Werewolves (WEHRWOLVES), article in The National Magazine 1857
THERE seems to be a certain ground of sympathy between savage beasts and human beings. The schoolboy knows very well that Romulus and Remus, according to tradition, were suckled by a wolf; and in the kingdom of Oude a similar circumstance did in fact happen. This tendency to chop and change intelligences, as Butler in Hudibras says of the Rosicrucian virtuosi, is not uncommon among animals when deprived of their own young. Cats have been known to suckle infantine rabbits; hens have brooded over eggs not of their own laying, and have been somewhat astonished by the unexpected issue; and books of natural history will furnish many other instances. Orson, says the French chivalric romance which forms the basis of the nursery tale, found an extempore mamma in a tenderhearted female bear; and here, again, fable has its counterpart in fact, as appears from the ensuing story.
Some huntsmen were following the chase, in the year 1661, in the forest of Lithuania, Poland, when they perceived a great many bears together, and in the midst of them two of small size, which exhibited some affinity to the human shape. The men followed closely, and at length captured one of these strange creatures, though it defended itself with its nails and teeth. It appeared to be about nine years old, and of course was taken before the king and queen, as a sight worthy of the royal gaze. The skin and hair were extremely white, the limbs well-proportioned and strong, the visage fair, and the eyes blue; but the creature could not speak, and its inclinations, as we are informed by an old account, were altogether brutish. Yet this truly bearish child was christened by an archbishop in the name of Joseph Ursin; the Queen of Poland stood godmother, the French embassador godfather, and attempts were made to tame him, (for we may as well by this time adopt the masculine personal pronoun,) and to teach him some principles of religion. These endeavors partially succeeded; for (if we may credit the account) at the sacred name he would learn to lift his hands and eyes to heaven. But he could not be taught to speak, though there was no apparent defect in his tongue. He was bestowed upon one of the lords about the court, who took him into his house as a servant. He could not be induced to throw aside his natural, or rather his acquired fierceness; but he learned to walk upright on his feet, and went wherever he was bidden. A writer says:
"He liked raw as well as boiled flesh; could suffer no clothes on his back, nor ever wear shoes, nor anything upon his head. Sometimes he would steal to the woods, and there suck the sap of trees, when he had torn off the bark with his nails. It was observed, that he being in the wood one day when a bear had killed two men, that beast came to him, and, instead of doing him any harm, played and licked his face and body."
It does not appear when or how this individual died, or what finally became of him.
Perhaps some of the details of this story may be exaggerated; but we have no reason for disbelieving the chief allegations. To facts of this nature we may probably attribute the old legends of men transforming themselves, or being transformed, into wolves; a fable which may also have been encouraged by the existence of a disease called lycanthropy, in which the patient fancies himself a wolf, and, it is said, is sometimes known to run wild about the fields at night, worrying the flocks, and snarling like a dog.
An old writer says:
"The infected imitate wolves, and think themselves such; leaping out of their beds in the night, and lurking about the sepulchers by day, with pale looks, hollow eyes, thirsty tongues, and exulcerated bodies."
In that store-house of marvels, "Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy," we find it stated that Wierus tells a story of a man at Padua, in 1541, "that would not believe to the contrary, but that he was a wolf." He further says:
"He hath another instance of a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear. Forrestus confirms as much by many examples; one, among the rest, of which he was an eye-witness, at Alcmaer, in Holland; a poor husbandman, that still hunted about graves and kept in churchyards, of a pale, black, ugly, and fearful look. Such, belike, or little better, were King Praetus's daughters that thought themselves kine. Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel, as some interpreters hold, was only troubled with this kind of madness."
