werewolf

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Werewolf (woodcut by Lucas Cranach , 1512)

A werewolf (from Germanic wer 'man'; cf. also Latin vir , Dutch weerwolf , Old English wer [e] wulf , in the Scandinavian languages varulv ) is a person in mythology , legend and poetry who can transform himself into a wolf . As a phenomenon, it belongs to the great complex of values ( Therianthropy - from Greek thēríon : 'wild animal' and ἄνθρωπος ánthrōpos : 'man'), which is in religion and mythology found worldwide.

overview

The term werewolf is based on the mythological notion that a human has the ability to transform into a wolf. Most of the legends tell of men who made a pact with the devil and received from him a belt made of wolf skin, with the help of which they could transform themselves. The being into which these devil allies pass is described as ominous and predatory. A specialty can be found in the Rhineland , where the werewolf known as Stüpp crouches on his victims and lets them carry him until he is exhausted or until he dies.

One of the modern werewolf myths that is not supported by folkloric traditions is the transformation of a person who has been injured by a werewolf, which is presented in various horror films . Both the files of the early modern trials and the innumerable legends from different parts of Europe speak uniformly of the fact that the victims of werewolf attacks were torn up and sometimes also eaten. A later wolf transformation is first mentioned in the script for the Hollywood film The Wolf Man (1941) written by Curt Siodmak .

origin

Representation of a werewolf. German woodcut from 1722

Reports about lycanthropy (from the Greek λύκος lýkos : 'wolf', ἄνθρωπος ánthrōpos : 'man'), that is, about the transformations between man and wolf, can be traced back very far in history. Even hybrids in cave paintings or sculptures like the lion man from the Lone Valley can be interpreted accordingly. The oldest written testimony is the Gilgamesh epic , in which the goddess Ištar transforms a shepherd into a wolf (Plate 6, verses 58-61). The Greek king Lykaon is known from Greek literature and the Metamorphoses of Ovid , who was transformed into a wolf by Zeus because he and his sons set human flesh in front of the god. Petronius Arbiter , a first-century satirist, tells in the Banquet of Trimalchio of a man who turns into a werewolf under the full moon, and his contemporary Pliny the Elder tells in his natural history of people who lived as wolves for several years before they did to return to a human being considers this to be pure fantasy. In the 16th century, Olaus Magnus turned against this view of Pliny in his work Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus ('History of the Northern Peoples'). There are certainly people in the north who turn into wolves when the moon is full . They broke into people's homes and consumed their supplies. They had built a wall on the border between their actual homeland, Lithuania and Courland , where they gathered every year and showed their strength by jumping over it. Whoever is too fat to pass this test is mocked by the others. Nobles and nobles were also part of it. After a few days, they would turn back into normal people.

In the Icelandic Egils saga , the grandfather Egils is reported to be a werewolf and therefore was given the name Kveldulf ('evening wolf ').

“En dag hvern, er að kveldi leið, þá gerðist hann styggur, svo að fáir menn máttu orðum við hann koma; var hann kveldsvæfur. Það var mál manna, að hann væri mjög hamrammur; hann var kallaður Kveld-Úlfur. "

“But every time it went to evening he got so angry that few people got into conversation with him. When it got dark he used to get sleepy. It is said that he often walked around in a transformed form at night. People called him evening wolf. "

- Egils saga, chapter 1, translated by Felix Niedner

The Völsunga saga also speaks of werewolves. Sigmund lives in the forest with his son Sinfiötli , and both of them turn into wolves at times.

This tradition is hinted at in Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre , for whose content the Völsunga saga is an essential source. In this opera Siegmund tells of his life in the forest with his father. He calls his father Wolfe , and he even speaks of himself and his father as a pair of wolves . The account of the loss of the father states:

"I only met a wolf's skin in the forest: it was empty in front of me, I couldn't find my father."

According to Herodotus ( Historien IV, 105) reports of the Scythians about the Neuren, a northern neighboring people, could be a source of the myth.

"[...] the Scythians and the Hellenes who live in the Scythian land claim that once a year each of the newcomers turns into a wolf for a few days and then returns to the human condition."

