The Monstrefact Omnibus: The Werewolf

In this special omnibus edition of The Monstrefact, join Robert for all five episodes of his recent look at the werewolf of myth, legend and media – from prehistoric wolf interactions and the ancient world to modern media incarnations of lycanthropy. Draw blood…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey everyone, Robert Lamb. Here in this special omnibus edition
of The Monster Fact, we've put together all five episodes
of our recent look at the werewolf in myth, legend
and media, from prehistoric wolf interactions and the ancient world
to modern media incarnations of lacanthropy. So let's dig right

(00:34):
in draw blood, where the limit of our campfire's glow
licks against the darkness of the wild's strange forms leap
and prowl, sometimes human, sometimes lupine, often somewhere in between.
Huddled around our cultivated flames, this nighttime sun of burning wood,

(00:59):
we invoke the ight of man, hot, food and drink,
dance and song, story and myth. These acts tell us
who we are, and yet the creatures of the outer
night tempt us to darker, wilder orbits places in the
wilderness from which our fire would be but a pinprick
of light. They are the wildness from which we arose

(01:22):
and might yet return, dressed in no furs but their own,
naked before no gods or none, man still remembers. They
are our violent hearts, our erotic blood, flesh, hunger, and desire.
Suckled by the moon, the werewolves creep closer, threatening to
leap with shredding claw and ripping teeth, even as their

(01:45):
howls urge us to cast aside our tools, our garments,
our language tongues and join them in the all encompassing night.
Here we begin a multi episode look at the werewolf
shape shifters, who walk the line between human being and
the wild wolf in all manner of horrifying and alluring ways. Broadly,

(02:10):
werewolf traditions and visions overlapped greatly with other shape shifter traditions.
Pretty Much every culture boasts some version of the human
into animal or animal into human story, as well as
some manner of human animal hybridity. These theoryanthropes are many,
serving as everything from divine avatars to tricksters and tormentors,

(02:33):
and entailing a plethora of animal forms. The werewolf, however,
is a creature that specifically emerges from the nexus of
human beings and the Eurasian wolf. The history of these
two species is long debated, concerning their coevolution and the
domestication of dogs some twenty thousand to forty thousand years ago,

(02:55):
just before or during the last glacial maximum. Suffice to say,
humans and some canids, perhaps cast off wolves or abandoned young,
forged a mutually beneficial relationship. In a sense, each social
animal found a new pack in the company of the other.
It's an interesting bond unlike any other. As neuroscientist John

(03:18):
Allman discusses in his two thousand book Evolving Brains, each
species benefited greatly from the domestication. The wolves gained at
its support for the rearing of their pups, and humans,
now bolstered by the wolf's keen senses, became an even
stronger hunter, able to outcompete their evolutionary rivals and protect

(03:41):
their camps against nocturnal predators. Thus, our ice age ancestors
brought canids closer to the fire of their culture, even
as their wild kin howled and raged in the vast
darkness beyond. Did they even then tell stories of fellow
hunter's lost to those outer orbits of wildness? Do they

(04:02):
imagine humans transformed into wolves, perhaps by the dawning of
a pelt or some act of savagery, We don't know.
They thought enough of wolves to depict one in the
surviving cave paintings at Fonde Gamme Cave in modern day France. Elsewhere,
I sage artists depicted the oldest known human animal hybrid

(04:23):
in the lone minsh or lion man figure of Hollenstein's
Stadel Cave, so we might reasonably assume such imaginings were possible,
but it would be tens of thousands of years before
specific words for what we think of as werewolves emerged
in human culture. In the nineteen forty eight book Man
into Wolf, Austrian polymath Robert Eisler presented an elaborate take

(04:46):
on humanity's prehistoric past, arguing that traditions of the werewolf
are based in the dual emergence of our ancestors as
two separate strains of early humans, one savage, violent and predatory,
the other peaceful. The conflict between these early peoples, he argues,
continues to resonate in the collective unconscious, as well as

