Calabrian Werewolf December 23, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernThis is a delightful piece on a Calabrian werewolf from Norman Douglas: we are in deepest southern Italy, 1907-1911. In some senses it is a massive anti-climax, but perhaps that is the point… At last we started, and I began to slumber once more. The carriage seemed to be going down a steep incline; […]
Portuguese Werewolf October 30, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThis note was published in Folklore in 1942 by, of all people, Violet Alford, one of a handful of impressive interwar British folklorists. Following Professor Hutton’s Presidential Address on Werewolves, this note may be of interest. An English friend, born and brought up in Portugal, remembers, when she was about seven years old, the mysterious […]
French Werewolves Sell Fat to Glass Factories? August 8, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernBeach has been messing around with wolves this week and he ran across this reference in relation to the wolf deaths in Dauphiné in the mid eighteenth century. The priest of Primarette wrote a summary of local attitudes to these killings. Enjoy the following: apart obviously from the fact that three kids had been devoured. […]
Non-Existent Werewolf Boy and the Lord of the Forest(s) March 29, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernCharles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions is a wonderful sources for witchery and bizarre history, but Mackay is a poor historian and, a bit like this blogger, references nothing. Take this passage that fascinated Beach. One young man at Besançon, with the full consciousness of the awful fate that awaited him, voluntarily gave himself up to […]
Dogs of God! Christian Werewolves? March 21, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernThis is one of those rare times in the early modern witch craze where one feels sorry for the judges. I mean they turn up at Jurgensburg in Livonia on the Baltic expecting an easy burning: old man widely thought to be a witch hauled up in front of them (though on another charge) and […]
The Christian Wolves of Ossory July 18, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalWe all know that medieval chroniclers and sensationalists love wonder stories. Beach has a private rule that even if a medieval tale takes place with a ‘reliable’ witness in living memory, then he still looks the other way. But the following story clearly ‘happened’ (though there may be a way to reread it) in that […]
The Were-Hyenas of Ethiopia June 26, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernIn the winter of last year Beachcombing had the werewolf mania bad and before he got bored with the hairy-handed ones he started to make notes on the Buda of Abyssinia, a winsome African lycanthrope. The following text was published in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and was written by a one-time European […]
The Werewolf Faith in Nineteenth-Century France January 28, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernSince beginning this blog eight months ago Beachcombing has had various itches including elephants, Atlantis (to be continued), birds and lightning. But none has bitten so deeply as the werewolf. Indeed, Beachcombing has sketched out another ten posts on the men and women who were furry on the inside. He even, damn it, started vaguely jotting […]
Irish Werewolf Cub-Scouts from Hell? January 26, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, MedievalIrish werewolf cub-scouts from hell… Sounds like a bad slasher film doesn’t it? But actually Beachcombing is about to introduce a genuine all singing, all dancing early medieval Irish institution. His first reading is from the Annals of Ulster for AD 847 ‘the sack of the island of Loch Muinremair by Mael Sechnaill [Irish High King] […]
The Werewolf of Temesa January 25, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : AncientA painfully short post tonight but Tiny Miss B is screaming next to the keyboard, Mrs B is out looking for a school for the elder daughter and Little Miss B is making the au pair’s life an inferno downstairs. So in dereliction of parental duty another part of the soon-to-end werewolf series: let’s hope […]
A Roman Werewolf and a Dinner Tale January 18, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : AncientBeachcombing still has the werewolf itch and it will not be exorcised unless he manages to spit out the story of Niceros the Freedman. The tale appears in Petronius’ Satyricon, the incomplete and bawdy Roman road novel that is best know today for its description of a Roman feast – where, in fact, this story is told. […]
A Werewolf in 1960s Italy January 16, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryRegular readers will know that Beachcombing has no great love for sociologists, who are to historians (or should be to historians) what garlic is to a vampire. However, he makes an exception for Belden Paulson’s brilliant The Searchers (1966) a description of life in a small Italian town, Castelfuoco (not its real name!), in the […]
The End of the Werewolf Faith in Strasburg January 14, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernBeachcombing recently examined the death of the fairy faith in the Yorkshire town of Ilkley and sold it to his readers as a melancholy moment in that community’s history. Today he thought, instead, that he would give evidence for the beginning of the end of faith in were-wolves in the area around Strasburg (‘Germany’ or […]