When I was a child, I played at being various types of animals; a proud, prancing horse, a sinuous leopard, a stalking wolf. I was responding to an age-old desire many human beings share: the need to become one with nature, to assume the mysterious qualities of our fascinating fellow creatures.
If someone had told me then that I could have the power to transform myself into any of those animals at will, I would have been thrilled. Today I have a somewhat more guarded take on the idea of transformation; certainly the painful process of change as depicted in such movies as American Werewolf in London doesn’t encourage one to attempt it!
But my love and admiration for animals has continued, and so has my desire to seek oness with nature. Actual shapeshifting remains a vicarious thrill which I now pursue through the werewolf characters in my romantic fantasy novels Prince Of Wolves, Prince Of Shadows and now Touch Of Wolf. I find it to be a powerful archetype that has touched a deep chord in many readers.
The concept of shapeshifting begins before History itself. Primitive man donned masks of animals they wished to emulate in the hunt. Shamans and medicine men gained the wisdom of the spirit animals or companions through ritual, dream-states or the use of certain hallucinogenic plants. In many traditional cultures, the shapeshifter or animal spirit is a benevolent or, at worse, ambiguous figure who represents the changing relationships between man and nature.
A wide variety of animals are involved in shapeshifter legends around the world. The bear, for instance, has a positive image in many Native American societies. Yuki shamans of California who could transform into a bear were called “bear doctors.” Among the Haida of the Pacific Northwest, there are tales of a chief’s daughter who married into a tribe of bear shapeshifters and bore children with their father’s powers.
In Central and South America, jaguar shapeshifters have great significance. Jaguars were considered sacred animals representative of the gods. The pre-Aztec Olmec culture left giant stone statues of “were-jaguars.” Even the word “shaman” is the same as the word for “jaguar” in some Indian languages. It’s hardly any wonder that men sought to become jaguars, supreme hunters of the forests and jungles.
Seals may seem unusual animals for shapeshifting candidates, but Celtic legend is full of tales of the Selkies, men and women who take on seal shape in the water and must preserve the seal skin on land in order to return to the sea (as in the film The Secret Of Roan Innish. The Shetland Isles tell stories of the Finn Folk, gardeners of the sea bottom, who make use of fairy medicine and take the form of seals. Traditional Scottish legends say that a weeping woman can lure a male Selkie onto land with her tears, and if they marry, their children will be born with webbed fingers and toes. The appeal of the selkie lies in its mastery of both land and sea, two very different worlds.
As with selkies, the appeal of the bird shifter is its mastery of two worlds: earth and sky. The dream of flight has been with mankind for centuries. Birds also have the power to commune with the spirits as no other creature can do, and in many traditional societies the bird is associated with the soul. One of the most familiar bird-shifter stories is that of Swan Lake, in which a princess is forced to take the form of a swan through the enchantment of an evil sorcerer. A more modern interpretation can be found in the movie Ladyhawke, in which a woman must where the form of a hawk by day and ride on her lover’s arm. (He, in turn, becomes a wolf by night). Raven, a trickster archetype among many Pacific Northwest cultures, also transforms himself into a man when involving himself in the affairs of humans.
Horse shifting is less common, but it can be found in the Celtic legends of the Pooka or Puca. Deer transformation is part of Native American belief, and common in Celtic tales of the fairy folk and Tuatha De’ Danaan. In every culture where animals form an important part of daily life, shapeshifter legends abound. In other parts of the world can be found werefoxes (Japan), wereleopards and werehyenas (Africa) and weredragons.
By far the most familiar form a shapeshifter takes in European legend is that of the wolf, or werewolf. Traditionally, this creature is a cursed and bloodthirsty killer that transforms when the moon is full and has no redeeming qualities, though he may be shown as a tragic figure. In the 1941 film The Wolf Man, the hero takes a form somewhere between wolf and man, a horrific creature inevitably doomed to death. Nazis used the code “werewolf” to carry out terrible crimes. This legend of the werewolf is derived from the European fear of and competition with wolves, and concepts of Good and Evil derived from ancient Christian tradition, where wolves were seen as natural allies of the devil. Lycanthropy may also have been a way to explain bizarre and psychopathic behavior, especially when linked with murder. In Navajo society of the Southwest, shapeshifters are generally considered to be evil witches, “skin walkers.” And the ancient
Greek legend of Lycaon tells of an Arcadian king transformed into a man-wolf by Jupiter as punishment for his offering of human flesh. In all these instances, the werewolf represents the darkest impulses in human behavior.
