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Werewolf — Description

It's been surprisingly difficult to summarize the history of the werewolf, because in the broadest terms, a werewolf, like ghosts, is one of those ubiquitous monsters that's extremely easy to come up with in any location where wolves and humans cohabit. Hell, the very word “werewolf” just means “man-wolf”, deriving from Old English “wer-” (meaning “man”, also the root of the word “world”, Old English “weorold”, “man-age”, and cognate with Latin “vir” as in “virility”) and “wulf” which means… well I'll let you take a crack at it, detective. Although apparently even that isn't as straightforward as I expected it to be, because there's a contestant etymology proposing that the “were” bit is actually descended from Old Norse “vargr” which means “wolf”. I mean… sure? It's hardly the most ludicrous etymology I've seen for something, I mean “vargr” does also carry some connotations as a euphemism for outlaws and outcasts, but that would kinda imply that the word means “wolf-wolf” and like… idk that's just a bit silly innit? I guess it's always possible there's some intentional wordplay split between the two explanations, because much to my groaning dismay, our species has an unhealthy affinity for puns.
If we wanna be extremely generous and describe a werewolf as just “guy turns into wolf”, then you'll find werewolves everywhere since literally the dawn of writing. The OG of all books, The Epic of Gilgamesh, briefly makes note of a time that ever-fickle goddess Ishtar spurned a former lover by turning him into a wolf and sicking his own dogs on him. See, this is why I try to be friends with my exes. Most online summaries of werewolf history begin in Greece, however, specifically with the story of King Lycaon of Arcadia as related in Ovid's Metamorphoses, composed in 8 CE. In this version, Jupiter hauls his ass downstairs because rumor has it that King Lycaon is big on human sacrifice and that's a massive no no. Everyone else at the party immediately drops to their knees for the king of the gods, but Lycaon calls bullshit and tests Jupiter's omniscience by serving him up some… uh… “nondescript meat” as it were. Of course, Jupiter has already been established to be the real deal, and the whole reason he was pissed off enough to come down to this rock was because Lycaon had a peculiar taste of the hominin variety. As soon as the stew hits the plate, Jupiter smites the house, turns Lycaon into a rabid wolf, and sicks him on his own livestock. Personally, I'd have just smote the bastard from my chair in Olympus if this was always gonna be the end result, but I guess I shouldn't question Jupiter after we just went over what happens when you do that.
You might notice how painfully unsubtle Lycaon’s name is. That root “lykos” literally just means “wolf” in Greek. It's appropriately the first part in a common synonym for werewolf, lycanthrope, which again just means “wolf-man”. The earliest explicit reference to “lycanthropy” as some kind of condition goes back to 2nd century physician Marcellus of Side, who wrote 42 volumes of what can only be described as “medical poetry”, one of which coined lycanthropy. This wasn't lycanthropy as we imagine it today, though. Instead, he specifically categorizes it as a form of melancholia where the sufferer vacantly hangs out around graveyards like a stray dog. Think of it like the difference between actual vampirism and that really cringe phase an emo preteen goes through where they identify as a vampire and douse themselves in sparkles or whatever the hell kids do these days.
The English word “werewolf” doesn't appear til damn near a thousand years later in the 11th century. The only instance of the word in its Old English form can be found in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of King Cnut, where the Devil himself is branded a werewolf whom the bishops are supposed to protect their “flock” from. I couldn't find what the first instance of the French cognate “garou” being used was, but by far the most popular medieval utilization was in the 12th century poet Marie de France’s work Bisclavret. Bisclavret is the story of a knight who gets cucked when he confides in his wife that he turns into a werewolf and just kinda minds his own business in the woods three days out of the week and she decides that's not very sexy. She steals the clothes he needs to transform back into a human and abandons him to his wolf-mancave, where the King eventually shows up and is so impressed by the amount of literal bootlicking that Bisclavret does that he takes him home as a pet, and when the only two people the wolf attacks are the wife and her new husband, the King has them tortured until they confess what they did to earn an otherwise saintly creature's ire. Bisclavret gets his clothes back, finally becomes bipedal again, and lives happily ever after, thus ends the tale of the earliest garou I could find. Some point later (Merrium Webster just says “circa 1580”, real helpful), an extra prefix got attached to this term to create another popular fantasy synonym for werewolf, “loup-garou”. You may notice that “loup” is just French for “wolf”, so depending on your etymology that means a loup-garou is either a “wolf-man-wolf” or a “wolf-wolf-wolf”. I can only assume that much like how ManBearPig is half-man, half-bear, half-pig, a loup-garou is half-wolf, half-man, half-wolf.
