19th century

The 19th century was the cradle of modern werewolf short fiction: a period when an ancient belief in human beings who became wolves was reshaped into a literary form capable of sustaining historical atmosphere, Gothic suspense, and uncertainty about the monstrous body. Between 1800 and 1849, the werewolf passed decisively from inherited superstition and medieval poetry into the short story, even though only a small number of examples were produced.

Origins in Superstition and Folklore

The period inherited werewolf legends from Greek, English, Italian, German, and French traditions. The names varied, but the underlying figure was recognizably similar: a human being who acquired the appearance and nature of a wolf. Older accounts commonly attributed werewolfism to the devil or to sorcerers. One influential description presents werewolves as sorcerers who anointed themselves with a diabolical ointment and put on an enchanted girdle; while wearing it, they appeared to others as wolves and believed themselves to possess both the shape and nature of wolves. The transformation was therefore both physical and psychological, joining altered appearance to altered appetite and conduct.

The vocabulary itself preserved this human-animal doubleness. The Germanic were-wulf meant “man-wolf,” while the Greek lycanthropos expressed a closely related idea. In the Anglo-Saxon construction, wer or were signified a man, appearing in compounds such as were-wulf, a man-wolf, and wer-gyld, the payment or fine for killing a man. The linguistic history made the monster a compound identity rather than simply an unusually savage animal: the wolf remained visible, but the human legal and moral category remained embedded in its name.

From Medieval Poetry to Nineteenth-Century Fiction

The literary ancestry of the 19th century werewolf story reaches back through medieval poetry. An early account of transformation described clothing becoming wolf hair, arms becoming legs, and the transformed person wanting to speak but being unable to do so. This detailed attention to the body’s alteration was identified as the first of its kind in recorded poetry. The werewolf was not merely announced as a supernatural creature; its emergence was dramatized as a crisis of language, clothing, anatomy, and selfhood.

Medieval poets continued the legend in different forms. “Roman de Guillaume de Palerne,” thought to have developed from Italian legend in the late twelfth century, was translated into French in 1350 and later rendered into modern English in 1832 from an ancient manuscript preserved in King's College Library. Its modern title, “William and the Werwolf,” helped carry the old material into the literary culture of the 19th century. In the 13th century, Marie’s “Lai du Bisclavaret” likewise treated the werewolf tradition; a passage from it was placed at the beginning of “The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin,” allowing a later English-language tale to announce its medieval authority before its own narrative began.

English poetic tradition also contributed to the monster’s development. Michael Drayton’s “The Moon-Calf,” written in the late 16th or early 17th century, presented the fierce wär-wolf through its thirst for cattle blood. By the 19th century, these older materials could be reassembled as literary evidence, regional legend, and Gothic inheritance. The transformation was not an abandonment of folklore but its migration into new narrative machinery.

The Short Story’s Breakthrough

The decisive formal change came when the werewolf moved from poetry into the short story. During the first half of the 19th century, short fiction itself was becoming darker and more technically ambitious, with writers including Edgar Allan Poe, Honoré de Balzac, George Soane, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wilhelm Hauff, Charles Dickens, and Samuel Warren helping shape the period’s horror environment. None of those authors, however, was represented as the author of a werewolf story in the discussed collection, a contrast that underscores how sparsely the genre was populated even while the surrounding horror tradition flourished.

The scarcity of novels makes the short stories especially important. Charles Maturin’s The Albigenses, published in 1824, addressed werewolves without making them the center of the Gothic novel. H. Laurence’s 1827 novella “Norman of the Strong Arm: A Tale of the Sanctuary of Westminster” drew on medieval superstitions and ended with a man imprisoned for allegedly befriending a werewolf. The first English novel in which a werewolf served as protagonist appeared later, when George W. M. Reynolds serialized “Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf” in Reynold's Miscellany from November 6, 1846, to July 24, 1847. In 1849, Wilhelm Meinhold’s multi-volume Sidonia the Sorceress offered a notable example of a she-wolf, while Catherine Crowe’s “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” centered on a woman accused of being one.