Claims that the term described people who suffered from an extreme form of wolf disease, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) , have not been substantiated. Likewise, rabies sufferers were mistaken for werewolves, as the infection here often occurs through the bite of an animal. The symptoms of this disease fit the description of werewolves: seizures in which the sick person begins to bite furiously , fear of water but at the same time severe thirst, which leads to spastic swallowing spasms, etc. reports of lycanthropes, i. H. About people who acted and howled like wolves and crawled around on all fours can also be understood as descriptions of people with an individual psychosis or of events (perhaps rituals in the context of peasant field cults) that the scholars in their study rooms did not understand and were therefore pressed into an existing interpretation pattern taken from myths, namely the Arcadian transformation of the wolf. Attempts by doctors ( Rudolf Leubuscher : About the werewolves and animal transformations in the Middle Ages , Berlin 1850) and folklorists ( Richard Andree ) of the 19th century to filter out a precisely defined clinical picture from the sparse and often distorted representations were doomed to failure. Nowadays one speaks of a form of mental illness without doctors or psychiatrists agreeing on the clinical picture, symptoms and above all on the causes. Sometimes the term only serves to describe a psychosis or the symptoms specific to it, which are labeled as lycanthropy either for lack of a suitable name or for sensationalism .

Werewolf trials

In the course of the witch hunts , numerous men were brought to justice and executed. A significant number of them have been accused of mutating werewolf, mostly shepherds. After a series of proceedings in the Duchy of Burgundy , the most famous werewolf trial in criminal history took place in Bedburg near Cologne in 1589 : the farmer Peter Stubbe (also Stübbe or Stump) was executed together with his daughter and his lover for allegedly killing at least 13 children and had offended two girls. Whether this was a real werewolf trial or a staged court case against a politically uncomfortable man is controversial. The case met with a great response, and even in the Netherlands, Denmark and England leaflets appeared, some decorated with woodcuts, in which the actual or alleged atrocities of Stubbe were described in great detail. Perhaps that is why the werewolf in the area between the rivers Erft and Rur was named Stüpp .

Werewolf trials mostly occurred in waves in areas suffering from a wolf plague, e.g. B. the Franche-Comté and the French Jura , the Hunsrück , the Westerwald and the Nassau area . In the mostly popular scientific literature there is often talk of about 30,000 werewolf attacks or 30,000 werewolf trials (in a period between 1520 and 1630 and mostly in France), but this number has not been historically proven. It is rejected by experts in witch and werewolf trials as a speculation that attracts the public.

Modern werewolf representations

In Africa, ideas about therianthropy are widespread. Those accused of witches are awarded the ability to transform themselves into snakes, hyenas, lions or mythical creatures and thus suck out their victims. Occasionally one suspects that animals run over are witches, in West Africa urination on the carcass or the still living animal is considered a witch's spell. Today's western image of the werewolf was primarily shaped by films. For example, in the 1941 film The Wolf Man , Curt Siodmak introduced the idea that people who are bitten by a wolf mutate into a werewolf when the moon is full, and that silver is the only means of killing him. Other versions, however, say that a werewolf dies when he sees an eclipse of the moon. Werewolves are also often said to have the ability to recover from injuries very quickly.

The subject is often treated ironically in new works, for example in Christian Morgenstern , who lyrically declines it in his gallows songs ("the Weswolf" etc. original ) or in Terry Pratchett's Helle Bards , where the werewolf Angua as a representative of an ethnic minority in the " Wache "(" The Watch ") is recorded. In The Talisman of Stephen King and Peter Straub , the protagonist Jack befriends a werewolf boy who becomes short-sighted as he enters our world. British writer Martin Millar treats the subject in his novel Lonely Werewolf Girl , in which a Scottish werewolf girl lives in a London department store. The German Fantastic Prize winner Markus Heitz also deals extensively with werewolves and other mutant beings in his works Ritus and Sanctum . A werewolf plays an important role in Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban .

In the role-playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse by White Wolf , werewolves play the role of tragic heroes who fight half-human, half-wolf to save the world.

The subject is treated in a new way in Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter series with the teacher Remus Lupine . This werewolf is a popular figure who is exposed to unjustified fears and prejudices due to his lycanthropy. The mythical phenomenon of the werewolf thus becomes a modern metaphor for chronic illnesses and disabilities in the non-magical world. In contrast to this is the Death Eater Fenrir Greyback , who enjoys the werewolf life to such an extent that he also likes to bite and kill children as a human being.

The werewolf also plays a major role in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. There it is the adolescents of the Quileut tribe (an Indian tribe living on the Olympic Peninsula , north-west Washington) who transform into giant wolves to protect their tribe. This transformation serves specifically to protect against their archenemies, the vampires. However, it later turns out that the werewolves are shapeshifters. The "real" werewolves have almost been exterminated, but they also exist there and only transform when the moon is full.

In the MMORPG World of Warcraft , werewolves found their way into the game as computer-controlled opponents as "worgen" and were later integrated as a playable race.

The werewolf is also a recurring theme in rock music , such as Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon or She Wolf by Megadeth . For films and TV series that take up the topic of werewolf , see List of werewolf films .

