“‘And if I look at the people, they are crueller than wolves.’ [Ovid] […] The father of history, Herodotus, said about the Dacians that they ‘are the bravest and most righteous of the Thracians’ […] The Dacians, the war wolves […] Pomponius Mela described the Dacians as ‘wild and utterly ready to face death’ […] believing themselves to be ‘immortal’ [due to their worship of Zalmoxis]. […] Strabo uses the term “daci”, “daoi” = “wolves” for the [Dacian] […] a warlike ritual origin, a kind of initiating or ‘warrior brotherhood’. This imitated the behaviour of wolves […] What was essential in these brotherhoods was the transformation of the young man into a wolf, namely a skilled warrior, a beast, supernaturally assimilating the behaviour of the wolf.
[…] each Dacian who was able to fight answered the call of the sacred wolf, symbolized by the battle flag. […] the Dacians' wolf was a god connected with war, worshiped and served by the military aristocracy, tarabostes, who became the wolves of war. They were the subjects of the wolf and entered its pack in order to defend the community where it was worshiped. It is certain that the Dacians' wolf was the most honoured.”
— Mădalina Strechie; “The Dacians: the Wolf Warriors” (2017)
Pre-Christian Wolf Warriors: Dacian and Viking Úlfhéðnar
THE NORTHMAN (2022); dir. Robert Eggers
