The Poetics of Wolves: Mapping a Metaphor in World Literature
In myth and literature wolves are ambivalent creatures reflecting
humanity’s problematic relationship with this animal perceived on the one hand
as valiant, courageous, and noble, but also as a pest and a threat. Among the
negative connotations, the wolf is a historical metaphor for the criminal and his
expulsion from the community. The wolf’s association with a voracious
appetite, causing his reputation as a cunning creature in the medieval beast epics
and in folklore, left its imprint on the political treatment of those the community
considered as wolves within their midst.i
The Germanic Middle Ages had a name for these human wolves, vargr,
both ‘wolf’ and ‘outlaw.’ Morally unclean due to the crimes he committed –
usually a murder – he was proscribed as a wolf, pronounced dead by the
community and abandoned to the night side of life. As the homo sacer he was
the human set apart from the community, and anyone was allowed to kill
him/her without being punished for homicide.ii Conceptually, human predators,
that is, individuals preying on the community, were wolves. As such they were
expelled to wilderness outside of the civil and peaceful polis, to a life of
roaming the woods, which then had the potential to deprive them even more
from their human shape and what the Greek called logos, speech and reason. In
myth and the medieval politics of expulsion becoming a wolf went hand in hand
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with a loss of sanity, which may explain why the seventeenth century associated
insanity with lupine qualities. (Robert Burton)
The politics of expulsion, however, do not have their beginnings in the
European Middle Ages. It is the beginning of a sedentary way of life that links
the wolf to cunning and evil and causes the emergence of heterotopias, the
separation between civilization as the space of settlement and nurturing, and
wilderness as the space outside of that settlement.iii Possibly as early as the
Mesolithic age, during which humans evolved from hunters and gatherers to
sedentary farmers, the wolf became a symbol of uncontrollable nature outside of
the space of dwelling, which had so far mentally incorporated its spirit as a
good luck token for the great hunt.
The human wolf in exile and the ensuing shifts of body and identity are
also not confined geographically to Northern Europe but had been the material
of myths as early as in Greek and Roman antiquity. The most famous example
for mythical lycanthropy is possibly the tale of Lykaon, the King of Arcadia,
whom Zeus changes into a wolf in an Arcadian lake for the crime of
cannibalism – a tale Ovid places at the very beginning of his Metamorphoses.iv
The story of expulsion and transformation into a wolf does, consequently, not
begin in the Germanic Middles Ages. However, while the exile is temporary in
the Arcadian rituals that replicate the mythical ban in worship of Zeus Lykaios,v
the Germanic vargr tended to be abandoned into permanent exile. The
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permanent exile in Greek myth thus becomes a historical biopolitical reality in
the Germanic Middle Ages.
Various terms in political and cultural theory are associated with such
lycanthropy. While vargr refers specifically to the perception of the outcast as a
cunning wolf and a parasite to the Germanic medieval community, Roman law
gives us the homo sacer as an over-arching term for the human who on account
of a crime is set apart from the community, banned, abandoned and thus
reduced to naked animal life. The Middle Ages also produced the berserkr, wolf
warriors, glorified in pagan medieval times but outlawed with the arrival of
Christianity. While clearly probing the limits of human reason during his animal
fits of frenzy that led him (or hervi) to the kind of self-sacrifice that we may
associate with Japanese kamikaze fighters or the lone wolf terrorist the
berserker was an ambivalent figure between great prowess, strength but also
immorality. He was quite literally a ‘wolf man’ because it was customary
among such warriors to don wolf or bear hides to give themselves an air of
ferocity and beastliness for the purpose of intimidating their enemies. One
explanation for this term is that the sark was the bear or wolf hide used by these
warriors in Scandinavia, while another theory is that the word berserkr could
also be derived from ‘bare skin,’ that is ‘without fur,’ naked, supporting
Agamben’s theory of the nuda vita, bare life in the state of exception (war).vii
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The lycanthrope is a hybrid in being both oppressed and oppressor. He is
expelled, cast out, on the run from persecution and, as Derrida has shown in his
last lecture series on the “Beast and the Sovereign,” he is also tyrannical,
sovereign in his freedom in the forest, free to die at the hands of the tyrant who
is free to slay. His evolution in history shows the shift from the ritual of
abandonment and killing to re-enactments of these rites as myth, carnivalesque
festivals, religious repression, and a return of the repressed in the form of
neurosis and racism. From the Middle Ages on the fear of the beast within man
is a fear of Satan introduced by the spread of Christianity in Central Europe.
