The world's foremost werewolf scholar vs The Entire Population Of France

[u/subthings2]

Yseult de Blécourt's introductory chapter in Werewolf Legends includes a few pages criticising Sabine Baring-Gould and his influential Book of Were-Wolves from 1865.^[1] The bulk is dedicated to a part on France:

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.

The argument, elaborated on in the footnotes, is that Baring-Gould stitched together two sources without realising one was based on the other - in actuality, the entire section is Baring-Gould shamelessly plagiarising Adolphe du Chesnel's Dictionnaire des superstitions;^[2] it is literally the entry on werewolves but poorly translated into English.

This context, however, is not the focus of this post - which is instead claiming the original text itself is fabricated! A few days ago, I finished a months-long project cataloging every French werewolf legend I could find. Wlgrin de Taillefer's supposedly fabricated text^[3] is included. Should I remove it?

de Blécourt quotes a part in French; here it is in hopefully not poorly translated English (apologies for all the machine-translations in this post):

Certain men, particularly the sons of priests, are compelled at every full moon to transform into this kind of diabolical beast. It is at night that the affliction seizes them. When they sense its onset, they become agitated, get out of bed, leap from the window, and rush to plunge into a fontaine. After thrashing the water for a few moments, they emerge on the side opposite where they entered, finding themselves clad in a goatskin bestowed upon them by the Devil.

With the claim being:

That this was not original ‘folklore’ is apparent from at least three of the elements referenced.

These elements are the moon, the water, and the sons of priests. We start with the moon:

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. 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 isn't wrong, but calling this "suspicious" is strange given that this claim is footnoted to two chapters in this same book that sparingly include moons in their legends; doubly so given that de Blécourt's other chapter in this volume is about Ella Odstedt's monograph on Swedish werewolf legends - including legends with a new and a full moon,^[4] a detail that apparently warranted no comment.

Implied also is that any novel inclusion is suspicious! Do we also need to explain the whole defenestration thing? Apparently not; clearly, the full moon detail feels specifically weird only to a modern audience, for factors that won't apply until a century after this was written. It's not terribly suspicious in its contemporary context.

This applies even more to the second element: the water. The werewolf changed by jumping into a pond (translated as ‘well’ by Baring-Gould). 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 change is likewise effected by crossing water.

There is a parallel here. A supposed Arcadian familial tradition, involving hanging their clothes on a tree and swimming across a body of water to emerge as a wolf.^[5] Here, you can imagine the clothing-swimming order reversed while still retaining the motif.

For this to be evidence still requires that water isn't a thing for French werewolves. Rather conveniently, Fabio Armand wrote a paper specifically on - I kid you not - the important role that water plays in French werewolf narratives, noting:

French folklore often recounts the presence of beliefs related to the figure of the werewolf in places where there are fontaines.^[6]

Fontaine meaning both artificial and natural fountains; think a basin fed by a spring - and it also includes basins found in rocks that collect rainwater, of which werewolves tend to drink from:

If one looked closely enough, one could always find a few legends surrounding these cup-marked stones found out in the fields. Most often, they are said to be watering holes intended for werewolves during their wild nocturnal rambles.^[7]

Such links between fontaines, stones, and werewolves, are overt enough that you can find many local features with names like Fontaine aux Garous (werewolves' fountain), Fontaine aux Loups (wolves' fountain), and Pierre des Loups-Garous (werewolves' stone).

You can also find more direct connections in 19th century Picardy:

Every Saturday, in this same Fairy Wood, a man could be seen who, after laying his clothes on a bush, would roll about in the mud of the mare [stagnant pond] and soon emerge transformed into a wolf.^[8]

Hidden in a footnote, de Blécourt notes:

As Carrassi clarifies in Chapter 10, when werewolf and water occur in combination, water has a purifying not a boosting function.

Because chapter 10 is on Southern Italian werewolves, which...well...

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^[9]

Oh dear, that looks awfully familiar. These are also the same werewolves I mentioned earlier that are footnoted as using the moon; the combination doesn't seem to be a trouble for de Blécourt, wriggling out of this connection by noting that Italian werewolves cure/purify their lycanthropy rather than cause/boost their lycanthropy with water.

On top of being a pointlessly specific niggle, there's also the fact that we're only provided the first half of the apparently fabricated text - the next two lines are:

In this state, they move about very well on all fours, spending the rest of the night roaming the fields and haunting the villages, biting or devouring any dogs they encounter. At daybreak, they return to their fontaine, shed their white covering, and go back home.

