by Barry Lopez
Natural history can be said to have begun formally with Aristotle. He wrote with some accuracy about wolves, in his Historia animalium, giving the period of gestation as from fifty-nine to sixty-three days, noting that
THE WOLF DISEASE
Seventeenth-century Europeans commonly referred to a lump that might announce breast cancer as a wolf. They similarly called open sores and knobs on their legs (and on the legs of their animals) wolves. In nineteenth-century medicine a type of general skin disorder characterized by ulcerative lesions and tubercules was called lupus vulgaris, the common wolf. A related disorder was lupus erythematosus unquium mutilans, literally “the mutilated red talons of the wolf,” a disease that attacks the hands and so disfigures the skin and nails that they look like the paws of a wolf. The notion is medieval and the hint of werewolves is hardly concealed. Today, systemic lupus erythematosus is recognized as one of the most puzzling disorders in medicine. An autoimmune or connective tissue disease like rheumatoid arthritis, its cause is unknown. The body simply produces antibodies that continue to attack healthy tissues. Eight out of ten victims are women, mostly in their child-bearing years. It remains incurable.
females came into heat but once a year, that the pups were born blind, and that the wolves of Arabia were smaller than European wolves. He showed open skepticism about folklore as a basis for scientific fact, being very much in favor of personal observation. This is not to say he never passed on fancy for fact. Later in the same volume he writes, “The fleeces and wool of sheep that have been killed by wolves, as also the clothes made from them, are exceptionally infested with lice.”
The scientific tradition of Aristotle was carried on by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, in his Historia naturalis, and later by Solinus in his Collectanea rerum memorabilium, or Polyhistor, which repeats much of Pliny and Aristotle. And there, except for the redundant work of the encyclopedists—Aelian in the second century, Isidore in the seventh, Neckham in the twelfth, Bartholomew in the thirteenth—scientific interest in the lives of animals ends. Four hundred years after Aristotle, Plutarch was writing: “Wolves give birth to their young when acorn-bearing trees shed their blossoms because, when she-wolves eat these blossoms, their wombs are opened. When the blossoms are not available, the embryo dies in their body and cannot be expelled; for that reason those regions where there are no oaks or mast-trees cannot be troubled by wolves.”
What replaced science was the folklore of the Physiologus, which, by the twelfth century, had expanded into the better known “bestiary.”
The first Physiologus—the word is Greek for “the naturalist”—may have appeared in Syria in the fourth century B.C., but it does not turn up in the Western world for another five hundred years. A collection of popular stories about animals, plants, and gem stones, it is likely the product of many authors representing an amalgamation of the oral literature of the ancient world. Unlike Aristotle’s contemporary Historia animalium, it made no pretense to scientific objectivity. Its authors were more intrigued by folklore, myth, and mysticism. The Physiologus was a book of wide popular appeal, probably as well known as Aesop, with which it soon came to share common features. Because of its popularity, it became an appropriate vehicle for didactic instruction. By the second and third centuries the stories in the Physiologus were being restructured to reflect Christian morals and world view. What was once entertaining pseudoscience had now become moral allegory.
Twelfth-century bestiary, from England.
This should not be construed so much as conscious plot on the part of the Church as a reflection of the intellectual climate of the times. Florence McCulloch, in a history of medieval Latin and French bestiaries, writes: “A characteristic of scholarship at this period was its preference for allegorical exegesis of the Scriptures and in like manner nature was interpreted mystically. Creatures of nature were to be explored for what they revealed of the hidden power and wisdom of God.” Accordingly, the Physiologus that began to appear at this time soon incorporated Scripture and moral lessons into its format.
It is important to understand that most men of learning did not take the contents of the Physiologus for science. As McCulloch points out, “Illustrations used by the Church Fathers to render subtle theological concepts more intelligible and vivid to the unlettered people [cannot] be presumed to prove that medieval man actually believed such examples as were perpetuated in the Physiologus and later the bestiary.”
