Introduction to Werewolves

Hello and welcome to my site! My name is Dallas and I am a senior at the University of Oklahoma. Before getting into the meat of the stories I wanted to inform you about what to expect from what you are about to read and fill you in on a little bit of the lore around werewolves. This has always been a topic I have been fascinated with. The battle between the beast and the man that rages on in werewolves always gets my blood pumping.

    When I first started this project I only had a general idea of what a werewolf was. Usually when one thinks of werewolf, they think it is a man or woman that has been bitten by another werewolf and is now cursed with being a werewolf themselves. However, there is a lot of lore out there that suggests that there are multiple different ways one becomes a werewolf. I have gathered information from various sources to write the stories you are about to read.

     There exists literature of a man that puts on a belt and transforms himself into a werewolf. The main form of literature that speaks unto this is a pamphlet written in 1589 by Hermann von Weinsberg, about a man named Peter Stumpp. Stumpp was thought to be able to transform himself at will into a wolf with the use of this belt he would put on. He eventually was put on trial for multiple homicides and confessed to eating fourteen children and two pregnant women. He said that he even went as far as to rip out the children from the mothers womb so that he could devour their hearts. I found the use of a werewolf belt to transform someone into a werewolf to be surprising because this person chooses to become something evil.

     Another form of werewolf is one that is transformed by the help of a creature or deity trickster. This lore is popular among the Navajo Native American tribe. The person who is inhabited by this spirit is known as a skinwalker or a yee naaldlooshii (by means of it, it goes on all fours). The skinwalker can take various different forms, but most common form is a wolf. This is where the concept of werewolves originate in several Native American tribes.

     I hope to surprise you with both of these transformations as well as a variation of Beauty and the Beast where the beast in the story is actually a werewolf. The beast from Beauty and the Beast is a werewolf that must lock himself away from the world for every day of the month save one, when the moon is full in the sky, where he can wander through the city. This is where he will meet Bell and where the two will try to find a way to be together. The first story you will read will be about a man's effort to retrieve his family. He will be offered help though it may turn out to be more than he had bargained for. I hope you enjoy what you read and if you have any comments please leave them on my Comment Wall!

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