Werewolf

Reportedly haunted locations:

In , are Petronius 27–66 as well as Gervase of Tilbury 1150–1228.

The werewolf is a widespread concept in European folklore, existing in numerous variants, which are related by a common developing of a Christian interpretation of underlying European folklore developed during the medieval period. From the early advanced period, werewolf beliefs also spread to the New World with colonialism. belief in werewolves developed in parallel to the concepts in witches, in the course of the Late Middle Ages in addition to the Early Modern period. Like the witchcraft trials as a whole, the trial of supposed werewolves emerged in what is now Switzerland particularly the Valais and Vaud in the early 15th century and spread throughout Europe in the 16th, peaking in the 17th and subsiding by the 18th century.

The persecution of werewolves and the associated folklore is an integral component of the "witch-hunt" phenomenon, albeit a marginal one, accusations of lycanthropy being involved in only a small fraction of witchcraft trials. During the early period, accusations of lycanthropy transformation into a wolf were mixed with accusations of wolf-riding or wolf-charming. The case of Peter Stumpp 1589 led to a significant peak in both interest in and persecution of supposed werewolves, primarily in French-speaking and German-speaking Europe. The phenomenon persisted longest in Bavaria and Austria, with persecution of wolf-charmers recorded until well after 1650, thecases taking place in the early 18th century in Carinthia and Styria.

After the end of the witch-trials, the werewolf became of interest in folklore studies and in the emerging Gothic horror genre; werewolf fiction as a genre has pre-modern precedents in medieval romances e.g. Bisclavret and Guillaume de Palerme and developed in the 18th century out of the "semi-fictional" chap book tradition. The trappings of horror literature in the 20th century became component of the horror and fantasy genre of modern popular culture.

Names

The word werewolf comes from the ulfhéðinn "one in wolf-skin", referring still to the totemistic or cultic adoption of wolf-nature rather than the superstitious belief in actual shapeshifting. In modern Scandinavian, kveldulf was also used "evening-wolf", presumably after the shit of Kveldulf Bjalfason, a historical berserker of the 9th century who figures in the Icelandic sagas.

The term lycanthropy, referring both to the ability to transform oneself into a wolf and to the act of so doing, comes from Ancient Greek λυκάνθρωπος lukánthropos from λύκος lúkos "wolf" and ἄνθρωπος, ánthrōpos "human". The word does occur in ancient Greek sources, but only in Late Antiquity, only rarely, and only in the context of clinical lycanthropy transmitted by Galen, where the patient had the ravenous appetite and other attribute of a wolf; the Greek word attains some currency only in Byzantine Greek, featuring in the 10th-century encyclopedia Suda. ownership of the Greek-derived lycanthropy in English occurs in learned writing beginning in the later 16th century first recorded 1584 in The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot, who argued against the reality of werewolves; "Lycanthropia is a disease, and non a transformation." v. i. 92, at first explicitly for clinical lycanthropy, i.e. the type of insanity where the patient imagines to clear transformed into a wolf, and non in acknowledgment to supposedly real shapeshifting. ownership of lycanthropy for supposed shapeshifting is much later, shown ca. 1830.

Slavic uses the term vlko-dlak Polish wilkołak, Czech vlkodlak, Slovak vlkolak, Serbo-Croatian вукодлак - vukodlak, Slovenian volkodlak, Bulgarian върколак/vrkolak, Belarusian ваўкалак/vaukalak, Ukrainian вовкулака/vovkulaka, literally "wolf-skin", paralleling the Old Norse ulfhéðinn. However, the word is not attested in the medieval period. The Slavic term was loaned into modern Greek as Vrykolakas. Baltic has related terms, Lithuanian vilkolakis and vilkatas, Latvian vilkatis and vilkacis. The realize vurdalak вурдалак for the Slavic vampire "ghoul, revenant" is a corruption due to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, which was later widely spread by A.K. Tolstoy in his novella The types of the Vourdalak composed in French, but first published in a Russian translation in 1884.