‘Dame, jeo devienc bisclavret.’
I wonder how old the idea of werewolves is. I guess I could check this sort of thing online, but really, does every train of thought have to end in Wikipedia now?
I ask because I'm reading Marie de France at the moment. She is very interesting and very readable, and one of her lais, ‘Bisclavret’, is about what we would call a werewolf, and was written probably around 1160. The title of the poem is explained on some sites as being the name of the central character, who becomes a wolf every week, but that doesn't seem right to me. She says:
Bisclavret ad nun en bretan,
Garwaf l'apelent li Norman.
‘Bisclavret’ is the Breton name,
the Normans call it ‘garwaf’.
Now ‘garwaf’ is the Old French form of the word which in modern French has become garou, an old-fashioned term for werewolf - and a cognate, for that matter. The Old French word was borrowed from, probably, Old Frankish *werwolf (showing the usual French change of initial Germanic /w/ to /gw/ to /g/).
Nowadays, the usual word for werewolf in French is the compound loup-garou, which, as the Académie points out rather irritably, therefore contains the notion of wolfiness twice. This has led to a reinterpretation of the garou element, so that it now behaves rather like the English were-, by which I mean it gets added to other animals when the indication is that a man can change into them. If you want to talk about, say, a were-rat in French, you would have to say rat-garou.
(Thomas Pynchon's book Mason & Dixon - which is amazing - features, I seem to remember, a were-beaver. Presumably in the French translation this would be a castor-garou.)
Anyway, for now what interests me is this word bisclavret. Most languages use a word which means ‘man-wolf’ for werewolf, reasonably enough, but I don't know enough about Celtic languages to tell whether this is different or not. Anyone know what the modern Breton word is, whether it bears any resemblance to this, and what exactly it means? (Wiktionary tells me that ‘wolf’ is ‘bleiz’ in Breton, but that's as far as I've got..)
Garvalf, ceo est beste salvage;
Tant cum il est en cele rage,
Hummes devure, grant mal fait,
Es granz forest converse e vait...
The werewolf is a savage beast;
When that rage comes over him,
He devours men, does great evil,
Roaming and prowling through the mighty forests....
I ask because I'm reading Marie de France at the moment. She is very interesting and very readable, and one of her lais, ‘Bisclavret’, is about what we would call a werewolf, and was written probably around 1160. The title of the poem is explained on some sites as being the name of the central character, who becomes a wolf every week, but that doesn't seem right to me. She says:
Bisclavret ad nun en bretan,
Garwaf l'apelent li Norman.
‘Bisclavret’ is the Breton name,
the Normans call it ‘garwaf’.
Now ‘garwaf’ is the Old French form of the word which in modern French has become garou, an old-fashioned term for werewolf - and a cognate, for that matter. The Old French word was borrowed from, probably, Old Frankish *werwolf (showing the usual French change of initial Germanic /w/ to /gw/ to /g/).
Nowadays, the usual word for werewolf in French is the compound loup-garou, which, as the Académie points out rather irritably, therefore contains the notion of wolfiness twice. This has led to a reinterpretation of the garou element, so that it now behaves rather like the English were-, by which I mean it gets added to other animals when the indication is that a man can change into them. If you want to talk about, say, a were-rat in French, you would have to say rat-garou.
(Thomas Pynchon's book Mason & Dixon - which is amazing - features, I seem to remember, a were-beaver. Presumably in the French translation this would be a castor-garou.)
Anyway, for now what interests me is this word bisclavret. Most languages use a word which means ‘man-wolf’ for werewolf, reasonably enough, but I don't know enough about Celtic languages to tell whether this is different or not. Anyone know what the modern Breton word is, whether it bears any resemblance to this, and what exactly it means? (Wiktionary tells me that ‘wolf’ is ‘bleiz’ in Breton, but that's as far as I've got..)
Garvalf, ceo est beste salvage;
Tant cum il est en cele rage,
Hummes devure, grant mal fait,
Es granz forest converse e vait...
The werewolf is a savage beast;
When that rage comes over him,
He devours men, does great evil,
Roaming and prowling through the mighty forests....