Does a dead werewolf become a vampire?

[j d worthington]

In "The Tomb of Sarah" by F. G. Loring (first published 1900), the vampire first manifests as a werewolf, before she gets enough of her strength back to resume human form.

Thanks! Where did you come across this, and is it currently available; if so, where?

 

[Nesacat]

Would like to get a copy of it too Teresa ... if it is currently available.

Have read the Lovecraft tale you mention j.d. ... it does seem as if this theme runs through the older tales and not the newer ones.

The Frost collection did have another interesting tale calle Eena of a wolf that turns into a woman when the moon is full.

I would really love to read any proper folk lore on this werewolf into vampire theory though if any come up and I'll post here any that I do find.

 

[j d worthington]

The Frost collection did have another interesting tale calle Eena of a wolf that turns into a woman when the moon is full.

I would really love to read any proper folk lore on this werewolf into vampire theory though if any come up and I'll post here any that I do find.

I would appreciate it. Also, if you don't mind giving the title, editor, and publisher of the book that started this, I'd like to look into it. At very least, it sounds like a book I'd very much like. And if "Eena" is not in this one, could you tell me where you read it? And again, thanks for calling this to our attention.

 

[Nesacat]

The book is edited by Brian J Frost and is entitled Book of the Werewolf. Mine's the 1973 edition. Published by Sphere (London).

Eena is part of the same collection.

here's some of what's online ... but none of them gives proper references ... quite frustrating

http://www.arkanefx.com/unpred/were/trans.html
Werewolf and vampire / undead lore become inseparably intertwined in places, a topic more fully covered in vampires. Slav and Greek werewolves were damned to return as vampires after their deaths, and in Normandy a damned person would first eat the winding sheet which covered his face, and then rise. The grave would heave and moan, and amid a foul smell and a phosphorescent glow the undead would take away as a wolf. Again, the role of the wolf as grave-robbing carrion eater appears.


http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=D588183&entry=10270
Werewolves and Vampires
In Slavic lore, the werewolf is closely related to the vampire; the name of the Serbo-Croatian Vukodlak vampire means "wolf's hair." Vlokoslak, a Serbian term, and Vyrkolaka, a Greek term, are among the names applied to either a vampire or a werewolf. Many European superstitions about vampires hold that they can shape-shift into various animal forms beside wolves.

In Greek and Serbian lore, werewolves are doomed to become vampires after death.

http://www.playspoon.com/twi/history.html
And what happens when a werewolf dies? Easy: he becomes either a lubin (a French word for wolf shaped ghoul, living on corpses he digs in graveyards) or a vampire. Such fear was so great that special laws were approved to deal with suspected dead werewolves : in Germany and Serbia their corpses were burnt and in Normandy the priests oversaw the beheading of the dead suspects.

 

[j d worthington]

Thanks. I'm going to have to see if I can track down a copy of that.

In connection with the Norman belief, I quote the following:

"It is an opinion which prevails much in Germany, that there are corpses which chew in their graves, and devour whatever lies near them. Some go so far as to say, they may be heard munching, like hogs, with a sort of grunting, grumbling noise.

"A German writer, named Michael Raufft, has writ a treatise upon this subject, which he entitles, De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis. He supposes it to be a certain fact, that dead corpses have devoured their linnen, and whatever else was within reach of their mouths, and that some have even eat their own flesh from their bones. He observes that it is a custom in some parts of Germany to prevent this practice by putting a lump of earth under the chin of the corpse, and that in other places they make use of a piece of money, or a stone, for this purpose, or tie the throat close with a handkerchief. He quotes several German authors that mention this ridiculous custom, and makes extracts from several others, who speak of corpses that have devoured their own flesh in the grave. This work was printed at Leipsick in 1728; and the author frequently refers to another writer, named Philip Rehrius, who published a treatise in 1679, with the same title, De Masticatione mortuorum. To the facts he has collected, he might have added the story of Henry Count of Salm, who, being thought dead, was really buried alive. The night after, a great cry was heard in the church of the abbey of Haute-Seille, where he was buried; and his grave being opened the next morning, he was found with his face downwards, instead of lying upon his back, as he had been buried.

"A few years since, a man being buried in the churchyard at Bar-le-duc, there was a noise heard in the grave; and the next day the man, being dug up, was found to have eat the flesh off his arms. This I had from several eye-witnesses. The man, it seems, was stupefied by drinking a great quantity of brandy, and was taken for dead. Raufft mentions a woman of Bohemia, in the year 1345, who devoured half of her burying-linnen. In Luther's time, there was a man and woman, that eat their own bowels in their graves; and in Moravia, a man devoured the linnen belonging to a woman that lay in the next grave."

This is from the Dissertation upon the Apparitions of Angels, Daemons, and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, by the Reverend Father Dom Augustin Calmet, a Benedictine Monk, and Abbot of Senones in Lorraine, as cited by William Scott Home in his article on "The Lovecraft 'Books': Some Addenda and Corrigenda". I've heard something similar several years ago in a documentary on premature burial; apparently it's a fairly widespread belief, or was (may still be, in some areas, for all I know).

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I came across "The Tomb of Sarah" in an elderly tome of vampire tales I checked out of the library: The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories, edited by Lucius Shepard. It was published in 1977, so I doubt it is readily available, but of course the Loring story may have been collected elsewhere.

Edit: I just found it here online http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/loring.html Although they cite an earlier date for first publication than the anthology does.

