drain at Fountain Road and saw ‘a large creature that looked like a fox but also looked like a man, it was sitting up like a man next to the drain’. Covell points out that this site is close to the sites of accounts six and eight.21 Other accounts arose in the following months, but all were similar in tone and content to these first ten. For all that werewolves are associated with full moons in popular fiction, in these accounts seven explicitly did not happen at a full moon. The witnesses were all at pains to point out that they had not been drinking. There’s nothing particularly unusual 17 Covell, The Beast, 99. 18 Covell, The Beast, 101. 19 Covell, The Beast, 103. 20 Amazing Hull Tours: https://www.facebook.com/amazinghulltours/. 21 Covell, The Beast, 104.

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about the sex or age range of the group: half were men, half were women; the youngest was a teenager, the oldest was aged but most were in their thirties or forties.

Categories These events can be categorised into three types. I would call the first category the ‘ambiguous/peculiar’ category. These accounts seem to have unnerved the witness/es but reasonable explanations still spring readily to mind. In event seven, Steve the restaurant worker saw a large dog with wolfish features. In event eight, Mike saw something dog-like which was large. In event nine a dangerous dog had been seen, but was not caught. In all these cases it could be argued that the witnesses had simply seen a large dog. In a modern world, we are not short of breeds that could fit the ‘wolf-like’ bill. Such domestic breeds include malamutes and huskies, plus many lesser-known breeds like Czech wolfdogs, kugshas and tamaskans. Huge domestic dogs without wolf-type coats or markings include deerhounds, mastiffs and Newfoundlands. In fact, Covell and two friends had wandered over the area on Sunday 2 May and he wrote that one of them had ridden his bike through ‘a pretty decent sized pile of dog faeces’ which indicates there are some ‘pretty decent sized’ dogs in the area.22 In event six, Debbie the shop worker had seen a man bent over something, had driven over whatever it was, and then later found blood on her wing and wheel. She herself suggested that it could have been a man crouched over roadkill which she then ran over, and which would have accounted for the bloody detritus found subsequently on her wing and tyre. I would also add events one and four to this ambiguous/peculiar category, albeit in a subset—perhaps we can call it ‘superpowers’. The couple from event one saw a large creature which was about six feet tall carrying a German Shepherd in its jaws over an eight-feet-tall wall-andwire impediment. And in event four, Jane saw a creature which made a single leap of about ten feet—both impressive feats, taken at face value. I call the second category ‘partly human’, and there are three exemplars. In event two pseudonymous ‘John’ had been chased by a growling animal that looked ‘partly human’ and in event three, Emma had seen a

22 Covell, The Beast, 106.

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man change into a dog several times. In event ten, the witness saw something that ‘looked like a fox but also looked like a man’. Jemma Waller’s creature walked on all fours and looked like a huge dog ‘but it had a human face’, so falls into the ‘partly human’ category. The Express’ second witness had seen ‘something bounding along the drain on all fours, then stopping and raising up onto its back legs’ and ‘… seen it turn from man to beast’ would clearly fall into our ‘partly human’ category. The Express’ third account, from the witness who had seen a ‘half-man, half-dog’ and whose own dog was too terrified to continue was, Covell reported, ‘press invention’.23 Given that the same article misreported the height of the creature seen by the first couple as eight, rather than six, feet tall, perhaps we can—like Covell—discount this one. If we didn’t, it would be in our ‘partly human’ category. The ‘Anubis type’ is my third category and is the most peculiar. In account five, Stan saw a ‘tall hairy man with the head of a dog’ which explicitly reminded him of Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian canine-headed deity.

Investigations at Barmston Drain An investigation was convened. Reporters and photographers including Mark Branagan (who had written The Express piece five days before) met on Friday 20 May 2016. Branagan invited barrister Charles Christian, author of A travel guide to Yorkshire’s Weird Wolds: The Mysterious Wold Newton Triangle, having called him and said ‘what do you think of the werewolf sightings in Hull?’. ‘That is how’ wrote Christian, ‘I found myself … in the abandoned and distinctly spooky precincts of St. Mary’s graveyard, in the Sculcoates district of Hull, standing by a tombstone posing for press photographs’.24 Christian regretted that the shortage of recent rain meant the mud was too hard to have taken recent animal tracks. Covell and Christian both recorded that the undergrowth on the Drain had been crushed and broken: ‘the damage

23 Personal Twitter conversation with Covell, 15 April 2018. 24 Charles Christian, Yorkshire’s Weird Wolds:The Mysterious Wold Newton Triangle

Urban Fantasist (Harleston 2015), location 211. Christian’s book defines a triangular area in Yorkshire that contains many supernatural stories, roughly centred around the village of Wold Newton.

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was far more extensive than you’d expect … My first reaction was that someone had rolled a boulder, refuse wheelie-bin or a supermarket trolley down the bank.’25

As the party walked Barmston Drain in the dark Covell noticed that ‘our torches hit something that reflected at us. A set of green eyes was now staring at us from across the embankment … they appeared to be much further apart than a cat, a dog or a fox.’26 ‘Normally if an animal is caught in the light like this, it either freezes or else it ducks down and scuttles away,’ wrote Christian. ‘This animal didn’t do either. Instead, to the dismay of my colleagues, it began making its way along the bank (still on the opposite side of the drain) in my direction … as if it was trying to take a closer look at me. Unusually for an animal, it didn’t stalk silently through the undergrowth but instead boldly crashed and trampled its way along the bank until it was directly opposite me, where it then halted and stared in my direction. Then, it ducked down, vanished and, I can only assume, made away into the wasteland lying beyond the drain.’27 Covell noted that a second pair of eyes appeared after people ‘heard loud wood cracking, like something had just snapped a tree’. And—like Christian— Covell had noticed their colleagues were ‘dismayed’: the reporter was by then ‘… some distance away’.28 Neither Covell nor Christian thought the shining eyes meant that the creature was uncanny or supernatural. The tapetum lucidum is a layer of tissue in the eye of many nocturnal animals. It reflects light back into the eye to enhance night vision and can produce a reflection in many different colours, typically green or pink. Covell calculated the distance between the first set of eyes to be either eight inches/twenty cm, or an even more considerable twelve inches/thirty cm.29 Covell took part in a second investigation on Saturday 21 May 2016 with ‘seven residents … a sceptic, and a well-respected member of the paranormal community’. A storm obscured the full moon for forty minutes and the team didn’t find anything significant.

25 Christian, Yorkshire’s Weird Wolds, location 251. 26 Covell, The Beast, 109. 27 Christian, Yorkshire’s Weird Wolds, location 257–263. 28 Covell, The Beast, 109. 29 Covell, The Beast, 149, 109.

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The Beast in Context Shape-shifters in British folklore tend to be cats and hares—the alternate forms of witches. Werewolves are unusual, though not completely absent. Baring-Gould thought that: ‘English folk-lore is singularly barren of were-wolf stories, the reason being that wolves had been extirpated from England under the Anglo-Saxon kings, and therefore ceased to be of dread to the people’.30 Gervase of Tilbury’s early thirteenth-century Otia Imperialia reported that ‘… in England we have often seen men change into wolves according to the phases of the moon’.31 Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop from 1161 to 1186, wrote a Penitential condemning people for being superstitious, ‘Whosoever shall believe that a man or woman may be changed into the shape of a wolf or other beast’ among them—censure which suggests he knew this belief to be present in his congregation.32 The low, rolling hills to the north of Hull—the Yorkshire Wolds—may have been one of the last wolf habitats in England: ‘In the entries at Flixton, Hackston, and Folkston, in the East Riding of Yorkshire are still to be seen memoranda of payments made for the destruction of wolves … they used to breed in the “cars” below, amongst the rushes, furze and bogs’.33 These ‘cars’ (more frequently spelled ‘carr’ these days) are exactly the boggy lands that the Beverley and Barmston Conduit was built to drain. It is also the area that is the focus of Charles Christian’s supernatural-travel book in which he claims that the wolves around refuge

30 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves; Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (London 1865), 100. 31 Otia Imperialia. Recreation for an Emperor, S.E. Banks and J.W. Bins (eds.) (Oxford 2002), 86–87. 32 G.G. Couton, Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1928), 33–34. A more recent edition in: Alex J. Novikoff (ed.), The Twelfth Century Renaissance. A Reader (Toronto 2016), 195. 33 James Edmund Harting, British Animals Extinct With Historic Times; With Some Account of British Wild White Cattle (Boston 1880), 155: ‘The “wolds” of Yorkshire appear, from the dates of parish books, to have been infested with Wolves perhaps later than any other part of England’. And quoting P. Blaine, An Encyclopedia of Rural Sports (London 1858), 105: ‘In the entries at Flixton, Hackston, and Folkston, in the East Riding of Yorkshire are still to be seen memoranda of payments made for the destruction of wolves … they used to breed in the “cars” below, amongst the rushes, furze and bogs’.