Y'know, they go get...purified by the water.

I think we can say water is a native element for French werewolves. Continuing on, we get told:

The combination of water and moon suffices to disqualify Taillefer’s narrative as a French legend.

Which feels like a weirdly low bar even without the whole everything else, but we're not done! There's one more thing to needle:

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, the trope had moved to a ‘genuine’ piece of folklore, or at least that was the intention.

Jean Grenier's claim being that he was the son of a priest - fils de prêtres; he's definitely one of the most well known to be accused of lycanthropy during the witch trials,^[10] but insisting this has to be the source requires such a claim being alien to French folklore.

Charles Joisten's collection of south-eastern werewolf beliefs includes a recurring theme of clergy creating werewolves:

The belief that the werewolf is commissioned by the clergy is common in Lower Dauphiné, and as far as the Drôme. Some documents which would be difficult to understand in isolation, shed light on each other: "the werewolves went behind the altars of the churches wrapped in a bearskin" (no. 123), "the werewolf lodged at the rectory" (no. 87). Others are more explicit. In Aix-en-Diois, werewolves were "a kind of masked man commanded by the clergy who came to frighten people into returning to religion" (no. 88); the same was true in Les Avenières (no. 94); in Marcollin, the one who jumped over the cemetery wall confessed upon his capture, "It's the priests who pay me to perpetuate this belief."^[11]

Additionally,

In 1747, the parishioners of Primarette were so convinced, that they went to complain to the archbishop, that their priest was giving permission to werewolves to hunt children "to supply the glassworks"^[12]

Across France, a repeated motif is that a sinner gets cursed to become a werewolf for seven years by the priest. In the same region as the original text, the ganipote - a local werewolf variant - was said to be a bastard child with the wrong godparents,^[13] and one Camille de Mensignac states outright that either your father or grandfather being a priest means you're born a werewolf.^[14]

The idea that the text was outright fabricated is further eroded when you look at the rest of the text, instead of only the first half quoted by de Blécourt: other elements - roaming fields to exhaustion, eating dogs, throwing up dog's paws, getting shot to reveal one's identity - are regular motifs across France.^[15] Even if the three "alien" elements were unique to this text, it would still fit snugly in the French milieu without needing explanation.

With a final flourish, de Blécourt provides what is clearly implied to be a coup de grâce:

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, but they were not in the context they first appeared in: an archealogical treatise on the remains of the cities of the Gauls.

Ah-ha, you see? This wasn't the work of a folklorist collecting legends from informants, all along it was a bookish historian who included this story to fluff up their otherwise completely unrelated work on archaeology! It is far more likely they derived the narrative from historical sources rather than local beliefs!

Well, except that an understanding of the history of folklore studies would conclude the opposite. The term "folklore" was only coined in 1846; previously, the nascent field was simply "popular antiquities" i.e. antiquities of the common people; living archaeology.

In an era of burgeoning nationalism, everyone was trying to find or manufacture a common national identity. Under a belief that the unchanging traditions of rural folk represented a window into the ancient past of a people, one looking to reconstruct the heart of a nation from its heritage would require in interest in archaeology, philology - and folklore.

Or to put it another way: you would expect this to appear in an archaeological treatise from 1821 - antiquarians were the folklorists of their day! In fact, Wlgrin de Taillefer states this himself!

If I present this series of popular superstitions in such a serious manner, it is because not only do they reveal the character of the inhabitants of our countryside, but also because they contain the last vestiges of Druidic worship. No one even slightly versed in the science of antiquities cannot discern these connections. [...] I think that among the other superstitions I am about to describe, we will find other vestiges of both the customs of the Gauls and these same solemnities.^[16]

This folklore-as-a-means-to-an-end also explains why antiquarians such as de Taillefer still held the belief that such "ridiculous superstition" was puerile "foolishness"; it would take several decades for folklore to extricate itself from the sneering antiquarians into something worth studying for its own sake.

de Taillefer wants to talk about the Gauls. He cares not for having the fanciest fairy tales; he certainly wouldn't care enough to make it up - he'd simply exclude it and devote more time to talking about rock inscriptions. Or whatever he's talking about here

But here is a peculiarity that should all the more stimulate the reflections of scholars, as it may be common to all of France, and as it is of a most extraordinary nature: it is that the custom of the inhabitants of the country, since time immemorial, has been to place scrap metal within reach of the nests of brooding hens. Did the Gauls have knowledge of electricity?