(05:07):
our ongoing human struggles against war, pain, and cruelty. These arguments, however,
depend on now outdated understandings of human evolution as well
as union archetypes, so I don't want to misrepresent his
ideas as modern scientific hypothesis, but rather as a work
of cultural commentary, it's an interesting take on the very

(05:28):
real long history of man and wolf. Turning to contemporary scholarship,
historian Daniel Ogden's excellent twenty twenty one book The Werewolf
in the Ancient World stresses that we mustn't be too
quick to view wolves as the mere bestial opposite of
humanity and thus a fitting wild energy to entertain in

(05:49):
our myths and legends of metamorphosis. Certainly, as he points out,
there are plenty of connotations in ancient accounts throughout the
Eurasian wolfe's historical range that identify the creature as an
embodiment of savagery or trickery, but others still acknowledge the social, noble, intelligent, cooperative,
and tactical nature of wild wolves. In other words, we

(06:12):
didn't just see our savage id in the wolf, something
frequently cited in werewolf tales. No, we saw much of
our nobility in them as well. Ogden writes, quote, were
wolves are wolves because there is a sense in which
wolves are in and of themselves were wolves already insofar,

(06:33):
that is, as they combine the qualities of the wildest
and most lawless of animals with those of civilization. And humanity.
In twenty seventeen's she Wolf, A Cultural History of Female Werewolves,
editor Hannah Priest also weighs in on this issue, arguing
that while we often do look to humanity's prehistoric past

(06:54):
for the seeds of werewolf legends, the narratives of werewolves
are intrinsically bound to quote historical circumstance, civilization, and literature.
The European roots of the werewolf are perhaps linked, she suggests,
not merely to the threat posed by wolves to hunter gatherers,
or even to the wolf like and wolf aided nature
of the hunter, but also to the threat posed by

(07:17):
wolves to domesticated animals, ultimately a threat to agriculture and property.
As we'll discuss later, this interpretation reveals much about the
gendered nature of male and female were wolves and the
sort of distinct threats they seem to embody toward male landowners.
Suffice to say, specific werewolf traditions do arise from the

(07:39):
relationship between humans and wolves, but it's a relationship that
changes drastically over time and takes on different forms across
cultural lines. Well have much to explore in the weeks ahead,
but for now, as we sit by our campfire, we
gaze out at the most perplexing shapes in the darkness,
Creatures that indeed blur the line between wilderness and civility,

(08:01):
Creatures that embody unnatural transformation. Informed it would seem, by
the many ways we transformed the natural world and ourselves
through the domestication of fauna and flora. As we discussed
the last time, the origins of werewolf traditions may trace

(08:23):
back to our prehistoric ancestors and the gradual domestication of
the wild wolf, an act that may have made us
better hunters and better watchers of the dark. At different
points in human history, we saw shades of the wolf
in our own animal nature, just as we also saw
shades of human intelligence, cunning, and society in the ways

(08:44):
of the wild wolf. This is not, however, to say
that the werewolf specifically is a universal concept. Shapeshifters and
animal human hybrids exist in virtually all human cultures, but
the werewolf naturally requires some familiarity with the species Canis lupus,
particularly the Eurasian wolf. Now, I want to stress that, yes,

(09:06):
the wolf's range includes North America, and they certainly do
factor into the rich traditions of various indigenous North American tribes,
but these traditions, including the off sited skin walkers, are
rather distinct from the werewolf concept as we know it today.
We may come back to discussion on this topic later on.
Let's start with the term werewolf or the Germanic wewulf.