See also

literature

  • Utz Anhalt: The werewolf. Selected aspects of a figure from the history of European myths with a special focus on rabies . Master's thesis, University of Hanover 1999 ( E-Text ).
  • Hermann Baumann (ed.): The peoples of Africa and their traditional cultures . 2 volumes. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1975 and 1979, ISBN 3-515-01968-5 / ISBN 3-515-01974-X .
  • Hermann von Bruiningk : The werewolf in Livonia and the last in the Wendenschen regional court and Dörptschen Hofgericht i. J. 1692 therefore held criminal proceedings , In: Mitteilungen aus der Livländischen Geschichte 22 (1922–1928), pages 163–220
  • Matthias Burgard: The Morbach Monster, a modern legend of the Internet age. Waxmann, Münster / Munich / Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-8309-2043-4 (= Mainz contributions to cultural anthropology, folklore , volume 2).
  • Richard Buxton : Wolves and Werewolves in Greek Thought. In: Jan N. Bremmer (Ed.): Interpretations of Greek mythology. Taylor & Francis, 1987, ISBN 0-7099-3270-7 , pp. 60-79, (online) .
  • Robert Eisler: Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy . With an introduction by Sir David K. Henderson. Spring Book, London around 1948/1950. Reprint: Ross-Erikson, Santa Barbara 1978, ISBN 0-915520-16-8
  • Wilhelm Hertz: The Werewolf. A contribution to the history of legends (habilitation). Kröner, Stuttgart 1862. Unchanged reprint: Sendet, Walluf 1973, ISBN 3-500-26840-4
  • Peter Kremer: Where horror lurks. Terrifying stories of bloodsuckers and headless riders, werewolves and revenants on Inde, Erft and Rur . PeKaDe, Düren 2003, ISBN 3-929928-01-9
  • Peter Kremer: The werewolf of Bedburg. Attempt to reconstruct the witchcraft trial from 1589 . Self-published, Düren 2005
  • Rudolf Leubuscher: Wehrwolfe and animal metamorphoses in the Middle Ages. A contribution to the history of psychology . Reimer, Berlin 1850. Reprint Verlag der Melusine, Allmendingen 1981, ISBN 3-88708-001-7
  • Elmar M. Lorey : Henrich the werewolf. A story from the time of the witch trials . Anabas, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-87038-297-X
  • Jan Niklas Meier: Transformations. The werewolf in the newer German fantasy. Oldib, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-939556-50-3 .
  • Nadine Metzger: Wolf people and nocturnal visits. To locate premodern concepts of lycanthropy and ephialtes in terms of cultural history . Gardez, Remscheid 2011, ISBN 978-3-89796-233-0 .
  • Sabine Richter: Werewolves and magic dances. Pre-Christian ideas in witch trials of the early modern period . Lang, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 2004, ISBN 3-631-51386-0 (also Phil. Diss., Univ. Gießen, 1998)
  • Rolf Schulte: Warlocks. The persecution of men in the context of the witch hunt from 1530–1730 in the Old Kingdom . Lang, Frankfurt a. M. u. a. 2000, ISBN 3-631-35556-4 (also dissertation at the University of Kiel 1999).
  • Harry Anthony Senn: Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania . (= East European Monographs; Volume 99). Boulder, New York 1982, ISBN 0-914710-93-1
  • Homayum Sidky: Witchcraft, lycanthropy, drugs, and disease: an anthropological study of the European witch-hunts (= American university studies: Series 11, Anthropology and sociology; Volume 70). Lang, New York et al. a. 1997, ISBN 0-8204-3354-3
  • Christian Stiegler: Forgotten Bestie - The Werewolf in German Literature (= Viennese Works on Literature, Vol. 21, edited by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler) Braumüller-Verlag, Vienna 2007 (based on the almost identical diploma thesis Stiegler at the University of Vienna 2006), ISBN 978-3-7003-1598-8
  • Montague Summers: The Werewolf in Lore and Legend . K. Paul, London 1933. Reprinted from Dover, Mineola, New York 2003: ISBN 978-0-486-43090-4

Web links

Wikisource: Werewolves  - Sources and Full Texts
Commons : Werewolf  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: werewolf  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chantal Bourgault du Coudray: The Curse of the Werewolf . IBTauris & Co. Ltd, New York 2006, ISBN 1-84511-157-5 .
  2. ↑ Andreas Fasel: The werewolf is around . January 1, 2012 ( welt.de [accessed May 10, 2019]).
  3. ↑ Reproduced on p. 173f. by Britt-Mari Näsström: Bärsärkarna. Vikingatidens Elitsoldater , Stockholm 2006.