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Werewolf fiction

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Adventures into Darkness, a Golden Age comic book series that ran for 10 issues from August 1952-1954

Werewolf fiction denotes the portrayal of werewolves and other shapeshifting therianthropes, in the media of literature, drama, film, games and music. Werewolf literature includes folklore, legend, saga, fairy tales, Gothic and horror fiction, fantasy fiction and poetry. Such stories may be supernatural, symbolic or allegorical. A classic American cinematic example of the theme is The Wolf Man (1941) which in later films joins with the Frankenstein Monster and Count Dracula as one of the three famous icons of modern day horror. However, werewolf fiction is an exceptionally diverse genre, with ancient folkloric roots and manifold modern re-interpretations.

Literary origins

For more information on werewolves in ancient myth, legend and folklore, see Werewolf.

In Greek mythology, there is a story of an Arcadian King called Lycaon who tested Zeus by serving him a dish of his slaughtered and dismembered son to see if Zeus was really all-knowing. As punishment for his trickery, Zeus transformed Lycaon into a wolf and killed his 50 sons by lightning bolts, but supposedly revived Lycaon's son Nyctimus, who the king had slaughtered.

In medieval romances, such as Bisclavret, and Guillaume de Palerme the werewolf is relatively benign, appearing as the victim of evil magic and aiding knights errant.

However, in most legends influenced by medieval theology the werewolf was a Satanic beast with a craving for human flesh. This appears in such later fiction as "The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains": an episode in the novel The Phantom Ship (1839) by Marryat, featuring a demonic femme fatale who transforms from woman to wolf.

Sexual themes are common in werewolf fiction; the protagonist kills his girlfriend as she walks with a former lover in Werewolf of London, suggesting sexual jealousy. The writers of The Wolf Man were careful in depicting killings as motivated out of hunger.[citation needed]

The wolf in the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" has been reinterpreted as a werewolf in many works of fiction, such as The Company of Wolves (1979) by Angela Carter (and its 1984 film adaptation) and the film Ginger Snaps (2000), which address female sexuality. 2011 also saw the release of Red Riding Hood with Amanda Seyfried in the main role, with the character name of Valerie.

Folklore

In folk and fairy tale traditions all over the world, humans who can shapeshift at will into both human and lupine forms appear in several fairy tales. According to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, they can appear in this capacity in the following tale types:

  • Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index tale type ATU 409, "The Girl as Wolf" [et]: a tale type more commonly found in the folklore of Estonia and Finland, a human hunter finds a woman in the woods and hides her animal (wolf) skin. Years later, after the wolf-maiden has given birth to children, one of them finds her wolf skin and gives to her. She puts it back and disappears, never to return.[1][2]
  • Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index tale type ATU 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband" and ATU 425A, "The Animal Bridegroom": a maiden is betrothed to an animal bridegroom (a wolf, in several variants), who comes at night to the bridal bed in human form. The maiden breaks a taboo and her enchanted husband disappears. She is forced to search for him.[3][4] Example: The White Wolf (fairy tale), Belgian fairy tale; Prince Wolf, Danish fairy tale.
  • Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index tale type ATU 425C, "Beauty and the Beast": a father has three daughters, the youngest the most beautiful and the most loved by her parent. He needs to go on a journey and asks his daughter what presents should he bring them, the youngest suggest something simple, but very or nearly impossible to find. Near the end of his journey, he finds the wished-for object in the garden of a (seemingly) abandoned castle, when a booming voice interrupts him. The voice belongs to a fierce creature (sometimes explicitly described as a wolf by the narrative) who demands "his most precious gift" in return: the youngest daughter. She willingly offers herself to the beast and discovers he is an enchanted prince. She helps him break the curse and they both live happily ever after.
  • Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index tale type ATU 552, "The Girls who married Animals": a bankrupt nobleman or a poor farmer is forced to wed his daughters to three animal suitors, who are actually enchanted princes under a curse. In some variants, one of the suitors is a wolf.[5][6][7][8][9][10]

19th century

The Were-Wolf by Housman

Nineteenth-century Gothic horror stories drew on previous folklore and legend to present the theme of the werewolf in a new fictional form. An early example is Hugues, the Wer-Wolf by Sutherland Menzies, published in 1838. The year after in 1839, Frederick Marryat's book The Phantom Ship was published, which included one of the first stories about a female werewolf, and is often reprinted as a stand-alone short story called The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains.[11] In another, Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1847) by G. W. M. Reynolds, we find the classic subject of a man who, although a kind-hearted man himself, accepts a deal with the devil to become a werewolf for 18 months accompanying Dr. Faustus and killing humans, in exchange for youth and wealth. "The Man-Wolf" (1831) by Leitch Ritchie yields the werewolf in an 11th-century setting, while Catherine Crowe penned what is believed to be the first werewolf short story by a woman: "A Story of a Weir-Wolf" (1846).[12] Other werewolf stories of this period include The Wolf Leader (1857) by Alexandre Dumas and Hugues-le-Loup (1869) by Erckmann-Chatrian.