(09:30):
This we can trace back to the writings of English
Benedictine monk Bishop Wolfstan, and this would have been very
early in the second millennium CE. While most famous for
being the last pre conquest English bishop, his service began
a mere four years prior to the Norman conquest of
ten sixty six. Wolfstan did in fact warn the English

(09:52):
of the threat posed by the quote would Fraco Verwulf,
this being a threat to the Church's flock. As Daniel
Ogden explains in The Werewolf in the Ancient World, the
usage here is broad and don't get excited, but it
certainly doesn't refer to actual were wolves now. As Ogden explains,
the traditional interpretation of the word werewolf saw it as

(10:15):
a combination of the Latin vere or man with wolf
a man wolf. But he stresses in his book that
the commonly accepted theory today is that where derives from
the Anglo saxon war, meaning stranger or outsider. The were
wolf is an outsider wolf, and this might, too, he argues,
connect to Norse ideas of wolf and outlaw. In fact,

(10:39):
he cites a thirteenth century Danish tradition that saw convicted
thieves hanged beside the corpse of a wolf to fully
convey the dead man's criminal nature to common citizens passing by.
Of course, these ideas line up with the way were
wolves have often been presented dangerous outsiders, threats to law

(11:00):
and ruling landowners, and if we think seriously about the
animal itself, a lone wolf that is not part of
a social pack. Male lone wolves, in reality, are generally
only temporarily alone, moving from one social group to another
or back into the same group they just left. But
in some cases this may also constitute an individual infected
with rabies a most dangerous creature. Indeed, the term like panthropy, however,

(11:27):
is much older, first employed by the second century CE
physician Marcellus of Side, who employed the term like anthropia
to describe medical conditions that we would now Ogden describes
define as different forms of mental illness. Marcellus's description continued
to echo through ancient medical writings, and, as Nadine Metzger

(11:49):
summarizes in twenty fourteen's Battling Demons with Medical Authority, published
in the journal History of Psychiatry, these lichen throats were
described as otherwise harmless, melancholic individuals who suffer from extreme dryness,
hang out its cemeteries, and mimic the behaviors of wolves
and dogs. Modern interpretations have considered a number of actual

(12:10):
ailments that might have underlined this broad diagnosis, rabies, porphyria,
neurological dysfunction, and epilepsy. Some additionally make a case for
some manner of true clinical lycanthropy. For ancient physicians, however,
it was nothing that a little fasting or the consumption
of a wolf's heart wouldn't cure. The term lycanthropy would

(12:33):
remain a purely medical term, while other Latin words more
specifically described shape shifting beings. That is, until ninth century CE,
historian Theophanes the Confessor described agents of the Byzantine emperor ascanthropes,
a manner of word play, here to invoke the Greek
myth of lychaan wordplay that would be repeated by George

(12:56):
Hammertolos aka George the Monk later that same century, and
this Ogden contends sets the word werewolf on the trajectory
that we enjoy today. It's interesting that we've long seen
this duality of magic and medicine, of the rational and
the superstitious in our werewolf media. As Matt Schimkowitz explores

(13:19):
in a twenty twenty five AV Club article titled film
Trivia FactCheck, original The Wolfman script kept the Werewolf at bay.
The nineteen forty one Universal Horror classic film was originally
intended to leave it ambiguous as to whether the film's
Lawrence Talbot suffered from a monstrous curse or a distortion

(13:39):
of the mind. The nineteen forty six films She Wolf
of London, as well as the nineteen seventy six Italian
grindhouse favorite Werewolf Woman, both employ the idea of werewolf
delusion rather than literal transformation. Finally, I want to come
back to Bishop wolf Stand here. His name has nothing
to do with werewolf, being rather a family name that

(14:01):
meant Wolfstone in the sense of strength and resilience. But
as Brad Steiger points out in nineteen ninety nine's The
Werewolf book. A much later German tradition recorded I Believe
in the nineteenth century, told of a wolf stone erected
over the grave of a slain werewolf, keeping the monster
at rest, but also becoming a focal point for the parentormal.

