Werewolves

The wolf as symbol of European anxieties

On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last, having cut a horseshoe loop through Austria, he crosses into Italy and stops in the picturesque Alpine plateau of Lessinia. More than a decade later, Adam Weymouth follows in the same wolf’s padded footsteps. For Slavc, this is a journey into a landscape of confusing novelties, full of motorways and noise and anti-wolf country folk.

Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers

I have to be honest: I’ve never been much concerned with what happened in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387. I suspect that may even be true for many Lithuanians. In Silence of the Gods, Francis Young pinpoints this year – of the conversion of the duchy to Christianity – as the official triumph of Christianity in Europe over paganism and idolatry. But he then goes on to examine the debris – and the survivors of paganism and their traditions in the northern regions of Europe. The first difficulty is defining and identifying paganism. The book is published by Cambridge University Press, so there is an unmistakably academic, seminar-ready,