A later Gothic story, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), has an implicit werewolf subtext, according to Colin Wilson.[13] This has been made explicit in some recent adaptations of this story, such as the BBC TV series Jekyll (2007). Stevenson's Olalla (1887) offers more explicit werewolf content, but, like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, this aspect remains subordinate to the story's larger themes.

Charles De Coster's 1867 novel The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak includes an extensive episode where the Flemish town of Damme is terrorized by what seems a rampaging werewolf, the numerous victims' bodies bearing what seems the mark of a wolf's fangs - thought ultimately they turn out to have been killed by a completely mundane serial killer, clever and ruthless, who used metal blades to simulate these wolf's tooth marks.

A rapacious female werewolf who appears in the guise of a seductive femme fatale before transforming into lupine form to devour her hapless male victims is the protagonist of Clemence Housman's acclaimed The Were-wolf published in 1896.[14]

20th century

In literature

The 20th century saw an explosion of werewolf short stories and novels published in both England and America. The famed English supernatural story writer Algernon Blackwood wrote a number of werewolf short stories. These often had an occult aspect to them. English author Gerald Biss published the 1919 werewolf novel The Door of the Unreal. American pulp magazines of the 1920 to 1950s, such as Weird Tales, include many werewolf tales, written by such authors as H. Warner Munn, Seabury Quinn and Manly Wade Wellman.[15] Robert E. Howard made his own contribution to the genre in "Wolfshead".

The most renowned werewolf novel of the 20th century was The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by American author Guy Endore. This novel has been accorded classic status and is considered by some to be the Dracula of werewolf literature.[16] It was adapted as The Curse of the Werewolf in 1961 for Hammer Film Productions. The novel The Wolf's Bride: A Tale from Estonia written by the Finnish author Aino Kallas was published in 1928 and it tells the story of the forester's wife living in Hiiumaa in the 17th century who became a werewolf under the influence of a malevolent forest spirit.[17] A more recent example is Moon of the Wolf (1967) by Les Whitten, which the 1972 movie of the same name, Moon of the Wolf, was based on.

In films

In cinema during the silent era, werewolves were portrayed in canine form in such films as The Werewolf (1913) and Wolf Blood (1925). The first feature film to portray an anthropomorphic werewolf was Werewolf of London in 1935 (not to be confused with the 1981 film of a similar title)[citation needed], establishing the canon that the werewolf always kills what he loves the most. The main werewolf of this film was a dapper London scientist who retained some of his style and most of his human features after his transformation.[18]

However, he lacked warmth, and it was left to the tragic character Laurence Stewart "Larry" Talbot played by Lon Chaney Jr. in 1941's The Wolf Man to capture the public imagination. This catapulted the werewolf into public consciousness.[18] The theme of lycanthropy as a disease or curse reached its standard treatment in the film, which contained the now-famous rhyme:

Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf
When the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.

This movie draws on elements of traditional folklore and fiction, such as the vulnerability of the werewolf to a silver bullet (as seen for instance in the legend of Beast of Gévaudan),[19] though at the climax of the film, the Wolf Man is actually dispatched with a silver-handled cane.

While the process of transmogrification is sometimes portrayed in such films and works of literature to be painful, other works omit this aspect in favor of a loss of consciousness during the change and even an inability to recall the event. Regardless, the resulting wolf is typically cunning but merciless, and prone to killing and eating people without compunction, regardless of the moral character of the person when human.

Lon Chaney Jr. himself became somewhat typecast as the Wolf Man and reprised his role in several sequels for Universal Studios. In these films, the werewolf lore of the first film was clarified. In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) it is firmly established that the Wolf Man is revived from the dead at a night of the full moon after his grave was disturbed. In House of Frankenstein (1944), silver bullets are used for the first time to dispatch him. Further sequels were House of Dracula (1945) and the parodic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

The success of Universal's The Wolf Man prompted rival Hollywood film companies Columbia Pictures and Fox Studios to bring out their own, now somewhat obscure, werewolf films. The first of these was The Undying Monster produced by Fox in 1942, adapted from a werewolf novel of the same name by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, published in 1936.

In 1981, two prominent werewolf films, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, both drew on themes from the Universal series.[20] While the werewolves in The Howling resembled bipedal wolves, the one in An American Werewolf in London had a more quadrupedal form with longer claws, a short tail, and finger-like structures on its front paws. The later had a follow-up called An American Werewolf in Paris.

In games

Main article: Lycanthropes in games ‎
Drawing based on the depiction of a werewolf in Dungeons & Dragons.

