werewolf

a person fabled in folklore and superstition to have been changed into a wolf by being bewitched or said to be able to assume wolf form at will

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

werewolf

a man transformed into a wolf. [Eur. Folklore: Benét, 1082]

See: Monsters

Werewolf

(dreams)

A werewolf is a creature that does not exist in the physical world. He is symbolic of a man who turns into a monster, a normal person who transforms into a bloodthirsty animal. The werewolf may represent something in your life or in your own personality. When interpreting this dream, consider internal and external factors that generally seem normal but have a tendency to transform into undesirable, hurtful, or dangerous concerns in your life.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Werewolf

in folk belief, a man who allegedly has the ability to transform himself into a beast or, more rarely, into a bush, stone, or similar object. In the popular beliefs of European peoples, a werewolf is a sorcerer who has taken the form of a wolf or an ordinary man who has been turned into a wolf by a magic spell. Analogous popular beliefs are known to exist among the peoples of India, where instead of a wolf the beast is a tiger; in Africa, it is a leopard or hyena; and in South America, it is a jaguar.”

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References in periodicals archive

But among the handful of figures unique to French-Canadian folklore like the chasse-galerie, a flying canoe powered by a pact with the devil, the loup-garou looms large.

In contrast to these early literary tales of courtly werewolves, the French oral tradition depicted the loup-garou as a savage beast linked to the devil.

Carolyn Podruchny's study of "Werewolves and Windigos: Narratives of Cannibal Monsters in French-Canadian Voyageur Oral Tradition" applies Bynum's reading of European werewolves to the New World loup-garou, which developed in a frontier setting and in relation to Native American lore.

(682) Handed down through the generations, later changing context from the original setting of the fur trade and colonial outposts to that of the logging camp, the loup-garou continued his reign of terror in French Canada via the oral tradition.

Claude Janelle, an untiring literary historian and bibliographer of French- Canadian and Quebecois science-fiction and fantasy, catalogues at least eight different loup-garou tales published in French Canada's periodical literature in Le XIXe siecle fantastique en Amerique francaise (The Fantastic Nineteenth Century in French America, 1999).

a ninth text, "Le Loup-garou" published in 1881 by Benjamin Sulte (1842-1923) in Au coin du feu, although it explains away events believed to be supernatural with the device of a hat-stealing Great Gray Owl.

The Changing Shape of a Shape-Shifter: The French-Canadian Loup-garou

"Les histoires de loup-garou au Moyen Age." In Symposium in honorem prof.

Les chiens de Dieu: La representation du loup-garou en Occident (XIe-XIX siecles).

"La Vita Ronani et les contes de loup-garou auxXIIe et XIIIe siecles." Moyen Age 97 (1991): 259-273.

"Mises en recit dune metamorphose: Le loup-garou." In Le merveilleux et la magie dans la litterature, edited by Gerard Chandes, 137-163.

"Bisclavret et les contes du loup-garou: Essai d'interpretation." Marche Romane 30 (1980): 267-276.

Werewolf transformation in the manuscript era