Traditional werewolves may transform as a result of a curse or enchantment, the bite of another werewolf, or an inherited trait. Others are witches who uses special salves and were the pelt of a wolf to make the change. In the Balkans, a man may become a werewolf by drinking the water that settled in a footprint left by a wolf in clay. Legend says that werewolves in human form may be identified by broad hands, short finders, and excess hair on the palm and between the brows. We’re all familiar with the way to kill a werewolf; just load your gun with a silver bullet, and take along a little wolfsbane!
Movies have done much to popularize this view of the werewolf. The Wolf Man added a number of inventions to the traditional legends, which caught on and were eventually accepted as werewolf basics. The movie invented its own gypsy werewolf lore, use of the pentagram to repel the werewolf and to predict future victims, added to an earlier film’s notion that lycanthropy is an infectious disease, and reinforces the concept that it’s the equivalent of testosterone poisoning run amuck. The “silver bullet” myth didn’t even appear until the third Universal Wolf Man film House of Frankenstein.
In I was a Teenage Werewolf, the theme that werewolf/bestial urges are already present in young men is taken to its ultimate limit when the young hero is subjected to experiments that will release the “primitive” in him. Teen Wolf provides a more humorous take on the myth, revealing lycanthropy as a parallel for puberty and presenting it as an inherited trait. Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson, is another humorous look at lycanthropy.
Of course most of the cinematic werewolves turned into halfway sort of beast, a biped covered with fur and sporting ridiculous fangs from a massive underbite. In the later movies The Howling and An American Werewolf In London, they began to take on an appearance closer to real wolves, but much more monstrous and distorted. Transformation in American Werewolf is excruciatingly painful, with the wolflike features literally breaking through the skin of the human body, bones cracking, and all sorts of unimaginable tortures. The resulting beast-man is subject to the usual bloodthirsty urges of the werewolf of ancient legend.
It’s ironic that these negative depictions of wolves are so far from the facts of wolf behavior and society. We know more about wolves in the wild than at any time in history; we know that they do not attack humans unless ill or severely provoked, and that they have family structures based on mutual aid, loyalty, and stringent care of the young. Studies by historians have shown that tales of werewolf attacks in European history stemmed from such diverse occurrences as starving or rabid wolves driven by illness, predation on livestock, feral dogs appearing as wolves to terrified human perception, and humans committing unspeakable crimes explained away as a part of werewolf nature.
This more positive view of shapeshifting is the one I prefer to use in my own novels. With my strong interest in real wolves, I knew that the notion of being “cursed” to run as a wolf and tear people to bits was a damaging and inaccurate portrait of creatures that didn’t deserve such a reputation. To the contrary, I viewed the ability to shapeshift into a wolf to be a positive attribute. I also saw the great romantic potential in a man who could change into a beast as magnificent and awe-inspiring as the wolf.
But if man doesn’t become a wolf via a curse, bite, or witchcraft, how does she or he effect the transformation? I chose to draw on the concept of werewolves as a separate race of beings living alongside humanity, ever a minority and struggling to keep their bloodline from dying out. To my mind, such beings would, like wolves, prefer to live away from human beings, in the forests shared by their four-legged brothers. They would have keen wolf senses even in human form. They would assume the finest qualities of the wolf -- loyalty to family and pack, devotion to the young, monogamy in mating -- yet they would also be capable of powerful territoriality and ferocity in defending those under their protection. They would never kill for the sake of killing, nor harm humans who did not attack them first. They would have inborn psychic powers to influence the minds of humans. They wouldn’t change through some painful metamorphosis, but alter themselves on a cellular level, swiftly and easily, and only after removing their clothing! Silver bullets would have no more effect on them than regular bullets; they’d be a lot harder to harm or kill than an ordinary man or woman, but they wouldn’t be invulnerable or immortal. Their origins would be not magical, but earthly.
When I set out to write my first romance novel, Prince Of Wolves, I was unconsciously developing this concept, and it would continue to develop through the successive werewolf novels Prince Of Shadows and Touch Of the Wolf. I realized that I wanted my werewolves to be able to “interbreed” with humans, which is a major concern in Touch Of The Wolf, where the werewolf hero is intent on preserving the werewolf blood through carefully arranged marriages. Assuming that my loup-garou and humans are two different species, such interbreeding ought to be impossible. But the same mechanism that allows the werewolves to Change also passed through their genes, allowing offspring to adapt on a cellular level to inherit traits of both werewolf and human in varying degrees. Some werewolves find it easier to live as humans and deliberately “forget” the Changing, while others remain true to their origins.