The Physiologus did not come into its own until the seventh century, when it was expanded to include the work of Isidore of Seville, a Spanish bishop and encyclopedist. Isidore’s Etymologiae was an attempt to set down all the knowledge of man in twenty books, the twelfth of which, De animalibus, was the source for material for a new Physiologus. Isidore’s work is derivative. He borrowed heavily from Pliny and Solinus, and in some places drew ludicrous conclusions or passed on, unquestioning, the ignorance of those he drew from. But this is, nevertheless, one of the most important works from the early Middle Ages. (Of the wolf he tells us, erroneously, that the word lupus is derived from two words, leo, “lion,” and pes, “foot,” and means “lion-footed.”)
By the ninth century the excessively nonsecular character of the Physiologus begins to show a secular influence, with the inclusion of chapters without Scripture or morals; but it is still the anonymous authors’ intent to show that the natural world is but a reflection of the moral order of God’s universe. By the twelfth century the Physiologus includes fanciful chapters on the dragon, the basilisk, the manticore, and the centaur, and is richly illustrated and widely enjoyed.
With natural curiosity about animals in a state of suspension and the natural world itself valuable only for the practical use to which it could be put, it is not Canis lupus we find in these bestiaries but the unabashed imagination of the times. The wolf does not appear in the earliest Physiologi; he does not show up consistently, in fact, until some time in the seventh century. After that we find a record in the section on wolves of most of the superstition that had come down from the time of the Greeks.
A thirteenth-century bestiary from the library of the monastery of Saint Victor in Paris, for example, tells (in the twentieth chapter of its second book, De luporum natura) of the association between wolves and light. The bestiarist also says it is appropriate that the Latin words for whore (lupa) and female wolf (lupa) should be the same, because both “plunder a man’s goods.” In the same bestiary the author cites Solinus as an authority for asserting that there is a tuft of hair on the wolf’s tail with the power of an aphrodisiac, which the wolf bites off if capture is imminent.
The wolf of the Physiologi and the bestiaries could strike a man dumb with his gaze, though if the man saw the wolf first he could put the wolf to flight. (The Malleus Maleficarum, written by two Franciscans as philosophical underpinning for the excesses of the Inquisition, says that the sorcerer can bewitch “by a mere look or glance from the eyes.” This and the above, I suspect, explains the origin of the French idiom elle a vu le loup, “She’s seen the wolf,” meaning she’s lost her virginity.) A common illustration in these books was that of a man standing on his shirt and clacking two rocks together, a method offered for curing dumbness. The wolf of the bestiary was reputed to have only one cervical vertebra; thus he was unable to turn his head and look behind him. Some said the backbone was so stiff that a wolf taken by the tail could be held under water, stiff as a board, until drowned. Aristotle and Pliny are cited as authorities here and, to be sure, both say the wolf has only one, not seven, cervical vertebrae.
The wolf was also thought to eat earth in times of great famine. Drawing on information in the bestiaries, Albertus Magnus wrote in the thirteenth century:
“It is said the wolves eat the mud called glis, not for the sake of getting nourishment but to make themselves heavier. Having eaten it the wolf preys on very strong animals—the ox or stag or horse—by leaping at them, straight on, and clinging to them. If he were light he would readi
ly be shaken off, but when he is weighed down by glis, he weighs so much that he can neither be shaken off nor gotten rid of. Presently when his prey is worn out and collapses, he tears at their throats and windpipes and so kills them. Then he vomits out the glis and feasts on the flesh of the animal he has slain.”
In French to be known by everyone is to be as well known as the white wolf, il est connu comme le loup blanc. To sneak along is to walk with the step of a wolf, marcher à pas du loup. Speak of the wolf and he appears, quand on parle du loup, on en voit la queue (literally, one speaks of the wolf and one sees his tail). The word loup can mean wolf or, in different contexts, a flaw in cabinetmaking, an error in calculation, or a blown entrance in the theatre. A black velvet mask worn at a costume ball, a device used to pull nails, and a machine used to break apart bales of wool are also “wolves.”
