A key work in the history of the Victorian werewolf is “The Werewolf” by Captain Frederick Marryat, also known as “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountain”. The opening of this story may seem disjointed to the reader. This is because it was part of the ending of a novel, The Phantom Ship (1839). This story is one of the earliest of the Victorian werewolf tales and had a great influence on all those that followed. It is probably this tale that has made so many werewolves white in color. “The Werewolf” by Clemence Housman is a good example of this. A strong current of fairy-tale imagery runs through these stories, as the Victorians were crazy for tales descended from Grimm.
Two men traveling in a small boat share their misfortunes. Krantz tells how his father fled justice to live in the evil Hartz Mountains (Transylvania). Krantz was the middle child of three, having an older brother, Caesar, and younger sister, Marcella. The children were locked up in their cabin in the winter while the father hunted.
One night they hear a horn and the father goes hunting a large white wolf. When he returns he has brought company with him, another fugitive/hunter and his beautiful daughter, Christina. The father marries Christina, not by Heaven’s grace, but with a strange oath to the spirits of the Hartz Mountains, swearing never to harm her. If the oath is broken, the children’s lives will be forfeit to the “the wolf, the vulture”.
Later Caesar is killed by a white wolf. His body is buried under stones but the wolves get at it anyway. After this Marcella is killed as well. Krantz sees his step-mother leaving the house at night and follows her to Marcella’s grave. He runs home for his father and they both see Christina eating the dead girl’s body:
“….Imagine his horror when (unprepared as he was for such a sight) he beheld, as he advanced towards the grave not a wolf, but his wife, in her night-dress, on her hands and knees, crouching by the body of my sister, and tearing off large pieces of the flesh, and devouring them with all the avidity of a wolf.”
Father shoots her dead. The girl turns into a dead white wolf. Christina’s father comes back to condemn the only surviving child, Krantz, “to the wolf, to the vulture”. So ends his story. Krantz tells his sailing companion that he feels a dire premonition, that he will soon die. When they land to get water a tiger leaps from the jungle, dragging away Krantz.
We don’t get to see Christina change into a wolf, only her dead body. More interesting is when Christina is discovered eating the dead girl. She is human but eating like a wolf. This is probably the creepiest part.
“The Gray Wolf” (1871) by George MacDonald appeared in The Portent & Other Stories (1909). A traveler in the Orkney Islands gets stranded while on a walking tour. For the night he must ask for hospitality from an old woman who has a wild young daughter. When the man sleeps he is attacked by a wolf-like creature that chases him. He escapes at the end, only to see the girl wailing on the far shore, desolate in her loneliness.
“Instinctively, he set himself firm, leaning a little forward, with half outstretched arms, and hands curved ready to clutch again at the throat upon which he had left those pitiful marks. But the creature as she sprung eluded his grasp, and just as he expected to feel her fangs, he found a woman weeping on his bosom, with her arms around his neck. The next instant, the gray wolf broke from him, and bounded howling up the cliff.”
The old woman tries to isolate her afflicted daughter by living in the most remote place in the world. Evidence of bruises suggests the daughter may attack her mother while in wolf form. MacDonald’s tale is not long or complex but does a great job of showing the loneliness of the lives of the daughter and mother. Some of the opening of the story reminds me of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, a possible inspiration of the story.
“Olalla” (1887) by Robert Louis Stevenson from The Merry Men and Other Tales & Fables (1905) has a wounded English officer go to Spain to recover. He rents a resedencia from an impoverished but noble family. He meets the idiot brother, Felipe, the babbling mother and finally the beautiful sister, Olalla, who he falls deeply in love with. Olalla feels for him but can never leave her home because of the family curse (lycanthropy). The officer is taken from the house when the mother savagely bites him on the arm. Weeks later he sees Olalla again, but she tells him she must stay alone and suffer her family’s curse as Christ bore all men’s sins.
“Her great eyes opened wide, the pupils shrank into points; a veil seemed to fall from her face, and leave it sharply expressive and yet inscrutable. And as I still stood, marvelling a little at her disturbance, she came swiftly up to me, and stooped and caught me by the hand; and the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had bitten me to the bone. The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of blood, and the monstrous horror of the act, flashed through me all in one, and I beat her back; and she sprang at me again and again, with bestial cries, cries that I recognised, such cries as had awakened me on the night of the high wind. Her strength was like that of madness; mine was rapidly ebbing with the loss of blood; my mind besides was whirling with the abhorrent strangeness of the onslaught, and I was already forced against the wall, when Olalla ran betwixt us, and Felipe, following at a bound, pinned down his mother on the floor. “
There isn’t much in the way of real werewolfery but the insane mother howls like a wolf and bites like one too. The narrator never worries that he has been bitten by a werewolf and will become one. Quite possibly the most boring werewolf story ever. The lycanthropy is hidden away and may not be anything more than insanity. The only good scene is when Olalla’s idiot mother savagely bites the narrator on the wrist. Stevenson wasn’t really interested in werewolves so much as he was on talking about evil, and its survival, and cure.