The word wehrwolf signifies a manwolf, or wolf-man. The fable is very old, and is found among many and widely separated nations. There was a people of ancient Scythia, called Neuri, of whom it was reported that they could turn themselves into wolves whenever they pleased, and could with equal facility resume their natural shapes. The Greek mythology tells of a king of Arcadia, one Lycaon, who was changed by Jupiter into a wolf for impiety:
"A wolf, not much from his first form es-
tranged;
So hoary-hair'd, his looks so full of rape,
So fiery-eyed, so terrible his shape,"
as Ovid writes, in the first book of his Metamorphoses. The belief extended all through the middle ages, and even into comparatively modern times. Bishop Hall, an English traveler of the time of James the First, says of a certain wood in Germany, that it was haunted, not only by freebooters, but by wolves and witches, "although these last are ofttimes but one." He saw there a boy, half of whose face had been devoured by a witch-wolf; "yet so as that the ear was rather cut than bitten off." At Limburgh, Hall saw one of the miscreants executed. The wretched woman was put to the wheel, and confessed in her tortures that she had devoured two-and-forty children while in her wolf form.
Fausanias, an ancient writer, tells a tale of a man who was a wolf for ten years, and at the end of that time resumed his humanity. According to some German authorities, wehrwolves, contrary to the account given by Bishop Hall, are in a state of continual enmity with witches; and this is illustrated by a story of a certain countryman who put up at the house of a jovial bailiff. After saturating himself with drink till he could not stand, he was left to have his sleep out on the floor; but the next morning a discovery was made which brought him under suspicion. A horse was found dead in the paddock, with his body cut in two with a scythe. The bailiff closely questioned his guest, and at length elicited from him the facts that the field was haunted by a witch, who flitted about in the shape of a light flame; that he, (the guest,) being a wehrwolf, pursued her with a scythe; that she fled for refuge under the belly of the horse, and that in aiming at her he divided the animal into two halves. What became of the countryman does not clearly appear.
Learned writers have differed as to whether a real transformation takes place, or whether the whole thing is not an illusion of the devil. In support of the former opinion there is no end of stories to the effect that certain persons have with their own eyes beheld the change of a human being into a wolf. An archduke of Russia seized a sorcerer named Lycaon, (a descendant, we suppose, of the ancient Arcadian king,) and commanded him to go through his feats of transmigration. The enchanter crouched down, muttered some incantations, and straightway passed into the wolf state, grinning with his open jaws, glaring with his eyes, and raging so fearfully that his keepers found it necessary to hold him. But the archduke played the too-confiding Lycaon a scurvy trick. He set two hounds upon him, and he was speedily torn to pieces.
Another story sets forth that a woman who was apprehended on suspicion of being a wehrwolf, was asked by the magistrate, in return for his sparing her life, to show him how she proceeded in that singular art for the practicing of which she was then before him. She consented, and, as a necessary preliminary, sent to her house for a particular pot of ointment. Having obtained this, she anointed various parts of her body, and fell into a profound sleep, which lasted three hours. When she woke she stated, in answer to inquiries, that she had taken the form of a wolf in the interval, had proceeded to a neighboring town, and had mangled a sheep and a cow. The magistrate sent to the place to inquire whether any such damage had been done, and was told that it had been done. But the relater of this narrative, one Sennertus, thinks that the devil was the real author of the killing and slaying, and that he influenced the woman to dream that the credit was due to herself. In any case, let us hope that the magistrate kept his promise of sparing the culprit's life.
Stories are also told of women transforming themselves into cats and hares, and of their being discovered by receiving certain wounds while in their abnormal condition, which were found upon them after they had returned to their proper form. According to one of these tales, an honest man was cleaving wood in his court-yard, when he was suddenly attacked by three very large and ferocious cats.
He defended himself by his prayers and his ax, and finally drove off the animals, who were considerably the worse for the combat. Shortly afterward he was apprehended, and charged before a magistrate with having wounded three honorable matrons so grievously that they were confined in their beds. It then turned out that the ferocious cats were no cats at all; but, as the matrons were of high lineage, the affair was hushed up, and the man was dismissed under a strict injunction to secrecy on forfeit of his life.
