Hungry Like the Wahrwilf Wuhrwulf Werewolf

(A companion piece to my earlier article on vampires...)

It is no surprise that, when humanity began to romanticize the vampire, the werewolf would also be enthusiastically reimagined and reinvented.
Where once the two sorts of creature were on something of an equal footing, being night-walking terrors that one wouldn't want to tangle with, they are now rather like opposite sides of the same coin flipped in the dark of a moonlit night.  The vampire is now most often seen as the slick, sophisticated monster, a gentleman (or woman) out for blood, seducing their victims along the way.  The werewolf, on the other hand, is ever the animal, a person transformed, whether through chance, fate, or will, into a ravening beast.


Tales of humans transformed into animals have been with us since pre-history, and various cultures have had their own localized versions of the legends.  Werebears, werefoxes, wereleopards, and weretigers have all infested the imaginations of populations.  Today, however, it is the werewolf which is best

Early woodcut illustration portraying a werewolf walking
upright.

known and which most often appears in (at least western) popular culture.  The wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood is even sometimes considered to really be a werewolf.
Like the legends of vampires, the legends of werewolves have their roots in a number of facts.  Where a vampire might be suspected if illnesses like consumption (tuberculosis) were sweeping a region, a werewolf was often blamed in, of course, cases of animal attack.  If a particularly large wolf or similar animal was hanging around a village, picking off small animals and children, or if the circumstances of attacks which had not been directly witnessed were deemed somehow unusual, rumors would begin to circulate. 

Pruthviraj Patil, modern
hypertrichosis sufferer.

People who were different in religious belief, ethnicity, or a number of other ways, might be accused of either taking animal for or of practicing witchcraft and summoning up a demon animal.  Certain physical traits (unibrow, low ears) were said to be signs of a werewolf in human form. 

Lon Chaney, Jr. as Laurence
Talbot, the wolfman

Sometimes the mentally challenged or the insane, always easy scapegoats, were blamed.  Indeed, there is a mental illness, clinical lycanthropy, which causes a person to believe that they can and do transform into an animal.  There is also a rare genetic condition, hypertrichosis, which causes profuse hair-growth on the face and body and which has been associated throughout history with the idea of werewolves; in fact, sufferers are often said to resemble the make-up worn by Lon Chaney, Jr. in the 1941 Universal film The Wolfman.  Another disease, porphyria, is more often associated with vampires, but has also been referenced in relation to werewolves as well.

Modern artistic interpretation of
a Berserker.

Early legends of human-to-animal transformation often had the person bringing the change upon themselves through various means.  There were the Viking Berserkers, fierce warriors who donned bear-skins to go into battle, thereby supposedly taking on the power of the animal; they were sometimes even said to become bears outright.
In some of the earliest stories, methods of becoming a werewolf including the application of special salves, a belt made of wolfskin, or a full pelt.  Some werewolves in works written in the medieval period were the victims of black magic.  In 1589 a German man, Peter Stumpp (AKA Stumpf, Stubb, Ubel Griswold) was accused of being a werewolf.  Under heavy torture he admitted to being a longtime black magic practitioner and of having received from the Devil a magical belt which allowed him to change to his wolf form.  At best, Stumpp was actually a victim of Catholic-Protestant infighting.  At worst, he was a truly vicious serial murderer with 18 or more victims to his credit.

Illustration from an edition of Wagner the
Wehr-Wolf.

Involuntary werewolves, those who did not seek to become animals, were usually said to be afflicted due to some part of their natural make-up.  For example, epilepsy was associated with a person possibly being a werewolf.  To drink water from the paw print of a wolf or from certain water sources where wolves congregated was considered one of many ways of becoming a werewolf.  The idea that someone bitten by a werewolf would become one is mostly prevalent in later literature and films, rarely making an appearance in legends.
With the surge of Gothic horror in the early 19th century, the werewolf began to reach the form we know today.  Now more frequently a werewolf was cursed to transform during the time of the full moon.  Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, an 1847 penny dreadful serial (sometimes taken as a companion to the contemporaneous Varney the Vampire) is one of the early well-known literary works which made this association.   Werewolves were not just male, either.  The novel The Phantom Ship featured an incident involving a seductive female werewolf, and in 1896 The Were-Wolf by Clemence Housman was mainly concerned with a woman of similar stripe.

Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) is
attacked by Dracula in his wolf/dog
form in the 1992 film adaptation
of Dracula.

Though in much modern horror media vampires and werewolves are pitted against each other as enemies, some early works had them almost as one and the same.  In Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel Dracula, for example, the Count could transform into much more than just a bat.  He could also become a mist and, in some instances, a large wolf or wolf-like creature.  This aspect was downplayed and often outright removed from early adaptations, though it was vaguely pointed to in the 1931 Universal film via the use of the plant wolfsbane as a deterrent against the vampire.  Dracula's shapeshifting abilities, including his wolf-like form, were finally more thoroughly explored in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film adaptation.
 The idea that werewolves are vulnerable to silver is mainly a construction of 19th century literature; early accounts dating to the medieval or Renaissance eras which claim to tell of wolves defeated with silver implements or bullets can mostly be proven to have been retconned.  Traditionally, werewolves were said to be vulnerable to everything from mountain ash to rye, with the aforementioned wolfsbane being a particular favorite.  Wolfsbane, in fact, ties the old legends to the new (those of bite and lunar influence) in the classic 1941 film The Wolfman, in which the following poem is recited:

Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night 
may become a wolf when the wolfbane (sic) blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.

In a publicity shot for the 1960s Gothic
soap opera Dark Shadows, stunt performer
Alex Stevens as werewolf Chris Jennings
is confronted by Jonathan Frid as vampire
Barnabas Collins, who wields a silver-
headed cane.

How werewolves are depicted physically has also undergone a major change.  While there are early tales and illustrations that portray them as walking upright (as in the first image in this article), much of the time early werewolves took on a total animal form, going on all fours and retaining nothing of their human appearance or memory.  Later, however, as the lore shifted, they were more often depicted as humanoid, walking upright and, very rarely, even retaining their human memory in wolf form or vice versa.  One interesting genre-flipping short story, Wolves Don't Cry by Bruce Elliott, concerns a wolf who wakes one morning in his cage at the zoo to find that he has turned into a human.  After being forced to adapt to human society, still retaining the memories of his life as a wolf, he goes to great lengths to return to his former state, resorting to the old black magic method of the wolfskin belt.  He manages a return, yet will spend the rest of his existence remembering his life as a human and knowing that it may have had some consequences he never imagined.
The supposed enmity between vampires and werewolves has popped up in recent years several times, in the darkly dystopian Underworld film franchise, which portrayed werewolves as a one-time slave race to vampires who had rebelled and, for a time, been supposedly almost wiped out, only to return.  This also eventually leads to a vampire-

The wolf form of Jacob Black
as portrayed in the Twilight films.
Because frankly, I didn't want
a shirtless Taylor Lautner
on my blog.

werewolf hybrid and a lot of great actions scenes.  The fighting has also experienced quite a boost thanks to the lamentably popular Twilight novels and films, in which an entire Native American wolf pack is portrayed (with surprisingly full-wolf forms).  They begin as enemies to the vampires, but when a vampire and a werewolf fall for the same mortal girl, they work together to defend her.  Is it any wonder that werewolves have also long been popular in romance novels, seen as something like noble savages who can sweep a woman off her feet?
There you have it.  Through the centuries, werewolves have gone from demonic, black-magic-infused, Satanic beasts to poor, tortured, misunderstood, moonstruck puppy dogs.  So, if you're out and about in the near future, and you come across a werewolf, give him a pat on the head.


But only while wearing chainmail gloves or something, because chances are you'll come damn close to losing an arm otherwise.