Thursday, January 26, 2006

Hellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underworld

Alby Stone has an interesting thesis at At the Edge entitled Hellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underworld. It goes through a series of connections starting with the appearance of dogs in many mythologies' stories of travel to the land of the dead. Stone looks at all sorts of older texts and draws some interesting conclusions about, well, hellhounds, werewolves and the Germanic Underworld.

What I found of particular interest was in the middle as Stone breaks down the various entymological theories on warg. According to this article,

This is a complex word: it is often used simply to mean 'wolf', but it also denotes an outlaw or the state of outlawry, in which case it refers to those who have committed crimes that are either unforgivable or unredeemable, and who are cast out from their communities and doomed to wander until they die. Outlaws were traditionally forest-dwellers, and could be legitimately killed.

It would be easy to assume that outlaws were called warg simply because their offences were of an especially savage kind, and that they were likened to wolves, wild, bestial, and uncivilised, as a result.


Stone then goes on to talk of how in some criminial justice systems, these outlaws were not just likened to wolves, but were literally declared to be wolves, and given all the legal protections of wolves, namely none. Fascinating stuff.

The article ends with an in-depth look at how ergotism and werewolfery are connected, what with the ergot theory being all the rage today in werewolf theory. Still, without making any judgement calls, Stone points out not only the physiological similarities, but the linguistic ones as well.

Good stuff all around, and though At the Edge is no longer published, the site has archived all their articles, a treasure-trove of mythological musings.

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