This fear occupies the stage well into the eighteenth century and is a
phenomenon reflected in the European literary and cultural traditions of the
Early Modern Age, specifically in the German Schelmenroman, the picaresque
novel, for example in Johann von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus.
This fear of Satan is culturally remembered well into the nineteenth century,
especially German Romanticism and Realism.
Some of my recent work (Arnds, Lycanthropy in German Literature,
2015) shows that this evolution of the wolf man can be traced via a body of
prose texts to demonstrate a) his relationship with various persecuted groups
through the ages, the mentally disabled, women as witches, Gypsies and Jews in
the nineteenth century, to the twentieth-century victims of genocide, and b) his
relationship with the history of psychoanalysis, from the anatomy of
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melancholy of the Early Modern Age, via the repression of animal instincts
from the Enlightenment on, to the compulsive return of the repressed in the
twentieth century.
As a cultural and political origin of totalitarianism, vargr, the wolf as
outcast and as despot, becomes associated with matters of race and gender as
soon as he is demonized by Christianity.viii In the late Middle Ages the wolf is
synonymous with the devil (Zipes, Trials 68), wolves and witches blending
together in this process of demonization. The Great Werewolf and Witch Hunt
initiated by Pope Innocent VIII in the Papal Bull Summis Desiderantes
Affectibus in December 1484 and by the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of
Witches, 1486) then gives rise to a religious racism that links the wolf not just
with any religious non-conformist but specifically with Jews, who were not
assimilated and seen as rootless wanderers. The equation of wolf, devil and the
racially marked outsider thus appears as early as in the fifteenth century. As
Jack Zipes has argued, in “all the religious diatribe of the 16th and 17th centuries
there were constant parallels drawn between the devil and his associates, the
Jews, witches, and werewolves, and this had a profound effect on the popular
imagination” (Zipes, Trials 69).
In the second half of the nineteenth century then wolves become more
closely associated with race in literature. As a racially marked pariah in the
context of the persecution of Gypsies this figure occurs in France as early as in
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Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), in Germany, for example, in
Wilhelm Raabe’s Bildungsroman Der Hungerpastor (1865) historical novella
and his rewriting of the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend in The Children of
Hamelin (Die Hämelschen Kinder, 1863), but also in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897), where the vampire, wolves, and Gypsies form a racially inferior
symbiosis reflecting Victorian England’s fear of infection from Eastern
European migrants, a text that may have renewed relevance these days.
Post-Enlightenment repression of animal instincts and the marginalization
that happens in racism form a close link in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In modernism, the wolf man as neurotic appears not only in
Freud’s case study of his Russian aristocratic patient Sergei Pankejev, but in
literature also in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) and Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915). In Kafka’s story, Gregor Samsa is
still a wolf in the medieval sense of an expelled vargr, the undesirable who can
be killed by anyone but cannot sacrificed due to his unclean nature. As an
Ungeziefer (in Old German the animal that is too unclean to be sacrificed), he is
a harbinger of the racist discourse the Nazis employed in the context of Jews 25
years later.
The reappearance of the lycanthrope in the first half of the twentieth
century is, however, not limited to psychoanalysis and literature; he returns also
in the Nazi cult of wolves and werewolves, particularly in Hitler’s self6
glorification as Aethalulfr (Adolf), the Noble Wolf. In post-Second World War
texts then wolves are contextualized in the context of the Third Reich, and as
part of what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms
with the past. In Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), for example, the wolf
stands allegorically for the Nazi apparatus devouring undesirables, and in
Grass’s Dog Years (1963) for race, breeding, and a catalyst for the
representation of perpetrators and victims. Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes
(The Ogre, 1970) is also of particular interest in this context.
