Sabine Baring-Gould, Emre Doğan

The Book of Were-Wolves

Baring-Gould’s 1865 Account Complete, Annotated — with a Register of What He Construed, Transcribed and Only Theorised, and What Has Been Established Since

In 1865 a young Devon curate could not hire anyone to walk him home across the fields: it was getting dark and there were loups-garoux abroad. Sabine Baring-Gould — antiquarian, folk-song collector, and the man who wrote the words of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” — went away and found out what those people were afraid of. What he produced is not the horror anthology it has been sold as; it is a piece of source criticism. He takes the werewolf backwards through the record — Herodotus and Petronius, then the Norse sagas, then the medieval chronicles, then the French trial transcripts — and at each step asks what the witnesses actually said. This edition prints all sixteen chapters entire. Around them: a head-note before each, every one ending in READING AGAINST HIM, which names the specific thing in that chapter to resist; a REGISTER OF EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE separating the four instruments he uses — a language he can construe, a document he transcribes, a story he repeats, and a theory he applies; a casebook of every trial; a who’s-who; a glossary of the Norse his best chapters are built on; a chronology; and a plain account of what has been established since 1865. The verdict is uneven in a way worth knowing before you start: his philology held, his mythology was abandoned within his lifetime, and his medicine — an “innate cruelty” — has been replaced by clinical lycanthropy, a rare delusional syndrome that explains the folklore well and the murders not at all. Six chapters describe murders, taken from the trial records: a note at the front says which and what is in them, and each of those head-notes opens by naming it. And the two most remarkable documents in the book are ones Baring-Gould prints without comment — in 1598 the Parlement of Paris sent a confessed werewolf to an asylum instead of the stake, and in 1603 the Parlement of Bordeaux held that lycanthropy existed only in a disordered brain and was not a punishable crime, sentencing a beggar boy of thirteen to perpetual imprisonment in a monastery instead. 198 pages.

Pages

198

Language

en