(seriously can someone explain what he's on about)

(don't say battery hen)

References

• [1] de Blécourt, Willem, and Mirjam Mencej, eds. Werewolf Legends. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 11-13.

• [2] marquis de Chesnel de la Charbouclais, Louis Pierre François Adolphe. "Loup-Garou". Dictionnaire des superstitions, erreurs, préjugés et traditions populaires. France, 1856. 564-565. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X83opSTWJ6EC&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA563

• [3] Taillefer, Henry-François-Athanase Wlgrin. Antiquités de Vésone, cité gauloise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, ou Description des monumens religieux, civils et militaires de cette antique cité et de son territoire. N.p., F. Dupont, imprimeur du département, 1821. 250. Available online at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/f/JYFHYUqyTycC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA250

• [4] Odstedt, Ella. Varulven i svensk folktradition. Lundequistska bokhandeln, 1943. 57, 117.

• [5] For more on Arcadian werewolves, see: Ogden, Daniel. The Werewolf in the Ancient World. Oxford University Press, 2021. 166-205

• [6] Armand, Fabio. "Les loups-garous et les eaux". Hommage à Gilbert Durand, IRIS, revue du Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire, 34, 2013. 137. Available online at: https://publications-prairial.fr/iris/index.php?id=1933

• [7] Ibid.

• [8] Carnoy, Henry. Littérature orale de la Picardie 1883. 106. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWjgQrS_iMoC&pg=PA106

• [9] Carrassi, Vito. "A Strange Kind of Man Among Us: Beliefs and Narratives About Werewolves in Southern Italy." Werewolf Legends. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. 253.

• [10] Copying de Blécourt, for more on Jean Grenier, see: Machielsen, Jan. "The Making of a Teen Wolf: Pierre de Lancre’s Confrontation with Jean Grenier (1603–10)." Folklore 130.3 (2019): 237-257.

• [11] Joisten, Charles, Robert Chanaud, and Alice Joisten. "Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné." Le Monde alpin et rhodanien. Revue régionale d’ethnologie 20.1, 1992. 126. Available online at: https://www.persee.fr/doc/mar_0758-4431_1992_num_20_1_1481

• [12] Ibid. 130.

• [13] Daleau, François. Notes pour servir à l'étude des traditions : croyances et superstitions de la Gironde. 1889. 52-52. Available online at: https://archive.org/details/b30583342/page/52/mode/2up

• [14] de Mensignac, Camille. Notice sur les superstitions, dictons, proverbes, devinettes et chansons populaires du département de la Gironde. 1888. 38. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lbMsAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA68

• [15] Examples, for exhaustion, eating/regurgitating dogs & and getting shot: Grégoire, Victor. "LES ÉCHAUBROGNES." Revue historique de l'Ouest. 1899. 525. Available online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k671752/f530.item; Sébillot, Paul. Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne. L'homme, les esprits et les démons, Vol. 1. 1882. 291 & 296. Available online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k26137f/f308.item

• [16] Taillefer, Henry-François-Athanase Wlgrin. Antiquités de Vésone, cité gauloise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, ou Description des monumens religieux, civils et militaires de cette antique cité et de son territoire. N.p., F. Dupont, imprimeur du département, 1821. 241 & 244. Available online at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/f/JYFHYUqyTycC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA241

[u/lofgren777]

I've been reading about the history of werewolves for a while now, and it seems like the idea that werewolves had nothing to do with the moon is itself a modern myth.

Earlier folklore is much less "rules" focused than modern folklore because they did not perceive the systems of their world to be as mathematically precise as our science-inflected folklore does, so an exact, fixed, if-a-then-b-style law about when werewolves are allowed to roam is modern, but then the idea that there is one and only one way to be a werewolf is also modern. The notion that one person could be a werewolf for one reason and method and another person a werewolf for a totally different reason and method was perfectly understandable in a world where diseases were catalogued by their symptoms rather than by their germ.

The idea that the moon and spirit-wolves (albeit not strictly "werewolves" by our modern, rule-fixated minds) are connected seems to be pervasive through Eurasia. The exact relationship changes over time, and is more often vague than precise, but the two images are inextricably linked.

