Volkolak

The victim, not the monster

Western European werewolf stories are mostly about a dangerous man. Slavic ones are mostly about an unlucky one.

In the East Slavic material the volkolak is typically a person who has been transformed by somebody else — a sorcerer, acting out of malice, revenge or slighted pride. The transformed person keeps their mind, cannot speak, cannot return on their own, and is in constant danger from villagers and dogs who see only a wolf.

The fear in these stories is not of being attacked. It is of being changed, and not being recognised.

What the record does not describe

There is no monster to describe here, and that is the point worth stating plainly.

In the East Slavic accounts the transformed person is a wolf — an ordinary one. The village material collected by Ivanits (1989) gives the transformation and its undoing in detail, and gives the animal almost none: no size beyond a wolf's size, no glowing eyes, no half-human posture, no muzzle caught between shapes. What is specified is not the body but the behaviour: the wolf keeps a human mind, cannot speak, hangs about near the settlement rather than in deep forest, and may be recognised by someone who knew the person.

Where a distinguishing mark does appear, it is a remnant of the human rather than a feature of the beast — clothing or a belt left lying where the person stood, or traces of the girdle still on the animal under its coat. These details vary from telling to telling, and plenty of accounts have none of them.

What is missing is as consistent as what is present. The sources give no fixed appearance, no full moon and no intermediate stage. What they do give is a method rather than a spectacle: a belt or a cord passed over the person, a blade driven into a stump or the ground and jumped across. The change is worked by a device, and the accounts dwell on the device rather than on the body changing. The muscular man-wolf standing upright is cinema and nineteenth-century illustration, not the Slavic record — and importing it would hide the detail that actually makes the belief work. A wolf you cannot pick out of a pack is the frightening part. The hair on a neighbour's hand would be a comfort.

The wedding party

The most characteristic version is not about an individual at all.

A sorcerer is not invited to a wedding, or is insulted at it, and turns the whole party — bride, groom, guests — into wolves. They run off into the forest and may be restored years later, or never.

That motif tells you exactly what the belief is for. It is about a community's obligations: who was invited, who was slighted, and what a person with a reputation can do to a family that treated them badly. A belief whose signature story is a botched guest list is a belief about village politics.

How it is done, and undone

The methods recorded are concrete and oddly domestic:

• a belt or girdle thrown over the person, or placed for them to step through
• a knife driven into a stump, with the victim made to leap over it — removing the knife ends the spell
• a rope, a cord, a spoken formula

The remedies are similarly physical: find the knife, cut the belt, address the wolf by its human name, throw a garment over it. The transformation is treated as a device with a mechanism, not as a condition of the soul.

Compare the nahual in colonial Mexico, where the same act — a person becoming an animal — is read by the recording priest as a pact with the Devil. The Slavic material has no pact. It has a sorcerer and a trick.

The word that changed meaning

Here is the complication that trips up most popular accounts.

In the South Slavic area, vukodlak — the same word, cognate with volkolak — came to be used for a revenant: a corpse that will not stay buried. That is the category recorded elsewhere in the Slavic material as the upyr, and the two beliefs remained distinct in content while sharing a name.

So in one part of the Slavic world the word means a living person turned into a wolf, and in another it means a dead person who has come back. Writers who collect "Slavic vampire lore" by searching for the word end up with a mixture of two different things.

The chupacabra, whose name spread across the Americas within a few years of its coining, shows the same pattern: names travel further and faster than the things they were coined for.

Wolves, actually

It is worth remembering what the background to all this was.

Wolves were a genuine and constant presence in the Slavic countryside: a threat to livestock, occasionally to people, hunted and feared and watched for all winter. A belief that some of the wolves at the field's edge are transformed people is not a fantasy constructed out of nothing. It is an overlay on an animal everybody saw.

And it does something the plain animal cannot: it makes the wolf answerable. A wolf that is a cursed neighbour has a history, a cause and possibly a remedy. A wolf that is only a wolf has none of those.

Sources

Ivanits (1989) for the Russian village material; Zelenin (1916) for the categories of cursed and unclean persons; Barber (1988) for the South Slavic revenant and the overlap of terms. The wedding-party motif is widespread in the East Slavic record.

• Dmitry Zelenin, Ocherki russkoi mifologii (Studies in Russian Mythology) (1916)The study of the unclean dead that underlies the Slavic treatment of restless corpses and cursed people alike.
• Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (1989). M. E. Sharpe, Armonk NYThe Russian village material, including sorcery, cursing and the wolf transformations attributed to it.
• Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (1988). Yale University PressFor the South Slavic semantic shift in which the word for a wolf-man comes to name a revenant.