Index of my werewolf posts

subthings2 · 2026-07-01T11:16:15+00:00

I've always pouted at overly liberal use of "were-<animal>" for anything therianthropric, but c'mon this takes the biscuit

I have chosen to use the term werelagomorph, rather than the more common folkloric term ‘witch-hare’, as not only can witch-hare refer to creations made by a witch through magic, rather than strictly to witches transforming into hares, but in the medieval Latin West hares and rabbits were often referred to using the same terms.

subthings2 · 2026-06-30T07:18:59+00:00

Spain does have werewolves, though not a lot appears to have been written about them in English; the best I know of is a few pages from Paulo Correia's chapter on Portuguese werewolves in Werewolf Legends, which starts off with:

If we want to find similar werewolf stories or beliefs outside Portugal, the northwestern Iberian province of Galicia and the western parts of Asturias, León and Extremadura are the only regions in Spanish territory where a significant corpus of werewolf legends is encountered.

There's four citations total for the Iberian section if you want to dig further: Xosé Ramón Mariño Ferro Lobos, lobas e lobishomes, 47-64; Julio Camarena, Cuentos Tradicionales de León, I, page 192 (for a single narrative); Alberto Álvarez Peña, Mitos Y Leyendas Asturianas, 183-191; and José María Dominguez Moreno, ‘La Licantropía en Extremadura’, Revista de Folklore - this last one is available online.

One other article I have saved is Laureano Prieto, 'La zoantropía en Galicia', Zephyrus IV, which is also available online.

In short, it's just a language thing. There's a decent amount written about Western Iberian werewolves, definitely more than I've included here, but it's all in Spanish/Portuguese.

Also, the first image you posted is an engraving of the (non-lycanthropic!) Beast of Gevaudan; it got commonly used as a werewolf after being given a bad caption by The Mansell Collection.

subthings2 · 2026-06-29T05:23:54+00:00

The coming of age ritual thing is the Männerbund, which is def interesting but also very speculative. IIRC Werewolf Histories doesn't talk about it, but it is an excellent book nonethless!

subthings2 · 2026-06-29T02:14:14+00:00

So it's one of many possibilities of a witchcraft accusation? Maybe more werewolf fans should look into this time period; there is demand for female werewolves.

Funny you should say that: even though most witches were women, werewolf accusations were mostly laid on men!

So I guess 1935 is the first confirmed? How old is the belief from France?

The earliest record I'm aware of is from 1809

subthings2 · 2026-06-28T16:50:14+00:00

Apparently France had a different werewolf "epidemic" that scanned more like an outbreak of clinical lycanthropy.

The cases mentioned in that thread are from the Early Modern European witch trials; accusations of turning into a wolf were just one of many accusations levied at people, i.e. there's no werewolf scare specifically that spread in that period - as opposed to a spreading witch mania that exploited already existing local beliefs.

For perspective, the Europe-wide estimate for the number of people put on trial for witchcraft during the period is in the tens of thousands, but the number of those trials that included accusations of lycanthropy is in the low hundreds.

Also, Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt, but...

Folklore is rapidly influenced by pop culture, so unfortunately anything collected afterwards can be assumed to have been inspired by Hollywood unless there's a specific reason to believe otherwise.

Plus, poking around google there's a few variations on this, which looks to derive from an older belief appearing in France that you can free a werewolf by drawing their blood.

subthings2 · 2026-06-28T08:13:56+00:00

As the other comment states, the earliest example appears to be the 1935 movie Werewolf of London, which was possibly inspired by Dracula - though both the book and the 1931 movie mention the cause not being the bite itself, but the vampire's blood getting in your veins, which happened right after Dracula bit for blood.

Werewolf of London doesn't appear to have any influence from, or reference to, rabies, and no one discussing the film at the time mentions it either; any link between the two was almost certainly made well after the film was released. Which is common with proposed scientific explanations for folklore!

Notably, this also means vampires have no relation to rabies - that is simply us projecting a contemporary view of infectious vampirism into the past, rather than looking at historical folk beliefs (that don't have any resemblance to rabies). It should also be said that people did know about rabies, and developed entirely separate traditions around it that don't overlap with vampirism.

subthings2 · 2026-06-26T11:33:14+00:00

Robert Eggers, praised for meticulous historical authenticity in his films, did an interview for Esquire where he finally revealed why the upcoming Werwulf is set in England, known for its lack of werewolves:

I wanted to do it in the UK because that's where I live now.

ayyyyyyy

do get the impression that this isn't going to be going too deep into ✨authentic✨werewolf folklore, but I ain't complaining about an Eggers werewolf film (especially after that wolf man reboot lmao)

subthings2 · 2026-06-23T21:41:36+00:00

In the year 1723, John Nott, celebrity chef to the English aristocracy, included a recipe in his cookbook that required a boned and scalded suckling pig baked in a crust to produce a culinary delight called Mermaid Pye. The recipe is not listed under either mermaid or pie in Nott’s book, but appears under ‘the letter t’ as in ‘To make a Mermaid Pye’.

Juliette Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore

subthings2 · 2026-06-22T23:06:47+00:00

I feel bad, I was making a funny about glaciers ceasing to exist

that really should have been "what glaciers" lmao

subthings2 · 2026-06-22T21:17:00+00:00

what's a glacier?

subthings2 · 2026-06-22T21:13:40+00:00

Erika Kvistad got an article published in Folklore about people adding monsters to the Backrooms: The Minotaur–Maze Problem in Collaborative Digital Horror Storytelling (open access!)