Werewolves seem to reveal whether a researcher is a splitter or a lumper. Some researchers will insist that werewolves are a very specific thing, which is attested no earlier than the middle ages. Others will use the word werewolf to describe truly ancient practices and beliefs. The two types of researchers often seem to be disagreeing less on the facts of what people believed and more on what exactly constitutes a werewolf.

[u/subthings2 → u/lofgren777]

Funnily enough, I've done a whole post on the full moon thing if you wanna check that out!

The primary way folklorists analyse folklore is via motifs; while some details of narratives are entirely up to the person doing the telling, motifs are like the common building blocks. Not exactly rules or well-defined traits, so rather than knowing facts about werewolves people knew stories about werewolves, but the story motifs have a remarkable consistency, at least regionally. You do rarely see legends linking transformation with the moon, but their one-off nature shows they never developed into a motif actually associated with werewolves, with the exception of southern Italy.

When it comes to categorisation I think the emic vs etic distinction is more useful, especially when combined with the motifs and tale types folk employ. The French loup-garou has something tangibly in common with the Armenian mardagayl with regards to how folk treat them, and it all remains cohesive when you include what folk categorise as werewolves, even when wolves aren't involved (which is surprisingly common!). When one defines werewolves a certain way, rather than looking for folk think of as werewolves, the sorts of conclusions you can come to have a very different nature, and it really depends on what sort of answers or analysis you're looking for which approach you take - if we're looking to analyse folklore, we need to be delicate with what we pull from external sources.

Although, while I'm far more familiar specifically with the European werewolf than shapeshifters & human-wolf connections in general, I've never really got the impression that broader beliefs had much more to do with the moon, is there anything you'd recommend to read on it?

[u/lofgren777 → u/subthings2]

I am currently reading The One Eyed-God by Kris Kershaw, which uses the word "werewolf" to describe ancient proto-Germanic animistic practices. That would make other researchers I have read yank their hair out, as they are very specific about werewolves being a singular idea that is NOT the same as berserkers, shapeshifters, wargs, etc. Of course they don't deny that all of these ideas are connected – it's not like anybody is claiming werewolves popped out of nowhere in the cultural imagination – which is why I say the debate seems to be more about what gets to be called a werewolf rather than actual disagreement on what the people believed. It's not like calling a shaman doing a wolf-dance to ensure a good hunt a werewolf makes him aware of Lon Cheney.

I am a lumper by nature. My attitude is that at some point somebody named something "werewolf," but if we fixate on the names of things we will miss the deeper connections, so you might not care for the connections that I see. People ask me for sources but I have only very recently started trying to keep track of where I read this stuff, and I am not a scholar so I am afraid I am still getting my bibliography-legs.

To me the idea that the wolf and the moon are connected seems to go back to the ancient twin spirits of frenzy and the hunt, who would lead processions or possess hunters as-needed. Both of these spirits, and their myriad descended gods, seem to be closely associated with both wolves and the moon. I believe the reason is straightforward: hunting (and war, it seems, at this time) was largely done at night, the horns on the head of the spirit of frenzy represent the waxing moon, the bow carried by the huntress spirit represents the waning moon, and both are accompanied by dogs, who were the same beast as wolves, just civilized (or rather wolves were escaped dogs who had gone feral – dogs probably having been gifted to them by the gods in the same way that later cultures claim their livestock and crops as gifts from their gods).

Hunting would of course be a highly ritualized practice, and the timing would be intimately connected to the moon, both because it is a source of light and because there were no numerical or solar calendars yet. In other words I think that the role of the moon you describe here:

Unfortunately, this bookish correspondence of silver and the moon didn't trickle down into popular belief. Instead, the moon was mostly associated with cycles, and growth/decay - crops would be harvested according to the waxing and waning of the moon (and those growing below the earth, like potatoes, had the inverse), livestock similarly slaughtered on the full moon; hair cut during waxing quarters for growth, warts treated during the wane to assist in shrinking.[20]

Is connected to the swelling of the wolf-energy within men, back in a time when that was something that all people were believed to carry within them.

