‘Dame, jeo devienc bisclavret.’

[wwidsith]

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

Comments

[muckefuck]

There are dictionaries, too, you know. Werewolf has been around since at least c1000 CE in English; eight centuries of so earlier, lycanthropos appeared in the works of the Pamphylian doctor Marcellus Sidetes. Of course, the idea of animals being able to take human state is found in ancient mythologies of cultures around the world. The Koreans even claim descent from a bear who became a woman and the Vietnamese trace their lineage back to a nymph marrying a dragon.

I'll see what I can do about your Breton.

[muckefuck]

Awesome! Versipellis ("changing-skin") in Pliny. What a shame its descendants didn't survive into modern Romance.

[wwidsith]

Yes! Although interestingly, the OED does have cites for ‘turnskin’ - meaning werewolf, and apparently translating Pliny's term. Now that IS awesome.

[muckefuck]

If you Google "bisclavret", you'll find some pretty amusing attempted etymologies. The only one which seems to hold any water is bleiz-lavared "wolf-speaking". I did find bleiz-lavret in a 19th-century French-Breton dictionary, but I'm not convinced this was something actually found in the mouths of the people. (As opposed to bleiz-garô from the same source, which is just the kind of mongrel construction I'd expect from that part of the world.) The modern Breton-French dictionary lists only bleiz noz "night wolf" and den-bleiz "person wolf".

[wwidsith]

Good stuff, thanks!

[rag_and_bone]

i just read a strange southern murder mystery novel based on the loup-garou, and there is some history in it that references werewolves as originating in france around the time of that poem (i think). apparently, there was a certain bacteria/mold that people were eating en masse (unknowingly) that made them kind of...rabid-esque? anyway, i'm not that interested in werewolves, so i glossed over it. but if you are interested, you might want to read it (it's so-so). it's called fever moon and it was written by a woman named caroline hayes, i think.

[wwidsith]

Hah, that sounds like an urban legend if ever I heard one, but thanks! I think I will look that up! I have become weirdly interested by the little critters..

[muckefuck]

Ah, is there any folkloric phenomenon that can't be explained by ergot? Ever since Caporael, it's been the most popular explanation for the witchcraft epidemic of early modern Europe.

[rag_and_bone]

bingo!

[oh_meow]

There's greek & roman stories about werewolves too, and in those versions the werewolf's clothes turn into stone once they've changed too.

[desayuno_ingles]

There's a running theme in the new Dr. Who with the phrase Blaidd Drwg which you can probably pronounce better than I can. If it's been translated correctly it means "bad wolf". Which is which?

[wwidsith]

Yeah, that's Welsh. Blaidd is wolf (probably cognate with the first element of ‘bisclavret’), and drwg is bad. But when you say ‘new’ Dr Who -- that was a few series back, wasn't it? Or are they doing it again? (I haven't really been watching since Billie left)

[desayuno_ingles]

"New" as in, not from 20 years ago. It's all new as soon as Eccleston was in it.

I kind of thought blaidd would be wolf. I think they pronounced it like blithe and yes, that it looked like a cognate.