A great many anecdotes touching this subject are contained in the writings of Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsal and Metropolitan of Sweden in the sixteenth century, who relates that, in the northern parts, at Christmas, there is a great gathering of these men-wolves, who, during the night, rage with such fierceness against mankind (for they are much more savage than natural wolves) that the inhabitants suffer infinite miseries. They attack houses, break open the doors, destroy the inmates, and, descending into the cellars, drink amazing quantities of ale and mead, leaving the empty barrels heaped one upon another. Somewhere in those wild northern regions there was once a wall belonging to a castle which had been destroyed; and here the wehrwolves would assemble at a given time, and exercise themselves in trying to leap over the wall. Those that could not succeed ("as commonly," says Olaus, "the fat ones cannot") were whipped by their captains. It was believed that the great men and chief nobility of the land belonged to this singular confraternity; so that it appears to have been a kind of fashionable recreation with the Swedish bloods, like having your box at the Opera with us, or being a man upon town or on the turf. The manner of effecting the change was by mumbling certain words, and drinking a cup of ale to a man-wolf.
The Swedish Archbishop proceeds to give some instances in point. Here is one:
"A nobleman was traveling with his retainers; and one night they found themselves in a thick wood, far from all human habitations. They were hungry, but they had no provisions with them, and the case began to look awkward. Several of the servants, however, had the faculty of changing themselves into wolves; and one of them told the rest not to be surprised at anything that might happen while he withdrew for a short time. He then went into a thick, dark part of the forest, and transformed himself, and came out as a wolf, and slew a sheep, which he brought to his companions, who received it gratefully; and then he returned into the secret, dusky place, and resumed his proper shape. By this device the nobleman and his retinue were saved from famishing."
The wolf was a great person among the traditions and mythology of the Scandinavians. We find him frequently in the Edda. There was an enormous and appalling wolf called Fenris, or Fenrir, who was the offspring of Loki, the Evil Principle. His name is supposed to mean "dweller in the abyss." The ancient Scandinavians believed that he would continue to cause great mischief to humanity until the last day, when, after a fearful combat, he will be vanquished by the gods. The Edda also makes mention of two other wolves, one of which pursues the sun, while the other chases the moon; and one day both those orbs will be caught and devoured by them. Of the origin of these wolves, we are told in the Edda, that a hag dwells in a wood to the eastward of Midgrad, called Jarnvid, (the Iron Wood,) which is the abode of a race of witches called the Jarnvidjur. This old hag is the mother of many gigantic sons, who are all of them shaped like wolves.
In France, wehrwolves are called loup garoux; in Normandy, when that duchy was an independent, semi-Scandinavian nationality, garwolves; and among the Bretons, Bisclavaret. This latter name is associated with an old story of a Breton nobleman who used to transform himself, and whose adventures are narrated by that French poetess of the thirteenth century, Marie, who charmed the court of Henry the Third by her lays. The nobleman's wife, having discovered his fearful secret, by dint of repeated questioning, (for her curiosity had been excited by his frequent absence from home,) possessed herself one day of his garments when he was in the wolf shape. This, as she had previously ascertained would be the case, prevented his returning to the state of man. The faithless wife then married a gallant, and Bisclavaret lurked miserably in woods and desert places, longing, but in vain, to shake off the brutish semblance that imprisoned him. In about a year, the king, while hunting, pursued the poor manwolf all day, and at length ran him down. Then did the whole court behold a marvel; for the beast ran up to the monarch's horse, seized the stirrup with his fore-paw, licked the king's feet, and pathetically implored protection. "By the mass!" cried the king, "this is a strange adventure and a piteous! The poor brute throws himself on my kingly mercy, with mute, imploring gestures, that have a touch of human reason in them. We have chased him sorely; but I swear he shall not die. You huntsmen, there! beat off the dogs!" Bisclavaret was taken to the court, and became a great favorite, for his manners were gentle and dog-like. One day, the husband of his former wife came to the court, when Bisclavaret suddenly burst into a furiously savage mood, leaped upon the knight, and, but for the interposition of the king, would have rent him in pieces. Again the same thing happened; and not long afterward, the lady herself was encountered by Bisclavaret in the forest. He seized upon her, and tore her nose from her face. The king, exasperated at this, swore that the wolf should be put to death; but an aged counselor, perceiving some mystery in the matter, advised that the lady and the knight should be imprisoned until the truth should be extorted from them. This was done; the tale was unwillingly told, and the clothes of Bisclavaret were restored. Not until he was placed in a room by himself with them, would he disenchant himself. He was at length shut up in the king's bed-chamber; and, after a while, when the monarch and the courtiers again entered, they found a comely gentleman asleep on the royal bed. The conclusion of the story is to the effect that the nobleman was taken into high favor, and that the wicked wife and her paramour were banished from the land.
