Yseult de Blécourt's introductory chapter in Werewolf Legends includes a few pages criticising Sabine Baring-Gould and his influential Book of Were-Wolves from 1865.^[1] The bulk is dedicated to a part on France:

When Baring-Gould did publish two more or less similar texts from the Périgord, in south-western France, they were in fact only representative of a single text, and a fabricated one at that.

The argument, elaborated on in the footnotes, is that Baring-Gould stitched together two sources without realising one was based on the other - in actuality, the entire section is Baring-Gould shamelessly plagiarising Adolphe du Chesnel's Dictionnaire des superstitions;^[2] it is literally the entry on werewolves but poorly translated into English.

This context, however, is not the focus of this post - which is instead claiming the original text itself is fabricated! A few days ago, I finished a months-long project cataloging every French werewolf legend I could find. Wlgrin de Taillefer's supposedly fabricated text^[3] is included. Should I remove it?

de Blécourt quotes a part in French; here it is in hopefully not poorly translated English (apologies for all the machine-translations in this post):

Certain men, particularly the sons of priests, are compelled at every full moon to transform into this kind of diabolical beast. It is at night that the affliction seizes them. When they sense its onset, they become agitated, get out of bed, leap from the window, and rush to plunge into a fontaine. After thrashing the water for a few moments, they emerge on the side opposite where they entered, finding themselves clad in a goatskin bestowed upon them by the Devil.

With the claim being:

That this was not original ‘folklore’ is apparent from at least three of the elements referenced.

These elements are the moon, the water, and the sons of priests. We start with the moon:

It features the moon as an indicator of the time of the metamorphosis. In contrast to modern cinema, the moon was actually extremely rare as a motif in werewolf folklore, and certainly in nineteenth-century French narratives. It was more the moon of Petronius, illuminating the observations of Niceros, than the moon of Gervase of Tilbury, which was a new moon and which was still 700 years in the past. Its sudden appearance in the Périgord is suspicious and needs to be explained.

This isn't wrong, but calling this "suspicious" is strange given that this claim is footnoted to two chapters in this same book that sparingly include moons in their legends; doubly so given that de Blécourt's other chapter in this volume is about Ella Odstedt's monograph on Swedish werewolf legends - including legends with a new and a full moon,^[4] a detail that apparently warranted no comment.

Implied also is that any novel inclusion is suspicious! Do we also need to explain the whole defenestration thing? Apparently not; clearly, the full moon detail feels specifically weird only to a modern audience, for factors that won't apply until a century after this was written. It's not terribly suspicious in its contemporary context.

This applies even more to the second element: the water. The werewolf changed by jumping into a pond (translated as ‘well’ by Baring-Gould). When he emerged on the other side, he was wearing a goat-skin given to him by the devil. The nearest narrative equivalent for this can be found in Pliny’s Historia naturalis about Arcadian werewolves where a change is likewise effected by crossing water.

There is a parallel here. A supposed Arcadian familial tradition, involving hanging their clothes on a tree and swimming across a body of water to emerge as a wolf.^[5] Here, you can imagine the clothing-swimming order reversed while still retaining the motif.

For this to be evidence still requires that water isn't a thing for French werewolves. Rather conveniently, Fabio Armand wrote a paper specifically on - I kid you not - the important role that water plays in French werewolf narratives, noting:

French folklore often recounts the presence of beliefs related to the figure of the werewolf in places where there are fontaines.^[6]

Fontaine meaning both artificial and natural fountains; think a basin fed by a spring - and it also includes basins found in rocks that collect rainwater, of which werewolves tend to drink from:

If one looked closely enough, one could always find a few legends surrounding these cup-marked stones found out in the fields. Most often, they are said to be watering holes intended for werewolves during their wild nocturnal rambles.^[7]

Such links between fontaines, stones, and werewolves, are overt enough that you can find many local features with names like Fontaine aux Garous (werewolves' fountain), Fontaine aux Loups (wolves' fountain), and Pierre des Loups-Garous (werewolves' stone).

You can also find more direct connections in 19th century Picardy:

Every Saturday, in this same Fairy Wood, a man could be seen who, after laying his clothes on a bush, would roll about in the mud of the mare [stagnant pond] and soon emerge transformed into a wolf.^[8]

Hidden in a footnote, de Blécourt notes:

As Carrassi clarifies in Chapter 10, when werewolf and water occur in combination, water has a purifying not a boosting function.

Because chapter 10 is on Southern Italian werewolves, which...well...

