Werewolves discussion

To get us reading about werewolves before our voted upon and agreed June selection of the month, I thought I would get the ball rolling by picking a quick read for the time that we have remaining in May. My selection hales all the way back to 1828. Its author is Richard Thompson and he has the distinction of writing the first original werewolf story in English. It was in his book titled Tales of the Antiquary. The story is "The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin." I'm sorry, but the only way I know of to read this particular story is on-line. Here is a link to it: https://books.google.com/books?id=bw8...

For such an old story, I really liked it! Give it a go and let us know what you think of it.

Many nineteenth centuries are almost all narrative with very little dialog. "The Wehr-Wolf" here certainly suffers the affliction that the narrative is too large in proportion to the dialog, but I found that made me appreciate the dialog, when it appeared, all the more.

This earliest werewolf story in English had several notable features for me:

1) It was set in France. This makes me think that the British considered werewolves not at first to be a native phenomenon to their country, but as something that came to them eventually by way of the continent.

2) Turning into a werewolf is voluntary. Most of the werewolves mentioned in the story become werewolves knowing they are doing so and doing so in order to gain an advantage over their fellow men. Making one's way in the world seems too hard for most honest men without skills.

3) The notion that men could be cursed to involuntarily turn into werewolves is also in this story. The way that is believed to happen is if a werewolf claws one deeply enough to pass on the curse.

4) This story also happens to present a possible cure for the curse, one of the few times I have seen such suggested as even possible. All one must do is beat the werewolf sufficiently with the forked branch of a tree. This "cure" was performed on one person who only thought he was cursed, and so it wasn't really tested in that case. The only other case where the cure worked was when one of the king's men claimed it was how he beat off a werewolf attack, but we do not know what happened to the particular werewolf attacking him other than it lost its paw, so there is room to doubt the sufficiency of this "cure".

5) The last peculiarity I note of this story is that the curse of lycanthropy didn't affect just one isolated person in one remote region somewhere. It seemed to affect most of the townsmen of a certain remote village, probably through the spread of the curse in that village long ago.

All in all, this was an enjoyable story that set out some features of a lore other storytellers could (and did) build upon.