We will add one more story, and that shall be from Sandys's notes to his translation of Ovid, 1632. His mode of telling it is so earnest and intense, that we prefer giving it to the reader in the writer's own language:
"One accustoming to change himselfe into a wolfe, and againe into a man, was lately taken, and brought before the Duke of Prussia, accused by the pesants for worrying their cattle. A deformed fellow, and not much unlike a beast. He had a scarre on his face, the marke of a wound which was given him by a dog when he was a wolfe, as himselfe reported. Upon examination, hee confessed that twice every years he was converted into that shape; first about Christmas, and againe at Midsummer; at which times he grew salvage, and was carried with a certaine naturall desire to converse with wolves in the woods; afflicted with paine and horror while the haire was breaking out of his skin, and before he was thoroughly changed. For a triall, he was shut up in prison, and carefully guarded; but continued unaltered. By which it appeares that this, as the like, proceedeth from a kinde of distraction, and strength of the abused imagination: the Divell doubly deluding both themselves, and such as behold them, with fantastick resemblances; although Bodin affinnes, and strives to maintaine, the contrary."
That many people have been executed, owing to the popular impression that they were wehrwolves, is too true; it is only another instance of the fatal facility with which superstition has turned disease itself into food for her love of cruelty, and a witness to her lamentable ignorance.
THERE seems to be a certain ground of sympathy between savage beasts and human beings. The schoolboy knows very well that Romulus and Remus, according to tradition, were suckled by a wolf; and in the kingdom of Oude a similar circumstance did in fact happen. This tendency to chop and change intelligences, as Butler in Hudibras says of the Rosicrucian virtuosi, is not uncommon among animals when deprived of their own young. Cats have been known to suckle infantine rabbits; hens have brooded over eggs not of their own laying, and have been somewhat astonished by the unexpected issue; and books of natural history will furnish many other instances. Orson, says the French chivalric romance which forms the basis of the nursery tale, found an extempore mamma in a tenderhearted female bear; and here, again, fable has its counterpart in fact, as appears from the ensuing story.
Some huntsmen were following the chase, in the year 1661, in the forest of Lithuania, Poland, when they perceived a great many bears together, and in the midst of them two of small size, which exhibited some affinity to the human shape. The men followed closely, and at length captured one of these strange creatures, though it defended itself with its nails and teeth. It appeared to be about nine years old, and of course was taken before the king and queen, as a sight worthy of the royal gaze. The skin and hair were extremely white, the limbs well-proportioned and strong, the visage fair, and the eyes blue; but the creature could not speak, and its inclinations, as we are informed by an old account, were altogether brutish. Yet this truly bearish child was christened by an archbishop in the name of Joseph Ursin; the Queen of Poland stood godmother, the French embassador godfather, and attempts were made to tame him, (for we may as well by this time adopt the masculine personal pronoun,) and to teach him some principles of religion. These endeavors partially succeeded; for (if we may credit the account) at the sacred name he would learn to lift his hands and eyes to heaven. But he could not be taught to speak, though there was no apparent defect in his tongue. He was bestowed upon one of the lords about the court, who took him into his house as a servant. He could not be induced to throw aside his natural, or rather his acquired fierceness; but he learned to walk upright on his feet, and went wherever he was bidden. A writer says:
"He liked raw as well as boiled flesh; could suffer no clothes on his back, nor ever wear shoes, nor anything upon his head. Sometimes he would steal to the woods, and there suck the sap of trees, when he had torn off the bark with his nails. It was observed, that he being in the wood one day when a bear had killed two men, that beast came to him, and, instead of doing him any harm, played and licked his face and body."
