The Living Age

The Living Age is an important periodical source in the book’s account of werewolf tradition. Rather than functioning as a fictional organization within the stories, it appears as a repository of historical, folkloric, and literary material through which beliefs about wolves, supernatural transformation, and the emergence of werewolf fiction are documented and interpreted.

Documentary Role

The periodical is cited for a passage from volume five, published in 1845, concerning popular beliefs about wolves in Great Britain. That material presents rural superstition as a system of avoidance and euphemism: peasants who feared the animal refrained from naming it directly, calling it instead the “old one,” the “grey one,” or the “great dog.” The practice reflects the belief that naming the wolf could provoke or intensify its power.

The same discussion distinguishes an ordinary wolf from the supernatural Wär Wolf. The natural animal is described as an open and plainly dangerous predator whose victims can resist it as best they can. The Wär Wolf, by contrast, combines human weakness and decrepitude with demoniacal power and will. In this account, the monstrous figure is specifically imagined as an old woman allied with Satan and able, under the form of a wolf, to paralyse cattle with her gaze; even the slightest wound is said to bring death.

Animal Lore and Werewolf Belief

The Living Age passage preserves a striking mixture of observation and supernatural explanation. A fine young ox may be found exhausted, foaming, and apparently frightened, with only a small wound that swells and inflames as though poison had been introduced. On examination, its intestines appear torn as if by wolf claws, and the body is inflamed throughout. Such details give the superstition a basis in visible animal suffering while attributing its inexplicable features to a demonic werewolf.

The book also uses the periodical to record the belief that a wolf which has tasted human flesh prefers it to every other food. This idea helps explain why wolves were imagined as more than ordinary predators: their appetite was transformed into evidence of an insatiable and spiritually threatening nature. Stories of wolves eating livestock, attacking children, or disinterring corpses could therefore be interpreted as the work of a possessing demon rather than as consequences of hunger, habitat, or animal behavior.

Water-Wolf and Mythic Contexts

A later passage from volume thirty-five, published in 1881, supplies background for the discussion of “Ursel. The Water-Wolf,” a story published in 1839. The story was excluded from the anthology because it never establishes whether its water-wolf is a transformed human; its creature is not described, although land wolves howl when it approaches a boat from the water. The periodical’s mythographic material consequently serves as contextual evidence rather than proof of the creature’s identity.

That material associates the water-wolf with Germanic mythology. Fenrir, described as the “water-wolf,” is linked to stormy waves, while fire glows from his eyes and nose and his name is also connected with fire. The discussion further connects Loki with flame, monster forms, hot springs, the whale, and the waters of heaven, and mentions Niörd’s power to still water and fire and Wate, the German water giant and father of Wieland the Smith. These associations broaden the werewolf tradition beyond the simple image of a human becoming a land wolf, placing animal transformation within older networks of water, fire, storm, and divine or monstrous ancestry.

Place in Literary History

The Living Age contributes to the book’s larger argument that werewolf literature developed from superstition through folklore and legend into modern literary forms. The anthology describes the years from 1800 to 1849 as the cradle of the English-language werewolf short story, a period in which the genre remained rare but produced significant examples. The periodical’s reprinted folklore helps show the cultural material from which those stories emerged: fear of naming wolves, belief in demonic agency, accounts of unnatural wounds, and uncertainty about the boundary between animal and human.

Its documentary function also preserves the instability of the werewolf concept. Some creatures are clearly treated as transformed humans; others, such as the water-wolf in the 1839 story, remain unidentified. By placing natural history, rural testimony, ancient mythology, and literary criticism beside one another, The Living Age illustrates how the werewolf was repeatedly reshaped as it moved between oral superstition, scholarly compilation, poetry, and short fiction. The periodical thus matters less as a single institutional actor than as a medium through which competing explanations of the wolf and the monstrous could be recorded and made available to later literary history.