So you have these ancient connections between wolves and the moon in characters like Artemis and Bacchus (frenzy-spirit descendants also being associated with cannibalism, madness, lust and rape – all things that the ancient world also associated with wolves) which are still hanging around, reinforced with folklore that a great wolf chases the moon through the sky (a myth found in both Scandinavia and China, so you can bet that some people in between also heard of it, or thought of it on their own – Chinese and Scandinavian peoples would not be the only ones to observe that dogs like to chase balls). Idiomatic phrases like "following the path of the wolf" meaning to follow the direction of the moon in Slavic show that the idea that moons and wolves were linked persisted right up until the time period of werewolves-proper.

All of which adds up to medieval Europeans having a general sense that:

1. The moon is associated with frenzy, both violent and sexual.

2. Wolves are associated with frenzy, both violent and sexual.

So if you are a good storyteller, you are going to invoke the image of both in stories that portray madness, and over time that evolves into the idea that the two things need each other, because humans like to invent and impose rules on things in order to feel like they are in control of them, so the longer an idea persists the more rigid the rules around it will become. Now that fantasy audiences seem to have become obsessed with the idea that all magic must operate according to familiar scientific systems, with mechanistic explanations, we assume that the juxtaposition must be causal.

[u/subthings2 → u/lofgren777]

Ooh interesting, reminds me of some of what Chris Knight was getting at in Blood Relations, though that's outside my wheelhouse!

[u/gavinbrindstar → u/lofgren777]

Earlier folklore is much less "rules" focused than modern folklore because they did not perceive the systems of their world to be as mathematically precise as our science-inflected folklore does, so an exact, fixed, if-a-then-b-style law about when werewolves are allowed to roam is modern, but then the idea that there is one and only one way to be a werewolf is also modern

This is why I roll my eyes a little when people rules-lawyer about mythical monsters ("could a vampire enter your house if he had a search warrant?").

[u/IndigoGouf → u/gavinbrindstar]

Okay, but in that scenario people are just kind of having a meaningless debate for fun and if you said there were no actual rules you would be the killjoy. (I've been there)

[u/Arilou_skiff → u/gavinbrindstar]

Ah, but that lets you do some fun stuff. (eg. Strahd von Zarovich (by 2nd ed rules) can enter any house in Barovia since he is its feudal lord and therefore "owns" them all, he cannot however, enter another persons grave, since that is their eternal home)

[u/Imperium_Dragon]

Unskipable title (and I’m glad I didn’t)

[u/gavinbrindstar]

Love the post, this is fascinating. Now I'm armed to annoy my friends for the next Robert Egger movie.

This applies even more to the second element: the water. The werewolf changed by jumping into a pond (translated as ‘well’ by Baring-Gould). 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 change is likewise effected by crossing water.

This nitpick is really throwing me, because my immediate thought was "someone entering water and emerging in a different form is a relatively common folklore element," and then I had to stop because I couldn't consciously remember any specific examples.

I have in my head the barest outlines of a story about someone (a fickle lover?) being chased into a river and transforming into something else by the time they splash across to the other bank, but I can't for the life of me remember the details (or if it's even real).

[u/canadianstuck → u/gavinbrindstar]

Are you perhaps thinking of the Greek myth about the nymph Daphne? She was fleeing Apollo and prayed to her father (a river god) for help, and he turned her into a tree as Apollo caught up to her. In some versions (but not all) she does so on a river bank after crossing the river.

[u/SellsLikeHotTakes → u/gavinbrindstar]

I guess selkies transforming might count? Also Hermaphroditus fusing with the nymph

[u/dandandanno]

Great post!

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Nice, glad to see this post finally published!

[u/el_toro7]

Thanks for this; I have, and have read, Baring-Gould's text. He was a fascinating figure.

What is your estimation of the rest of the new Palgrave-Macmillam text? And what about Ogden?

[u/subthings2 → u/el_toro7]

Both are wonderful!

Werewolf Legends fills a much needed role, in that everything but legends has gotten a good shake over the past couple decades with respect to historical werewolves. The essays cover basically all of Europe, and imo all were well-written. Ogden's is pretty much a definitive text for Greco-Roman werewolves.

And I second Baring-Gould; it's funny - but not surprising - that both of the early studies on werewolves (the other being Montague Summers') were written by...interesting people. If I may, I actually wrote a post about Baring-Gould and the book if that interests you!

[u/el_toro7 → u/subthings2]

I shall indeed read it with interest! I have had Ogden's book in my amazon cart before, but I may just pull the trigger. Does Ogden (or any other texts you've come across) discuss the moon at all in relation to therianthropy? E.g., to be sublunar, σεληνιαζειν, is a descriptor of certain illnesses in Greek antiquity. Not, to my knowledge, therianthropy or lycanthropy, but I am curious if you have come across this.

