Werewolves

Werewolves are presented as figures of transformation in northern European folklore, where becoming a wolf could mean more than wearing a disguise: it could alter a person’s identity, conduct, and place in the community. The book follows this motif from accounts of shamanic animal identification and a seventeenth-century Latvian testimony to its later echoes in the Oskorei and Black Metal. Across these settings, the wolf form carries both power and danger, but the modern cultural parallels are suggestive rather than proof of an unbroken tradition.

Transformation and Animal Identity

In the account of shamanic practice, animal transformation begins with deliberate bodily signs. A shaman might wear fur and adorn himself with teeth, claws, or feathers, or paint his body to call forth the qualities of a particular animal. The description stresses that imitation could develop into a perceived metamorphosis: the performer and the creature represented seemed to merge in the consciousness of the participant and in the eyes of others. The animal was therefore not merely a costume or emblem; within this account, taking on its appearance could change behavior and perception.

The discussion places Werewolves alongside Berserkers, whose transformation was associated with wolf pelts, belts made from wolf hair, or a particular beverage. The change could be partly intentional and partly involuntary, and the source allows that a drug may have been involved without establishing that it was. This combination of chosen practice and forces beyond the participant’s control gives the motif an unsettled character. The wolf identity could be sought, but it could also become an obligation that the person could not simply put aside.

Thies and the Inherited Power

A reported case from 1691, in what is now Latvia, gives the motif a specific human history. An elderly farmer named Thies described himself as a member of a werewolf community and spoke of transformation into a wolf and powers exercised in conflict with enemies, in encounters involving animals, and in escapes from dogs. His account is presented as testimony about the customs and beliefs of that community, not as independent confirmation that supernatural transformation occurred.

Thies was eighty years old and said that he remained a werewolf. Before his death, he intended to pass the power to a younger man through a special initiation. His own initiation had come from an older farmer, who gave him a wolf pelt. From then on, Thies said, he had to become a wolf at certain times of year, especially around the summer and winter solstices. The change was described as compulsory: it did not depend on whether he wanted the power or tried to resist it. The pelt thus marked not only an assumed identity but an inherited responsibility, transferred between generations and governed by the calendar.

A further folkloric passage describes young men who put on a magical fur at appointed times and became werewolves. In ordinary life they could be friendly and harmless; as werewolves, they were regarded with caution. Some, the account says, wished to escape the power attributed to the fur. Together with Thies’s story, this detail makes transformation a conditional social identity: the same person could be known as an ordinary neighbor and feared under the animal form. The accounts preserve that tension without reducing the werewolf either to a simple monster or to a freely chosen disguise.

Folklore, Theft, and Fertility

The werewolf material also appears within a wider discussion of the Oskorei, a wintertime host associated with the dead, nocturnal riding, and disruptive visits to farms. In one account, the theft of food and drink, the taking of horses, and the destruction of animals belonged to a ritual economy. Thies described stolen provisions and animals as offerings that might be given willingly or taken by force; the sacred theft was believed to secure fertility. In related Alpine customs, Perchten received food or were permitted to plunder a pantry.

Such practices did not retain a single meaning over time. As farmers became less willing to accept the depredations, the older ritual explanation faded. The disguised riders were increasingly understood not as embodiments of the dead or fertility powers but as troublesome offenders. The changing interpretation shows how a custom could lose its communal and sacred rationale while its disruptive actions remained visible. The werewolf’s place in this account is part of a broader folklore in which animal transformation, seasonal rites, and violations of ordinary rules overlap, though the book does not make the werewolf and the Oskorei identical.

Modern Echoes and Limits of the Comparison

The book finds visual and behavioral parallels between the Oskorei and Scandinavian Black Metal, especially in the early 1990s. Musicians used demonic face paint, old Nordic clothing, emblems of death, altered vocal styles, and pseudonyms drawn from history and mythology. The resemblance to masked folkloric figures lies in these transformations of appearance, voice, and public identity. Yet the comparison has limits: the Oskorei belonged to a rural world of village relations and seasonal customs, whereas Black Metal developed as an underground culture in Scandinavian cities.

The musical connection also emerged through a changing engagement with northern myth. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death used an image of the Oskorei and marked a shift from early Satanic horror themes toward ancestral heathen mythology. The book argues that such ancestral imagery became important to later Black Metal, but it does not treat this influence as evidence that musicians practiced the older werewolf rites. Rather, the folklore offered forms through which modern performers could imagine ferocity, animality, and a break with ordinary social identity.

The werewolf motif therefore links several distinct kinds of transformation: the shamanic identification with an animal, the compulsory seasonal power claimed by Thies, and the modern musician’s crafted persona. These are not interchangeable experiences. Their juxtaposition instead reveals why the figure remains potent in the book’s account: the wolf marks a boundary between human and animal, familiar neighbor and feared outsider, chosen style and force that seems to exceed choice.