Academic literature on the topic 'Wolves – folklore'

This chapter analyses the fairy tales, folklore, and the art of oral storytelling that are all woven into the very fabric of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves. It outlines The Company of Wolves's fragmented narrative structure, which exists within the dreams of a sleeping adolescent girl that is comprised of stories told to her by her Granny. It also talks about how The Company of Wolves plays with the form of the fairy tale and its ideas regarding initiation, redemption, and personal and social progress in order to explore the changes and uncertainties of growing up. This chapter explores Jordan and Carter's process of demythologising culturally constructed notions of gender and identity by retelling the very fairy tales that helped establish such notions. It examines the role played by fairy tales in conditioning communities, and how certain tales were repurposed through literary adaptations to educate and instruct different types of audiences.

Chapter 1 discusses the theme of cultural xenophobia common to the earliest werewolf movies. It begins with an exploration of three silent films, all of which were inspired by Native American rather than European folklore. Using detailed plot synopses for lost films, it argues that these narratives use werewolves to demonise America's indigenous peoples. It then discusses the earliest werewolf film of the sound period, Werewolf of London (1935), in the context of the ‘yellow peril’ and suggests that it is symptomatic of Western fears surrounding immigration in the 1930s. Finally, it considers Universal’s ‘Wolf Man’ films as products of World War II and posits that they collectively form a wartime horror story in which a tragic all-American werewolf is forced to do battle with monsters of European origin.

This chapter discusses the stories and myths regarding humans turning into wolves that have fascinated and terrified people for millennia and continue to speak of an elementary aspect of the collective human consciousness. It talks about the common perception of the werewolf that derives from its myriad representations in folklore, literature, and cinema. It also mentions The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould and Werwolves by Elliott O'Donnell in reference to the occurrence of lycanthropy that is invoked as the result of a curse, or through the practice of diabolical occult rituals. This chapter mentions the most widespread ideas of lycanthropy that and originate from Hollywood cinema. It mentions historical anthropologist and witchcraft scholar Willem de Blécourt from Werewolf Histories, who references antiquated tales from Estonia and Russia concerning women who unwittingly marry werewolves.

The articles discusses the material relating to werewolves collected from the island of Saaremaa that is stored at the Estonian Folklore Archives. It is presumed that belief in werewolves persisted longer on Saaremaa than in many other Estonian regions. Interpretations are offered to the werewolf legends. For this purpose, historical background data and information on the significance of wolves in the mental world of the Estonian peasant is introduced. Werewolf legends represent alternative strategies of coping with difficulties (the danger of famine, tension between genders and social classes) that defied existing social norms. As relatively many tales of female werewolves have been collected from Saaremaa, they are given special attention. The popularity of female werewolves on Saaremaa, and in Estonia, can be connected with the strong status of women among the Estonian and Livonian peasants and with the hypothesis of the matrilineality of these societies in prehistoric times.

Geologists learned of the existence of the 33-metre-long Allikukivi Cave in the Devonian sandstone of south western Estonia only in 1961, when during excavation work a more than 7-metre-deep void opened under an excavator. Estonian lore of caves and cave systems describes them as starting points of underground passageways. They have been considered places of refuge during times of war and plague, sites of hidden treasure, and the dwelling places of nature giants. In describing the development story of this particular cave, geologists have used archival pieces from the Estonian Literary Museum’s Folklore Archives and reference material from earlier printed sources. The case study focuses on observing the geological phenomenon as a folklore- and landscape-related whole. There appear to be two different layers of tradition: one of them vanishing, the other vigorous. The episodes of the first contaminated text that reached the archives in 1890 feature spirits who come out of the opening near the spring. What follows is a legend of a giant that contains the motif of throwing a stone at a church. The connection with legends of giants dwelling in caves is manifested weakly and the text is fragmentary and vague showing the characteristics of departing from tradition. These features corroborate the geologists’ opinion that the cave in question may have been open in the past, but also suggests that when the cave closed in (or was deliberately shut because of the danger it presented) the legend gradually faded. The second plot then became predominant. The landscape components of the later folklore layer consist in three large openings on a hill (in a geological sense, three sinkholes in Devonian sandstone that appear when an underground hole caves in) and a spring that is connected to them (the holes appeared because water eroded the sandstone). The holes remain as the traces of buildings that sank underground due to the breaking of ethical norms that occurred when a beggar who turned up at a wedding was not allowed to stay for the night; in some versions the motif of the wedding guests turning into wolves is added (Aa 86, Aa 87 and Aa 73 in Antti Aarne’s 1918 catalogue of legends). Even if the cave is mentioned, it is not linked with the plot of the legend. However, important status is given to the spring that is created simultaneously to the building sinking into the ground, with the spring water turned into spirits. In 1961 Allikukivi Cave was taken under protection and its entrance was supported. The cave became a tourism object and the legend of the house sinking underground was activated. This is a good example of the revival of folklore in connection with tourist services. Today, the special focus of this popular tourism object is on all three landscape elements: the cave, a nearby sinkhole with a diameter of around seven metres, and the spring, which comes to the surface 15 m away. The discovery of the cave has introduced no new motifs to the plot of the legend, but in guided tours it has become customary practice to tell the legend of the wedding house, accompanied by the evidence in the landscape.