What's your thoughts about werewolves?
Thoughts? Nonny, I need a whole other brain to contain all of my views about werewolves. They were a two-year obsession of mine a while back, and the fierce love for the folklore never went away. This ask also gives me an excuse to dig out my reference books on werewolves and English fairytales :3
Werewolves and Urban Fantasy
If weâre going to talk werewolves, then I want to lead by saying that, as much as I love them, YA fiction has distorted their image. The idea of alpha male aggression being the driving force of a pack, alongside all of the âvampires v werewolvesâ schtick, really gets under my skin. Wolves are territorial animals, true, but itâs a product of their evolutionary environment. If you look at the pack dynamics, youâll see that theyâre incredibly familial. Maybe not quite as much as elephants, whales or dolphins, but considering their predatory nature itâs really impressive. Taking that natural inclination to family bonds, and sticking it inside a human-wolf combination, youâre more likely to get that huge, sprawling family who like to feed everyone and do wayyy too much baking than is normal.
Then, thinking about pack v pack, theyâre pretty good at co-existing so long as each respects the otherâs territory. They would also be hella competitive. So thatâs fun. In short, I love urban fantasy werewolves as long as theyâre done properly and not to be dramatic or anything, but I would kill for my cosy werewolf families.
Almost every culture in the world has a version of the werewolf, or some kind of aligned creature/spiritual being. I devoured Werewolves by Doctor Bob Curran and something that really struck me was the sheer amount of âspeciesâ of werewolves. Even in countries without wolves, a trip through the local folklore will unearth many creatures who are similar.
The whole idea of werewolves goes back to our primal nature, when we were just starting to run and walk as a buck-naked race on the African continent, battling with other predators for survival. That capability for violence and agression has largely filtered out of our system through thousands of years of evolution, but enough still remains to manifest itself our collective psychology. As societies settled down and became more ordered, more respectable, the idea of a beast within became a morbin fascination. The Victorians were largely responsible for the resurganceâand the warpingâof werewolves (among many other cultural lores, which Iâve talked about here in regards to fae).
Personally, Iâm not very fond of the Victorian werewolf achetype. I like to call it the Penny Dreadful Wolf. A lot of the lore and culture behind the creatures was stripped away in favour of providing the Victorian public with (literal) cheap thrills. The whole idea that werewolves can be killed with silver came from early Victorian literature in an effort to gentrify werewolf hunting. Silver was expensive and hard to come by, and so authors and playwrites decided that the middle working-class protagonists had to need it in order to kill the werewolf and save the day.
The Penny Dreadful wolf is also the source of the idea that werewolves are nothing but mindless, aggressive alpha-male killers; the poor man behind the wolf-skin was usually a lovely, mild-mannered person, until they got bitten. Because that was the archetype which society carried forwards into the modern age, that was the idea which filtered down through the years to us now. Imo, itâs a shame to only run with the resultant myths. There is so much that you can use to make your werewolves diverse, interesting and truly fantastical - and give other cultures positive representation in the process!
I prefer to think of the mythos of werewolves as a tree, or rather, part of a tree. The trunk would be human-beasts, and from it stem loads of limbs, and from those smaller branches, and each branch has fruit of its own. New stuff is always growing on it, as modern society grows and alters the stories, or older myths and ledgends re-surface.
From dog-headed races to shamanic rituals to spirit-totems of Native America, and then back in time to Wepwawet, the wolf-headed diety of the City of Wolves in Egypt; Romulus and Remus, raised by Lupus the wolf - and even further back, to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Irish idea that a man could bring out the wolf inside himself by speaking of it. There are so many and itâs amazing!
These canine, supernatural beings ranged between everything from kind, wise protectors, to terrible, evil beasts. One of my favourites is the Cynocephali, written about in the Liang Shu, which is a text of uncertain authorship/origin concerning the Liang Dynasty. The Cynocephali inhabited an idealistic land which could either be America (links to Vinland) or Japan, and they gaurded it as their territory from anyone who tried to settle there. Fu Hsi is considered to be the creator of humankind from clay (another really common theme, and Iâll circle back to this) in Chinese lore, and his first creations were the dog-headed people, whom he banished. They could be the Cynocephali, or they could be another branch of the mythology entirely; either way, stories of their nature was conflicting. Some considered them to civilised, and others thought them to be feral, bitter about their banishment and without any humanity.
Later on, came the beserkers in Norse lore and the shamanic invocations of the wolf-spirit in Finland, where they invited bears, wolves and other predators to enter their skin. The early medieval Western mind siezed on these stories and, finding tales of wolves and men in their own lore, started to nurture the huge culture which today has such popularity.
Why stick with one broad, generalised view of werewolves when youâve got an entire tree to explore, plus all of its roots and the fruit it produces? The way I see it, youâve got to drop the word werewolf completely and look at the broader idea of the beast within to really appreciate them.
Humankind, the Earth and Nature
Humans being created from clay or earth is a really common idea around the world. It never ceases to amaze me, and Iâm of the opinion that the global popularity of werewolves and the global popularity of humankind-from-the-earth are connected to one another. No matter what happens to us as a race, no matter how many machines we build or how many inventions we churn out, we keep on coming back to the earth and the natural world. Solar and Lunarpunk are now gaining popularity, and green living is seeing a large rise in popularity. Itâs even considered trendy now to shift back to rural living.
An angle I wish I could see worked further where human-beasts are concerned is the angle of humanity never being able to truly escape the primal nature we came from. Not as a bad, primal-nature-is-dangerous concept, but as the idea that humankind is so restricted by our own socially-imposed ideals that the best way to achieve accepting, diverse and all-inclusive society is by letting that primal nature (the metaphorical wolf) back in.
Before I finish up, Iâd also like to touch briefly on the ancient link between inner beasts and mental illness. We live in a far more open-minded society, and so the idea that mentally unwell people are monsters should not be circulating, but occasionally Iâll come across a werewolf piece of (fan)fiction that perpetuates the toxic trope. I just?? Why would anyone??? This isnât the Victorian era.
Thereâs a whole connection between animalistic behaviour being bad, hypersexuality, mental illess and social conventions, but this isnât the place to go on about that. Iâm trying to stick to topic, so to be as brief as I can: lycanthropy is archaic, donât use it as a psychiatric/medical term to justify or explain a werewolf-like character; only use it in the context of transformation from human into wolf. I donât believe that you canât give human-beast/werewolf characters mental illnesses (theyâre part human, after all), but Iâd say that the inner animal and the mental illness must be completely seperate from one another.
I heckin love human-beasts, be it werewolves, spiritual possession, beserkers, dog-men or whatever else you want to throw at me, as long as you consider the true cultural roots of each myth and donât just pick and choose in order to twist a werewolf into something to meet your YA teen romance needs. Be respectful, steer clear of the âmental illness = monstrousâ angle, and research, research, research.
These have been my thoughts on werewolves, and Iâm not sorry for stretching your dashes with my super enthusiasm.Â