In the fields of France the wolf is a spirit of the crops. When the wind blows in waves across the fields the peasants say “the wolf is going through.” When young children go pick the blue cornflowers the parents warn of the wolf that sits in the corn. If a wolf is seen out in the fields they look to see if it carries its tail high or low. If the tail hangs straight down it is the crop spirit himself, and they salute him.
At harvest time the wolf moves through the fields of grain just ahead of the reapers. If a man stumbles or cuts himself with a scythe they say, “The wolf got him.” When they come to the last sheaf in the field, that is called the wolf sheaf and the person who cuts it (who kills the wolf in doing so) is called the wolf until spring. The sheaf is called the rye wolf or the wheat wolf or the corn wolf, accordingly. In some areas it is burned, in others taken home and destroyed in the spring.
In the farm country around Bordeaux a wether, or castrated sheep, was led around the fields, its horns dressed with flowers and small harvest sheaves, its body wound with garlands and bright ribbons. Its sacrifice signaled the death of the wolf corn spirit.
Other beliefs endorsed by the bestiarists were that the wolf was repelled by squill, or sea onion; that a horse that stepped in a wolf print would be crippled; that a pregnant mare who kicked a wolf would miscarry; that wolf-bitten mutton is sweeter; and that wolves are repulsed by music. The bulb of the squill (Urginea maritima and other species) was hung around the neck of sheep in a flock to ward off wolves and carried as a protection by travelers. (Red squill is still used today in Europe as a rat poison.) That the wolf should be considered the bane of the horse, a principal domesticated beast of burden with more nobility than the ass, the ox, or the cow, is evidence of the moral structuring of the bestiaries. The Devil seeks the saintliest to bring down. For the same reason a sheep picked out of the flock and killed by wolves took on special significance. That the meat would taste sweeter might be an opinion derived from Plutarch, who wrote that the breath of the wolf was so hot it softened and cooked the meat it devoured. Others felt, very strongly, that wolf-bitten meat was poisonous. Jacob Grimm writes in Teutonic Mythology of the belief that any woman who ate wolf-bitten lamb or goat would give birth to a child that showed the wolf bite in its flesh.
Aelian, the third-century Roman, tells in De natura animalium the story of Pythochares, a flute player who drove off a pack of wolves with his music. This is an early reference to the widespread and persistent belief that wolves hate music. An analogous belief is that a drum with a wolf skin head will drown out any number of drums with sheepskin heads, or that a string of wolf gut will dominate strings of sheep gut. In music today a discordant note on the violin is still called a wolf, as are the harsh, howling sounds of some chords on the organ.
It is apparently not the music of clacking stones, in the case of the man struck dumb, that frightens the wolf off and returns speech, however. Wolves, writes one sixteenth-century writer, hate stones and avoid them wherever they go because the bruises they cause breed worms. Richard Lupton, a medieval English writer, puts it quaintly: “When he is constrained to go by stony places, the wolf treads very demurely. For being hurt with a very little stroke of a stone, it breeds worms, whereof at length he is consumed and brought to his death.”
T. H. White, in a modern translation of a twelfth-century bestiary, gives us the moralizing on this point: “For what can we mean by the Wolf but the Devil … and what by the stones but the Apostles or the saints or the Lord Himself? All the prophets have been called stones of adamant. And He Himself, Our Lord Jesus Christ, has been called in the Law ‘a stumbling block and a rock of scandal.’ ”
Who could argue that it was in the nature of wolves to hate stones?
There is a third group of books, after the natural histories of Aristotle and Pliny and the bestiaries and Physiologi, that sought to reveal the wolf and those are the encyclopedias of such men as Alexander Neckham, Albertus Magnus, and Bartholomew of England. They wrote in the tradition of Isidore but much later—Neckham in the twelfth century, and Magnus and Bartholomew along with Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth. In the work of the encyclopedists one finds more political and social allegory than moral allegory, and a good deal of folklore. Bartholomew tells us that wolves eat marjoram to whet their appetites and sharpen their teeth before leaving for the evening hunt, and that they are fond of fish. In fact, he tells us, if wolves find a fisherman’s nets on the beach and see no fish around they will tear the nets in anger, a story Aristotle perhaps told first about wolves near Lake Maeotis in Greece. Albertus Magnus writes that any man who binds a wolf’s right eye to his right sleeve will be protected against men and dogs alike.
