“I looked back for my comrade; he had stripped off all his clothes and laid them down by the wayside. My heart was in my mouth; and there I stood feeling like a dead man. Then he made water all round the clothes, and in an instant changed into a wolf.”
The werewolf has gripped the human imagination in its clawed paw for centuries. The quote above is from Petronius’s Satyricon, thought of as one of the earliest novels in Western literature, dating from the first century AD (the word lycanthrope too is derived from the Greek). But ancient Greece can by no means claim to be the source of the legend: in fact, wherever there are wolves, you’ll find fables and superstitions about werewolves. Hence you’ll find them elsewhere in Europe: the Norse had their version of the tale, as did the Finns, and the Russians. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
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