13 Days of Halloween: Lycanthropes

Better than Christmas, Easter, birthdays (even mine), and Valentine's Day combined together, Halloween is my favorite time of year. To celebrate, I'm offering 13 Days of Halloween: 13 posts over 13 days that relate to the scariest, silliest, most supernatural holiday ever - with bookish significance. Without further ado, the first of thirteen.

Werewolves

The myth of the shapeshifter has been a part of human culture since before the age of writing. Possibly stemming from ancient beliefs in part-human-part-animal gods, shapeshifters offer humans the opportunity to identify, even if only in imagination, with our more animalistic tendencies. The werewolf is the most popular of the shapeshifters. Lycanthropy, greek for wolf and man, is the proper term for the phenomena.

In Metamorphosis, Ovid tells of an ancient king, Lycaon, who tested the gods by mixing human flesh in with the animal offering. When the gods discovered his treachery, they turned him into a wolf. They kept his human mind conscious though, so he would have to live with the knowledge of his cannibalism.

The legend of the werewolf was furthered by the Norse who would cover themselves in bear or wolf skin before battle and who were rumored to be particularly ruthless fighters. Called "Berserkers", this group of men believed that the donning of animal hide called forth the animal in the human, perhaps giving them an excuse or a motivation for the violence to come.


Even the seemingly innocent werewolf stories, such as Little Red Riding Hood and Three Little Pigs maintain the cannibalistic or at least the voracious carnivore tendencies of the werewolf as well as the human thinking ability. And of course we started adding even more sexy to the situation - which is disturbing but oh so hot...

Today the myth of the werewolf - especially the sexy werewolf - stands out in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series which features the werewolf as a cultural phenomena within a native American tribe who were defenders against the evil of vampires.


Werewolves are also featured in the Sookie Stackhouse series and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series which feature both good and evil werewolves. This dichotomy flourishes within the werewolf myth; they fall relatively equally on either side of the good v. evil battle, falling into a few categories:

1. Good men who are forced to succumb to evil by the mandated full-moon shift to werewolf.
2. Voluntary shifters who use their supernatural abilities to fight vampires, witches, and other agents of evil.
3. Mostly wolfish beings who desire to make a more permanent shift to werewolf.

For a bit of fun and a chance to win a free book or a set of bookmarks:

Name one werewolf not mentioned here and tell me which category he/she falls into - or if it falls into a new category, let me know!