Werewolf Folklore: The Trials Nobody Talks About
Europe held werewolf trials. Actual courts, actual defendants, actual executions, running alongside the witch trials and using much of the same machinery.
The folklore behind them is stranger than any film version, and considerably sadder.
Here is what the records contain, where the modern werewolf came from, and which parts were invented in the twentieth century.
The trials
Concentrated in France, the German lands and the Baltic, mostly across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Peter Stumpp
The best-documented case, tried near Cologne in 1589. He confessed under torture to killing and eating a number of people while in wolf form, with the transformation attributed to a belt given by the devil. He was executed with extraordinary cruelty and a printed pamphlet about the case circulated in English.
Read without the wolf, the case is a confession extracted under torture from a man accused of murder. The wolf is the framework the court brought, not something the evidence produced.
Gilles Garnier
Tried at Dole in 1573 for the killing of children, again confessing to transformation by ointment. Same structure, same outcome.
Thiess of Kaltenbrun
The one that breaks the pattern, and the most interesting record in the whole subject. Tried in Livonia in 1692, an old man freely stated he was a werewolf and insisted that he and others went down to hell three times a year to fight witches and recover the grain they had stolen. He described himself as a hound of God.
He would not recant, refused to accept that his work was diabolical, and the court did not know what to do with him. He was sentenced to a flogging for superstition rather than executed. The case is a rare glimpse of a folk belief that did not fit the interrogators' template at all.
What the folklore actually said
Pieces that carry this
Transformation by object
The recurring mechanism in the records is a belt, a girdle or an ointment, given or made. Not a bite, and not a curse in the modern sense. Transformation was something you did, usually deliberately, with equipment.
Wolves as fighters for the community
The Livonian material is not unique. Comparable traditions appear elsewhere in Europe of people who leave their bodies in animal form to fight for the harvest, most famously the benandanti of Friuli in northern Italy, who described themselves as battling witches for the crops and were gradually reinterpreted as witches themselves by the inquisitors questioning them.
The Norse thread
The Volsunga Saga has Sigmund and Sinfjotli putting on wolf skins and being unable to remove them for a period, and the berserkr and ulfhednar traditions describe warriors in bear and wolf skins. Our wolf symbolism guide covers the Norse wolves in full.
The Beast of Gevaudan
The most famous animal panic in European history, and worth including because it shows the machinery working without any transformation involved.
Between 1764 and 1767 something killed a large number of people in the Gevaudan region of southern France, mostly women and children tending livestock. The king sent professional hunters and then dragoons. Reports described a creature larger than a wolf, sometimes armoured, sometimes reddish.
What it probably was
Most historians favour wolves, possibly several, in a period of hardship where children were sent out alone to mind animals. Other suggestions have included a large hybrid dog. What the sources make clear is that the descriptions grew more elaborate as the story travelled, which is the same pattern visible in the trial records.
The episode fed straight into the modern werewolf image, and the silver bullet detail is sometimes traced to it after the fact. Our guide to common misconceptions covers how stories of this shape grow.
Where the modern werewolf came from
Almost none of the familiar rules are traditional.
The full moon
Barely present in the trial material. It became standard through twentieth century film, particularly the Universal pictures of the 1930s and 1940s.
Silver bullets
Not a European folk motif in any consistent way. Largely a cinema invention, sometimes traced to the Beast of Gevaudan story after the fact.
Transmission by bite
Also mostly modern. The old accounts have transformation by choice and by object, which makes the werewolf a very different figure: not a victim of infection but somebody who put the belt on.
That change matters. The modern werewolf is a story about losing control. The historical one is a story about a bargain.
Why the trials clustered where they did
The geography is not random, and it tells you something.
Werewolf prosecutions concentrate in France, the German-speaking lands and the Baltic, and thin out sharply in England, which had witch trials in quantity but almost no werewolf ones. The most likely reason is mundane: England had exterminated its wolves by roughly the sixteenth century. A werewolf accusation needs a landscape where wolves are a present danger, because the accusation is doing the work of explaining real losses.
Where the animal was gone, the category had nothing to attach to and did not develop.
What was actually happening
Several things at once, and no single explanation covers the cases.
Real wolf attacks occurred, and in periods of famine they occurred more. Serious crimes were committed and needed explaining. Ergot poisoning from contaminated rye has been proposed and is plausible in some regions. Judicial torture produced whatever confession the questioner had in mind. And in cases like Thiess, an intact folk belief was being forced into a legal category that had no room for it.
The one thing the records do not show is a supernatural event. What they show is a legal system with a category and a supply of people who could be fitted into it.
Reading one case properly
If any of this interests you, read the Thiess transcript rather than a summary of it.
It is short, it is translated, and it contains something almost nothing else in this field does: a person describing his own belief, at length, refusing to accept the interpretation being pressed on him, and losing the argument anyway. Every other case above reaches us through the interrogator template. That one does not quite.
One piece to start with
Frequently Asked Questions
Were there real werewolf trials?
Yes. They ran mainly in France, the German lands and the Baltic across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using the same procedures as witch trials. Peter Stumpp in 1589 and Gilles Garnier in 1573 are the best documented, and both confessed under torture.
Did the full moon feature in werewolf folklore?
Very little. The moon rule is largely a twentieth century film convention. Older accounts describe transformation by belt, girdle or ointment, and usually by choice.
What was the Livonian werewolf case?
In 1692 an old man named Thiess told a court he was a werewolf who went to hell three times a year to fight witches and recover stolen grain, calling himself a hound of God. He refused to call it diabolical and received a flogging rather than execution.
Wear the Older Version
Bargain rather than infection, and considerably more interesting. Our wolf collection covers jewelry and home pieces, alongside the Viking range.
Related Reads
Wolf Symbolism in Witchcraft and Norse Tradition
Wolf Moon: January Magic and Meaning
Cats in the Witch Trials
The Valknut: Odin's Knot of the Slain