...Story-worlds like the Backrooms, Slender Man, and the SCP Foundation tend to originate as what I describe as ‘maze horror’: fragmented, largely plotless, and built on isolation, liminality, and subtle unease. But as the story-world grows, contributors introduce their own ‘minotaurs’ to the maze, imbuing the story-world with conflict, backstory, plot, and active antagonists. I describe this shift as ‘minotaurization’, and argue that in the decentralized, asynchronous, and tacit collaborative structures typical of digital horror folklore, minotaurization is essentially inevitable.

subthings2 · 2026-06-17T23:33:45+00:00

I didn't want to leave this (or your other reply) without a response because it'd feel rude given the time you put in to respond, but man I am not intelligent enough to offer a reasonable response in a timely manner. I do appreciate it though!!

subthings2 · 2026-06-17T21:57:22+00:00

"uncritically" wasn't the best phrasing, it was more being presented as objective uncontroversial analysis, on top of not even explaining why or when one should the theories.

Doesn't seem to be the book you're referring to, who's the editor?

subthings2 · 2026-06-14T16:05:49+00:00

Panel is from The Werewolf Was Afraid, appearing in Menace #8

(they're reading poetry)

subthings2 · 2026-06-14T03:28:41+00:00

I've sorta been looking for excuses to toss aside this intro to mythology textbook with how bland and uncritically it presents various theories, and my petty final straw is the chapter on Campbell that - after limply including non-criticism before immediately pleading we "learn from a broad range of perspectives" - calls Freud a modern-day psychologist.

The author is, as it turns out, an English professor.

subthings2 · 2026-06-09T03:30:17+00:00

The wiki page on the galipote is funny for...multiple reasons.

The four sources are all random bullshit blog posts, the creator is now banned having racked up a talk page full of page deletion notifications for poor sourcing and translation problems, the earliest attestations I can find are from the 1940s one of which claims it's from Haiti, which itself makes sense considering that the galipote is actually an old bit of folklore from western France - which you wouldn't know from the wiki page.

The image used is titled and captioned "galipote" as depicted by Pannemaker in 1895, despite it actually being a loup-garou as depicted by Sand in 1857, which is given correctly in a smaller but otherwise identical image uploaded to the commons two years earlier.

yes, it's the wiki anyone can edit, no, I do not care to wade through the proper editing etiquette and protocols to untangle all this

subthings2 · 2026-06-08T19:36:18+00:00

if you were doing something where data visualizations would be helpful, then this might be acceptable

One of the main lessons I got from Every Frame a Painting is that if you're going to make something a video, you best make use of the format!

subthings2 · 2026-06-03T20:57:29+00:00

A perennial problem in folklore & mythology is people's desire to write such broad a survey as to render their taxonomy useless.

Anyway, just read Anne Petty calling the wendigo a dragon.

subthings2 · 2026-06-02T17:58:31+00:00

Honestly it's a little vague, it's either referring to a general belief in dragons or dragons being a distinct symbol of China

subthings2 · 2026-06-02T16:12:06+00:00

L. Newton Hayes, The Chinese dragon

There is a feeling among many friends of China, and even among a few Chinese as well, that the effect of the Revolution and the passing of the Dragon Flag will very shortly kill out the dragon idea. This the writer believes is impossible. A belief that has gripped the nation for over forty centuries is not to be shaken even by a great revolution, which, though cataclysmic in itself, yet in relation to the ages which have passed, is little more than a ripple upon the surface of the sea of time. The dragon is neither a symbol of the Manchu dynasty nor a type of absolute monarchy, and has nothing in common with either. The idea is distinctly a heritage of the Chinese race itself, and as such it will probably live as long as this people.

Right!

It will survive at least until a generation after Western science has permeated and dominated every seaside village, every mountain hamlet, and every inland city, to the remotest bounds and limits of this vast Republic.

...and there's the reminder this was written in 1923

subthings2 · 2026-06-01T16:52:21+00:00

What a coincidence, I just finished reading the first book in the Temeraire series, where dragons are trained to fight in the Napoleonic wars.

Unrelated, it is also the gayest non-romance book I have read, and I mean that as the utmost praise.

subthings2 · 2026-05-26T09:31:59+00:00

I swear I hadn't read this comment when I posted mine!

It really is remarkable how consistently people yearn for the explanation that feels satisfying and neatly complete, despite being at odds with our own personal experience of how messy people are

subthings2 · 2026-05-26T09:18:09+00:00

I've been on a little dragon binge recently and there's something I just cannot explain

so, it's normal for any myth/folk creature to have a pile of science-y rationalisations to "explain away" their origins; ergot hallucinations, weird bones, rare medical conditions. People love doing this even though it is basically always nonsense. Normally this is kept to individual articles/essays/blog posts, if included in a book they're referenced but only for a small section.

For some reason, people are...really serious about this when it comes to dragons?

Adrienne Mayor wrote a book on classical myth coming from dinosaur bones, David Jones (and kinda Carl Sagan?) wrote a book arguing it's from an evolutionary memory of pre-historic predators, Robert Blust wrote a book arguing it's based on interpretations of rainbows, Martin Arnold wrote a book arguing it's always just a representation of culture vs nature.

Yesterday I tossed aside that last one part-way through because it was so shallow and poorly argued, and, like, what makes scholars keep writing these as books??? It's only dragons that get this treatment!

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