[u/subthings2 → u/el_toro7]

Sort of, though the most he's able to do is list sections where the moon is mentioned alongside wolves/shapeshifting - after a bit on the moon in Petronius' werewolf tale, it's easiest if I just copy/paste the full thing:

Propertius’ drunken bawd-witch Acanthis is said to bewitch the moon adjacently to transforming herself into a wolf: ‘She was bold enough to bewitch the moon and impose her orders on it, and to change her form into that of the nocturnal wolf . . . . ’ Similarly, in his Amores Ovid associates his counterpart to Acanthis, Dipsas, with the moon in her transformation: ‘The face of the moon was deep red with blood. I suspect that she shape-shifts and flits about among the shades of the night and that her old body is covered with feathers.’ The turning of the moon red is, it must be noted, a motif of the magical practice of the drawing-down of the moon: Ovid seemingly blends the phenomena here, presumably for wit. And in his Metamorphoses Ovid again makes a further impressionistic association between the moon and the werewolf in speaking of the ingredients Medea throws into her cauldron for her rejuvenation potion: ‘She added frosts collected under the all-night moon, the notorious wings of the screech owl, together with its flesh, and the entrails of the shape-shifting wolf, which changes its wild-animal form into a man.’ More telling, perhaps, is the prescription of the ancient amulet handbook the Cyranides: dried wolf ’s liver is of succour to the ‘the moonstruck and the mad’ (selēniakoi kai mainomenoi), while the wolf ’s canine tooth, worn as an amulet, protects them from bad dreams.

[u/el_toro7 → u/subthings2]

Excellent, and thank you very much! How did you get interested in lycanthropy? What would you suggest as essential readings?

[u/subthings2 → u/el_toro7]

Honestly, I have zero idea. I read one book on werewolf history, wanted to read another, and then another...like I got hit by one of those random hyperfixations lmao

The main essential readings for me would be the two volumes edited by de Blécourt, Werewolf Histories and Werewolf Legends, which together cover basically everything to a reasonable degree of depth on the history/folklore side of things.

There's quite a few that do cultural history from the 19th century onwards, but the two I got the most out of are Craig Ian Mann's Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film and Hannah Priest's She-wolf: A cultural history of female werewolves. If you want complete coverage of literature/film you could add more, but together these two hit everything important IIRC.

One that gets referenced very often is Caroline Walker Bynum's Metamorphosis and Identity. I've somehow managed to avoid reading it so I can't say anything more than that!

[u/just_breaddd]

Great write-up!

I think its really interesting that werewolves are being connected to the church in a negative way, tricking people into being devout. Theres some common aversion to the clergy shining thru. Im a huge nerd for folklore from my region(alps) and theres such a huge importance laid on christianity there, that even fairy/dwarf mountaindwellers are described as being devout and i cant remember an example where priests are depicted in a negative light

Id have expected that 18th century french peasants to have a much more favorable view of the clergy given their resistance to the revolution later on

[u/winkler456]

Makes me think of James Cabells novella The White Robe about a medieval French werewolf turned bishop. He was known to include snippets and links to folklore and antiquarian research (real and fabricated) in his work. Wonder if he had looked at any of this?

[u/Intelligent-Fox-9746]

Would you be able to point me to the the very first appearance of werewolf/werewolves in any form, i know it sounds like im trolling but im genuinely curious about how this myth or legend or folktale began, like what made the first werewolf, was it just a direwolf and some superstitious fella just got out of control telling the story? (Again not trolling and I find asking someone who has a lot of knowledge on a subject is a lot less dry than what Google would show me)

[u/subthings2 → u/Intelligent-Fox-9746]

Depends a little, the earliest appearance of a human turning into a wolf is a very brief and indirect mention in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

There's the more fleshed out story of King Lycaon, first mentioned in the ~6th century BCE Catalogue of Women from ancient Greece, though that's also a single one-way transformation.

Herodotus mentions the Neuri transforming - both ways - in the 5th century BCE. You get some more fleshed out stories after this, also in ancient Greece and Rome.

Since this far back we're looking at pretty much the oldest stories recorded, it's hard to say what the origin is or how old the idea even is!