(14:29):
We continue this week with our look at werewolves, having
previously discussed purported prehistoric origins of the were wolf in
the experiences and observations of early humans, as well as
the earliest known usages of the words werewolf and lacanthropy.
The former werewolf emerges in the early second millennium CE,

(14:49):
while the latter lacanthropy has an older but complex history
as a second century CE catch all for various mental illnesses,
which came to be conflated with the Greek myth of
Lachaan Like Haan was the legendary king of Arcadia who
dared to try and trick the high god Zeus into
eating human flesh. His ploy was unsuccessful, however, and Zeus

(15:13):
inflicted a fitting divine punishment for one so savage, which
Avid describes as following in the Metamorphosis Henry Thomas Riley translation, Alarmed,
he himself takes to flight, and, having reached the solitude
of the country. He howls aloud and in vain attempts
to speak. His mouth gathers rage from himself, and through

(15:36):
its usual desire for slaughter, it is directed against the sheep,
and even still delights in blood. His garments are changed
into hair, his arms into legs. He becomes a wolf,
and he still retains vestiges of his ancient form. His
hoariness is still the same, The same violence appears in
his features. His eyes are bright as before. He is

(15:58):
still the same image of ferocity, and just to be sure,
all responsible parties are punished. Zeus follows this up with
a great flood. But Laikaan himself is indeed transformed into
a wolf, and, like the Biblical Cane, as Riley points
out in his notes, he is forced to live as
a cast off outsider, a lone wolf. In some tellings,

(16:20):
his sons are transformed as well. While the myth of
Likaan is sometimes held up as an ancient key to
understanding subsequent werewolf tales, Daniel Ogden in twenty twenty one's
were Wolves in the Ancient World maintains that the tale
is a quote metaphorical derivative of the ancient folkloric traditions
that are indeed the key. He devotes an entire later

(16:43):
chapter in the book to Laichan and the complex interplay
there of three key categories. One historic evidence for a
lupine transformation right of passage for young men of the
Antet clan, Two various related myths of lupine transformation and
sacrilegious acts of human sacrifice in cannibalism. And three a

(17:07):
supposedly historical tale of an individual changing into a wolf
after eating part of a human sacrifice at the Likekaea
festival on the slopes of Mount like Chaan aka Wolf Mountain.
I won't attempt to summarize the entirety of his analysis,
but Ogden does contend that the story is more werewolf
adjacent than anything. Laikayan is a man punished with transformation

(17:31):
into a wolf, a transformation that occurs only once outside
of his control, making him no more a true were
wolf than Arachne, another victim of divine transformation punishment in
Greek myth, is a were spider, so an unsatisfying were
wolf and by no means the key trendsetter that some
make him out to be, but still an important and

(17:53):
influential myth in the Grand tradition of were wolves. As
discussed in the last episode, He's not key to the
understand the word lacanthropy, but his myth eventually becomes conflated
with the term to some degree. Now. One of the
tales interwoven in the Arcadian myth is that of the
Olympic athlete DeMarcus, a boxer who is said to have

(18:14):
been transformed into a wolf for a period of nine
to ten years at the Festival of Lykaea, possibly due
to ritual consumption of human flesh, thus, as is common
in all Ichaean myths, blurring the line between man and beast.
But Ogden stresses that the quote unquote werewolf ism of DeMarcus,
if we may call it, that, is more directly related

(18:37):
to his status as a superb athlete. In keeping with
various other supernatural stories of the time about athletes, including
other accounts of lupine transformation, this would seem a tale
as old as time. Multiple contemporary mma fighters, for example,
and professional sports stars have been nicknamed werewolf. The Batman

(18:58):
villain known as Werewolf is also an Olympic athlete, and
let us not forget teen Wolf cousins Scott and Todd Howard,
known for their lycanthropic basketball abilities. This brings us back
to a continuing point of contemplation in were wolf traditions,
there is a certain bit of the beast that we
admire and crave to manifest in our strength and speed,

(19:22):
or even in our savagery. We'll have more to explore
concerning ancient lacanthropy in the next episode, including the best
cases for the earliest written and visual depictions of werewolves.