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for travellers ‘were regarded with particular loathing because they scavenged in graveyards for freshly buried corpses’. This is not unusual wolf behaviour, especially in winter.34 Christian adds that various acts of cunning ‘gave rise to the belief they were not ordinary wolves but human beings who adopted a wolf-like shape by night’ and that in a twelfth-century account ‘this creature is described as walking upright and having a particularly long and powerful tail, almost as long as its body, that it used to knock its victims to the floor. It is also at about this time we hear the first reports of the creature’s ferocious red eyes “crimson and darting fire” and foul breath.’ Very similarly, a ghost book from 1968 reports that this werewolf was ‘Equipped with abnormally large teeth which glow in the dark, and exuding a terrible stench, the animal is supposed to fell nocturnal travelers with its tail, which is almost as long as its body. The eyes are crimson and dart fire.’ It also mentions that ‘historical records’ (no reference) tell of these creatures’ cunning, boldness and ‘habit of suddenly descending in large numbers on an area where they have been previously unknown, (which) all helped to give rise to the belief that the animals were not ordinary wolves but human beings … organized by a wizard whose innocent appearance enabled him to gather information’.35 I am unable to find any sources for this particular information other than these very recent two. Christian goes on to recount other sightings of similar entities (including an eighteenth-century and a 1960s one), and to link them with a creature named ‘Old Stinker’, a term derived from its carrion-breath. It is worth remembering that the Barmston Drain was, at times, famous for its foul stench. The name ‘Old Stinker’ as applied to a creature appears to be very recent indeed. It has stuck, and is present in many of the secondary tabloid stories from 2016. Post-Reformation werewolf cases were far more plentiful on the Continent, and English people had the means to find out about them. One of the most famous was the case of Peter Stump who was tried in his home town of Bedburg in 1589. He may have been a serial killer, 34 Dogs digging corpses from graves has contributed to vampire folklore too. It was easier in the past for two reasons: people were generally buried in winding sheets rather than coffins; and they would likely have had shallow graves in the winter owing to the difficulty of digging frozen soil. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven and London 1988), 19. 35 John Harries, The Ghost Hunters Road Book (London 1974), 26.

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or a victim of bloody Reformation politics. His accusers charged him with crimes of violence, incest and devil-worship, then—disgusted by his ferocity—enacted some of the most appalling and protracted tortures ever recorded, seemingly oblivious to the paradox. The story was collected in an illustrated pamphlet which was printed in English by Edward Venge in London in 1590.36 ‘Lycanthropy’ was included in Oxford scholar Robert Burton’s 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy where he wrote that ‘… Wolf Madness (is)… when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves or some such beasts’. Burton’s definition, combined with the reminiscences of Simon Goulart,37 made their way into Jacobean theatre. John Webster’s 1612 play The Duchess of Malfi had a melancholic character digging up bodies at night and carrying body parts down the street. As unusual as werewolves are in British folklore, they are not absent in contemporary British culture. The modern werewolf trope expressed in novels, comics and movies is endemic to the degree that you can absorb the salient points, whether you are a horror-genre fan or not. It is interesting that the ‘Werewolf of Hull’ conforms more to Twilight, Underworld and Dog Soldiers than it does to Gerald of Wales’ werewolves or those from the Stories of Marie de France, both early medieval tales. To a modern audience, ambiguous beastly shapes easily evoke the idea of a werewolf. The concept also has tabloid appeal and good viral potential. However, given the creature’s appearance, it is hard to avoid comparison with a more traditional British folklore theme—the Black Dog. Folklorists such as Ethel Rudkin, Theo Brown and Katherine Briggs among many others have collected and commented upon British Black Dog stories. Although their distribution and habits vary, folkloric Black Dogs are so similar that they can reasonably be thought of as individuals within the same closely related family. In European tradition in general, dogs have often been closely allied to death and its administrators. For example, a contributor to Notes and Queries in 1850 wrote that many Yorkshire folk ‘…place implicit credence in the reality of the appearance of a death sign … It has the appearance

36 Montague Summers reprinted the whole pamphlet in his The Werewolf (London 1933), 254–259. 37 Simon Coulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories Containing the Wonders of Our Time (London 1607), translated from the French.

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of a large black dog, with long shaggy hair. According to the statements of parties who have seen (it) frequently, it makes its appearance to some member of that family from which death will shortly select his victim.’38 Black Dog folklore in the UK has been most densely observed in Lincolnshire (just south of Hull and the Humber Estuary) and in Devonshire but, as Theo Brown pointed out, those places were where she and Ethel Rudkin conducted their research to produce their two seminal papers. She reasonably conceded: ‘With a similar concentration of field work, perhaps an equal density (of Black Dogs) might be found anywhere else’.39 Brown divides Black Dogs into three forms, or what she termed ‘species’. The least common is a type which appears in specific localities, and in conjunction with a calendar cycle.40 Another type does not change form, is huge, an individual (rather than being one member of a species), and is associated with a place or, sometimes, a family.41 This type can be a harbinger of death. As such, it is worth considering the role of Banshees in Irish folklore, varieties of which are sometimes focused upon the prominent men or chieftains of older or aristocratic families, just as Swedish weisse Frauen/white ladies and Old Norse fylgja are.42 Patricia Lysaught said that ‘there is little doubt … that the banshee and her ilk should … be considered the supernatural counterparts of … professional mourners’.43 The banshee in that context, therefore, is a marker of social status rather a supernatural perpetrator. Using this logic, there is a possibility that this sub-species of Black Dog is associated with death but does not cause it. Brown’s third and largest category of Black Dog is known by a variety of local names such as Trash, Shuck, Padfoot, Skriker, Hooter, Barguest and others.44

38 T.T. Wilkinson, ‘Trash or Skriker’ Notes and Queries Ser. 1, 2 (1850), 52–53;

https://archive.org/stream/notesqueries1218unse/notesqueries1218unse_djvu.txt. Retrieved 4 June 2021. 39 Theo Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, Folklore 69 (1958), 175–192, cit. 175–176. Cf. Mark Norman, Black Dog Folklore (2016; Woodbury, 2020). 40 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 179. 41 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 178. 42 Patricia Lysaught, The Banshee: The Irish Death Messenger (Boulder 1986), 63. 43 Lysaught, The Banshee, 69. 44 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 176.

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The ‘Barguest’ term was theorised by Sir Walter Scott to have derived from ‘bier-ghost’ (deathbed-ghost). An alternative is that it comes from ‘burgh’ (city) ghost ‘because this type was so well known in connection with Winchester, Norwich, Newcastle, York and Wakefield’.45 Alternatively, ‘Bargest is not a town ghost …. On the contrary, it is said in general to frequent small villages and hills … the real derivation seems to be … bear-ghost, from its appearing on the form of a bear or a large dog.’46 The ‘Shuck’ name has been derived from Old English scucca which means a devil or a fiend, but Westwood and Simpson point out that ‘shucky is Norfolk dialect for “shaggy”, and the creature is frequently described as such’.47 The ‘Trash’ or ‘Gytrash’ term is thought to derive from the splashing noise the creature’s huge feet make as they squelch through mud and puddles. Brown says these sorts of Black Dogs are found in two principal districts (although there are plenty of outliers). The first is ‘Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, where the dog is frequently one-eyed, haunts coasts, fens, roads and churchyards’ and the second is on the other side of England to the west in ‘Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Derbyshire, where it haunts hill-country, roads and churchyards’. Scotland seems bereft of Black Dogs, but that may be because their functions are fulfilled by fairy dogs.48 These Black Dogs are often characterised as being benign if left alone, even rarely helpful, but often chilling portenders of bad luck, ill health and disease. In their defence, there are those who believe this to be an unnuanced stereotype: ‘Shuck … is almost invariably described as a black dog who is ominous to meet. This ignores the variety of both printed texts and oral testimony.’49 They can also be

45 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 183. 46 Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England; or, The Drolls, Traditions,

and Superstitions of Old Cornwall (London 1908) 471. Orig. London, 1881. 47 Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends (London 2005), 500–501. 48 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 176. 49 Westwood and Simpson, The Lore of the Land, 500.