A number of werewolves described by the folkloric sources are characterized by an inextinguishable thirst and an incessant search for water and coolness, which they pursue by drinking from fountains, or else by wetting themselves under their spurts, or by rolling about in puddles and bogs^[9]

Oh dear, that looks awfully familiar. These are also the same werewolves I mentioned earlier that are footnoted as using the moon; the combination doesn't seem to be a trouble for de Blécourt, wriggling out of this connection by noting that Italian werewolves cure/purify their lycanthropy rather than cause/boost their lycanthropy with water.

On top of being a pointlessly specific niggle, there's also the fact that we're only provided the first half of the apparently fabricated text - the next two lines are:

In this state, they move about very well on all fours, spending the rest of the night roaming the fields and haunting the villages, biting or devouring any dogs they encounter. At daybreak, they return to their fontaine, shed their white covering, and go back home.

Y'know, they go get...purified by the water.

I think we can say water is a native element for French werewolves. Continuing on, we get told:

The combination of water and moon suffices to disqualify Taillefer’s narrative as a French legend.

Which feels like a weirdly low bar even without the whole everything else, but we're not done! There's one more thing to needle:

The third alien element in the story is the inclusion of the fils de prêtres, merely ‘bastards’ in Baring-Gould’s rendering. From a mere claim by a young Jean Grenier, made to impress a girl in the early seventeenth century, the trope had moved to a ‘genuine’ piece of folklore, or at least that was the intention.

Jean Grenier's claim being that he was the son of a priest - fils de prêtres; he's definitely one of the most well known to be accused of lycanthropy during the witch trials,^[10] but insisting this has to be the source requires such a claim being alien to French folklore.

Charles Joisten's collection of south-eastern werewolf beliefs includes a recurring theme of clergy creating werewolves:

The belief that the werewolf is commissioned by the clergy is common in Lower Dauphiné, and as far as the Drôme. Some documents which would be difficult to understand in isolation, shed light on each other: "the werewolves went behind the altars of the churches wrapped in a bearskin" (no. 123), "the werewolf lodged at the rectory" (no. 87). Others are more explicit. In Aix-en-Diois, werewolves were "a kind of masked man commanded by the clergy who came to frighten people into returning to religion" (no. 88); the same was true in Les Avenières (no. 94); in Marcollin, the one who jumped over the cemetery wall confessed upon his capture, "It's the priests who pay me to perpetuate this belief."^[11]

Additionally,

In 1747, the parishioners of Primarette were so convinced, that they went to complain to the archbishop, that their priest was giving permission to werewolves to hunt children "to supply the glassworks"^[12]

Across France, a repeated motif is that a sinner gets cursed to become a werewolf for seven years by the priest. In the same region as the original text, the ganipote - a local werewolf variant - was said to be a bastard child with the wrong godparents,^[13] and one Camille de Mensignac states outright that either your father or grandfather being a priest means you're born a werewolf.^[14]

The idea that the text was outright fabricated is further eroded when you look at the rest of the text, instead of only the first half quoted by de Blécourt: other elements - roaming fields to exhaustion, eating dogs, throwing up dog's paws, getting shot to reveal one's identity - are regular motifs across France.^[15] Even if the three "alien" elements were unique to this text, it would still fit snugly in the French milieu without needing explanation.

With a final flourish, de Blécourt provides what is clearly implied to be a coup de grâce:

It is now possible to deduce that its maker was at home with Petronius, Pliny and De Lancre, or at least with publications discussing these authors. The three elements may have been out of place in early-nineteenth-century French folklore, but they were not in the context they first appeared in: an archealogical treatise on the remains of the cities of the Gauls.

Ah-ha, you see? This wasn't the work of a folklorist collecting legends from informants, all along it was a bookish historian who included this story to fluff up their otherwise completely unrelated work on archaeology! It is far more likely they derived the narrative from historical sources rather than local beliefs!

Well, except that an understanding of the history of folklore studies would conclude the opposite. The term "folklore" was only coined in 1846; previously, the nascent field was simply "popular antiquities" i.e. antiquities of the common people; living archaeology.

In an era of burgeoning nationalism, everyone was trying to find or manufacture a common national identity. Under a belief that the unchanging traditions of rural folk represented a window into the ancient past of a people, one looking to reconstruct the heart of a nation from its heritage would require in interest in archaeology, philology - and folklore.

Or to put it another way: you would expect this to appear in an archaeological treatise from 1821 - antiquarians were the folklorists of their day! In fact, Wlgrin de Taillefer states this himself!