 

[j d worthington]

Thanks, Teresa. I recall seeing that one around several years ago, but didn't pick it up, as I had the majority of stories in there. I'll have to see if I can't locate it.

 

[j d worthington]

Read "The Tomb of Sarah" -- quite nice; thanks again for bringing it to my attention. I would argue, however, that Sarah wasn't truly "dead", as she had been strangled, not staked or beheaded; what kept her in the tomb was that mortar or paste laced with the Host, I think. Nonetheless, yes, there's a strong connection between werewolves and vampires, but I think it may, in this case (and Dracula) be the other way around: vampires can become wolves at will (or need).

 

[Nesacat]

Read Tomb of Sarah online and it was odd to find a vampire that had not been staked or beheaded and the 'host' being used in the mortar. I thought that was quite an interesting idea. That the host would be able to hold a vampire across all those centuries. And the dog roses. Didn't know that vampires were averse to those either.

It would seem that in this case the wolf was a form, she as a vampire could assume and that she was not really a were-wolf. Dracula could assume the form of a wolf as well and he got off the ship in that form. Quite similar to Sarah in the sense that he too would have been weakened by the long voyage. It would appear to be an easier form to assume to maintain.

 

[j d worthington]

Hi, Nesa -- I read your pm before seeing you'd already read my previous post... Yes, I'm not quite sure I'd consider this as a werewolf either, though it's certainly close enough to qualify unless one applies a rather stringent classificaiton (hello, Chris!), which, being the stick-in-the-mud pedant I often am, I tend to do.... Perhaps the wolf form is easier to maintain because, symbolically, it's closer to the animal nature within the human? I realize this is more of a psychological idea, but that does seem to be a thread running through much early religious thought; that those who allow their baser nature to predominate tended to show it in changes in their physiognomy; perhaps the same was true of a vampire? It's a curious thought, anyway. As for the "dog roses" -- I've run across that now and again ... I'd have to drag out the story to make certain, but I seem to remember that has a part to play in either F. Marion Crawford's "For the Blood is the Life" or E. F. Benson's "Mrs. Amworth"; I'll try to get around to reading the rest of this Dracula Book in the next week or so, and see if my memory's playing tricks again. If I find any other references to this, I'll let you know. My copy of the werewolf book should get here in the next few weeks (it's coming form the UK) -- so I'll let you know my impressions on that as well. Thanks to both of you for the recommendations!

 

[Philip Harris]

Can't see it happening! The Dogs of Isis and Vie pyres are opposite sides of the same coin. Can't see how one could become the other. They would have to trade places. Like yin becoming yang and vice versa.

 

[steve12553]

Can't see it happening! The Dogs of Isis and Vie pyres are opposite sides of the same coin. Can't see how one could become the other. They would have to trade places. Like yin becoming yang and vice versa.

But isn't that what it's all about. Transformations. Yin becomes yang. Man becomes wolf. Wolf becomes bat. Fantasy does have rules but aren't they evershifting transient things.

 

[j d worthington]

And, despite the scepticism in my early posts on this, the evidence seems to be mounting up that this really is well-grounded in authentic folklore and older, more traditional stories. And here I thought I knew this subject so well.... I love learning new stuff! (even if it's actually old and I was just unaware of it)

 

[Philip Harris]

Another question to consider is weather or not any such transformation is voluntary.

 

[j d worthington]

In the stories I've been coming across lately, it varies. Some have yes, some no. "The Werewolf of Ponkert" I'd class as a no.

 

[Jodi]

Have to say I have heard of this somewhere before - but I can't remember where. It wasn't in Frost's book so obviously its not a completely new idea

 

[creslin_black]

I think I read something about a Medieval belief in that sort of thing. Needless to say, it's just one more example of Medieval imagination at work.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

These beliefs are actually quite rational, IF you proceed from the same set of basic assumptions they did.

And once you accepted that a man could transform himself into a wolf, or a dead man rise from the grave, it wouldn't be a big leap to assume that the werewolf becomes a vampire after he dies.

Particularly if you considered the similarities.

 

[j d worthington]

And, as we've seen from both medical and historical research (as well as the blending of the two in pharmacopaleontology and archaeology), there were actually good reasons for believing in many of these things; diseases that we didn't begin to understand until many, many centuries later (vampires date back to at least ancient Babylon, and werewolves to probably roughly the same period, though I think the earliest recorded is around Roman times). Hyperpilosity, certain aspects of porfiria, various types of catalepsy, certain poisons that tend to make it difficult to tell someone's still alive without modern techniques, etc., can easily explain many of the origins of the belief in the beings themselves; the various surrounding tropes are a bit more ambiguous, but many of them we've grown up on are Hollywood material, and not based in traditional folk beliefs. So it wasn't so much medieval imagination (as said, these date back much, much further) as it was the lack of knowledge of physics and anatomy and medicine, biology, things that we've only begun to understand within the last 2-3 centuries (remember how recently it became legal to use cadavers for medical schools, once Christianity became the rule with its taboos against mutilating the dead -- or burning, for that matter, thus preventing "bodily resurrection"; much of what the Greeks and Romans had learned about anatomy had been lost during those intervening ages, kept locked away with so much other knowledge in monasteries that at least preserved the knowledge, even if they didn't always add to it -- though sometimes they did). It was knowledge, not imagination per se, but it was knowledge based in a different understanding of the rules of the universe, one they simply could not possibly have known with the tools at their disposal.

 

[creslin_black]

Well said.