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guardians of treasure or of ancient sacred places, like wells.50 Some have the ability to shape-shift, which prompts some commentators to point out that they should more properly be considered shape-shifting boggarts/ bogeys/mischievous spirits than Black Dogs per se.51 In Norfolk, Black Shuck can manifest as a goat, a calf, or a horse. On the Isle of Man, the ‘Buggane’ can take the form of a tall, headless man or heifer. In Suffolk, the ‘Moddey Dhoe’ can appear in human form. In Yarmouth the ‘Scarfe’ looks like a huge black goat. North Yorkshire’s ‘Barguest’ can manifest as a pig, and donkey and a calf, and in Wakefield ‘Padfoot’ is the size of a calf and has twisted spiral horns.52

Graves, Grims and Gallows Hull is situated on the north bank of the enormous Humber estuary. The Humber’s southern shores meet North Lincolnshire, one of the two UK counties that accommodate the Black Dog ‘hotspots’ identified by Brown and Rudkin. The Lincolnshire Black Dog is ‘blacker than the blackest night’. It can (somewhat unusually for a supernatural creature) cross water but not parish boundaries. These Black Dogs are also strongly associated with burial sites and churchyards. Both Rudkin and Brown saw the distribution of Black Dog folklore as indicative of transmission by water-ways, the ‘streams and tributaries of the Humber’, and, ‘the Black Dog has to do with an invasion by water, up the main rivers then up the tributary streams to the spring-line’.53 That the folklore went north, as well as south, of the Humber is indicated by its use by Yorkshire novelist Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre: ‘I remembered certain of Bessie’s tales, wherein figured a North-of-England spirit called a “Gytrash” which, in the form of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated travelers’.54 Black Dog folklore is unambiguously associated with death and graveyards. It may be they are examples of the ‘Church Grim’ tradition, in

50 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 176. 51 Westwood and Simpson, The Lore of the Land, 500: ‘Shuck is not a true Black Dog

but one of the many shape-shifting bogey beasts’. 52 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 176. 53 Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, 128; Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 179. 54 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter 12.

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which spirits are believed to protect churchyards from evil such as witches and the devil.55 These Grims have been linked to the practice of ‘foundation sacrifice’, a ritual in which a building is consecrated to its use with the dedication of a life. The first to be interred in a graveyard, goes the logic, would be condemned to guard it for the rest of eternity: to avoid this arduous duty falling to a human, a dog could be killed and buried first. Ruth Tongue knew of three black dogs which had been ‘secretly buried in a churchyard to protect a new extension … she vouched for this strange ritual among sextons’.56 The Beast of Barmston Drain has three graveyards to choose from on its small patch: the Sculcoates Sacristy/Air Street Cemetery (the original cemetery of St Mary’s Parish Church which was rebuilt and resituated in the twentieth century), Sculcoates Lane Cemetery (south) and Sculcoates Lane Cemetery (north). In sighting four the creature had run off ‘into the old yards near the cemetery’. Covell had compared Victorian maps of the cemeteries with modern satellite images and noted that one of them was about 30 percent covered in overgrowth, ‘a vegetation thick environment that is akin to a wildlife reservation than a cemetery’, with access to the Drain and surrounded by barely used industrial land. It is a perfect area for feral dogs, or else homeless people, to live inconspicuously. Indeed, on 4 June 2016, Covell had taken a closer look and found ‘three sites inside the cemetery where small fires had been lit, one of these was actually on bricks with a metal wire mesh over the top, like a makeshift barbeque’. He had also previously seen ‘an encampment of tents near the rear wall’.57 Black Dogs also haunt places of symbolic transition: ‘… our Black Dogs which haunt bridges and riversides are playing the part of these otherworld situations, using physical bridges etc. as their symbolic “props”’.58 Rudkin writes, ‘At Manton there is a green lane that is probably a very old track … the Dog has been met with here, near the bridge that crosses the stream’.59 Crossroads frequently embody choices or confusion in folklore. As such, they are thought to be liminal places where the barriers between the mundane and supernatural worlds are thinnest. Wirt Sykes recounted 55 Katherine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (London 1977), 74. 56 Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, 75. 57 Covell, The Beast, 72. 58 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 192. 59 Ethel H. Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, Folklore 49 (1938), 111–131, cit. 119.

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that traditionally in Wales when a corpse was borne to the graveyard, the entourage stopped and said the Lord’s Prayer at every crossroads.60 The Devil can reputedly be met at crossroads too: the trope that a nascent musician trades his soul for virtuosity at crossroads has passed into rockmusic tradition. Naturally, Black Dogs can be found at crossroads too. Until the introduction of the Burial of Suicide Act of 1823, people in England and Wales who had killed themselves were buried at crossroads, the remainder of an apotropaic practice applied to a person who had undergone an ‘unhallowed’ death. Rudkin says that a Black Dog was ‘to be seen down Brick Pit Lane near the bridge that crosses the river Till, and he is connected in the local mind with a woman who drowned herself at this spot’.61 Other forms of violent or premature death are sometimes associated with Black Dogs. At Knaith, Lincolnshire a woman who had been murdered for her wealth ‘haunted the place … as a Black Dog with a woman’s face’ which evokes Covell’s tenth account and Jemma Waller’s beast which ‘had a human face’.62 Covell provides a seven-page list of people who have suffered unusual deaths in and around the Drain since 1834. It would require further research to establish whether the Barmston and Beverley Drain is a more deadly water-course than others of its type, such as the Grand Union Canal, and so whether its morbid reputation is deserved. Gallows sites also have a connection with Black Dogs. Thistleton-Dyer recounted the story of a poor, old woman from Tring in Hertfordshire who had, in 1751, been drowned for suspected witchcraft. This was not a judicial but a criminal act: 1751 was a considerable time after the educated classes thought witchcraft real, and over a decade after the Witchcraft Act of 1735 had formalised that modern approach. The principal perpetrator was hanged and gibbeted near the place where the murder had happened but ‘… the spot was haunted by a black dog’. ‘He was as big as a Newfoundland, but very gaunt, shaggy, with long ears and tail, eyes like balls of fire, and large, long teeth, for he seemed to grin at us’.63

60 Wirt Sykes, British Goblins: Welsh Folklore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (London 1880), 331. 61 Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, 121. 62 Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, 121; Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 181. 63 T.F. Thiselton-Dyer, Ghost World (London 1893), 107.

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A demonic aspect to Black Dog folklore is impossible to avoid, given that the spectres themselves sometimes forebode bad luck and that Christianity demonises that which it can’t successfully assimilate. On the continent, Black Dogs are often portrayed as the devil, like the black dog who accompanied Faust when he had made his fateful pact with Mephistopheles. A variety of Scottish black dog named ‘Muckle Black Tyke’ was also believed to be the Devil. Sykes mentions that the devil embodies as a familiar rather than as himself, and one of his favoured animal forms is a dog.64 Horses and dogs are reputed to be terrified when they see the Black Dog.65 In the third 2016 newspaper account of the Beast, a domestic dog was said to have been sufficiently scared to have refused to go any further. However, as we have seen, this event does not fall within Covell’s canonical sightings.66 Black Dogs vary in size from normal to enormous. Brown says they can be ‘as big as a calf’, which resonates with Jemma Waller’s entity which ‘looked like a big dog, probably bigger than my car, but it had a human face’. They are also attested to be able to walk on two legs,67 just like the second creature mentioned in the newspaper reports, and numbers four, five, six and seven of Covell’s sightings. A dog walking on two legs provides a very different profile to an ‘Anubis-type’ human body with a canine head. Elliot O’Donnell recorded a case of woman at the turn of the twentieth century who had seen an Anubis type in Exmoor: ‘… she had seen a phantasm, which she believed to be that of a werewolf, in the Valley of the Doones, Exmoor. … she was on the path directly in front of her the tall grey figure of a man with a wolf’s head … preparing to spring on a large rabbit that was crouching on the ground’.68 It is worth noting that the Anubis type does not turn up anywhere else in English folklore, and that O’Donnell was absurdly credulous. Rudkin reports that the Black Dog is not a stealthy creature: ‘… it was the boundary hedge into which he vanished with a “gurt (‘great’—DH) crack”. He is often heard, for when he disappears into a hedge the leaves

64 Sykes, British Goblins, 197. 65 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 187. 66 Private Twitter messages with Covell 15 April 2019. 67 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 181. 68 Elliott O’Donnell, Werwolves (London 1912), 104.