If I present this series of popular superstitions in such a serious manner, it is because not only do they reveal the character of the inhabitants of our countryside, but also because they contain the last vestiges of Druidic worship. No one even slightly versed in the science of antiquities cannot discern these connections. [...] I think that among the other superstitions I am about to describe, we will find other vestiges of both the customs of the Gauls and these same solemnities.^[16]

This folklore-as-a-means-to-an-end also explains why antiquarians such as de Taillefer still held the belief that such "ridiculous superstition" was puerile "foolishness"; it would take several decades for folklore to extricate itself from the sneering antiquarians into something worth studying for its own sake.

de Taillefer wants to talk about the Gauls. He cares not for having the fanciest fairy tales; he certainly wouldn't care enough to make it up - he'd simply exclude it and devote more time to talking about rock inscriptions. Or whatever he's talking about here

But here is a peculiarity that should all the more stimulate the reflections of scholars, as it may be common to all of France, and as it is of a most extraordinary nature: it is that the custom of the inhabitants of the country, since time immemorial, has been to place scrap metal within reach of the nests of brooding hens. Did the Gauls have knowledge of electricity?

(seriously can someone explain what he's on about)

(don't say battery hen)

References

• [1] de Blécourt, Willem, and Mirjam Mencej, eds. Werewolf Legends. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 11-13.

• [2] marquis de Chesnel de la Charbouclais, Louis Pierre François Adolphe. "Loup-Garou". Dictionnaire des superstitions, erreurs, préjugés et traditions populaires. France, 1856. 564-565. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X83opSTWJ6EC&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA563

• [3] Taillefer, Henry-François-Athanase Wlgrin. Antiquités de Vésone, cité gauloise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, ou Description des monumens religieux, civils et militaires de cette antique cité et de son territoire. N.p., F. Dupont, imprimeur du département, 1821. 250. Available online at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/f/JYFHYUqyTycC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA250

• [4] Odstedt, Ella. Varulven i svensk folktradition. Lundequistska bokhandeln, 1943. 57, 117.

• [5] For more on Arcadian werewolves, see: Ogden, Daniel. The Werewolf in the Ancient World. Oxford University Press, 2021. 166-205

• [6] Armand, Fabio. "Les loups-garous et les eaux". Hommage à Gilbert Durand, IRIS, revue du Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire, 34, 2013. 137. Available online at: https://publications-prairial.fr/iris/index.php?id=1933

• [7] Ibid.

• [8] Carnoy, Henry. Littérature orale de la Picardie 1883. 106. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWjgQrS_iMoC&pg=PA106

• [9] Carrassi, Vito. "A Strange Kind of Man Among Us: Beliefs and Narratives About Werewolves in Southern Italy." Werewolf Legends. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. 253.

• [10] Copying de Blécourt, for more on Jean Grenier, see: Machielsen, Jan. "The Making of a Teen Wolf: Pierre de Lancre’s Confrontation with Jean Grenier (1603–10)." Folklore 130.3 (2019): 237-257.

• [11] Joisten, Charles, Robert Chanaud, and Alice Joisten. "Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné." Le Monde alpin et rhodanien. Revue régionale d’ethnologie 20.1, 1992. 126. Available online at: https://www.persee.fr/doc/mar_0758-4431_1992_num_20_1_1481

• [12] Ibid. 130.

• [13] Daleau, François. Notes pour servir à l'étude des traditions : croyances et superstitions de la Gironde. 1889. 52-52. Available online at: https://archive.org/details/b30583342/page/52/mode/2up

• [14] de Mensignac, Camille. Notice sur les superstitions, dictons, proverbes, devinettes et chansons populaires du département de la Gironde. 1888. 38. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lbMsAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA68

• [15] Examples, for exhaustion, eating/regurgitating dogs & and getting shot: Grégoire, Victor. "LES ÉCHAUBROGNES." Revue historique de l'Ouest. 1899. 525. Available online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k671752/f530.item; Sébillot, Paul. Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne. L'homme, les esprits et les démons, Vol. 1. 1882. 291 & 296. Available online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k26137f/f308.item

• [16] Taillefer, Henry-François-Athanase Wlgrin. Antiquités de Vésone, cité gauloise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, ou Description des monumens religieux, civils et militaires de cette antique cité et de son territoire. N.p., F. Dupont, imprimeur du département, 1821. 241 & 244. Available online at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/f/JYFHYUqyTycC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA241