The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark

Abstract

In 1798 the Danish priest Joachim Junge, in an ethnographic description of his parishioners’ ways of life, gave a rational explanation to the extraordinary accounts of ‘goat-feeted’ and ‘one eyed’ people who were supposed to live near the polar circle. The goat-feeted people may have been so named because they climbed up mountains with a goat’s speed, probably with the help of skis of a sort; whereas the ‘one-eyed’ probably wore a kind of travelling cloak with only a narrow slit for the eyes; and the ‘wolfsmen’ could be just Nordic people entirely dressed in animal skins as protection against the polar winter. In the same way, he explains the fact that pregnant women, afraid of werewolves, always take a young boy with them if they have to go out after dusk, by the superstition’s positive function: it prevented them from falling down, hampered as they were in their walk when heavily pregnant.¹ To discover a more satisfying reason, and one that related more to the people who said those kinds of things, as to why pregnant women had to be careful about werewolves, we will have to look at the legends of about a century later.²