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restle (‘rustle’—DH) loudly, or the twigs crackle as if they were afire.’69 Covell and Christian also ‘heard loud wood cracking, like something had just snapped a tree’ when they saw the luminous eyes from the opposite bank of the Drain during their investigation. The animal they saw was clearly neither shy nor intimidated as it ‘instead boldly crashed and trampled its way along the bank’. If an animal does not feel the need to skulk, it is reasonable to assume that it is either domesticated or, at the very least, not afraid of people. Brown mentions that most of the cases where people had suffered ill-effects from seeing the folkloric Black Dog were cases where they had tried to harm it.70 In other words, their afflictions were well deserved: ‘most of the black dogs I have listed are not offensive. Most of those who have been injured were asking for trouble, either by attacking the dog or running away from it, which is exactly what we should expect from a real dog.’ None of the Barmston Drain Beast’s witnesses were harmed although they were all alarmed. Rudkin lists many examples of another strand of Black Dog folklore— where the creature is benevolent: ‘the most striking fact about the Dog in Lincolnshire is that he is never feared’. This may be an authentic strand of folklore, or alternatively it is possible that with the nineteenth-century rise of Romanticism, theosophy and spiritualism some ancient traditions were stripped of their malignant aspects. She mentioned the case of a woman on the road to Scunthorpe who overheard the ‘bad intentions of labourers … had she not been accompanied by a big, black dog’, a dog which had accompanied her but which she did not know.71 Another woman went on a journey, returned by the same route later and thought it was ‘nice of the dog to wait for her’. She felt that it had protected her. A similar version was told by Augustus Hare about a man named Johnnie Greenwood who had been accompanied by a large black dog through a forest at night. Years later, two criminals were about to be executed at York Gaol for murder when they had confessed to the chaplain that they had thought of robbing and killing him that night, but they ‘felt that Johnnie and the

69 Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, 130. 70 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 187. 71 Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, 117.

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dog together would be too much for them’.72 Briggs notes that this type of story was ‘fairly widespread during the early 1900s, when Augustus Hare heard it’ and she was told similar versions.

Sane People and Mad Visions Brown was keen to vouch for the down-to-earth reliability of her Black Dog witnesses: ‘There seems to be no reason why we should doubt them; the dog has been seen by a very mixed crowd of people, mainly country folk who, as any folklorist knows, are often the most sceptical of mortals’. Rudkin offered a similar testament: ‘The people who can supply these details are of the hard-working, normal, strong-minded type’ and ‘I had never yet had a Black Dog story from anyone who was weak either in body or mind’, although she wryly added that one species was ‘most often seen after closing time (of the Public House—DH) on Saturday nights when … men were going home!’73 In a similar vein, Covell mentions that all of his witnesses were sober when they had their encounters with the Beast of Barmston Drain. These kinds of assurances are ubiquitous in strange sightings. People are always keen to point out that they are sober, sensible and intelligent, no matter how odd their experiences have been.74 The British Isles is the home of many ‘cryptid’ or mysterious animal stories. One of the most popular types is the ‘alien-big-cat’ or ‘phantom cat’, such as the ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor’. Stories about outsized feline predators living outside their natural range, theorised to be jaguars, cougars, leopards, pumas and so on, have been around since the 1970s. It has been suggested that these animals have escaped from private

72 Katherine M. Briggs, British Folktales and Legends A Sampler (St. Albans 1977),

117. 73 Brown, ‘The Black Dog’, 179; Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog’, 119. 74 These testaments should not surprise us. ‘Stake innoculation’ is a discursive technique

which prepares the way to resist a predictable counter-argument. In paranormal debates it is common, for example, to encounter an ‘avowal of prior scepticism’ e.g., starting a paranormal story with ‘I was a total skeptic’. See Christopher C. French and Anna Stone, Anomalistic Psychology (Basingstoke 2014), 175.

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collections to thrive in the wild. In a notable case of alien-big-cat misidentification, the ‘Essex Lion’ of 2012 turned out to be a Maine-Coon cat called Teddy Bear.75 Two police helicopters, police firearms officers and experts from Colchester Zoo searched for around twenty-four hours after being alerted by holidaymakers, one of whom managed to get a picture of the large domestic cat hunkered down in the grass. It is not the only case. Spock the 27 lb/12¼ kg Maine Coon from San Jose, California also hit the headlines at CNN when he was mistaken for a bobcat.76 These accounts remind us that size is very difficult to gauge accurately over distance, and that normal, sensible people get things wrong all the time—not through stupidity, but because human perception is unreliable. Modern approaches in psychology have provided a good understanding of the ways in which we systematically misperceive the world, and it has been noted that this knowledge is not widespread among the general public.77 Perception and memory are often regarded by nonpsychologists as ‘recording’ rather than ‘constructing’ processes. Consequently, the reliability of eyewitness testimony is generally overestimated by non-specialists. For one example, our processing bandwidth has limits. We don’t work by refreshing the perception of our environment moment by moment, but tend instead to use mechanisms for efficiency. When we’re short of time and/or under stress it is easier to react using general rules of thumb called heuristics: the ‘availability heuristic’ is a ‘tendency to rely on those examples and instances that spring readily to mind’.78 In other words, our minds tend to re-employ the patterns that we’re familiar with—the ones that are mentally ‘to hand’. This is why the popularity of werewolves in modern media is as relevant to the case of the Beast as the traditional Black Dog folklore. Our heuristics naturally reflect our social learning.79 Researcher David Hufford collected most of his first-person accounts of a terrifying but

75 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-19397686. 76 https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/19/living/giant-house-cat-feat/index.html. 77 French and Stone, Anomalistic Psychology, 114: ‘looking back at the explanations (neurological/psychobiological) in the chapter, they do not seem to be particularly well known in the general population’. 78 French and Stone, Anomalistic Psychology, 126. 79 French and Stone, Anomalistic Psychology, 82.

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harmless sleep malfunction called ‘sleep-paralysis’ in Newfoundland, where the mythology was such that people did have a vocabulary and schema for it.80 It usually caused him trouble that he was ‘working on a subject for which there is no really useful English vocabulary’. For another example, the term ‘apophenia’ means to see patterns in random noise. At the extreme end of the spectrum, it can be a sign of mental illness—psychosis and paranoia. But at the healthy end of the spectrum, it is normal and adaptive. People (and other animals, for that matter) are alert to the idea that something intelligent and predatory may be in their environment—an ‘agent’81 —and our tendency to see these ‘agents’ is highest when we are vulnerable, uncertain or seeing ambiguous information. When we get it wrong, we could make what Daniel Kahneman calls ‘type I’ errors82 —false positives, or ‘seeing things that aren’t there’.83 Where apophenia occurs in perception it is called pareidolia. Probably the most common form of apophenia we experience is the tendency to see human faces everywhere: in clouds, in toast … and perhaps even on dogs and foxes. These few examples serve to show that eyewitness accounts are not meaningless, but they do need to be assessed in the context of our most recent understandings of psychology.

80 David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia 1989), vii. 81 Justin Barrett is one of many people who has coined a term for this human tendency to look for agency in the environment. He calls it the Hyper-Active Agency Detection device, or HADD. Cf. Justin L. Barrett, ‘Exploring Religion’s Basement. The Cognitive Science of Religion’, in: Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal C. Park, Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (second edition, London 2015), 234–255. 82 Daniel Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (London 2011). 83 We could also make ‘type II’ errors—false negatives, or ‘not seeing things that are

there’. For understandable evolutionary reasons, people who make type I errors (needlessly jumping at shadows) tend to pass on their genes more than people who make type II errors (ignoring tigers). Kahneman, Thinking.