My loup-garous have spread throughout the world, to every culture where wolves once ranged. In the modern world, the werewolves are greatly outnumbered and struggling to survive. But something is happening to them; a mysterious “call” is beginning to summon the remaining werewolves from all parts of the world to the place where Prince Of Wolves begins, a remote village in the Canadian Rockies. One way or another, the werewolves will continue -- and eventually they will find acceptance among the humans who have reviled and feared them since ancient times.
Werewolves will continue to be the staples of horror fiction, slavering creatures bent on slaughtering innocents. But for me, shapeshifters are wonderfully romantic. They provide the link between man and nature that most cultures have lost with the coming of “civilization” and technology. They reintroduce us to the lost essence of our soul, the animal natures we’ve suppressed. They remind us that freedom still exists, and that we can accept the wildness within ourselves without losing control of it.
-Susan Krinard
by bestselling author, Susan Krinard
Excerpt From the Prologue of Touch Of The Wolf:
Braden stood in the broad shadow of his grandfather, Tiberius, earl of Greyburn, and gazed about the Great Hall into thirty pairs of eyes. Eyes that, like his, seemed human but were not. Watchful eyes: fierce, ever alert, weighing every other man and woman who waited in silence for the earl to speak. Even now, at this ninth great meeting of the families, the delegates never forgot what they were. Loup-garous. Werewolves. A breed apart from mankind, but living among humanity. A race that would have faced extinction if not for the earl of Greyburn’s great Cause. Braden had been told the story so many times that he knew it by heart. Tiberius had spent his youth searching for his scattered people--in Europe, Russia, Asia, American. His special gifts let him sense them wherever they survived--among the aristocracy and elite of their homelands, more likely than not; more rarely among the common folk, hiding what they were.
The hiding was always necessary. It was a world of humans, and humans far outnumbered the wolf-kind. Yet the loup-garous had intermarried with humans, and ceased to breed true.
Tiberius knew that their people would die out, fade to nothing in a matter of years or decades--inevitably--unless the blood bred true again. Unless those purest of lineage and power joined to others equally pure.
There was only one way it could be done. Boundaries must be set aside; old national rivalries, old hatreds forgotten. The loup-garous must come together, must make a great pact to preserve their race. Tiberius had cajoled, threatened, pleaded, argued, and used his considerable power to bend others to his will. And they had come, to this stronghold in the inner heart of Northcumberland, where they Greyburn Forsters had held their land for hundreds of years--Forsters who shared a surname with humans but were so much more. That first Convocation in 1820 had been fraught with peril and suspicion, but in the end the loup-garous had chosen their salvation. The first marriage contracts had been negotiated, bloodlines traced for the new records.
So it had now been forty years, twice each decade. But this was Braden’s first meeting; at fourteen he had learned to Change, and was at last worthy of taking part in the Cause. He stared under drawn brows at the Russian delegate, the father of the girl who had been promised to Braden at this very meeting. A great landowner, this prince, who ruled a virtual kingdom of serfs in his distant country. The Russian blood was strong, yet, and when joined to the ancient British strain...Braden shook his head. It was too much to consider here, in this forbidding place with its banners and cold stone. He looked instead at the other delegates, memorizing faces: dour Scots from Highland and Lowland; French Aristocrats, who with their powers had survived the purging of the nobility in their land; the wary Austrians and Prussians; the small conclaves of proud Spanish and Italians from warmer climes, where their people clung to the mountains; Norsemen who crossed the sea to land again on shores where once their ancestors had raided and conquered.
There was a handful of guests from more exotic lands, who had come but reluctantly: an Indian prince, a sheik from the deserts, the last survivor of a venerable clan in Nippon. Only their non-human blood bound them to the others.
And then there were the Americans. They fiercely guarded their independence and looked askance at the British nobleman who claimed leadership of all who ran as wolves and men. But they, too, recognized Grandfather’s warning, and so they had arrived at Greyburn--to talk, debate, hammer out compromise.
Today, the ninth gathering of the families was at an end. The delegates would scatter for five more years, but new contracts were set in place, and there would be another generation of children born to carry on the revived bloodlines. Just at the first contract had bound Braden’s late father to Angela Gevaudan of the old French blood. Angela had dutifully borne the Greyburn heir three children: Braden, Quentin, and Rowena. Each would, in turn, marry as the great Cause dictated; and their children would follow suit, on into the future when the loup-garous would become the powerful, fearless people they were meant to be....