The perception of the wolf as a nefarious animal is a phenomenon in most
parts of the world. It is, of course, a misunderstanding of wolf behavior, for the
wolf generally guarantees the health of the natural environment by hunting
down sick and old animals.ix And in literature, the parasitic wolf trespassing and
living off the land that is off-limits, as well as wolves in the context of war,
sovereignty, and the trauma of abandonment, go well beyond European
boundaries. In Cormac Mc Carthy’s novel The Crossing (1994), for example, a
Mexican she-wolf trespassing into US territory becomes a metaphor for the
loneliness of an orphaned boy, for US immigration policies and the practice of
returning illegal immigrants across borderlines.x The wolf as a persecuted and
demonized animal but also as an adept survivor and figure of resistance features
prominently in Lü Jiamin a.k.a. Jiang Rong’s Chinese novel Wolf Totem
(2004).xi In this novel about ecological devastation and the destruction of
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indigenous culture, however, the lycophobia we observe in many European
texts exists too, but is culturally tied to the Chinese, while in Mongolian culture
the wolf is revered. The whole book is about this clash or two cultures and their
opposite perception of the wolf.
What I have observed in my mapping of the wolf as a metaphor in world
literature and cultures are the following points: a) the wolf is a metaphor that
changes over time. But in doing so it maintains a connection with the trauma of
human abandonment and abjection; this seems to be rather ubiquitous in
cultures that are sedentary; b) in indigenous, non-sedentary cultures this is very
different. Here the wolf is often exclusively glorified, a phenomenon that no
doubt results from closer observation of wolf behavior to the point that
lycanthropy becomes a positive quality, and lycophilia displaces lycophobia.
Jiang Rong’s novel is a good example, as is Ovid’s metamorphosis in David
Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), a novel about the Roman poet’s exile and
his mysterious encounter with a wolf boy, and in which Roman and barbarian
cultures are implicitly equated with European and Australian Aboriginal
cultures. And in the film Dances with Wolves, the wolf Two Socks holds a key
position of negotiation and conflict between European and indigenous culture;
c) finally, in Western cultures the wolf tends to be seen as unleashing passion,
from the aggressive sense of the berserk wolf warrior, to the threat of natives
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considered uncultured and uncivilized, to his equation with sexual passion, as
we see it in interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood.
This folktale has recently come alive again in the context of a renewed
national fear of the wolf crossing Eastern borders and attacking the occasional
sheep, or skulking around kindergardens in Lower Saxony or Mecklenburg. The
word “Problemwolf” is haunting German media, demonizing the wolf who
causes problems, who does not behave according to human rules and laws,
although given its fairytale legacy Germany should be well acquainted with
wolves who do not behave. On the other hand, culture is quick to respond to the
new presence of wolves and the fear and fascination they inspire, as is
evidenced by Nicolette Krebitz’s recent film ‘Wild,’ which shows the love
relationship between a young rebellious woman and a wolf she has encountered
in her drab neighborhood. The material is not new. In the 1970s, the British
author Angela Carter already exploited the Red Cap tale for its Freudian
subtext, showing the young woman in a sexual relationship with the predator.
This new film of the beauty and beast genre exploits the traditional metaphor of
the wolf as a catalyst for releasing the wild side in humans, especially in women
running with wolves, a side that has been repressed for as long as rationalminded communities have existed.
Since the dawn of humanity the wolf has been perceived to be the cause
of either fruition or perdition.xii In the Paleolithic Age, the search for food
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during the hunt necessitated extensive wanderings, which became even more
expansive and urgent if the food sources had dried up and the whole clan was
forced to move on in search of new hunting grounds. This nomadic hunting
lifestyle finally gave way to a more sedentary one, as the hunters and gatherers
settled down and became farmers. It is after this transition period that the fear of
the wolf overshadowed what may have been its former glory so that it became
increasingly seen as a threat to the community. Consequently, wolves had to be
killed, as they started threatening the clan and the livestock. No longer
perceived as nurturers they became associated primarily with rapaciousness.