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Map of Barmston Drain. The numbers refer to the sightings described in the text

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363

Summary It is worth noting that there are different names for whatever has been spotted around Sculcoates. Local enthusiast Mike Covell uses the term ‘Beast of Barmston Drain’ in a neutral manner that could cover either a natural or a supernatural entity. Those with a taste for more lurid terminology, such as newspapers (which do, after all, have a product to sell) use ‘werewolf’. Those, like Charles Christian, who wish to place the entity in a cultural landscape use a term like ‘Old Stinker’. It should be clear by now that the commentary on this creature reflects the needs and expectations of its witnesses. Are we suffering a form of sub-conscious guilt at the eradication of a species on our island, especially in the context of our present ecological crisis? Sam George of the University of Hertfordshire thought so. In an online piece for The Conversation and in a paper presented at The Manchester Gothic Festival, George proposed that Old Stinker ‘represents not our belief in him as a supernatural shapeshifter, but our collective guilt at the extinction of an entire indigenous species of wolf’.84 Regrettably, in a country that still has people who enjoy a fox hunt, I cannot share George’s optimism that we are capable of such regret. If people in the UK have a collective unconscious, then it remembers wolves very well, and wild boars, reindeer and beavers not at all. So what is the Beast of Barmston Drain? Leaving aside the possibility that it is a supernatural entity, Covell lists four plausible candidates.85 It could be a large pet or feral dog/s. It could also be an alien big cat. If large predators like this were living in a built-up area, especially if they formed breeding populations, they would leave a lot of evidence in the form of prey corpses and identifiable scat. There is certainly enough overgrowth in Sculcoates and along the Drain to afford feral animals good cover. There are also enough potential prey species like rabbits and birds for food. Covell also mentions that there have been roe deer sightings 84 Sam George, ‘Why We Should Welcome the Return of “Old Stinker”, the English Werewolf’. http://theconversation.com/why-we-should-welcome-the-return-of-old-stinker-theenglish-werewolf-67797; George, ‘Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Wyrd Case of “Old Stinker” the Hull Werewolf’, https://www.aca demia.edu/33708017/Wolves_in_the_Wolds_Late_Capitalism_the_English_Eerie_and_ the_Wyrd_Case_of_Old_Stinker_the_Hull_Werewolf. 85 Covell, The Beast, 151.

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toward the northern end of the Drain. Roe deer have the ability to leap the distances that the Beast is said to. They can also make a territorial signalling noise that sound like barking, similar to that of a dog.86 And finally the Beast could, of course, be a person. For me, the way the story has been transmitted holds the most significant clue. We live in a society which has horror-as-entertainment at its core. We have novels, films, video games and Gothic tourism. Whether you are a fan or not, the symbols and images are available to us all. Covell started by looking for black-eyed children and unearthed a different theme, but in an area which has a very well developed Black-Dog folklore and in a milieu where werewolf tales are abundant. The story was almost certainly primed by the previous Halloween’s Hull Daily Mail coverage of an ‘Old Stinker’ article placed to publicise Charles Christian’s book.87 It lost both proportion and accuracy when the newspapers became enthusiastic in 2016: media with tame headlines don’t sell papers or clicks, after all. The secondary coverage either directly cited the Express story or used identical quotes. The final stage was engagement with social media. We can assume that since rock star Alice Cooper was talking about the Beast of Barmston Drain on Facebook,88 then a great many other people were too. The story went viral but had not been improved by fresh information. An imponderable number of words have been written on thousands of websites using what was—until Covell’s book—just a few hundred words of source material. If contemporary entertainment shows us anything it is that we all love a mystery. With the decline in traditional authoritative religion, we are free to extemporise on our own supernatural schema, using a grab-bag of contemporary fiction themes, urban legends, creepy-pasta and traditional folklore. This, and our unprecedented ability to communicate, made the Werewolf of Hull a small story with a big impact.

86 D. Reby, B. Cargneluttia, and J.M. Hewison, ‘Contexts and Possible Functions of Barking in Roe Deer’, Animal Behaviour 57, Issue 5, (May 1999), 1121–1128; https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347298910569 87 Haunted by Old Stinker the Werewolf: Yorkshire’s Bermuda Triangle, Hull Daily Mail, 31 October 2015. 88 Rock star Alice Cooper and Facebook, A Strange Creature Has Been Spotted in England, And People Are Freaking Out, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ rock-legend-alice-cooper-launches-8088552. Retrieved 25 May 2019.

Correction to: Werewolf Legends Willem de Blécourt and Mirjam Mencej

Correction to: W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3 The original version of this book was inadvertently published without including the author names, affiliations, and email addresses, which have now been added and the page references in the Index have been updated accordingly. The book and the chapter have been updated with the changes. Additionally, the screen shot in chapter 9 was misplaced and has been moved to the end of the chapter and the map in chapter 14 was misplaced and has been moved before the summary. The book has been updated with the changes. The publisher apologizes to the editors and to their readers.

The updated version of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3_15

C1

Index

A An American Werewolf in London, film, 239 Aesop, popular Greek fabulist , 18 Afzelius, Arvid August, 19 th c. Swedish pator and mythologist , 10n, 21, 22, 24 Alentejo, region in Portugal , 286n, 301, 309 Algarve, region in Portugal , 286, 291, 294n, 306, 307 Allgau, region in Swabia and Austria, 15 Alps, 16, 17, 18, 155, 261–83, 301n, 338 Ansbach, city in Bavaria, 16 anthropophagy, 89, 97, 288, 303 Antwerp, Belgian province, 32 Aosta Valley, region in Italy, 262, 272 apophenia, 361 Apulia, region in Southern Italy, 238, 239, 240, 248, 254–9

Apuseni mountains, Romania, 209–11, 213–5, 219, 228, 233 archives, folklore, 23, 41, 76, 107, 135, 185n, 214, 264, 286, 300 Asturias, region in Spain, 288, 289 Augsburg, city in Bavaria, 14n Austria, country in Europe, 16, 17, 19, 156, 157n Azores, Portuguese island region, 286n, 292n, 294n, 298n, 309, 310

B back-rider, 72–3, 275, 314, 316, 319, 320, 326, 328–33 ballad, 168–70 Bari, city in Italy, 244n, 255 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 19 th c. English minister and author, 8, 11–13, 21, 166, 349 Barmston Drain, 18 th c. canal in Yorkshire, 339–64

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. de Blécourt and M. Mencej (eds.), Werewolf Legends, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06082-3

365

366

INDEX

Barth, forest in Mecklenburg, Germany, 50, 64 Bartholomew of Exeter, 12 th c. English bishop, 349 Bartsch, Karl, 19 th c. German philologist , 32n, 48, 61, 66n, 71 Basanaviˇcius, Jonas, 19 th and early 20 th c. Lithuanian physician, 108, 109 bear, 25, 30, 46, 69–72, 76, 79, 80, 106, 140, 150, 152, 274n, 353 Belarus, 108, 132, 136, 141, 142, 145, 149 Belgium, 8, 32, 33, 241n, 313, 318, 333, 337 belt, 44–47, 66, 144, 322, 332 Bernard, Daniel, French author, 226 Bethel, Brian, Texas reporter, 342 Betuwe, region in the Netherlands , 330, 333, 337 Bible, 18, 24, 39, 40, 329 Bîrlea, Ovidiu, present-day Romanian folklorist , 213 birth, werewolf through, 27, 28, 31, 38, 39, 51n, 137, 144, 146, 245–46, 322, 323 Black Dog, folklore, 351–60 Black Earth, region in Russia, 149 black-eyed-kids, 341–2 Blažek, Antonin, early 20 th c. Czech folklorist , 168, 171, 172 Blekinge, Swedish province, 26 blood, 27, 66–8, 187–8, 220, 251, 255, 288, 298–9 blood pressure, 218 Bodin, Jean, 16 th c. demonologist , 8 Bohemia, region in Czechia, 157n, 160n, 162, 169, 174 Bohuslän, province in Sweden, 26, 29, 30 Bordelon, Laurent, early 18 th c. French author, 18

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 153n, 183–208 Bouquet, Romain, 19 th c. French author, 278 Braga, Téofilo, early 20 th c. Portuguese folklorist , 290 Branagan, Mark, English journalist , 340, 347 Brati´c, Tomo, early 20 th c. Bosnian author, 187 Bräuner, Johann Jacob, 18 th c. German author, 6 bread, 85, 90, 91, 93, 117, 126, 134, 139, 143, 146, 149, 150, 152, 163n, 215, 217, 220, 268–70, 301n Brest, region in Belarus , 132n, 136, 139, 140 Briggs, Katherine, 20 th c. English folklorist , 351, 359 Brontë, Charlotte, 19 th c. English novelist , 354 Bronzini, Giovanni Battista, 20 th c. Italian historian, 244, 245n, 249n, 253, 259n Brothers and the Ogre, the, fairy tale (ATU 327B), 303–5 Brown, Theo, 20 th c. English folklorist , 352–59 Brunold-Bigler, Ursula, present-day Swiss folklorist , 16–7 Bryansk, region in Russia, 132n, 149, 150 Buchatskiy, region in Russia, 148 Bug, river in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, 141 bullet, silver, 55, 61, 68–9, 96, 99, 120 Burned Skin, legend, 314, 316, 330, 331, 332 Burton, Robert, 17 th c. English author, 351

INDEX

C ˇ Capek, Karel, early 20 th c. Czech author, 176 Cantemir, prince Dimitrie, 18 th c. Moldavian author, 212 Carpathians, region in Romania, 145, 148, 153, 209–236 Carter, Angela, 20 th c. English author, 2 Castellaneta, city in Apulia, Italy, 239, 254, 255 cat, 71, 81, 89–90, 92, 190, 191, 221, 273, 275–6, 292n, 348, 359–60, 363 Cave of the werewolf, 308 caul, 27, 39 Chernigov, region in Ukraine, 132n, 133, 134, 136 Christian, Charles, English barrister and author, 343, 347–50, 351, 358, 363 Christiansen, Reidar, 20 th c. Norwegian folklorist , 30. See also migratory legend Ciulei, Thomas, Romanian documentary maker, 209, 211, 218 clothes underneath skin (or inside fur) (Q47), 24, 38, 90, 93, 96, 115, 144 clusters, 313–338 Coelho, Adolfo, 19 th and early 20 th c. Portuguese philogist , 290, 296n Cooper, Alice, rockstar, 364 Covell, Mike, present day English historian, 339–48, 355–8 Croatia, country in Europe, 153n, 162 crying, 85, 92, 98, 300 cunning folk, 79–80, 83 curse, 22, 26–28, 133, 138, 150, 288, 332

367

cutting werewolf (counter measure). See blood Czechia, 14, 20, 155–181

D Dacians, mythological Romanian ancestors , 228 Dalmatia, region in Croatia, 188 Dalsland, Swedish province, 28 Daniels, Thomas, 20 th c. Belgian legend collector, 331–2, 333–4 Daughter of the werewolf, fairy tale (ATU 409), 9, 164–5 Davainis-Silvestraitis, Meˇcislovas, 19 th c. Lithuanian folklorist , 108 Denmark, country in Europe, 14, 26, 30, 31, 33, 39, 51n, 56, 106, 241, 248n, 282, 310, 323 devil, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 43, 61n, 69, 106, 119–120, 145n, 170, 172, 184, 187, 192, 194–5, 200, 205, 206, 222, 224n, 280, 292, 301, 309, 311, 314, 325n, 327, 351, 353, 355–57 Devonshire, English county, 352 Dinnissen, M.H., 20 th c. Dutch headmasterlegend collector, 318, 330, 332 disguise. See skin Doberan, town in Mecklenburg, Germany, 60 Dobšinský, Pavol, 19 th c. Slovakian folklore collector, 165 dog, 14, 46, 70, 140, 216, 292, 302, 305, 306, 322, 327, 328, 330, 336, 339–41, 343–4, 346–7 Dominaw, settlement in Pravdinsk, historical Prussia, 105 dream, 193, 196 Dundes, Alan, 20 th c. Californian folklorist , 1, 3

368

INDEX

Dykstra, Waling, 19 th c. Frisian author, 319

E Eggen, Coen, 20 th c. Dutch legend collector museologist , 333 elephant, on car. See Contemporary Legend 2024 Engels, Graad, 20 th c. Dutch legend collector aka Fransen, 331 Erben, Karel Jaromir, 19 th c. Slavic mythologist , 162, 163, 172, 173, 175 Estonia, country in Europe, 23, 24n, 38, 54–5, 62, 75, 78–9, 86–7, 90, 93, 104n, 157n, 167n, 118n, 157n, 167n, 208n Extremadura, region in Spain, 288

F fabulate, 2n–3n, 23, 37, 186, 188, 189, 211, 214, 309, 316, 319, 321, 322, 334, 336, 337 fairy tales. See Brothers and the Ogre; Daughter of the Werewolf; Little Red Riding Hood; Maiden without Hands; Rumpelstilskin; Sister, the Faithless Faveraz, poacher in Haute-Savoie, 267–8 Favre, Joseph-Siménon, 19 th c. Alpine folklorist , 273 fear, exploitation of, 223 female werewolves, 47, 59–63, 67, 68, 88, 171, 202, 220, 221, 281, 289, 306 ficti lupi, 157, 267, 361–2 Finland, country in Europe, 34, 75–99, 269n

Flanders, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, 8, 32, 172n, 313, 316, 318 foetus, 24 Foggia, place in Apulia, Italy, 246n, 256, 258, 259 fox, 15, 71, 345, 347, 348, 363 France, pays de l’Europe, 11–4, 17, 19, 28, 33, 106n, 202, 212, 219, 246n, 251n, 261–72, 301n Frisia, province in the Netherlands , 11n, 315, 317, 319–21, 322, 325, 333, 336 G Galicia, region in Spain, 286n, 288–290 Gästrikland, Swedish province, 28 Gift to the Werewolf, legend. See bread Gelderland, province in the Netherlands , 316, 325, 327 Gendt, town in the Netherlands , 318, 330, 332 Gennep, Arnold van, 20 th c. French ethnologist , 84n, 263, 264 George, Sam, English academic, 18n, 363 Gervase of Tilbury, 13 th c. author, 12, 246, 349 Gheorghe, David, werewolf , 210, 213, 215–7, 220, 222, 226–9, 231, 232 ghost, 303, 348 Giacosa, Guiseppe, 19 th c. Italian poet , 273 God, deity, 58, 86, 98, 147, 158, 165, 215, 218, 222, 223, 229, 231, 235–6, 269, 292n god, Egyptian, 344, 347, 357 god, Lithuanian, 109 god, Roman, 158

INDEX

Gomel’, region in Ukraine, 138, 140 gothic, 18, 363 Grat, ian Florea, werewolf , 209–236 Grenier, Jean, early 17 th c. French werewolf , 13 Grimm, Jacob, 19 th c. German librarian philologist , 4, 5–7, 10, 13, 171n Grimm, Wilhelm, brother of J., 4, 5–7, 175 Grohmann, Jozef Virgil, 19 th c. Prague mythologist , 158n, 159n, 162, 163, 170 Groningen, province in the Netherlands , 315, 317, 321–3

H Hagberg, Louise, 20 th c. amanuensis Nordisk Museum Stockholm, 26, 27 Halland, Swedish province, 29, 30 Hanka, Václav, 19 th c. Czech falsifier, 159 Hanuš, Ignác Jan, 19 th c. Czech librarian, 9, 156n, 166, 175 hare, 349 Hasdeu, Bogdan Petriceicu, 19 th c. Romanian philologist , 213 Haute-Savoie. See Savoie Hede¸san, Otilia, 20 th c. Romanian folklorist , 214 Heldring, Ottho Gerhard, 19 th c. Dutch Protestant minister, 333, 337 Hennenberger, Caspar, 16 th c. German Lutheran pastor and cartographer, 105 Herculano, Alexandre, 19 th c. Portugese forerunner of Romanticism, 290, 291

369

Hertz, Wilhelm, 19 th c. German Germanist , 5n, 7–10, 11, 13, 15, 44, 61, 101n Heupers, Engelbert, 20 th c. Dutch collector of legends , 314n, 327–329, 330, 331, 336, 338 hide. See skin Hilversum, place in the Netherlands , 314 Hol, Adriana, 20 th c. Dutch teacher legend collector, 329–30 Hopkin, David, social historian, 271 horse, 292 Huckauf, 316 Hufford, David, 20 th c. American ethnographer, 360–1 Huizenga-Onnekes, E.J., early 20 th c. Dutch legend collector, 321, 322 Hull, English city, 339–364 Hungry Farmhand, legend, 5, 38, 47–8, 49–56, 58, 59, 62, 70, 317, 321, 322, 330 Hunt, Wild, 63 Hutsuls, region in Ukraine, 146, 147 I index, 365–375 Ingria, Ingermanland, Baltic region, 78, 87, 89, 93 Ionit, a˘ , Maria, Romanian folklorist , 214, 220n Isere, department in France, 270, 278 J Jaarsma, Adam Aukes, 20 th c. Frisian assistant minister collector of legends and folk-tales , 320–322, 331, 336, 337, 338 Jánošík Juraj, early 18 th c. social bandit and Slovak legendary figure, 166