Werewolves have long been a race in the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons. In the game's 5th edition, its most recent version, werewolves are weak to silver, and can shift between human, wolf, and hybrid humanoid forms, being able to use weapons in both human and hybrid form.[21]

Many video games portray the idea of werewolves, although, in most of their appearances, they are presented as mindless monsters or villains. In more rare cases, they feature as NPCs, such as the character Witherfang from Dragon Age: Origins (2009), who is not strictly evil and was created as an act of revenge, or even the game's protagonist, as in the case of Bigby Wolf from The Wolf Among Us (2013), a noir adventure game based on the eponymous comic book series that includes characters inspired by fairy tales.[22] The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006) causes the series' recurring main character, Link, to become a werewolf, a transformation induced by a magical "Twilight" that has spread across the realm. In wolf form, he is ridden and guided by the imp Midna. While the idea was praised as fun to control, it also proved divisive, seen as a "gimmick" in comparison to controlling Link as a sword-wielding human.[23]

See also

References

  1. ^ METSVAHI, Merili. The Woman as Wolf (AT 409): Some Interpretations of a Very Estonian Folk Tale. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, [S.l.], v. 7, n. 2, p. 65-92, jan. 2014. ISSN 2228-0987. Available at: <http://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/153>. Date accessed: 25 apr. 2020.
  2. ^ Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. University of California Press. 1977. p. 96. ISBN 0-520-03537-2
  3. ^ Uther, Hans-Jörg. Handbuch zu den "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" der Brüder Grimm: Entstehung - Wirkung - Interpretation. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2008. pp. 200-201. ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8
  4. ^ Sherman, Josepha (2008). Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore. Sharpe Reference. pp. 376-377. ISBN 978-0-7656-8047-1
  5. ^ Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books. 1984. pp. 35-36.
  6. ^ János Berze Nagy. Népmesék Heves- és Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok-megyébol (Népköltési gyüjtemény 9. kötet). Budapest: Az Athenaeum Részvény-Társulat Tulajdona. 1907. pp. 127-133.
  7. ^ Schiefner, Anton. Awarische Texte. K. Akademie der wissenschaften. 1873. pp. xiixv and 33-47.
  8. ^ Macler, Frederic. Contes, légendes et épopées populaires d'Arménie, traduits ou adaptés de l'arménien, par Frédéric Macler. Vol. I. Collection: Les joyaux de l'Orient; Tome 13. Paris. 1928-1933. pp. 69-80.
  9. ^ Prym, E./Socin, A. Syrische Sagen und Märchen aus dem Volksmunde. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprechts Verlag, 1881. pp. 60-66.
  10. ^ Kovács Ágnes. Szegény ember okos leánya: Román népmesék. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó. 1957. pp. 100-114.
  11. ^ The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero
  12. ^ Barger, Andrew; Shifters: The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849, 2010. p. 85; ISBN 978-1933747255
  13. ^ Wilson, Colin "Werewolves", in Jack Sullivan (ed.) The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (Viking Press, 1986) pp. 453-455 (out of print); (Random House Value Publishing, 1989) ISBN 978-0-517-61852-3
  14. ^ Brian Frost (1973) Book of the Werewolf: 29
  15. ^ Stefan Dziemianowicz, "The Werewolf" in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S.T. Joshi. Greenwood Press 2007, ISBN 0313337810 (pp. 653-668).
  16. ^ Squires, J., "Endore, Guy S." in Sullivan
  17. ^ Chantal Bourgault Du Coudray, The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. ISBN 9781429462655 (p. 112, 169)
  18. ^ a b Searles B (1988). Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Harry N. Abrams. pp. 165–67. ISBN 0-8109-0922-7.
  19. ^ Robert Jackson (1995) Witchcraft and the Occult. Devizes, Quintet Publishing: 25
  20. ^ Berardinelli, James. An American Werewolf in London (review), ReelReviews.com, no date
  21. ^ Bassil, Matt (July 2022). "D&D Werewolf 5e monster guide". Wargamer. Retrieved 2023-04-20.
  22. ^ Hawkins, Janine (2015-10-30). "The 10 Best Werewolves in Videogames". Paste Magazine. Retrieved 2023-04-20.
  23. ^ Meikleham, David (2023-04-20). "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess marked the end of the GameCube era and the dawn of the Wii". GamesRadar+. Retrieved 2023-04-20.

Further reading

  • Black, George Fraser. A List of Works Relating to Lycanthropy. New York: New York Public Library Publications, 1919. (earliest published list of werewolf fiction)
  • Du Coudray, Chantal Bourgault. The Curse of the Werewolf. London : I. B. Tauris, 2006. ISBN 1-84511-158-3 (book on literary symbolism of the werewolf)
  • Flores, Nona C. Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays. New York: Garland, 1996. ISBN 0-8153-1315-2 (contains learned commentary on William of Palerne)
  • Frost, Brian J. The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2003. ISBN 0-87972-860-4 (contains long lists of novels and short stories, especially pre-1970s ones, with excerpts)
  • Steiger, Brad. The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shapeshifting Beings. Visible Ink Press, 1999. ISBN 1-57859-078-7 (contains long list of films, medium-sized list of novels)
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