Under a full moon, a man drops to all fours. Hair sprouts along his back, his jaw lengthens into a muzzle, and his cry turns into a howl. By morning he is human again, with blood under his nails and no memory of the night. This is the werewolf as modern films imagine it — but the belief in people who become wolves is far older and far stranger than Hollywood. It stretches from ancient Greece to medieval France, from Norse sagas to the courtrooms of the sixteenth century, where men and women were tried and executed for the crime of turning into wolves.
The word comes from Old English wer, “man” (as in “wergild”), and wulf: “man-wolf.” Its Greek equivalent, lykanthrōpos, gives us lycanthropy.
Lycaon: The First Werewolf
The oldest werewolf story in European literature is the Greek myth of Lycaon, king of Arcadia. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Zeus visited Lycaon’s palace disguised as a traveller. Lycaon, suspecting the stranger was a god and wanting to test him, served him the cooked flesh of a human being — in some versions, his own son. Zeus, enraged, destroyed the palace with lightning. Lycaon fled into the fields, and as he tried to speak, he howled. His clothes became shaggy fur, his arms became legs, and he turned into a wolf, still thirsting for blood.
The Greek geographer Pausanias recorded a darker tradition from Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, where a sacrifice to Zeus Lykaios was said to involve human flesh. Whoever tasted it would become a wolf for nine years; if he abstained from human flesh during that time, he would become human again.
Petronius and the Soldier
The Roman writer Petronius, in the Satyricon (first century CE), includes the earliest surviving werewolf story told as a tale of horror. A freedman named Niceros tells how he travelled at night with a soldier, who stopped among the tombs by the roadside, took off his clothes, urinated in a circle around them, and turned into a wolf. The clothes turned to stone. The wolf ran howling into the woods. When Niceros reached his destination, he learned that a wolf had attacked the sheep and been wounded in the neck with a spear. The next day he found the soldier in bed with a doctor tending a wound in his neck. “I knew then he was a werewolf,” says Niceros, “and I could never eat bread with him again.”
Wolf-Warriors of the North
In Norse tradition, warriors known as úlfheðnar (“wolf-skins”), related to the berserkers (“bear-shirts”), went into battle wearing wolf pelts, in a trance-like fury that made them feel no pain. The Völsunga saga tells how Sigmund and his son Sinfjötli, living as outlaws in the forest, found two men asleep in a hut with wolf-skins hanging above them. They put on the skins and could not take them off, and became wolves for ten days, killing men in the forest (see Sigurd: The Dragon-Slayer of Norse Legend).
The wolf was also Odin’s animal, and the great wolf Fenrir was the enemy of the gods (see Tyr and Fenrir).
Sympathetic Werewolves
Medieval romance often treated the werewolf with sympathy. In Marie de France’s lai Bisclavret (late twelfth century), a Breton knight turns into a wolf three days a week and hides his clothes under a stone. His wife, learning the secret, steals the clothes so he cannot return to human form, and marries another man. The wolf is caught by the king and becomes his gentle pet — until he attacks the wife and her new husband. The truth comes out, the clothes are restored, and the knight becomes human again.
In the French romance Guillaume de Palerne (c. 1200), a prince transformed into a wolf by his stepmother protects the hero and his beloved. And in Ireland, the wolves of Ossory were said to be a family cursed by Saint Patrick to become wolves for seven years at a time; the twelfth-century writer Gerald of Wales tells of a priest who met a talking wolf and was asked to give the last rites to its dying wife.
How to Become a Werewolf
European folklore offered many ways:
- Wearing a wolf-skin or a belt of wolf hide, often given by the Devil.
- Drinking rainwater from a wolf’s footprint.
- Being born on Christmas Eve, or being the seventh son.
- A curse from a saint or witch.
- A pact with the Devil, the explanation favoured in the witch-hunting era.
The idea that werewolves are created by a bite, transform at the full moon, and can be killed only by silver is largely modern, popularized by the film The Wolf Man (1941), with Lon Chaney Jr. Silver bullets appear in older folklore — the Beast of Gévaudan was said to have been killed with one — but the combination is Hollywood’s.
The Werewolf Trials
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belief in werewolves had terrible consequences. Across France, Germany, and Switzerland, people accused of lycanthropy were tried and executed, often alongside the witch trials. These cases, including the notorious trial of Peter Stumpp in Germany in 1589, are described in The Werewolf Trials of Early Modern Europe.
The Beast of Gévaudan
Between 1764 and 1767, a mysterious creature killed around a hundred people, mostly women and children, in the province of Gévaudan in southern France. The attacks caused national panic, and King Louis XV sent his own huntsmen. Many believed the beast was a werewolf. In 1767 a local hunter, Jean Chastel, shot a large wolf-like animal — with a silver bullet, according to later legend — and the killings stopped. Historians still debate what the creature was: a wolf, a wolf-dog hybrid, an escaped exotic animal, or several animals.
Lycanthropy as Illness
Physicians since antiquity described lycanthropy as a form of madness in which a person believed himself to be a wolf. The seventh-century Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina described sufferers who wandered among tombs at night, howling. Modern psychiatry recognizes clinical lycanthropy, a rare delusion in which a person believes they are turning into an animal. Some writers have suggested that conditions such as rabies, hypertrichosis (excessive hair growth), or ergot poisoning may have contributed to werewolf beliefs.
The Werewolf Today
From Universal’s Wolf Man to An American Werewolf in London (1981), Teen Wolf, the Twilight saga, and Remus Lupin in Harry Potter, the werewolf is one of the great monsters of modern culture. It endures because it expresses a simple fear: that beneath civilized humanity lies an animal, waiting for the moon.
Last reviewed: September 2026.