It's interesting that Bisclavret is so sympathetic to the plight of its werewolf protagonist. Medieval Christianity’s stance on werewolves was surprisingly kinda chill. Church fathers like Augustine of Hippo just kinda wrote them off as harmless delusions and mistaken identities because only God had the power to transform a lifeform like that and surely he'd know about it if the big man got off his ass just to bamf some random peasants into wolves. Like if people wanna believe they can turn into wolves, fine whatev as long as they aren't hurting anybody. Don't ask don't tell, ya know? But then the Inquisition unexpectedly sprung out from behind the coal shed and suddenly there was a spike in demand for literally any excuse to round up a bunch of innocent people for a spitroast flambé. In 1486, Heinrich Kramer, a clergyman who was just completely out of his gourd, published the terrifyingly fanatic Malleus Mallificarum, the definitive manual for witchhunters and their torture methods. Though translated as the “Hammer of Witches”, werewolves were thrown in for good measure, the transformation now assumed to be an illusion supplied to witches by the Devil himself as a disguise tailored for serial killing. The most famous victim of this assumption was German farmer Peter Stumpp, who in 1589 was forced under torture to confess to murdering and eating sixteen people and several missing livestock animals in the devilish guise of a werewolf for 25 years. Stumpp, his mistress, and young daughter were brutally executed on the rack, on Halloween no less, flayed with hot pincers and torn into pieces, likely never having done anything they were accused of. Man, thank the gods we in the modern day have advanced so far above such primitive fearmongering and backwards Satanic panics. Ha ha. Hah hah. Uuhhhhhhhgh we're all gonna die…
Now, that's all well and good (well I mean not for Stumpp but he's dead now so nyeh), but this picture still feels really incomplete when held up to our modern mental image of a werewolf. So far, the werewolf hasn't really been a distinct form in itself, they're just people who turn into regular ass wolves indistinguishable from any other forest puppy. It's more polymorph than lycanthropy. When exactly we first came up with the roided furry archetype is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Alexandre Dumas's 1857 novel The Wolf Leader features bipedal werewolves, but even then they're just normal wolves who sometimes rear up on their hind legs for dramatic effect. It seems the hybrid form I was trying to emulate with this drawing actually came shockingly late, specifically as an invention of Hollywood, so we have to jump forward to the 20th century.
The first werewolf film produced was 1913's The Werewolf, because titles like that are first come first serve. We know next to nothing about this first foray into the genre, because the film reels were all destroyed in a fire at Universal Studios in 1924. I can only assume it's because, from what we know from descriptions that survive, it was super fucking racist towards Native Americans, and karma's a bitch. Werewolves became more sympathetic (which by Dust Bowl standards means more white) in 1935, when Universal Studios released Werewolf of London. This is where we get the first proper hybrid depiction of a werewolf, dressing actor Henry Hull up in a bunch of Chewbacca pubes so that the monster could emote in ways that a live wolf just wouldn't be able to convey. This is also the first piece of media to portray lycanthropy as a disease that can be spread through the bite of another werewolf, such is the tragic fate of Hull's character, botanist Wilfred Glendon, during an expedition to reclaim a rare moon-powered flower from Tibet. In fact, the whole transforming when the moon is full thing mostly comes from this film as well. Grant it, it probably didn't invent the idea per se, as wolf transformations have been described as happening under the moon since at least Petronius, but it's usually been more set dressing than a direct causation up until this point. Either way, it brings up the age old question of why the hell the sun has no effect on werewolves. Like moonlight is just sunlight reflecting off of the moon, so wouldn't the daytime blast of vitamin D be even more damning if that's the trigger? Am I the only one who's annoyed by this?
The full moon stipulation of Werewolf of London, interestingly enough, is also the vehicle to first introduce the concept of the unwilling werewolf. Like, consider all of the historical tales we've discussed so far. Like Bisclavret, most of them retain their human sentience and personality when they turn into a wolf. The 1935 film meanwhile depicts Glendon's inability to control his transformation and the murderous urges it forces upon him. This archetype would be much more heavily spotlighted in 1941's The Wolf Man, in which creepy sleeze Larry Talbot is driven to quivering madness as the entire town either brands him a delusional murderer or the straight-up monster that he became after being bitten. This mad dog is only put down when his own father bludgeons the bastard to death with a silver cane, a werewolf's only weakness, which… is also where that trope originated from. You may have heard that the whole silver bullet thing comes from accounts of the infamous Beast of Gévaudan being killed by French huntsman Jean Chastel in 1767, but no contemporary records support this. Instead, this seems to be an embellishment inserted into the narrative in 1946 by author Henri Pourrat, who, probably inspired by The Wolf Man, had Chastel melting down silver medallions dedicated to the Virgin Mary into musketballs to slay the otherwise unkillable Beast, so no, this is another completely 20th century invention. I'm honestly kinda surprised it took this long to get to these ubiquitously famous details, but how best to kill a werewolf seems as good a place as any to finally take this essay out back behind the shed.
Design notes, I hate chimeric creatures. By definition, it's really difficult to make them look biologically consistent, which is always what I try to aim for when designing a monster. I'm not one of those folks that cares all too much for the realism angle of this design philosophy, I just think it makes the creature look better. I had to find a way to either build a wolf out of a primate or a primate out of a wolf, and I decided to roll with the former. This ultimately meant slapping a baboon's face and lemur's nose on a gorilla's body and giving it a more wolf-like tail. It came out fine, but idk this one of those pieces where there's just something nagging in the back of my head saying I could've taken a different route and gotten a more creatively rewarding result. What that is, I have no idea, but it serves its purpose for now, and I wanna go to bed, so I'll just roll with it until the itch becomes too obnoxious.