370

INDEX

Joisten, Alice, widow of Charles , 226n, 264n, 269n, 271n, 274n Joisten, Charles, 20 th c. French folklorist , 17, 263–7, 278, 281, 301n Jomppanen, Stuorra-Jovna (Big John), werewolf , 97 jumping, motif (i.e: vaulting, leaping), 34, 38, 60, 105, 116, 118, 132–4, 135, 137, 142, 144, 146, 149, 171, 172, 192, 231, 232, 290, 322

K Kamenets, region in Ukraine, 148 Karelia, region in Russia and Finland, 78, 79, 87, 90, 149n Kargopol, region in northern Russia, 151, 152 Kemp, Pierre, 20 th c. Limburg author, 335 Kiev, region in Ukraine, 132n, 138 Klein Krams, place in Mecklenburg, Germany, 59 Klintberg, Bengt af, 20 th c. Swedish folklorist , 22n, 23–25, 26, 34, 35n, 37, 38n, 48n, 59n, 90n, 168n, 173n Kooijman, Henk, 20 th c. Dutch legend collector, 329, 330, 336 Kosovo, Russian district , 148 Kristensen, Evald Tang, 19 th c. Danish folklorist , 30, 31, 37 Kristensen, Jens, clogmaker at Ersted, Denmark, 30 Krosenbrink, Henk, 20 th c. Dutch legend collector, 329n, 331, 332n, 336–7

L Laan, Ko ter, 20 th c. Dutch folklorist , 317, 322n Lachia, Czech region, 167, 170 Lancre, Pierre de, early 17 th c. French demonologist , 13 Lapland, region in northern Scandinavia, 77, 78, 80, 86, 89, 94, 95, 98, 99 Latvia, Baltic republic, 6, 29, 104n, 111n Laube, Teophilus, late 17 th c. German author, 6n, 18 Laupin, place in Mecklenburg , 52n, 59, 65n Lecouteux, Claude, late 20 th c. and early 21st c. French medievalist , 19n, 51n, 110n, 221 legend, definition, 1–5, 319. See also Burned Skin; Gift to the Werewolf; Hungry Farmhand; Merchant into Werewolf; Wedding Guests; Werewolf Husband Leite de,Vasconcellos, José, 19 th 20 th c. Portugese philologist , 291, 295n, 296n León, region in Spain, 288, 289 Levi, Carlo, 20 th c. Italian physician and author, 249 Liege (present-day Belgium), werewolf trial in, 5, 6 Liemers, region in the Netherlands , 330, 337n Lilek, Emilian, late 19 th , early 20 th c. Slovenian ethnologist , 186n, 187, 188n, 192n, 196n–198n Limburg, Belgian province, 32, 313, 333, 334 Limburg Dutch province, 316, 320, 323, 325, 331–33, 335, 337

INDEX

Lincolnshire, English county, 352, 354, 356, 358 Lippe, district in Germany, 32 Lisbon, city in Portugal , 286n, 291, 297, 300, 309 Lithuania Minor (Prussian Lithuania), historical region in Prussia, 104, 105 Lithuania, Baltic state, 101–128 Little Red Riding Hood, fairy tale (ATU 333), 18 Livonia, historical Baltic region, 19n, 29, 104, 111, 161n, 269n, 281 Loorits, Oskar, 20 th c. Estonian folklorist , 29n, 36, 70, 72n, 79n, 269n Lublin, region in Poland, 132n, 141, 165 Lübz, town in Mecklenburg, Gemany, 49n, 65, 66 Lusitania. See Portugal Lutheranism, 39, 77, 88 lycanthropy, medical condition, 351 Lysaught, Patricia, Irish folklorist , 352

M Maiden, without Hands, fairy tale (ATU 706), 164–5 Maksimov, Sergey, 19 th c. Russian folklorist , 150 map, 19, 34, 35, 228, 263, 271n, 287, 317, 323, 323–326, 324, 327, 346, 362 Marcu, Ionu¸t, Romanian werewolf , 210, 213, 214, 221–23, 226 Mauss, Marcel, early 20 th c. French anthropologist , 269 Mecklenburg, region in Germany, 19n, 32n, 42, 63, 70 Meertens, Pieter J., 20 th c. Dutch philologist , 318n, 325

371

Meier, Ernst, early 20 th c. German folklorist , 15 memorate, 2n–3n, 13n, 16, 23, 37, 38, 121–123, 156, 165, 186, 189, 191, 211, 214, 218, 223, 232, 233, 244, 286, 293–305, 306, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322, 326, 328, 331, 333, 337 Metsvahi, Merili, Estonian werewolf specialist , 55, 62, 63n, 90, 105n, 118n, 157n, 167n Michelet, Jules, 19 th c. French credulous historian, 11 migratory legend. See fabulate Minden, town in Germany, 32 Minsk, province in Belarus , 132n, 142 Molen, Sytse Jan van der, 20 th c. Frisian newspaper editor folklorist , 317, 319 moon, 12, 38, 137, 139, 146–7, 158, 214, 246–7, 255, 258, 289, 295, 345, 349 Moravia, historical region in Czech Republic, 156n, 161n, 167, 174 motif (Thompson), 216, 241, 262, 272 Mus, lea, Ion, 20 th c. Romanian folklorist , 214

N Naming the Werewolf, legend, 7, 10, 22, 29, 55, 60, 63–66, 72, 138, 220, 248n, 323 Närke, Swedish province, 34 Neagota, Bogdan, Romanian historian of religions , 211, 214, 226 Negru, Pascu, Romanian werewolf , 210, 213–215, 226, 230 Nezhin, region in Ukraine, 134

372

INDEX

nightmare or mara, 24, 35, 36, 38, 39, 69, 161n, 172n, 206, 269n, 282–3, 295n, 306n, 320–1, 338 noble savage, 175 North-Brabant, province in the Netherlands , 315, 316, 317, 327, 329, 331–2, 333, 334, 335n North-Holland, province in the Netherlands , 315 Norway, European country, 14, 29, 30 Novgorod, region in Russia, 149n, 151, 152 O O’Donnell, Elliott, early 20 th c. English ghostfinder, 8n, 357 Odstedt, Ella, 20 th c. Swedish folklorist , 22–5, 26–8, 29n, 30, 34n, 35n, 36, 37–40, 85n ointment, 44, 47–8 Olaus Magnus, 16 th c. Swedish Catholic archbishop, 38, 104, 105, 110 Olbracht, Ivan, 20 th c. Czech writer, 176 Oldenburg, region in Germany, 322 Old Stinker, 350–1, 362–3, 363–4 Old Stinker, English legendary figure, 340n Ore’l, region in Central Russia, 150 Östergotland, Swedish province, 26, 34 Ostrog, region in Ukraine, 135 outcast, – law, – sider, 43, 75–6, 99, 177, 259, 293, 311 Overijssel, province in the Netherlands , 325 Ovid, Publius Ovidius Naso, popular Roman werewolf writer, 18 P pack, 43, 78, 86, 89, 90n, 124, 143, 150, 180, 223, 233, 267, 288

Paladru, lake in the Isère, France, 271 Palatinate, German earldom, 15 Palermo, city in Sicily, Italy, 246, 247 Pedroso, Consiglieri, Portugese folklorist , 290, 294n pelt. See skin Pegel, Ernst, teacher, collaborator of Wossidlo, 44, 45, 47, 52n, 65n Périgord, historical region in France, 11, 12, 263 Petronius, Roman author, 13, 247, 266n Peucer, Caspar, 16 th c. German scholar, 6 Piedmont, Italian region, 272 pig, 149, 292 pitchfork, 139, 144 Pitre, Giuseppe, late 19th c. Sicilian folklorist , 239n, 243, 246, 247, 250, 251 Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundes, Roman author, 13, 296n Podkarpatská Rus, region in Czechoslovakia, 176 Podlasie, region, mostly in Ukraine, 132n, 140–1, 153 Poland, European country, 2n, 7, 11, 19, 33, 48n, 115, 116, 132n, 140, 153, 156, 157, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 174 Polívka, Jiˇrí, 19 th c., early 20 th c. Czech linguist , 175 Pomerania, historical southern Baltic region, 42, 54n Pooley, William G., British historian, 13n, 19 Porto, Portuguese city, 288 Portugal, European country, 19, 33n, 285–311 Prasek, Vincent, 19 th c. Czech antiquarian, 168