Bibliography of Werewolf/Shapeshifter Books:
Nonfiction Books: Baring-Gould: The book of Werewolves (largely negative folkloric take on shapeshifters.) Cohen, Daniel: Werewolves, Daniel Cohen Douglas, Adam: Beast Within, Adam, Douglas Otten, Charlotte: Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves In Western Culture Pijoan, Teresa: White Wolf Woman and other native America transformation myths Summers, Montague: The Werewolf Time-Life Books: Transformations
Fiction: Note: Some of these books, including my own, present shapeshifters as a separate race of being, who inherit their traits, and are cast in a largely positive light. The majority of these stories depict shapeshifters as under a curse or enchantment; such creatures may or may not be evil, but they are usually eager to lift the spell, unless they are villains. This is by no means a complete list of all titles available. Books with an asterisk (*) are those I have read. Many of these books are out of print but may be found in used book store or via online searches such as www.bibliofind.com.
Werewolf Romance:
Krinard, Susan
Prince of Wolves *
Prince of Shadows *
Touch of Wolf (October, 1999)*
Passion of the Wolf (2000)*
Baker, Laura: Legend
Rebecca: Moonstruck (Novella)
Delacroix, Claire: Enchanted
Flanders, Rebecca
Shadow of the Wolf
Wolf in Waiting
Secret of the Wolf
Flynn, Connie
Shadow of the Moon
Shadow of the Wolf
Forster, Suzanne: Moonlight (Novella)
Other Shapeshifters, Romance
Carter, Margaret: Dark Changeling (Vampire Shapeshifter)
Dodd, Christina: A Well Favored Gentleman (Selkie)
Forbes, Tracy: Touch not the Cat (Cat)
Freiman, Kate: Lady Moonlight (Horse)
Hanna, Lynn: Circle of Time (Selkie)Joy, Dara: Rejar, Mine to Take (jaguar)
Toombs, Jane: Lover’s Moon (dragon)
Wilhelm, Terri Lynn: Storm Prince (Selkie)
Werewolves (Fantasy)
Borchardt, Alice: The Silver Wolf
Boyd, Donna: The Passion
Danvers, Dennis: Wilderness
David, Peter: Howling Mad (Wolf turns into a man!)*
de Lint, Charles: Wolf Moon
Hamilton, Laurell K: Anita Blake novels
Huff, Tanya: Blood Trails
Cheri Scotch:
Werewolf’s Touch
Werewolf’s Sin
Werewolf’s Kiss
Toombs, Jane
Moonrunner I: Under the Shadow
Moonrunner II: Gathering Darkness
Moonrunner III: Dark Sunrise
The Volan Curse
Werewolves: Horror
Cadnum, Michael: Saint Peter’s Wolf
Case, David: Wolf Tracks
Davis, Brett: Hair of the Dog
Elfandsson, Galad: The Black Wolf
Endore, Guy: The Werewolf In Paris
Falconer, David L.: Realm of the Wolf
Greenberg, Martin H., editor: Werewolves
Holt, John R.: Wolf Moon
Jaccoma, Richard: The Werewolf’s Revenge, The Werewolf’s Tale
Levy, Edward: The Beast Within
McCammon, Robert: The Wolf’s Hour
Rovin, Jeff: Return of the Wolf Man
Sackett, Jeffrey: Mark of the Werewolf
Somtow, S.P.: Moon Dance
Stableford, Brian: The Werewolves of London
Tem, Melanie: Wilding
Other Shapeshifters, SF/Fantasy
Bull, Emma: War for the Oaks (dog)
Durgin, Doranna: Dun Lady’s Jess (horse turns into a woman)
Kerr, Peg: The Wild Swans (swan)
MacAvoy, R.A.
Tea With the Black Dragon (dragon)
The Grey Horse (horse)
McCaffrey, Anne & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough: (selkie)
Power Lines
Power Play
Powers that Be
Roberson, Jennifer: Cheysuli Series (various animals) *
Saberhagan, Fred: Dancing Bears (bears)
Shinn, Sharon: The Shape-Changers Wife
Springer, Nancy: The Hex Witch of Seldom (horse)*
Waters, Elisabeth: Changing Fate
Zelazny, Roger: Eye of Cat
http://www.peak.org/~ridgwad/AHWW.html
alt.horror.werewolves, newsgroup devoted to “spiritual therianthrophy” as well as werewolf fiction and folklore
http://www2.wku.edu/www/lights-out/vol1no4/shape.html Interview on Shapechangers by Jennifer Roberson and Robert McCammon
http://www.halcyon.com/phaedrus/translist/transbooks1.html
Transformation Stories list (last updated ‘98? not complete)
http://www.rxcreations.com/werewolf/links.html
The werewolf page.....links to other werewolf sites.
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