Werewolf fiction
Werewolf fiction denotes the portrayal of
Literary origins
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[1] and killed his 50 sons by lightning bolts, but supposedly revived Lycaon's son Nyctimus, who the king had slaughtered and who succeeded his father in the kingdom of Arcadia.[2]
In medieval
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 (1935),[5] suggesting sexual jealousy.[6][7] The writers of The Wolf Man (1941) 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)[8] by Angela Carter (and its 1984 film adaptation) and the film Ginger Snaps (2000), which address female sexuality.[9][10] 2011 also saw the release of Red Riding Hood[11] 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 tale type ATU 409, "The Girl as Wolf" : 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 returns it to her. She puts it back and disappears, never to return.[12][13]
- 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.[14][15] Example: The White Wolf, 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.[16][17][18][19][20][21]
19th century
Nineteenth-century
A later Gothic story,
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.[25]
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.[26] 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.[27] 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.[28] 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
However, he lacked warmth, and it was left to the tragic character
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),[31] 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
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.[32] 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
As a well-known and iconic creature type,
These include a number of games where lycanthropes are either incidental villains, or the primary villain of the game, as well as games that allow players to play as a lycanthrope. It has been noted with respect to video games in particular that werewolves are "most often presented in videogames as mindless, slavering enemies", though some games do provide a more nuanced presentation.[33][34]
In more rare cases, they feature as
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.[37]
Dungeons & Dragons
Lycanthrope | |
---|---|
Humanoid |
In
Description
In the standard Dungeons & Dragons rules, lycanthropy is both hereditary (the children of lycanthropes are lycanthropes of the same type) and infectious (victims of lycanthrope bites become lycanthropes themselves, of the same type as the attacker). The rules distinguish between natural and afflicted lycanthropes, according to the cause of lycanthropy, and handle them by different rules.[44]
Hereditary lycanthropes can change shape at will, and retain their personality, being in control of their actions. Infected lycanthropes' shapechanges are affected by the full moon. They usually are not aware of their actions and act as aggressive predators. Lycanthropes can assume the form of an animal/humanoid hybrid, in addition to their animal form. Most lycanthropes in animal form can communicate with animals of their type. In humanoid form, they can use any weapon, and in animal form they use natural weapons like the corresponding animals, but each type has a different fighting style in hybrid form. An illustration in one edition of the Monster Manual implied that the beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast was a lycanthrope, with a creature having a resemblance to the Beast attacking a human resembling that film's antagonist, Gaston.[45]
Screen Rant has described the operation of lycanthropy in the game as an aspect that "makes no sense" because it is often a positive development for a character. "It is possible for a character to be infected with lycanthropy in Dungeons & Dragons and it comes highly recommended, as the benefits outweigh the negatives".[41] It notes that "[i]n exchange for learning how to control your condition, you gain Damage Reduction, +2 to your Wisdom stat, the Scent ability, Low-Light Vision, a new Hit Dice, the Iron Will feat, and the ability to transform into a more powerful form".[41] Like many examples of werewolves in modern fiction, D&D's werewolves and other lycanthropes are vulnerable to silver and highly resistant to other kinds of harm.
The archetypal lycanthrope, the werewolf, was ranked sixth among the ten best low-level monsters by the authors of Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies. The authors described the werewolf as "a classic monster" and "the best illustration of a monster with damage reduction; unless characters have a silver weapon, they will have a hard time hurting this creature". The authors also note that "Werewolves are shapechangers, which means players can never be entirely sure whether that surly villager might indeed be the great black wolf who attacked their characters out in the forest."
Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Another role-playing game featuring the creature is
Along with the other titles in the World of Darkness, Werewolf was discontinued in 2004. Its successor title within the
Video games
Numerous video games have featured lycanthropes, both as antagonists of the player, and as playable characters.
- Knight Lore (1984)
- Altered Beast (1988) allows the player to take various creature forms over the course of the game, including a wolf, dragon, bear, tiger, and golden wolf.[33]
- Werewolf: The Last Warrior (1990)[34]
- Shining Force (1992)[34]
- Contra: Hard Corps (1994) features a "cyborg werewolf" wearing "rad sunglasses" and named Brad Fang[33][34]
- Nightmare Creatures (1997)[48]
- Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (1999)[48]
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006)[34][48]
- Wolf Team (2007)[34]
- Sonic Unleashed (2008) is another of the few games to feature another form of lycanthrope, with the protagonist turning into a werehog[33][34][48]
- Dragon Age: Origins (2009)[33]
- Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010)[48]
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)[33][34][48]
- Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf (2011), a promotional video game made for the band Fucking Werewolf Asso[33]
- Blood of the Werewolf (2013)[34][48]
- The Wolf Among Us (2013–2014)[33][34][48]
- Bloodborne (2015)[33][48]
- The Order: 1886 (2015)[48]
- Werewolves Within (2016)[48]
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood (2021)[48]
- The Quarry (2022)[48]
Some games have been noted to feature werewolf-like creatures, but without the element of lycanthrope. For example, in
Other kinds of games
See also
References
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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. William of Palerne)
- Frost, Brian J. The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature. Madison: 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)