Even today, in sedentary cultures wolves are feared more than given
credit. Where credit is given it is then often contested again, as in the case of the
reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park, which was long thought to have
contributed to the regeneration of nature. The wolves were even thought to have
changed the course of the rivers in that national park, although this has recently
been much disputed (cf. Arthur Middleton, Is the wolf a real American Hero?).
i
As David Hunt has shown the almost consistently negative perception of wolves in Western
cultures contrasts markedly with the respect Central Asian cultures have for the animal; Cf.
D. Hunt (2008) ‘The Face of the Wolf is blessed, or is it? Diverging Perceptions of the Wolf’,
Folklore, 119.3, pp. 319-34.
ii
Mircea Eliade has pointed out that in myth and ritual the wolf stands out in Germanic
culture: M. Eliade (1959) ‘Les Daces et les loups’, Numen, 6.1, pp. 15-31; specifically p. 23:
‘Si l’on tient compte de toutes les autres contexts où le loup joue un role important dans la
mythologie et les rituels des Germains (berserker, Männerbünde, loup-garous, and so on), on
peut en conclure que, si l’essentiel de ce complexe religieux semble bien indo-européen, une
solidarité plus accentuée se laisse déceler entre les Iraniens, les Thraces et les Germains.’ My
translation: If one considers all other contexts in which the wolf plays an important role in
mythology and the rituals of the Germanic tribes [berserker, Männerbünde, werewolves, and
so on] one must conclude that, although the essence of this religious complex seems to be
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Indo-European, a clearer line regarding this mythology runs between the Iranians, the
Thracians and the Germans.)
iii
D. Hunt too concludes in his research of the perception of the wolf among Eastern
European and Central Asian culture that there is a ‘correlation between the mode of life of the
people and their attitude to the wolf’ (p. 331), that the more people live outdoors the more
positive their attitude to wolves is, while a more sedentary lifestyle increases the fear of the
wolf.
iv
Lycanthropy afflicts those who believe themselves to be turning not only into wolves, but
also into other animals such as dogs (Kuanthropy), or even cows (Boanthropy); see S.
Baring-Gould (1865) The Book of Werewolves (Ireland: Nonsuch), p. 14.
v
Buxton, ‘Wolves’, p. 74.
vi
Speidel, p. 271, argues that there were also a few warrior women such as the North
American Freydis.
vii
See also M. P. Speidel (2002) ‘Berserks: A History of Indo-European ‘Mad Warriors’’,
Journal of World History 13.2, pp. 253-90, and K. R. McCone (1987) ‘Hund, Wolf und
Krieger bei den Indogermanen’, Studien zum Indogermanischen Wortschatz, ed. Wolfgang
Meid (Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck P), pp. 101-54, especially p. 106.
In Matthew 7.15 Jesus cautions: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but
inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”
viii
ix
Wolves, however, seem to be entirely unpredictable; cf. B. Holstun Lopez (1978) Of
Wolves and Men. (London, Toronto, Melbourne: Dent & Sons Ltd.), p. 4: ‘To be rigorous
about wolves – you might as well expect rigor of clouds.’
x
McIntyre has shown how the negative associations that Europeans have with the wolf,
based on tales such as Little Red Riding Hood has led to the attempt of European immigrants
to the USA to exterminate the wolf. See R. McIntyre (1995) War Against the Wolf:
America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf (Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press).
xi
Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem (London: Penguin, 2009, [first published 2004]) describes
the wolf as a model for the hunting lifestyle still customary among Mongolian nomads. For
positive images of the wolf as a hunter, warrior, and survivor in Central Asian cultures see
also D. Hunt, pp. 326-7.
xii
A. Douglas (1993) The Beast Within. Man, Myths and Werewolves (London: Orion), p. 36.
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