Author: Aleksander Pluskowski
Publisher: Boydell Press (www.boydellandbrewer.com)
Price: £45
Isbn: 978184383262

One of the set-pieces in Charles Fort’s Lo! is the sheer panic caused in the north of England in 1904 by the escape of a wolf from captivity (FT192:40–42). Such was the fear of predation – of children as well as livestock – that a national cry went up for big game hunters to assist the official and unofficial searches. To Fort, this wolf scare provided a model of the evolution of ‘mass hysteria’ outbreaks that was applicable to a range of social panics. In this case, shortly after the escape, local papers began reporting sheep predations. When the hunts organised by anxious farmers failed, the London newspapers took an interest and publicised the request for big game hunters. Despite their self-promotion, none of the hunters shot any wolves and in the end the flap of sightings died down. Then a wolf is shot, miles away, and the scare is publicly declared to be over… but the attacks continue. The story only fades because the newspapers lose interest and wind down their reportage, much as media interest in crop-circles died after the ‘confessions’ of Doug and Dave in the 1990s.

	The wolf was a metaphor for greed and cruelty but had a humorous role as a trickster in fables

To the mediæval Christians, the wolf was commonly used as a metaphor for greed and cruelty. Fables about the wolf disguised as a monk became a satirical vehicle for the growing discontent with oppression by corrupt lords and clerics. In particular, the ballads credited to Marie de France became popular in the courtly world of the 12th century, spreading across Europe. Paradoxically, mediæval lore also included a “good wolf” (for example, the one that guarded the head of the martyred St Edmund) and a more instructive and humorous role as a trickster in fables.

Today, according to Pluskowski, the wolf is widely used as “an iconic symbol of the intense fear and insecurity that some associate with the Middle Ages”. It was conceived of as “a monstrous predator, perpetually in search of victims, its behaviour ranging from quiet seduction to frenzied slaughter”. On the other hand, for conservationists, the wolf is a relatively passive force in the environment. To a great extent, the wolf has suffered from a bad press. England’s 1904 scare was largely escalated by reporters from the London newspapers who depicted the “beast” as “ravaging” the countryside, “slaughtering” and “mutilating” sheep. Each age has responded to the wolf, argues Pluskowski, according to its own needs, and in most cases “it was the human response which was irrational and excessive.”

Our modern conception of the wolf closely identifies it with the folkloric Wildwood, both serving as enduring metaphors for raw, untamed nature and its monstrous inhabitants. We have a familiar picture of the mediæval peasant cowering in his shack, while outside the hungry wolf prowls. The wolf was a stand-in for “the Devil in the woods” – unconscious expression, perhaps, of the great paranoia of the times, that Christian civilisation itself was under siege on every front by the minions of Satan. This was expressed earlier, and more poetically, in the Odinist cosmology; here, the great wolf Fenris – the feral force of Ragnarok – is destructive to man and god. Disrupting all order, he is Chaos incarnate.

However, Pluskowski’s treatment mixes that of an academic historian with that of a folklorist, delivering the expected detailed analysis, abstruse terms and acreage of footnotes.

While the scope of the work is wide, its main focus is on Britain and Scandinavia, contrasting their “distribution of wolves in the landscape, their potential impact as predators on both animals and people, and their use as commodities, in literature, art, cosmology and identity.” It also compares the drive to exterminate wolves in England with their continued survival in Scandinavia.

The wolf was, in reality, more to be found in farmlands, in the borderland between the Wildwood and the villages. The dry factual chapters act as an antidote to the mounting lupine angst as Pluskowski points out that the routines “of tracking, hunting, trapping, butchering the carcass and preparing the skin, fur or even meat,” demystified much of the terror of the beast, as can be demonstrated in areas such as rural Poland, where cultural knowledge of wolves is clearly distinct from practical experience of countryfolk. Of particular interest are the closing chapters which touch on wolf-related names, she-wolves raising foundlings and the wolf in Nordic religion, and offer a good analysis of that extreme expression of wolfishness, the werewolf.

There’s a wonderful line in the 1984 movie The Company of Wolves (based on an Angela Carter story) in which granny warns the pubescent girl about wolfish men being “hairy on the inside”. It is easy to see how the wolf became identified with man’s ‘rapacious’ aspect: the berserker warrior, the outlaw (“wolf’s head”) and the sociopathic killer.

Pluskowski weaves a story that enchants – as well it might, drawing on material that ranges from nursery rhymes and legend to modern computer games and the cinema, through cosmology and religious iconography. His passion makes even the minutiæ enjoyable. Through these pages the vital wolf-essence bounds across the landscapes of stone, tapestry, vellum, metal and mortal imagination.