(19:49):
We've been discussing the roots of werewolf traditions, both in
prehistoric human history and in ancient mythology and literature. Based
on my readings, I think it's safe to say that
werewolf tradition emerged from various elements in human history, in
the human psyche, taking on different forms depending on time
and location, and most importantly influencing later traditions, legends, folk tales,

(20:11):
and of course fictional takes as well. When we look
for specific examples of early or even the earliest literary
examples of werewolfs, it really depends on how narrowly or
widely we refine our search. For instance, the oldest surviving
work of literature, the epic of Gilgamesh features the wild
man and possible beast men in Keitu, and there's certainly

(20:32):
some crossover from here into later werewolf traditions, but to
be clear, in Ketu not a were wolf. More interesting,
as Daniel Ogden brings up in the werewolf in the
ancient world, the epic of Gilgamesh does feature reference to
the goddess Ishtar having turned humans into various beasts, including
a wolf. Much later, though still ancient to us, Homer's

(20:55):
the Odyssey from the eighth century BCE refers to the
witch circeansforming humans not only into pigs her specialty, but
into wolves as well. These are both cases of transformative witchcraft,
and while Ogden contends that stories like this certainly feed
into werewolf traditions, we'd be going overboard to single either
out as a true case zero for literary or mythic leacanthropy.

(21:19):
Focusing on the importance of temporary and even deliberate transformation
with connection between the two forms. Ogden points to a
tale that is often singled out as the most obvious
werewolf story from the ancient world, one appearing in the
satiricon of Gaius Petronius arbiter from the late first century CE.

(21:40):
The Latin satire contains a story told by the character
Nicros at a banquet, and it roughly goes as follows.
Back when the freedman Nicros was still a slave, he
fell in love with the wife of an innkeeper and
would sneak off to her whenever he could. One night,
when the master of the house was away, Nicros persuaded

(22:02):
the current HouseGuest, quote a soldier as brave as Orcus,
to accompany him on the midnight journey. Shortly afterwards, they
found themselves in an acropolis amongst the tombs, where the
moon shone down in them like the midday sun. And
then Nicros observed the soldier in a most shocking and
remarkable act. He took off all his clothes, neatly, piled

(22:25):
them up urinated in a circle around them, and then
transformed into a wolf. The wolf howled and ran away,
and when Nekros tried to touch the clothes that the
soldier had left within the circle of urine, he found
that the clothing had turned to stone. In fear, he
hurried on to see the innkeeper's wife, whose name was Melissa,

(22:46):
and She told him that if he'd arrived earlier, he
could have helped them, for a wild wolf had attacked
their livestock, draining their blood before they were able to
drive the beast away with a spear to the neck.
Nicros began his way home after that, passing where the
clothing had been stacked, but finding only splashes of blood there,
And when he finally reached his master's house, he found

(23:08):
a doctor attending to the soldier who had suffered a
grievous neck wound. Now we can easily identify the key
attributes of temporary deliberate transformation with connection between the two forms,
as well as various flourishes that would remain popular in
werewolf fiction up through modern times. Thus it's pretty definitive. Furthermore,

(23:30):
Ogden contends that this one is quote one really good
quirking story, which is key because the tale first and
foremost serves as entertainment with humorous wrinkles concerning the storyteller,
while also somewhat reflecting popular beliefs and the contemporary appetite
for fantastic tales infused with the supernatural. In short, it's

(23:51):
a werewolf story doing what werewolf stories have always done,
and that is entertained. Visual depictions are less definitive, as
we often lack the full context of what we're looking at.
Is it a mere wolf human disguised as a wolf,
or merely wearing a wolf's pelt. There are various stopping
points before we arrive at full werewolf, even as we

(24:13):
contend with images tied to known tales such as the
satiricon or the myth of Lycaan theoryanthropic figures can likewise
mean various things. Still acknowledging all of this, some images
do read strongly as wear a wolf, at least to
us Modern viewers across the gulf of time consider the
sixth century Etruscan Pontic plate, which seems to depict a furry,