Against this background, the short story was not a lesser substitute for the novel. Edgar Allan Poe praised the tale as the prose form offering the best opportunity for the display of the highest talent. The werewolf’s compact fiction suited a creature defined by revelation: the narrative could delay the transformation, preserve doubt about the suspected human being, and then make the monstrous identity suddenly occupy the entire story.

Representative Werewolf Tales

“Hugues the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages” exemplifies the period’s habit of placing modern short fiction inside medieval history. First published in the September 1838 issue of The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic under the initials “S. M.,” the story was generally attributed to Sutherland Menzies, although Elizabeth Stone was also proposed as the writer behind the pen name. Its historical character and detailed footnotes supported the Menzies attribution. The story drew on the ancient Hugues family, its Norman connection with Henry II, and its reputed lycanthropic bloodline; Hugh Lupus, identified as the first Earl Kent, was associated with a wolf’s head on the family crest. The tale thus made genealogy, heraldry, and annotation part of the machinery of supernatural credibility.

“The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin” supplied another model of regional and historical anchoring. It appeared in The Olio, or, Museum of Entertainment on February 23, 1828, in a volume whose page 97 placed it below an illustration of knights fighting on a battlefield. First published anonymously, it was later reprinted by Richard Thomson in Tales of an Antiquary. Thomson’s position as librarian of the London Institute and his work as a historian encouraged a mixture of historical material and fiction. The story’s title invoked a German term, while its setting and explanatory frame connected the monster with French legend.

The accompanying account of Poictou described the area as a celebrated haunt of creatures suspended between phantom and beast of prey. Germans called them Wehr-Wolves, the French called them Bisclavarets or Loups Garoux, and the English lacked an equally established name, sometimes referring to them simply as Wild Wolves. The superstition held that these beings were men in compact with the Arch Enemy who could assume wolf form at certain periods. In Upper Limousin, they were believed to leave the hills and mountains at midnight, howl through nearby towns and villages, and terrify the inhabitants. Their supernatural visitations were said, paradoxically, to increase local piety.

That legend was given a concrete Gothic setting at St. Yrieux, where an old but handsome country house belonged by inherited descent to the young Baroness Louise Joliedame. Fear of the Wehr-Wolves, distaste for its old-fashioned chambers, and a stronger attraction to the court of Francis I led her to let the chateau to strangers. Much of the building remained unrepaired and rapidly decayed. The country house therefore functioned as more than scenery: inherited fear, aristocratic history, abandonment, and architectural deterioration converged in one space.

Limits, Variations, and Legacy

The 19th century did not produce a single stable werewolf model. Some works emphasized a male human becoming a wolf, while others displaced the tradition into female monstrosity. Captain Frederick Marryat’s “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains,” drawn from Chapter XXXIX of The Phantom Ship, first published serially in the London New Monthly Magazine in 1838, was not technically a werewolf story in the strict sense because its central monster was a she-wolf. The later tale was published in 1839 and concerned a monster rising from Transylvania. Its classification exposed the tension between a broad popular category and the older male-centered meaning of the werewolf name: in French, loup-garou; in German, wehr-wolf; in Old English, wär-wolf; and in Portuguese, lupus-homo.

The genre also depended on uncertainty. “Ursel. The Water-Wolf,” published in 1839, was excluded from the discussed collection because it was unclear whether the water-wolf was a transformed human. The story offered only a suggestive clue: land wolves howled when the creature approached a boat from the water, while the creature itself was never described. This withholding mattered. It showed that the boundary between a werewolf story and a tale of an otherworldly animal could remain unresolved, and that the period’s literature often generated fear through incomplete identification rather than through a fully explained metamorphosis.

By the end of the period, the werewolf had become part of a larger nineteenth-century recovery of horror’s early forms. The Best Horror Short Stories 1800-1849 presented the first half of the century as the cradle of modern horror short stories, drawing on more than three hundred stories and selecting twelve, including pieces rescued from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Atkinson’s Casket. Its annotations, story backgrounds, author photographs, and publication history treated forgotten fiction as both literature and archive. In that framework, the 19th century appears not merely as a date range but as a hinge: superstition became folklore, folklore became poetry, poetry became short fiction, and short fiction supplied the compact, historically charged form through which the modern werewolf could endure.