“The Other Side: A Bretan Legend” (1893) by Count Eric Stenbock from Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1893). Gabriel is a sensitive fellow who lives a sad life in a brutal Bretan village. There is a stream that runs by the village that no one crosses because on the other side live monsters like werewolves, lead by the Wolf-Keeper. Gabriel crosses the stream to gather a blue flower and becomes the husband of a wolf-woman. He forgets his former life in the village. When the villagers have a funereal for the missing Gabriel, he hears their prayers and wants to go back. The Wolf-Woman won’t let him but he puts her to sleep with the juice of the blue flower.
“…But on a sudden a black cloud covered the moon entirely, and all was black, utter darkness, and through the darkness he heard wolves howling and shrieking in the hideous ardour of the chase, and there passed before him a horrible procession of wolves (black wolves with red fiery eyes), and with them men that had the heads of wolves and wolves that had the heads of men, and above them flew owls (black owls with red fiery eyes), and bats and long serpentine black things, and last of all seated on an enormous black ram with hideous human face the wolf-keeper on whose face was eternal shadow; but they continued their horrid chase and passed him by, and when they had passed the moon shone out more beautiful than ever, and the strange nightingale sang again, and the strange intense blue flowers were in long reaches in front to the right and to the left.”
Returning across the stream he is transformed into a wolf. Only Abbé Félicien’s prayers can save him. The Other Side is consumed in flame and no longer haunted. Gabriel survives but for nine days a year is afflicted with madness (or lycanthropy).
The transformation in this story is unique, crossing a magical stream to become a werewolf. The figure of the Wolf-Keeper is also found here along, though he bears a striking resemblance to the Devil, with his hunting hounds.
This story reads more like a fairy tale by George MacDonald or more exactly like the Marchen tales of E. T. A. Hoffman. There are werewolves, and wolf men and men-wolves in it as well as the creepy Wolf-Keeper, who rides around on a black ram. I believe it is this tale that inspired Saki to call his werewolf Gabriel-Ernst, making it a kind of sequel. Saki certainly could identify with Stenbock’s point-of-view as an oppressed artist.
“The Werewolf” from Second Book of Tales (1911) by Eugene Field is set in ancient Saxony. Harold is bethrothed to Yseult but his family secret, the curse of Siegfried, keeps him from her. Whenever he feels a bout of the trouble coming he goes off hunting. His rival for Yseult’s affections, Alfred, notices and tries to use it against Harold. Alfred also points out that Harold is never around when the werewolf comes and attacks the Saxons.
When the Feast of Saint Alfraeda comes, Harold has a dream which he tells Yseult about. A bearded man takes his soul from his body and places it inside a wolf. He is then driven in wolf-form to hunt down and kill. He finds a beautiful girl at the sacred grove where the feast is held, and kills her. Harold begs Yseult not to go the ceremony. When Alfred chides him, Yseult goes to the grove with Alfred and his spearmen. Harold retreats into his castle tower but before he goes he gives Yseult the charmed spear of Siegfried, one that never dulls.
At the grove the werewolf attacks Yseult. She kills it with the spear of Siegfried. She rushes to find Harold. He is up in his tower but he has been stabbed through the heart, just like the wolf.
“But no, Harold was not asleep. His face was calm and beautiful, as if he dreamed of his beloved, but his raiment was red with the blood that streamed from a wound in his breast–a gaping, ghastly spear wound just above his heart.”
This story suggests that the man doesn’t transform so much as have his spirit place inside a wolf. The wolf, once killed, does not turn back into a man. Instead, any harm that happens to the wolf happens to the man. The author of this story was a children’s writer. This shows in his way of avoiding protracted violence. Instead, the story has more of fairy tale feel to it, worthy of George MacDonald. Field is not the first to use ancient Saxony in his story. “Hugues the Werewolf” uses it much earlier in the days of the Penny Dreadfuls.
Of course, there were many other werewolf stories during the Victorian time period. Toward the end of the period Bram Stoker would publish Dracula (1897) and everything would change again, Marryat no longer the main source of inspiration. Also Stoker would inspire novels as well as stories, like Gerald Biss’s The Door of the Unreal (1919) and Jessie Kerruish’s The Monster Undying (1922), Robert W. Service’s fake werewolf in The House of Fear (1927) and finally Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933).