(24:35):
bipedal humanoid with a wolf's head. The context is unclear,
though probably linked in some way to Hercules and the
centaur depicted elsewhere on the plate. The theory anthropic figure
here may represent death or the wolf man combination here
may reference the god Faunas, who in Ovid's metamorphosis, attempts

(24:57):
to rape Hercules while Hercules is dressed in his lover
Amphilles clothing. We're reminded in all of this that the
werewolf is a monster. It is a thing, a form
that illustrates various ideas, observations, and comparisons, and any of
these ideas, observations, or comparisons may essentially summon an image

(25:21):
comparable to the werewolf, completely on their own, detached in
whole or in part from any particular werewolf tradition. That's
it for now, But next week we will continue our journey,
and we will turn our attention to the female werewolf.

(25:43):
As we continue our look at the werewolf in myth, legend,
and media, we now turn to the female werewolf, a
gendered take on the monster that might, at first glance
seem to be mere titillation, but the roots of the
concept weave their way through a variety of contemplations about
femininity and the wild in all their forms. I want

(26:06):
to return to twenty seventeen's She Wolf, A Cultural History
of Female Werewolves, which features multiple chapters by different authors
that examine female werewolves in myth, legend, and media, everything
from centuries old legends to modern cartoons. As previously mentioned,
the book's editor, Hannah Priest argues that European werewolf narratives

(26:27):
revolve around the threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals,
ultimately a threat to male owned agriculture and property. When
the werewolf is male, the threat comes from outside the
male land donor's domain, the outlaw wolf wanderer, who might
seek to tear through the defenses and kill livestock or
family members. Meanwhile, female werewolves tend to emerge from within

(26:49):
the male land donor's domain, often endangering children and serving
as an overall threat to domesticity. Of note, the first
Mexican wear wolf movie, Leloba or The She Wolf from
nineteen sixty five, features both a female and a male werewolf,
and they correspond to this form quite perfectly. The female

(27:10):
werewolf the daughter of a well to do Mexican landowner
and scientists, and the male werewolf pursuit her from afar.
In this gothic slice of Golden age Mexican cinema, the
werewolf seems to represent the wild and uncontrollable elements of
someone within the family unit and someone from beyond it.
For more on Laloba, see our recent episode of Weird

(27:32):
House Cinema on the film, It's interesting that both the
first Mexican Werewolf movie and the first werewolf motion picture
period a now lost nineteen thirteen short titled The Werewolf,
feature female licanthropes, but the vast majority of werewolf tales
lean heavily toward male, often hyper masculine visions of wolf

(27:53):
human hybridity. Likewise, while the wolf man is often presented
as a lone wolf, the female male wolf woman is
often connected to a social group or part of a
mated pair. This is interesting in how it connects to
previous discussions of what our ancestors saw of themselves in
wolves and vice versa. As highly social animals, wild wolves

(28:16):
reflect aspects of human family and society, and it's only
rational for these elements to influence our conceptions of human
wolf hybridity as well. In fact, as author J. Kate
mentions later on in the She Wolf book quote, aside
from a brief fashion for presenting female were wolves as
lonely night stalkers in Victorian literature, the dominant presentation of

(28:40):
female wear wolves from the Middle Ages onwards has been
as part of a social unit comprising other were wolves
or other humans. I won't attempt to summarize everything explored
in the book. Definitely pick a copy up for yourself
if you're interested in this topic as i am. There's
an entire chapter concerning females in the RPG world Werewolf

(29:00):
the Apocalypse game, for example, but it explores the various
ways in which female werewolf treatments explore societal ideas concerning
female connectedness to nature and societal norms related to body, hair, menstruation, sexuality, aging,
and other topics. And in some cases, certainly, the female

