Selected Werewolf Readings, and the Shelf That Would Catch Us Out

The load-bearing eight

Read these eight and the other forty-one stop being surprising — almost everything else is downstream of one of them or an argument with one.

1. Satyricon, chapters 61 to 62 Petronius · 61

   The oldest werewolf story with working rules, and short enough to read between two other things. The clothes come off and must be there to return to; a wound given to the wolf is found on the man. Both rules are still running in 2022.

2. Bisclavret Marie de France · 1160

   The household filing, eight centuries early. A husband with a weekly condition, a wife who hides his clothes, and a man who cannot come back without them. One set, one hiding place, no spare.

3. A True Discourse… (the Bedburg pamphlet) Anonymous, translated by George Bores · 1590

   The only surviving source for the most famous case in Europe, printed in London out of a German original that is now lost. Sixteen pages, sold as news. Cited here by the town rather than by its full printed title, which names the accused, and read for one thing only: what it records is a neighbour.

4. Judgment of the Parlement of Bordeaux, 6 September 1603 Parlement of Bordeaux · 1603

   A court with the power to order an execution considered a defendant of thirteen, gave judgment that it was dealing with an illness, and confined him to a friary instead. The register's first clinical disposition, three centuries before anybody would call it that.

5. The Werewolf of Paris Guy Endore · 1933

   The condition as a condition, and the state as the larger wolf. Everything the 1941 film is praised for inventing is on the page here, eight years earlier, in a novel that is angrier and better and unread.

6. Werewolf of London Stuart Walker · 1935

   Where the full moon and the bite both enter the screen record, six years before the picture that gets the credit for them and drops one of the two. It also has the register's only antidote that is not wolfsbane. The most under-read filing on the page.

7. The Wolf Man George Waggner and Curt Siodmak · 1941

   The founding document of everything readers believe is folklore: silver, the pentagram, the poem and the unwilling sufferer. Almost none of it is older than the script, and the screenwriter said so. What it keeps is the household, because the werewolf is the son of the house.

8. The Werewolves of Millers Hollow Philippe des Pallières and Hervé Marly · 2001

   The register's conclusion, sold in a box. The threat is one of the villagers, the village votes, and the village is frequently wrong. Nobody is ever attacked from outside.

The shelf

Three cards on this register report real prosecutions, and its leading finding turns on what one screenwriter said about his own script. Both are places where a household paper can go wrong, so these are the works that would let a reader check the register, and in two cases correct it.

• Werewolf Histories Willem de Blécourt (editor) · 2015

  The scholarly baseline on the trials, and where the register went for the early cards rather than to the popular surveys that repeat them.

• Metamorphoses of the Werewolf: A Literary Study from Antiquity through the Renaissance Leslie A. Sconduto · 2008

  Antiquity to the Renaissance, and the source to check the register's readings of the Roman account, the twelfth-century lai and the Ossory episode against.

• A Lycanthropy Reader Charlotte F. Otten (editor) · 1986

  The primary sources gathered in one volume, including the 1590 pamphlet. The single most useful item on this list for a reader who wants to check a card rather than take the register's word for it.

• Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast Jay M. Smith · 2011

  The source behind the register's 1764 document card, and the reason that card treats the emergency as an identification failure and a press event rather than as a transformation.

• The Making of a Teen Wolf a journal article in Folklore 130(3) · 2019

  The reconstruction the register relied on for the 1603 judgment, and where a reader should go before repeating anything about that case from a popular source.

  Cited by its short title. The article's full title names both the magistrate and the defendant.

• The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within Chantal Bourgault du Coudray · 2006

  The fiction and the film, treated as a body of work with rules. The best companion to the second half of this register.

• The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature Brian J. Frost · 2003

  How the register established that a book exists and what is in it.

  Reference, not argument. Use it to find the novels, not to settle a claim about them.

• The Book of Were-Wolves Sabine Baring-Gould · 1865

  On the register as a card in its own right, and on the shelf as the route by which most of the trials reached English readers.

  Credulous by any modern standard, and cited here as a period document rather than as evidence about anything earlier. Nobody here has read it cover to cover for the silver question, which is why no finding on this page cites it.

• The Werewolf Montague Summers · 1933

  A period survey, valuable chiefly for showing what a twentieth-century compiler thought the subject was.

  Summers believed in them. Read it as a document about its author.

• Wolf Man's Maker: Memoir of a Hollywood Writer Curt Siodmak · 2001

  Where the screenwriter of the 1941 film sets out what he made up and why. The register's leading finding rests on the substance of this account together with the absence of silver anywhere earlier on the page.

  A self-report, given many decades after the fact. The register cites the substance, has not verified the wording, and therefore does not quote it.

• Histoire fidèle de la bête en Gévaudan Henri Pourrat · 1946

  Reported to be where the silver bullet attaches itself to the 1764 emergency, long after the event.

  Nobody here has confirmed that attribution against a second source, so the 1764 card calls the detail a later embellishment and stops there. Cite Smith for the emergency itself.