It does not appear when or how this individual died, or what finally became of him.
Perhaps some of the details of this story may be exaggerated; but we have no reason for disbelieving the chief allegations. To facts of this nature we may probably attribute the old legends of men transforming themselves, or being transformed, into wolves; a fable which may also have been encouraged by the existence of a disease called lycanthropy, in which the patient fancies himself a wolf, and, it is said, is sometimes known to run wild about the fields at night, worrying the flocks, and snarling like a dog.
An old writer says:
"The infected imitate wolves, and think themselves such; leaping out of their beds in the night, and lurking about the sepulchers by day, with pale looks, hollow eyes, thirsty tongues, and exulcerated bodies."
In that store-house of marvels, "Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy," we find it stated that Wierus tells a story of a man at Padua, in 1541, "that would not believe to the contrary, but that he was a wolf." He further says:
"He hath another instance of a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear. Forrestus confirms as much by many examples; one, among the rest, of which he was an eye-witness, at Alcmaer, in Holland; a poor husbandman, that still hunted about graves and kept in churchyards, of a pale, black, ugly, and fearful look. Such, belike, or little better, were King Praetus's daughters that thought themselves kine. Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel, as some interpreters hold, was only troubled with this kind of madness."
The word wehrwolf signifies a manwolf, or wolf-man. The fable is very old, and is found among many and widely separated nations. There was a people of ancient Scythia, called Neuri, of whom it was reported that they could turn themselves into wolves whenever they pleased, and could with equal facility resume their natural shapes. The Greek mythology tells of a king of Arcadia, one Lycaon, who was changed by Jupiter into a wolf for impiety:
"A wolf, not much from his first form es-
tranged;
So hoary-hair'd, his looks so full of rape,
So fiery-eyed, so terrible his shape,"
as Ovid writes, in the first book of his Metamorphoses. The belief extended all through the middle ages, and even into comparatively modern times. Bishop Hall, an English traveler of the time of James the First, says of a certain wood in Germany, that it was haunted, not only by freebooters, but by wolves and witches, "although these last are ofttimes but one." He saw there a boy, half of whose face had been devoured by a witch-wolf; "yet so as that the ear was rather cut than bitten off." At Limburgh, Hall saw one of the miscreants executed. The wretched woman was put to the wheel, and confessed in her tortures that she had devoured two-and-forty children while in her wolf form.
Fausanias, an ancient writer, tells a tale of a man who was a wolf for ten years, and at the end of that time resumed his humanity. According to some German authorities, wehrwolves, contrary to the account given by Bishop Hall, are in a state of continual enmity with witches; and this is illustrated by a story of a certain countryman who put up at the house of a jovial bailiff. After saturating himself with drink till he could not stand, he was left to have his sleep out on the floor; but the next morning a discovery was made which brought him under suspicion. A horse was found dead in the paddock, with his body cut in two with a scythe. The bailiff closely questioned his guest, and at length elicited from him the facts that the field was haunted by a witch, who flitted about in the shape of a light flame; that he, (the guest,) being a wehrwolf, pursued her with a scythe; that she fled for refuge under the belly of the horse, and that in aiming at her he divided the animal into two halves. What became of the countryman does not clearly appear.
Learned writers have differed as to whether a real transformation takes place, or whether the whole thing is not an illusion of the devil. In support of the former opinion there is no end of stories to the effect that certain persons have with their own eyes beheld the change of a human being into a wolf. An archduke of Russia seized a sorcerer named Lycaon, (a descendant, we suppose, of the ancient Arcadian king,) and commanded him to go through his feats of transmigration. The enchanter crouched down, muttered some incantations, and straightway passed into the wolf state, grinning with his open jaws, glaring with his eyes, and raging so fearfully that his keepers found it necessary to hold him. But the archduke played the too-confiding Lycaon a scurvy trick. He set two hounds upon him, and he was speedily torn to pieces.