INDEX

priest, 46, 69–70, 88, 273–5 Primarette complex, 262 Puida, Lithuanian wrewolf , 110, 112 Q Queer, werewolf as, 320–1, 338 R Raccuglia, Salvatore, 19 th c. Sicilian medical practician, 252 Rättäkitti, famous sorceres, 80, 81n, 83 Raudvere, Catharina, historian of religion, 39–40 Rémy, Nicolas, late 16 th , early 17 th c. French demonologist , 6 Reusz, Samuel, 19 th c. Slovakian folklore collector, 166 reflection, 24n, 81, 88, 139, 150 Reynolds, Leda, English journalist , 340 Rhineland, region in Germany, 32, 334, 337 Roeck, Alfons, 20 th c. Flemish folklorist , 8, 33n, 316–7, 338 Romppanen, farm (and farmer) in Merikavia parish (Finland), 81, 94–5 Ronse, place in East Flanders, misspelled as Rousse, 8 Rovno, region in Ukraine, 132n, 137, 138 Rudkin, Ethel, 20 th c. English folklorist , 352–9 Rumpelstilzchen fairy tale (ATU 500), 69 Rügen, island in Baltic, 36, 46, 69 S Sager, collaborator of Wossidlo, 52n, 53n, 62

373

Sámi. See Lapland Samogitia, region in Lithuania, 106n Satan. See Devil Schleswig-Holstein, region in Germany, 7n, 42, 44n, 60, 69 Schönwerth, Franz, 19 th c. Bavarian collector of folklore, 15 Scott, Walter, 19 th c. British author, 353 Sealand (Zeeland), province in the Netherlands , 316 seventh son, 39, 289, 294, 298, 306n, 314, 317, 319–23 shaman(istic), 80, 154 shepherd, 61, 168 Shepherd of Wolves, 215–16, 219, 226, 233 Sicily, Italian island, 243, 248, 251, 252 Silesia, historical region in Germany, Czech republic, Poland, 156n, 167, 168 silver, 68, 96, 120 Simonsen, Michele, late 20 th c., early 21st c. Danish folklorist , 31, 51n, 241n, 248n, 256, 282, 310n Sinninghe, Jacques R.W., 20 th c. Dutch folklorist , 32n, 315, 317, 319, 326, 327, 335n, 338 Sirvydas, Konstantinas (Constantinus Szyrwid), 17 th c. Lithuanian lexicographer, 107 Sister, the Faithless fairy tale (ATU 315), 117 Skane, Swedish province, 26, 27, 29, 30 skin, 9, 12, 22, 24, 38, 137, 262, 265–6, 276–8 Slanˇciauskas, Matas, early 20 th c. Lithuanian folklore collector, 109–111 Smaland, Swedish province, 26, 29

374

INDEX

Snina, region in Slovakia, 146 son, seventh, 39, 298, 306n, 314, 317, 319, 320, 322, 323 sorcerer, 77, 79–80, 80–83, 85–89, 94, 95, 99, 115–7, 132, 133, 135–6, 138, 139–40, 141, 142–3, 149–50, 154, 166, 216, 225, 245, 275 Souˇcek, Ludvík, Czech science fiction author, 178 soul, 25, 138, 141, 145, 196, 197, 198, 212, 215, 221, 225, 229, 230, 235, 236, 294, 356 South-Holland, province in the Netherlands , 329 Spilka, Josef, Slovakian folklorist , 176 Spornitz, place in Mecklenburg, Germany, 65–7, 72 St. Petersburg, 78 staircase (against werewolves), 251, 255, 257, 259 Stump, Peter, late 16 th c. German werewolf , 19n, 352 Swabia, region in Bavaria, Germany, 15, 19 Sykes, Wirt, 19 th c. Welsh folklorist , 355, 357

T Taillefer, Wlgrin de, early 19 th c. French aristocrat , 11n, 12 tapetum lucidum, 348 Teenage Werewolf, film, 181 Tejo, valley in Portugal , 286n, 300 Theft legend, 77, 80–3, 91 Thistleton-Dyer, Thomas.Firminger, 19 th c., early 20 th c. English folklorist , 356–7 Thompson, Stith. See motif Tillhagen, Carl-Herman, 20 th c. Swedish ethnologist , 23

Tinneveld, Arnold, 20 th c. Dutch teacher folk-tale collector, 330–2 Tolstoy, Nikita Ilyich, 20 th c. Russian ethno-linguist , 153 Tomeˇcek, Jaromir, 20 th c. Czech author, 176 Tongue, Ruth, 20 th c. English folklorist , 355 transference of wounds, 71, 259, 262, 266–8, 273, 274, 275, 302, 330, 334 Trombatore, Ignazio, 19 th c. Sicilian folklore collector, 244, 247, 248 Turku, city in Finland, 78, 83n, 91n Turner, Victor, 20 th c. British anthropologist , 280n U Unternehmen Werwolf (Action Werewolf), 178–9 Uppland, Swedish province, 34 Ushitskiy, region in Ukraine, 145 Utena, town in Lithuania, 122 Utrecht, province in the Netherlands , 314, 327–9 V Vähi, Tiina, 21st c. Estonian werewolf scholar, 54, 55n vampires and vampirism, 153, 163, 165, 180, 184, 186–9, 193, 197, 240 Värmland, Swedish province, 26, 34 Västergotland, Swedish province, 26, 28, 29n, 34 Veckenstedt, Edmund, 19 th c. German ethnologist , 108 Velius, ˙ Norbertas, 19 th c. Lithuanian folklorist , 103, 120n verb (to werewolf, werewolfing), 45, 318, 331, 338

INDEX

verb (witching), 328–9, 338 Viseu, region in Portugal , 308, 309n Vologda, Russian region, 149n, 150 Voskuil, J.J., 20 th c. Dutch author and folklorist , 325, 326 Vouzela, Portugese municipality, 308 Vyborg, Russian city, 78 W Waldeck, German state, 32 Waldensian Alps, 262, 272, 275, 276, 277n Waren, town in Mecklenburg, Germany, 65 water man, 161 Webster, John, early 17 th c. English playwright , 351 Wedding Guest (cq. Procession), legend, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 24, 34, 38, 48, 77, 84–8, 93, 94, 95, 98, 115, 116–7, 121, 124, 132, 133–4, 136, 139, 141, 142–4, 145, 148, 150, 151 werebear. See bear Werewolf: The Apocalypse, 180 werewolfgirdle. See belt Werewolf Husband (cq. Lover), legend, 11, 25–9, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 73, 140, 256, 272n, 297n, 309, 316, 321, 322, 328, 344–7 Westeifel, region in Germany, 32 Western Pomerania. See Pomerania Wild Hunt. See Hunt, Wild Wild Man, 278–9 witches, 4, 15, 17, 19, 43n, 44, 48, 60, 61, 64, 68, 71, 72, 79, 89, 106, 107, 127, 141, 145, 148, 149, 150, 158, 163n, 173n, 176, 177, 199n, 200n, 202n, 213, 239, 240, 245n, 262n, 273, 274n, 275–6, 292n, 293, 294, 295, 298, 305, 306, 311, 315,

375

317, 322, 329, 333, 349, 355, 356 witching. See verb Wittenburg, place in Mecklenburg, Germany, 49, 52n, 53n, 69 Wójcicki, Kazimierz Władysław, 19 th c. Polish folklorist , 7, 163 Wolf, Johann Wilhelm, 19 th c. German folklorist working in Belgium, 8n, 9 wolf, 17–8, 42–3, 72, 79, 156, 292 Wolf tail remains (Q43), 24, 34, 59, 81, 93–5, 108, 111 Wollman, Frank, early 20 th c. Czech philologist , 156, 159n, 161n, 163–165n, 167n, 168n, 171n, 172n, 173n, 177n Woman as a Werewolf, fairy tale (ATU 409), 62n, 152 Wossidlo, Richard, 19th -early 20 th c. German philologist , 41–74 wounds. See transference Wulff, Ms. informant of Wossidlo, 44n, 52n, 53n, 70n Wunderer, Johann David, 16 th c. traveller, 106 Wuttke, Adolf, 19th c. German theologian, 15, 44n Y Yaroslavl, region in Russia (Upper Volga basin), 150 Yorkshire, English county, 339–361 You are a Werewolf (Q33). See Naming Z Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, region in the Netherlands , 336 Zhytomir, region in Ukraine, 132n, 137–140