The Animals That Therefore We Are

"The mortal envelope of the Middle Age has disappeared, but the essential remains. Because the temporal disguise has fallen, the dupes of history and of its dates say that the Middle Age is dead. Does one die for changing his shirt?"
– Jules Barbey D’Aurvilley

“Between the coronavirus and the wolf, I have the impression that we are in the Middle Ages.”
– Eric Battement, Marie de Mesnil-Follemprise.

In April 2020, as a global pandemic raged, in a village in Seine Maritime an automatic surveillance camera picked up a slinking predatory shape: a grey wolf, the first to be seen in Normandy for over a century. By May four sheep and a lamb had been slaughtered in the village of Mesnil-Follemprise, near Dieppe. The bafflement of Mesnil’s mayor, in the face of plagues and predators, his feeling that the Middle Ages had come again, is at odds with local author Jules Barbey D’Aurvilley’s assertion that it never left. Something of the Middle Ages remains in this part of Normandy, subtle but detectable, like the resonance after the first peal of a bell. An echo.

Until the nineteenth century France had one of the biggest wild wolf populations in Europe yet, even before they were hunted to the point of extinction in France, the Basse-Normandie region was historically untroubled by wolves. But still, that echo. The region developed its own wolf lore, one which responded less to the real and present threat posed by wolves (as in regions such as Burgundy, the Auvergne and the Pay de la Loire)[1] and more to Normandy’s Viking inheritance.

Packs of wolves roam the Norse Sagas, both real and mythical. Carelessly appropriated wolfskins which turn their wearers into wolves whose wolfishness remains even after the skins have been discarded. When Vikings settled in Normandy they brough those stories with them, along with their own wolfish reputation; contemporary accounts of Viking raids refer to their perpetrators as descending on villages and monasteries as ravenous packs, slaughtering monks and cattle alike.[2] And in the stories that get told here, it’s possible to detect a fear, not of the wolf itself, but of becoming a wolf, of going or being placed so far beyond the pale of humanity you can never come back. In Danish the word for wolf and the word for exile are the same: vagr.[3]

Amélie Bosquet describes such an exile as ‘not so much the individual insurgent against society, but that man chased by ruthless enemies, man in a struggle with a harsh and stout nature, an isolated man in the grip of terror.’ Such a description speaks also to the men accused of being werewolves – Loup Garou. Werewolf trials in France, as in many other parts of Europe in the sixteen hundreds, were often precursors to witch trials.[4] While, theologically, lycanthropy had been dismissed as a phenomenon by the Church by 1672, the law of the time made it possible to accuse, try and execute a person for the crime of voluntarily turning into animals, including wolves, by means of witchcraft. Yet if cruelty and sadism of the witch trials facilitated by the Parliament of Rouen understood the collapsing of the categories of wolf and man as evidence of diabolical affiliations, the folkloric construction of the Loup Garou in the Basse-Normandie region is not punitive but pitiful. [5]

The earth above the grave of one recently dead begins to shift and move. Plaintive howls are heard from beneath the soil, and the sound of tearing shrouds. At night phosphorescent lights are seen dancing above the bier. Here lies one who has died unshriven, died damned, and their eternal torment has already begun.[6] Shortly they will return, hauling themselves out of the grave, having devoured their own winding sheets. The priest is prepared. He has observed the signs. A new spade, sharpened. Then the exhumation, the beheading. All the while, the sources report, the priest must combat demons in the shape of dogs, who manifest to hamper the priest’s work and to greet their new companion. Yet this figure is not the preternatural predator or sorcerer found in the records of other regions of France. This Loup Garou fails to devour children, slake his thirst on blood like the vampires of Central Europe. He is, instead, pitiable: ‘condemned by virtue of moral or legal outrages, to suffer a terrible punishment. [. . .] They suffer their punishment alone, exiled from their fellow men.’

We are safe for now of course. The Loup Garou of Basse-Normandie keep very particular timetables, only roaming abroad between Advent and Candlemas, where, as a Bessin proverb has it, the other animals who have gathered to kneel in respect, are stricken with horror:

Au Chandeleur toutes les bêtes sont dans l’horreur.

While stories of werewolves can be found in the folk histories of all French regions, Manche, and Basse-Normandie more broadly, possesses an adjacent figure; the ‘varou’ – a werewolf who can also turn himself into other nocturnal creatures. What is fascinating about the varou beliefs that are found here is both how recently they were current and how responsive they were to the changing ecology of Basse Normandie. Once wolves became increasingly rare, and then extinct here, a varou becomes not simply one who has or can turn into a wolf, but a being able to transform into any animal at will. The varou became cats, dogs, horses, birds: things you might encounter on any night-time walk. Discussing the regional specificity of the varou, Bosquet points out that, unlike in the dictionaries and glossaries of the Haute-Normandie region, where the term is rarely if ever referred to and is generally found by its more dialectical version ‘Garou’, the dictionaries of this region not only translate the term ‘varou’ but provide historical comment upon it. In the pages of these books the echo of a howl is diminishing, telling of the significance of this liminal figure, in a land with no wolves.

In 1952, the Regional Ethnography Laboratory interviewed Basse-Normandie residents about the varou. Once the ‘denials and smiles’ of the informants died away, accounts began to emerge, dating as late as the 1940s of varou of various kinds in this area. A sorcerer who could turn into an enormous ash-coloured grey hound. An uncle who lived at Ainsy who could turn into a raven in order to cause mischief. His father, who could turn himself into an owl.

Three nights after we arrive, just after sunset, I am finishing some chores in the potager when I become aware of a howling. It is choral, it is every dog in this village and the next village, it is coming on the cold still air and as I stand more and more voices join it. A wash of adrenaline comes and I hold my breath trying to hear what it is the animals are hearing, listening at the edge of my senses in the pooling dark. Nothing comes. What is out there in the night, provoking this plaintive chorus is unavailable to me, and it remains incomprehensible and frightening as I make my way back into the farmhouse. On Mont Doville, high above the farm, the ravens are roosting and the barn has emptied of owls, already out seeking whom they may devour.

[1] See Jean-Marc Moriceau, ‘The Wolf Threat in France from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century’ (2014).

[2] When Marie de France wrote her poem Bisclavret, ‘The Werewolf’, about a Norman Baron who possesses the ability to turn himself into a wolf at will, she makes a pointed comparison. I see you, the text seems to say, I know you are still all wolves.

[3] I wonder idly if this is the root of the English word ‘vagrant’, the lone wanderer whose shaggy pelt is now present only in his etymology.

[4] This is certainly true of Normandy. While werewolf trials were recorded in other parts of France, the records for the Parliament of Rouen, however fond they were of trying and executing apparent witches, give no accounts of men accused of being werewolves being tried there.

[5] Bosquet goes further in her account, somewhat wryly suggesting that the werewolves of the Basse Normandie region were a more genteel class of monster altogether, stating: ‘the werewolves of our province have always had their nails clipped by the beautiful sex, and, what deserves them more praise, none of them has seriously identified with the abominable extravagances of true lycanthropes.’

[6] Various sources attest that the magnitude of one’s transgression, in order to be condemned to return as a werewolf, one must have been excommunicated up to seven times, or sold one’s soul to Satan, which as we all know, rarely ends profitably.

[7] For more on this subject see Amélie Bosquet, La Normandie Romanesque et Merveilleuse, ‘Loup Garou’ (J. Techener & A. Le Brument, 1845) (pp. 223-43) and M. Moricet, ‘Le Varou’, Annales de Normandie (1952) pp. 73-82.