Another story sets forth that a woman who was apprehended on suspicion of being a wehrwolf, was asked by the magistrate, in return for his sparing her life, to show him how she proceeded in that singular art for the practicing of which she was then before him. She consented, and, as a necessary preliminary, sent to her house for a particular pot of ointment. Having obtained this, she anointed various parts of her body, and fell into a profound sleep, which lasted three hours. When she woke she stated, in answer to inquiries, that she had taken the form of a wolf in the interval, had proceeded to a neighboring town, and had mangled a sheep and a cow. The magistrate sent to the place to inquire whether any such damage had been done, and was told that it had been done. But the relater of this narrative, one Sennertus, thinks that the devil was the real author of the killing and slaying, and that he influenced the woman to dream that the credit was due to herself. In any case, let us hope that the magistrate kept his promise of sparing the culprit's life.
Stories are also told of women transforming themselves into cats and hares, and of their being discovered by receiving certain wounds while in their abnormal condition, which were found upon them after they had returned to their proper form. According to one of these tales, an honest man was cleaving wood in his court-yard, when he was suddenly attacked by three very large and ferocious cats.
He defended himself by his prayers and his ax, and finally drove off the animals, who were considerably the worse for the combat. Shortly afterward he was apprehended, and charged before a magistrate with having wounded three honorable matrons so grievously that they were confined in their beds. It then turned out that the ferocious cats were no cats at all; but, as the matrons were of high lineage, the affair was hushed up, and the man was dismissed under a strict injunction to secrecy on forfeit of his life.
A great many anecdotes touching this subject are contained in the writings of Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsal and Metropolitan of Sweden in the sixteenth century, who relates that, in the northern parts, at Christmas, there is a great gathering of these men-wolves, who, during the night, rage with such fierceness against mankind (for they are much more savage than natural wolves) that the inhabitants suffer infinite miseries. They attack houses, break open the doors, destroy the inmates, and, descending into the cellars, drink amazing quantities of ale and mead, leaving the empty barrels heaped one upon another. Somewhere in those wild northern regions there was once a wall belonging to a castle which had been destroyed; and here the wehrwolves would assemble at a given time, and exercise themselves in trying to leap over the wall. Those that could not succeed ("as commonly," says Olaus, "the fat ones cannot") were whipped by their captains. It was believed that the great men and chief nobility of the land belonged to this singular confraternity; so that it appears to have been a kind of fashionable recreation with the Swedish bloods, like having your box at the Opera with us, or being a man upon town or on the turf. The manner of effecting the change was by mumbling certain words, and drinking a cup of ale to a man-wolf.
The Swedish Archbishop proceeds to give some instances in point. Here is one:
"A nobleman was traveling with his retainers; and one night they found themselves in a thick wood, far from all human habitations. They were hungry, but they had no provisions with them, and the case began to look awkward. Several of the servants, however, had the faculty of changing themselves into wolves; and one of them told the rest not to be surprised at anything that might happen while he withdrew for a short time. He then went into a thick, dark part of the forest, and transformed himself, and came out as a wolf, and slew a sheep, which he brought to his companions, who received it gratefully; and then he returned into the secret, dusky place, and resumed his proper shape. By this device the nobleman and his retinue were saved from famishing."
The wolf was a great person among the traditions and mythology of the Scandinavians. We find him frequently in the Edda. There was an enormous and appalling wolf called Fenris, or Fenrir, who was the offspring of Loki, the Evil Principle. His name is supposed to mean "dweller in the abyss." The ancient Scandinavians believed that he would continue to cause great mischief to humanity until the last day, when, after a fearful combat, he will be vanquished by the gods. The Edda also makes mention of two other wolves, one of which pursues the sun, while the other chases the moon; and one day both those orbs will be caught and devoured by them. Of the origin of these wolves, we are told in the Edda, that a hag dwells in a wood to the eastward of Midgrad, called Jarnvid, (the Iron Wood,) which is the abode of a race of witches called the Jarnvidjur. This old hag is the mother of many gigantic sons, who are all of them shaped like wolves.