Lupton in his Notable Things catalogues the habits of hanging up a wolf’s head to keep sorcerers at bay and of burying a wolf’s tail at the entrance to a village to keep off other wolves. The grease rendered from a wolf’s body, he says, will protect the hands from the worst cold, and wolf dung buried in the barnyard to keep off wolves will drive sheep and cattle crazy until it is removed.
And an English writer of the sixteenth century, Edward Topsell, in A Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, fascinates us with the following:
“The brains of a wolf do decrease and increase with the moon. The neck of a wolf is short which argueth a treacherous nature. If the heart of a wolf be kept dry, it rendereth a most pleasant or sweet-smelling savor. They will go into the water two-by-two, every one hanging upon another’s tail, which they take in their mouths… . Their manner is when they fall upon a goat or a hog, not to kill them, but to lead them by the ear and with all the speed they can drive them to their fellow-wolves; and if the beast be stubborn, and will not run with them, then he beateth his hinder parts with his tail, holding his ear fast in his mouth. But if it be a swine that is so gotten, then they lead him to the waters, and there kill him, for if they eat him not out of cold water, their teeth doth burn with an intolerable heat… . If any labouring or travelling man doth wear the skin of a wolf about his feet, his shoes shall never pain or trouble him. He which doth eat the skin of a wolf well tempered and sodden will keep him from all evil dreams, and cause him to take his rest quietly. The teeth of a wolf being rubbed upon the gums of the young infants doth open them whereby the teeth may the easier come forth.”
On the twenty-third of April, Eastern Europeans celebrate the feast of Saint George, a patron of cattle, horses, and wolves. On the morning of the feast day, provided various taboos have been observed, Saint George rings the wolves’ snouts and puts them on leashes so the herds can be taken out to spring pasture for the first time without fear. Wolf dung is sometimes burned—or asafetida (devil’s dung)—and the cattle are herded through the smoke to absorb its scent.
It was believed that if you sewed anything together on Saint George’s morning, wolves born that spring would lose their sight, as though their eyes had been sewn shut. A peasant who wished to know which of his sheep would fally prey to wolves in the months following set eggs on the ground before the barn. Those that stepped on the eggs would be killed before the year was out by wolves. To salvage the meat, a peasant might slaughter the sheep righ
t there.
In Russia the same feast is that of Saint Yury, and the wolf is known as Saint Yury’s dog. During the year wolf-killed sheep and cattle are not disturbed. They are considered the animals Saint George has set aside for the wolves.
It was an urge to inform that motivated writers like Topsell, just as it was an urge to teach that saw the Christianization of the Physiologus. The wolf did not come off well in either effort. Even Renaissance veneries like Tuberville’s Booke of Hunting (1577), which explain knowledgeably how to lure wolves to a blind and praise the devotion of young wolves to their parents, still have them eating snakes and killing each other “for spite.”
Secular inquiry into the lives of animals, inquiry for the sake of learning rather than for the sake of edifying moral lessons or entertainment, did not begin again until the sixteenth century. At that point we find Konrad Genser’s Historia animalium, published in 1551, and the animal encyclopedias of Aldorvandi. But it is not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—when Carolus Linnaeus provides a system of organization, Charles Darwin writes of finches in the Galapagos, and John James Audubon draws birds in Florida—that the system of knowledge that had taken natural history for little more than symbology or a source of literary entertainment begins to break up. And for the wolf, astoundingly, the tradition continues almost unbroken until 1945, when The Wolves of North America by Stanley Young and Edward Goldman was published. A mixture of science and folklore, it passed as the only authoritative general work on wolves in America and Europe until the 1960s. Aside from Adolph Murie’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley—the first unbiased ecological treatise on wolves, published in 1944—and a couple of popular books, there was nothing else around.
It is hard to conceive of another animal—I don’t think there is one—that has suffered such prejudice as an object of our scientific curiosity.