Werewolf

The werewolf appears here as the convergence of animal, legal, and religious meanings rather than as a creature defined by a single transformation story. The account follows the Germanic word vargr, whose meanings include wolf and outlaw, and shows how its association with criminals and the socially expelled helped make the wolf-man figure intelligible. It also sets that feared figure against older traditions in which wolves could be sacred or linked to warrior identity, leaving the werewolf poised between demonized outsider and powerful cultural emblem.

The wolf and the outlaw

The linguistic history begins with the word’s range across Northern European languages. In descriptions of men, the related forms carried strongly negative meanings: criminal, outlaw, outcast, thief, evildoer, damned person, and even Devil. These are not interchangeable descriptions of a supernatural species. Rather, the account presents them as a semantic field in which the wolf’s name could designate human wrongdoing and exclusion as well as the animal itself. That overlap supplied one route by which the outlaw could become associated with the werewolf.

The word also had a precise legal life. Early Northern European laws attached prefixes to varg-related terms to identify particular offenses, including cattle theft and killing. In the Icelandic Grágás, Mary Gerstein discusses morthvarg as a term for a particular category of outlaw. Her interpretation connects it with furtive killing and concealment of the crime, a pattern that the book describes as evoking a skulking werewolf. The legal term does not simply name a transformed person: its force lies in the criminal act and in the outlaw’s resulting status, while the wolf association gives that status a mythic shadow.

Old Norwegian law supplies another particularly pointed example. Gerstein’s discussion of the Gulathingslov identifies brennuvargr as a designation for a person outlawed for arson, literally a fire-wolf. The sentence described in that legal context strips the offender of rights and names him through the offense. The book stresses that vargr in these early legal codes was a rare, specialized term, preserved in formal language for especially grave acts, including arson, oath-breaking, and secret killing. The werewolf connection therefore grows out of more than resemblance to an animal: it is attached to the imagined condition of a person cast outside human protection and order.

From outlawry to werewolf lore

Sabine Baring-Gould’s account supplies a broader explanation for how those meanings could feed stories of transformation. He describes vargr as carrying a double significance, wolf and godless man, and relates it to forms used for a scoundrel or fiend in other Germanic languages. He also recounts an older legal conception in which an outlaw was treated as having a wolf’s head and was driven away like a wolf. In this account, the outlaw lives apart from human society, exposed to the wilderness and pursued as an animal would be. Baring-Gould presents that social and legal condition as a source of the later mythical idea that outlaws became wolves.

The movement between the human and animal categories is therefore not just a matter of bodily change. The outlaw is made wolf-like through exclusion: law removes his standing among people, and the language of expulsion places him among dangerous animals. Werewolf stories can then make that social metaphor literal, turning the banished person into a creature who crosses the boundary between human community and wilderness. This reading also explains why the term’s legal history matters to the book’s treatment of the werewolf: the creature carries the memory of a judgment against a person as well as the image of a wolf.

The book connects this history to Varg Vikernes’s chosen name, while carefully distinguishing the name’s intended meaning from its older associations. Vikernes said he selected it mainly for its common meaning of wolf; the account notes that there is no evidence he knew the historical legal uses when he changed his name. In light of those uses, however, the name acquires an ominous resonance: varg could evoke not only a wolf but an outlaw associated with arson or other grave crimes. That resonance belongs to the book’s retrospective interpretation, not to a demonstrated motive behind the name choice.

Changing religious meanings

The wolf’s associations are not presented as timeless. The book argues that the negative view of wolves and their connection to the Devil became prominent after the Christian period began in Europe. In some sources the Devil himself is called a werewolf, an extension of the same association between wolf, evil, and exclusion. This later religious framing helps explain why the werewolf could become an image of danger beyond ordinary human society.

That negative framing contrasts with the pre-Christian material in the account. Wolves could serve as totem animals for warrior groups, and the Ulfhethnar, or wolf-coats, were described as wearing wolf skins. Baring-Gould’s report presents Berserkers as entering an altered state and taking on extraordinary force in battle. The book further describes them in old chronicles as men of Odin, and notes that wolves were sacred to Odin, who was accompanied by Geri and Freki. These details do not make the werewolf identical to the warrior or to a sacred wolf; instead, they establish a different cultural register in which wolf imagery could signify affiliation, power, and religious connection rather than disgrace.

The werewolf as a boundary figure

Taken together, the legal and religious strands make the werewolf a figure of unstable borders. It stands between animal and human, but also between belonging and banishment, criminal identity and mythic identity, Christian demonization and older warrior symbolism. The book’s account does not flatten these meanings into one universal belief. It traces how the same wolf image could be used to mark a person as a dangerous outsider, explain the outlaw’s separation from society, or evoke a warrior tradition tied to Odin.

That layered history gives the werewolf its particular force in the discussion of Varg Vikernes. The name’s common sense points to the animal; its older legal associations point toward the outlaw, including the fire-wolf. The book treats the convergence as striking but preserves the distinction between historical resonance and conscious intention. The werewolf thus functions less as a creature in a narrated adventure than as a cultural figure through which language, law, religion, and identity meet.