At times, the veneer can grow alarmingly thin:Īn old soldier, who had been in Waterloo, informed me that to his mind there was no pleasure equal to running a man through the body, and that he could lie awake at night musing on the pleasurable sensations afforded him by that act. His reader will nonetheless gather that it waxes where there is superstitious ignorance and wanes where people have managed to access a humane education. But during Baring-Gould’s treatise the depravity of the werewolf is being steadily shifted from an animal Otherness and on, inexorably, towards the human breast.īaring-Gould never speculates on how this depravity is distributed across races, nationalities, social classes, ages and genders. The wolf’s behaviour is surely entirely mechanical – there is a sparse kind of rationality to everything that a wolf does – whilst the lunacy of cannibalism results from a freedom to err that is exclusively human. There is something philosophically offensive to the idea that animals are “wild” and associated with frenzied mayhem. The symbol that everyone is working with here might well be the wrong one. There is daylight everywhere and the supernatural is now banished like a moonbeam. From the medieval period onwards, Baring-Gould dwells only on documented cases of psychopathy and cannibalism. This story changes once we have reached the Viking motif of “ the Berserkir.” Now the werewolf is human from top to tail, a warrior who would temporarily believe that he was a wild animal whilst he was rampaging around the battlefield. What is a werewolf? Baring-Gould begins by looking across the various ancient myths about metamorphosis, in which heroes and villains alike would flit between human bodies and animal ones. His work was certainly always serious enough for him to remain on his feet. He was the product of a culture in which amateurism had been sometimes viewed as more glorious than careerist professionalism. After completing all of the mundane tasks from his clerical day job he would retire to his rectory and his recreational scholarship. Today Baring-Gould might look like the supremest manifestation of the Victorian amateur. Has anybody else ever thought of writing whilst standing upright since Baring-Gould had done it? Perhaps the only reason that Baring-Gould had written so many books was that he had fixed his body to the maximum productive advantage. Make of it what you will that Baring-Gould had supposedly written all of his 248 books while standing before a lectern. Whereas the werewolf is half man, half beast, this book stands half-upright with the dignity of science and it hunches half-over with its ghoulish sensationalism. We might suspect that a little of the wolf has already crept into its own writing. Sabine Baring-Gould was a Victorian clergyman and his The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) aims to achieve a historical and scientific overview of lycanthropy.
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