The Book of Werewolves [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION First published in 1865, Sabine Baring-Gould's classic study of werewolves is a revelation on the subject, being written at a time when werewolves were still taken very seriously in the wilder corners of Europe and, indeed, most other parts of the world. Since then, werewolves have retreated into fiction and famously into films where, along with vampires, they have become purveyors of macabre entertairmient. But what this book demonstrates is that the werewolf was once the object of very real terror. And with good reason. The spark of this study was Baring-Gould's close encounter in the remote French countryside with, if not quite the creature itself, a first-hand and very solid belief in its existence. (He describes this belief in an opening worthy of a Gothic novel.) This led him to wonder about the roots of the belief and thus to an investigation which trawls an enormous range of sources dating from antiquity up to the nineteenth century, skipping lightly firom Norse saga to African and American folktales. The author's own position is robustly modern, couched though it is in the leisurely and polished language of his day. The viewpoint to which he V