(29:21):
werewolf can be yet another example of the monstrous feminine,
in which some aspect of female bodies or female experience
is othered from the standpoint of patriarchal anxiety. Overall, however,
a good monster tale can reveal and convey much more.
The werewolf stands as a nexus between the wild and
the civilized, between freedom and taboo, between liberty and control,

(29:45):
and takes on so many additional meanings when applied specifically
to women. In Daniel Ogden's excellent twenty twenty one book
The Werewolf in the Ancient World, he of course highlights
the difficulty in deciding what exactly constitutes a werewolf versus
other modes of ibrid monsters in various cultures that had
no precise word for werewolf, and this applies to both

(30:06):
masculine werewolves and feminine werewolves. Of course, he does mention
an account that Priest singles out as the entry point
of the female werewolf into literature. That is Gerald of
Wales's twelfth century CE Topographia Hibernia. Gerald recounts a priest's
travels in post Norman invasion Ireland, and specifically his encounter

(30:29):
with natives of Ossery, who spoke of how a man
and a woman of their people were picked to undergo
a seven year transformation into wolf. The locals end up
bringing the priest to visit the dying she wolf and
give her last rites. At this moment, the male counterpart
peels away the wolf's hide from her body, revealing the

(30:50):
form of an old woman within. It's a perplexing story,
as priest points out, it's a tale told by an invader.
Gerald of Wales was half Norman and half wealth Welsh
and certainly not Irish, and the story concerns the traditions
and customs of a conquered people. Furthermore, as Ogden points out,
the story is all the weirder when you consider that

(31:10):
the people of Ossery have to contend with all of
this lacanthropy because they were cursed by a priest, and
in later tellings of the same story, by Saint Patrick himself,
all for the crime of being disruptive when he tried
to convert them to Christianity. So driving out snakes is
one thing, but cursing locals to become werewolves surely quite another.

(31:32):
In she Wolf, historian Merely Metsi explores Estonian werewolves, specifically
accounts from the Isle of Sarema, where tales of female
werewolves are more common than tales of male werewolves. Apparently,
Estonia is rich in werewolf traditions, which survive in the
form of various fairy tales, legends, and also some historic

(31:54):
accounts of witch trials. Metsiti explores the topic from a
number of different but the overall argument that I found
most remarkable was that the predominance of female werewolf tales
in Estonian traditions may connect to greater levels of gender
equality in pre Christian Estonian and a definite loss of

(32:15):
those rights as Christian influences permeated Estonian society. Furthermore, we
may refer back to older connections between the wolf and
fertility magic, traditional observations of lupine motherhood, and the link
between maternity and sexuality that was subsequently eradicated under the
influence of Christian culture. In other words, while laws and

(32:37):
top down societal norms might have subjugated women, their traditional
power in Estonia was not so easily erased, and we
see it remain as protest as recognition, and so forth
in the tales of Women with the Secret Mind of wolves.
One Estonian story shared in Mesave's chapter encapsulates several of
these ideas. The wife also has wolf pups. There are

(33:02):
different versions, but it essentially tells the story of a
woman who goes into the woods to hunt and secure
meat for the family, while her husband seems to stay
at home in the cabin and seemingly just complain about
how chilly it is, citing the fact that their child
is too cold. The wife tells them that their child
is better off than those who sleep in the straw
behind the house, and when the husband goes out to investigate,

(33:25):
he finds several wolf pups, which he promptly kills. The
next night, while the man lounges in the sauna, a
great wolf bursts him through the door. And attacks him.
He manages to defend himself. He burns the wolf with
a pair of tongs, scaring the creature off, and later
via the old identifying wound trope, he learns that the

(33:46):
wolf was in fact his own wife, seeking vengeance for
his killing of her wild wolf children. Female werewolf stories
continue to entertain us while also retaining their ability to
intentional or unintentionally reveal much about the times and places
they emerge from, revealing both negative societal ideas about women

(34:09):
as well as more celebratory and even subversive ideas about
feminine power. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact,
The Artifact, or adam Alius Dependium each week. As always,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
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