8 October 2021
Woodcut, c. 1685. Three men, armed with clubs and a pitchfork, drive a wolf into well. On the left, of the scene the wolf, dressed in human clothing, is hung. In the background are the villages of Neuses and Eschenbach. The German caption reads: “Great Incident! With an outlawed wolf, who in 1685 in the Margraviate of Ansbach carried away and ate a number of children, was finally caught in a well on 9 October at Neuses near Eschenbach, and later hung.”
As most people know, a werewolf is a fictional monster, a person who changes into a wolf. In the most common English-language form of the legend, this transformation takes place at the full moon. Werewolf is a word with a very straightforward etymology, but with some interesting side notes. It is a compound of the Old English words wer (man) + wulf (wolf). So, a werewolf is literally a man-wolf. (Cf. man / woman / wife.)
But the word appears either only once or three times in the extant Old English corpus, depending on how you count it. The three passages in which it appears are by the same writer, repeated three times with slightly different wording/scribal variations. The writer is, coincidentally, Wulfstan (literally “wolf-stone”), the archbishop of York. In his writing, Wulfstan liked to play with the word wulf, and he doesn’t use werewolf in the sense we’re familiar with today. He uses it as a metaphor for Satan, a “wolf” that preys on humans. The passage as it appears in the first law code of Cnut (c.1020) reads as follows:
Þonne moton þa hyrdas beon swyðe wacore & geornlice clypigende, þe wið þone þeodsceaðan folce sceolan scyldan: þæt syndan bisceopas & mæssepreostas, þe godcunde heorda bewarian & bewerian sceolan mid wislican laran, þæt se wod freca werewulf to swyðe ne slite, ne to fela ne abite of godcunde heorde.
(Thus, the shepherds, who must protect the people against this ravager of the people must be very vigilant and zealously cry out: these are the bishops and priests who must defend and protect the divine flock with wise teaching, so that the mad, gluttonous werewolf does not rend nor bite too many of the divine flock.)
The Consiliatio Cnuti, a twelfth-century translation of Cnut’s law code into Latin, uses the word virlupus (literally man-wolf), which is a nonce calque of the English.
Given that Wulfstan’s uses of the word are in a different sense than that of the legendary monster, and that they are isolated by several centuries from the next uses of the word, later uses of the word to mean a lycanthrope may represent an independent coinage. When werewolf reappears in the late twelfth century, wer was still in common use and could produce compounds.
Werewolf stories became extremely popular in England at that time. The most famous is probably Marie de France’s lai of Bisclavret, written in the late twelfth / early thirteenth century. Marie wrote in Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken by the English nobility at the time. Bisclavret opens with the lines:
Quant de lais faire m’entrement,
Ne voil ublier Bisclaveret.
Bisclaveret ad nun en bretan,
Garwaf l’apelent li Norman.(Since I have undertaken to compose lais,
I don’t want to forget Bisclavret.
Bisclavret is the name in Breton;
the Normans call it Garwaf.
Garwaf and its variant spellings, which are found elsewhere in the lai, do not appear in Anglo-Norman other than in this text. Garwaf appears to be an Anglo-French speaker’s pronunciation of the English werewolf.
But while garwaf or variations thereof do not appear in French, there is one instance in Latin that refers to the French word. In c.1212, around the same time Marie de France was writing, Gervase of Tilbury, an Englishman, wrote Otia Imperialia (Recreation for the Emperor) for the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV. It is a book of marvels and includes the following passage:
Vidimus enim frequenter in Anglia, per lunationes homines in lupos mutari, quod hominum genus gerulfos Galli nominant, Angli vero Werewlf, dicunt. Were enim Anglice virum sonat, Wlf lupum.
(For we have often seen in England that men are changed into wolves by the phases of the moon, that type of men the French name gerulfos, the English, in truth, call werewolf. For in English were expresses virum, wolf lupum.)
This is the only known appearance of gerulfus in a Latin text, and would seem to be another instance of garwaf, this time by an Englishman Latinizing the Anglo-Norman word with its Francophone pronunciation of the English werewolf. Normally we speak of English borrowing words from Anglo-Norman, but werewolf is a case of the transfer going in the other direction.
One last note, in medieval usage werewolf could also mean a man-eating wolf. We see that use in The Master of Game, a book about hunting written c.1410 and found in several manuscripts, the preferred one being London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.12:
Ther ben some that eten children or men and ete noon oþere flessh fro þe tyme þat þei be acherned with mennys flessh, for rather þei wolde be dede, and þei ben cleped werwolfes for men shuld be “ware” of hem.
(There are some that eat children or men and eat no other flesh after the time when they are blooded with men’s flesh, for they would rather be dead, and they are called werewolves because men should be “wary” of them.)
From this passage, it would seem that by the early fifteenth century the first element in the compound, wer, was no longer understood, and the false etymology of a wolf to be wary of had developed. It seems the practice of making up plausible sounding folk etymologies is not just a modern one.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. werewolf, n.
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008, s.v. garulf.
Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, 2009.
Gervase of Tilbury. “Otia Imperialia.” In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. Scriptores rerum Bunsvicensium. Hannover: Förster, 1707, 895. Google Books.
Libermann, Felix. Die Gesetze Der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903. 1 Cnut § 26.3 (c.1020), 306–307. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.1, fols. 3r–41r.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. wer-wolf, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. werewolf, n.
Waters, Claire M. “Bisclavret.” The Lais of Marie de France. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2018, 144–45. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wulfstan. Old English Legal Writings: Wulfstan. Andrew Rabin, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 66. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2020, 252–53.
Image credit: Unknown artist, c.1685. Public domain image.