24 The New York ReviewHowl
Marina Warner
The Werewolf in the Ancient World
by Daniel Ogden.
Oxford University Press,
261 pp., $32.95During the wild party at the center of
Petronius’s Satyricon, the host, Trimal-
chio, invites his friend Niceros, a freed
slave like himself, to tell the company
what once happened to him. Like the
best spooky storytellers, Niceros be-
gins with humdrum circumstances:
he’d fallen in love with a married
woman and one day, when his master
was conveniently absent, he set out
to join her in the countryside. How-
ever, not wanting to travel alone, he
persuades “a soldier, as brave as the
devil... to accompany me as far as the
fifth milestone.”
They leave at dawn and are walking
past the usual tombs lining the subur-
ban road when the soldier stops for a
pee against a gravestone. Niceros averts
his eyes for a little while, then, looking
up, finds that his companion has taken
off his clothes and is pissing in a circle
around them. The soldier then turns
into a wolf—“Don’t think I’m joking,”
warns the storyteller. Howling, the
animal lopes off into the woods, and
Niceros, investigating the clothes, finds
a heap of stones instead. He sets off
again and, scared, shivering, and sweat-
ing, at last reaches his lover, who tells
him that overnight a wolf has ravaged
their flocks but that they’d managed to
spear him in the neck. On his return
home, Niceros finds the soldier in bed,
with a doctor tending his neck wound.
This dinner- party turn at Trimal-
chio’s is the “only one really good,
corking story” in the classical corpus
of werewolf lore, or so declares Daniel
Ogden, author of The Werewolf in the
Ancient World—and he has quested
high and low for evidence. Moonlight,
howling, marauding, bodily transfor-
mation into and out of lupine shape,and the telltale mark branding the cul-
prit—these elements have always been
part of the lore, which has only kept
expanding since the Age of Reason.
Today werewolves are a staple of mass
entertainment, seething in the caul-
dron of story beside other grisly and
ghastly elements, including vampires,
zombies, ghouls, cannibal fiends, and
even the dementors from Harry Potter,
with whom some share several char-
acteristics—among them nocturnal
roaming, violent predation, and scav-
enging for carrion.
The werewolf fantasy and its multiple
offshoots are the subject of this learned
and often entertaining new study. The
author is a teacher of classics at the
University of Exeter, where, inciden-
tally, J. K. Rowling studied—she is ru-
mored to have based certain characters
at Hogwarts on her professors, but this
was before Ogden’s time. Still, the in-
spiration of classical monsters seems
to be holding: his earlier books include
Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the
Greek and Roman Worlds (2002) and
Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the
Classical and Early Christian Worlds
(2013).^1
The Greeks had a word for writer-
collectors of mirabilia, or wonderful,
incredible things; they were known as
“paradoxographers.” In The Werewolf
in the Ancient World Ogden shows
himself to be a keen contemporary
paradoxographer. Combining detailed
analysis of the sources with digressive
reveries, he’s aiming at “a compre-
hensive sourcebook” and has hunted
across the centuries for buried items of
lore, ranging from ancient Greek texts
to Christian commentaries on pagan
thinkers (including by Augustine andthe tenth- century nun Hrotswitha),
then on to the medieval period, with
busy digressions on Icelandic sagas,
Grimm fairy tales, and Victorian ghost
stories. In pursuit of his quarry, Ogden
investigates sorcery, shapeshifting,
initiation rites, mental derangement,
spirit projection, and shamanic night
flying, expounding with irrepressible
enthusiasm on such things as were-
wolves’ relations with ghosts, vampires,
sorcerers, and witches.
Two unusual principles underpin Og-
den’s case studies. First, he makes clear
his belief that urban myths, campfire
horror stories, and folk material in gen-
eral—even if recorded much later—
can fill in the gaps or illuminate the
elliptical and often fragmentary nar-
ratives of antiquity: “It is a maxim of
folklore studies that tale types should
be considered ancient already by the
point of their earliest attestation.”^2
Classical reports of shapeshifting into
a wolf derive from a folkloric core and
can be explored through the effloresc-
ing evidence of the belief since before
the Victorian era.
