werewulf

Old English werewulf is a compound of wer (man, male person) and wulf (wolf). The word is exactly what it says: a man who is also a wolf. The wer element, from PIE *wiHrós (man), is cognate with Latin vir (man, whence 'virile') and Sanskrit vīra (hero). The same wer appears in weregild — the legal price paid to a victim's family to settle a killing in Anglo-Saxon law. The man-wolf and the man-price share a root.

Lycanthropy — the clinical term for the delusion of transforming into a wolf — comes from Greek lykánthrōpos, from lýkos (wolf) and ánthrōpos (human). Greek mythology provides the origin story: King Lycaon of Arcadia served Zeus a meal of human flesh, and Zeus punished him by transforming him into a wolf. The punishment gave the condition its name. Ovid retells the story in the Metamorphoses. The transformation is not a gift. It is always a punishment or a curse.

Werewolf trials were conducted in Europe from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, parallel to witch trials. Peter Stumpp, executed in Bedburg, Germany, in 1589, confessed under torture to being a werewolf who had killed and eaten fourteen children and two pregnant women. The confession was almost certainly extracted by torture and shaped by the interrogators' beliefs. Werewolf trials functioned like witch trials: they used supernatural explanations for real violence.

The werewolf's association with the full moon is largely a Hollywood invention. Lon Chaney Jr.'s The Wolf Man (1941) established the trope: the full moon triggers the transformation. Earlier folklore specified no particular trigger — some werewolves transformed voluntarily using a belt or salve, others were cursed to transform at random. The full moon link is less than a hundred years old. It feels ancient because film is more powerful than print.