In France, wehrwolves are called loup garoux; in Normandy, when that duchy was an independent, semi-Scandinavian nationality, garwolves; and among the Bretons, Bisclavaret. This latter name is associated with an old story of a Breton nobleman who used to transform himself, and whose adventures are narrated by that French poetess of the thirteenth century, Marie, who charmed the court of Henry the Third by her lays. The nobleman's wife, having discovered his fearful secret, by dint of repeated questioning, (for her curiosity had been excited by his frequent absence from home,) possessed herself one day of his garments when he was in the wolf shape. This, as she had previously ascertained would be the case, prevented his returning to the state of man. The faithless wife then married a gallant, and Bisclavaret lurked miserably in woods and desert places, longing, but in vain, to shake off the brutish semblance that imprisoned him. In about a year, the king, while hunting, pursued the poor manwolf all day, and at length ran him down. Then did the whole court behold a marvel; for the beast ran up to the monarch's horse, seized the stirrup with his fore-paw, licked the king's feet, and pathetically implored protection. "By the mass!" cried the king, "this is a strange adventure and a piteous! The poor brute throws himself on my kingly mercy, with mute, imploring gestures, that have a touch of human reason in them. We have chased him sorely; but I swear he shall not die. You huntsmen, there! beat off the dogs!" Bisclavaret was taken to the court, and became a great favorite, for his manners were gentle and dog-like. One day, the husband of his former wife came to the court, when Bisclavaret suddenly burst into a furiously savage mood, leaped upon the knight, and, but for the interposition of the king, would have rent him in pieces. Again the same thing happened; and not long afterward, the lady herself was encountered by Bisclavaret in the forest. He seized upon her, and tore her nose from her face. The king, exasperated at this, swore that the wolf should be put to death; but an aged counselor, perceiving some mystery in the matter, advised that the lady and the knight should be imprisoned until the truth should be extorted from them. This was done; the tale was unwillingly told, and the clothes of Bisclavaret were restored. Not until he was placed in a room by himself with them, would he disenchant himself. He was at length shut up in the king's bed-chamber; and, after a while, when the monarch and the courtiers again entered, they found a comely gentleman asleep on the royal bed. The conclusion of the story is to the effect that the nobleman was taken into high favor, and that the wicked wife and her paramour were banished from the land.
We will add one more story, and that shall be from Sandys's notes to his translation of Ovid, 1632. His mode of telling it is so earnest and intense, that we prefer giving it to the reader in the writer's own language:
"One accustoming to change himselfe into a wolfe, and againe into a man, was lately taken, and brought before the Duke of Prussia, accused by the pesants for worrying their cattle. A deformed fellow, and not much unlike a beast. He had a scarre on his face, the marke of a wound which was given him by a dog when he was a wolfe, as himselfe reported. Upon examination, hee confessed that twice every years he was converted into that shape; first about Christmas, and againe at Midsummer; at which times he grew salvage, and was carried with a certaine naturall desire to converse with wolves in the woods; afflicted with paine and horror while the haire was breaking out of his skin, and before he was thoroughly changed. For a triall, he was shut up in prison, and carefully guarded; but continued unaltered. By which it appeares that this, as the like, proceedeth from a kinde of distraction, and strength of the abused imagination: the Divell doubly deluding both themselves, and such as behold them, with fantastick resemblances; although Bodin affinnes, and strives to maintaine, the contrary."
That many people have been executed, owing to the popular impression that they were wehrwolves, is too true; it is only another instance of the fatal facility with which superstition has turned disease itself into food for her love of cruelty, and a witness to her lamentable ignorance.
No comments:
Post a Comment