Werewolves Love Beer and Flesh

Heya readers, remember a while back when I wrote about the crazy bishop Olaus Magnus? He was one of many men from the 1500s that considered themselves experts on the supernatural. Well, good news (sorta) I dug up even more of Olaus Magnus’ thoughts on werewolves, and they’re just as strange as his other theories and “facts.”

“In Prussia, Livonia, and Lithuania, although the inhabitants suffer considerably from the rapacity of wolves throughout the year, in that these animals rend their cattle, which are scattered in great numbers through the woods, whenever they stray in the very least, yet this is not regarded by them as such a serious matter as what they endure from men turned into wolves.

On the feast of the Nativity of Christ, at night, such a multitude of wolves transformed from men gather together in a certain spot, arranged among themselves, and then spread to rage with wondrous ferocity against human beings, and those animals which are not wild, that the natives of these regions suffer more detriment from these, than they do from true and natural wolves; for when a human habitation has been detected by them isolated in the woods, they besiege it with atrocity, striving to break in the doors, and in the event of their doing so, they devour all the human beings, and every animal which is found within. They burst into the beer-cellars, and there they empty the tuns of beer or mead, and pile up the empty casks one above another in the middle of the cellar, thus showing their difference from natural and genuine wolves.”

In my last post on Olaus Magnus I mentioned this next part, but here it is in his own words:

“Between Lithuania, Livonia, and Courland are the walls of a certain old ruined castle. At this spot congregate thousands, on a fixed occasion, and try their agility in jumping. Those who are unable to bound over the wall, as; is often the case with the fattest, are fallen upon with scourges by the captains and slain.”

So according to Olaus Magnus, a man from the Middle Ages, werewolves ate humans and loved beer. Yummy.

– Moonlight