Accordingly, he can leap forward to
“The Three Snake Leaves,” one of the
Grimms’ fairy stories in Children’s and
Household Tales, show its closeness
to Marie de France’s twelfth- century
wonder tale “Bisclavret,” and loop
back to the classics to show that some
werewolves aren’t malignant but rather
wronged victims of enchantment,
like the transformed beasts in Circe’s
palace in the Odyssey. The intercon-
nection Ogden sees among classical
narratives and popular tales predom-
inantly ascribed to oral transmission
(as in the Satyricon) abolishes the
generic distinction between human-ist mythology and the fantasy genre,
and overlooks the usual chronology of
gothic narrative as a belated, decadent
expression of modernity: Bram Stok-
er’s Dracula and Stephenie Meyer’s
Edward Cullen, the 104- year- old vam-
pire hero of her Twilight series, begin
to appear to share more with classical
heroes and monsters—in their powers
of horror and, at the same time, their
sinister male glamour—than to figure
as symptoms of recent discontents.
The second motivating principle
of Ogden’s approach is no less wide-
ranging and unexpected. Writers such
as Roberto Calasso—from The Mar-
riage of Cadmus and Harmony and
its sequels to the new, posthumously
published Book of All Books (a retell-
ing the Old Testament)^3 —as well as
Neil Gaiman with Norse Mythology
and Stephen Fry with the Mythos tril-
ogy shape similar masses of conflicting
material into unitary, cogent, forward-
moving narratives, winning them cult
followings. By contrast, Ogden argues
that synthesizing storytelling is mis-
leading: it passes over pregnant details
and misses clues to meanings con-
cealed deep within the tales; a keen-
eyed reader needs to tap these seams to
yield the tale’s secrets. He takes pride
in fingering discrepancies and lacu-
nae and gives charts of variations and
differences from one surviving text to
another. He “disaggregates” (his pre-
ferred verb) the various sources and
reads them centrifugally to determine
their relevance. An earlier example
of this approach is Robert Graves’s
rich and now venerable collection The
Greek Myths, in which he proceeds
through a mythic figure’s multiple
manifestations and then, in a separate
body of notes, offers his own quixotic
interpretations.The result in The Werewolf in the An-
cient World is a thicket of dense and
demanding detail. Ogden’s omnium
gatherum is enriched with numerous
asides and notes—about screech owls
and witches (striges) and the interre-
lations between the words for “wolf”
(lykos) and “light” (lykƝ), as in Ho-
mer’s amphilykƝ: “around- light” or
twilight, the hour of the wolf. The
method carries signs of enthusiastic
lecturing, but the way Ogden endorses
one interpretation instead of another
can feel a bit arbitrary. Also, he has his
own inconsistencies: sometimes ety-
mology serves his purposes, sometimes
not. I couldn’t help thinking of John
Ruskin in Modern Painters, where, de-
fining the differences between true and
false griffins, he decrees that, in a true
griffin, this kind of claw or that kind of
beak or tail is not admissible. Ogden
similarly discriminates between true
and false werewolves.
What do we learn makes for authen-
tic werewolfishness? The origins of the
English prefix were remain “mystify-
ing and controversial,” Ogden tells us.
The word werewulf itself first appears
around 1000 CE in the Homilies ofLykaon being transformed into a wolf by Zeus; engraving after Hendrik Goltzius from a 1589 edition of Ovid’s MetamorphosesLos Angeles County Museum of Art(^2) See William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread:
A Guide to International Tales Found
in Classical Literature (Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
(^3) Translated by Tim Parks (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2021).
(^1) Ogden’s new book, The Dragon in the
West: From Ancient Myth to Modern
Legend, will be published by Oxford
University Press in January 2022.
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