Werwolves

Elliott O’Donnell approached lycanthropy the way a credulous anthropologist might: as a real phenomenon worth cataloguing. Published by Methuen in 1912, his survey opens with the nature and supposed origins of the werewolf, the means by which a person was said to become one, and the exorcisms used against them. From there he tours Europe country by country, gathering lore from the British Isles, France, Germany, the Balkans, Spain, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Iceland, Lapland, Russia and Siberia. Chapter after chapter closes with a narrated case, some vouched for by O’Donnell himself, who maintained he had witnessed occult phenomena firsthand. He is a loose guide to the French werewolf trials he cites, misnaming several of the accused, but the book endures as a store of regional lore and a record of how seriously the occult revival took its monsters.