Latvia is identified as the setting of a 1691 account about Thies, an elderly farmer who described his membership in a werewolf community. The episode gives the country a focused role in the book’s comparison of European traditions of transformation, seasonal obligation, and ritual theft: Latvia is not developed as a general historical or geographical subject, but as the location of Thies’s testimony.

Thies and the Werewolf Community

In the account, Thies was 80 years old and still considered himself a werewolf. He intended to transmit his power to a younger man through a special initiation before he died. His own initiation had come from an older farmer, who gave him a wolf pelt; the pelt thus stands at the center of a chain of transmission connecting generations of practitioners.

Thies’s transformation was described not as a choice freely repeated whenever he wished, but as a compulsion tied to particular times of year. Especially at the summer and winter solstices, he had to become a wolf whether he wanted to or struggled against the change. The testimony therefore presents the werewolf identity as both an inherited power and a burden imposed by seasonal recurrence.

Seasonal Practice and Fertility

The book places the Latvian account beside traditions in which transformation and transgression belonged to a larger ritual order. In its comparison, Thies described thefts of food and drink, and the ripping apart of animals, as acts with a cultic background: stolen provisions and damaged animals could function as sacrifices, given willingly or taken by force, that were believed to secure fertility.

This interpretation connects Latvia’s werewolf tradition to the Oskorei, whose nighttime raids were also associated with food, drink, horses, and the fertility of fields. The comparison does not make the traditions identical; it shows how acts later regarded as destructive or criminal could once be understood within a seasonal exchange involving offerings and hoped-for prosperity.

Narrative Significance

Latvia’s brief appearance anchors the book’s discussion of werewolves in a named place and a dated testimony. Thies’s account gives the surrounding folklore a human chain of initiation—a pelt passed from an older farmer, a power intended for a younger recipient—and a recurring calendar of compulsory transformation. Set alongside the Oskorei, it helps the book trace how beliefs about seasonal beings and fertility could survive in altered form, even as the meanings attached to raids and theft shifted.