Marie of Paris’s Bisclaveret

There is a poem that werewolf fans know well. It starts

“AMONGST them all, there is one lay

I’d not forget; that of Bisclavret.

Bisclavret is the name in Breton,

Garwaf (Werewolf) in Norman.

Many a year such tales men told,

For it had often chanced, of old,

That humans werewolves became;

From the woods, to kill and maim,

They would roam; savage creatures,

When lodged in wolf-like features,

For men they eat, and ill they wreak,

And then again the wild woods seek.

But word of that I must delay,

To tell you first of Bisclavret.”

The rest of the poem is about how Bisclavret is really the sweetest and best lil’ doggo who has his clothes hidden from him so he can’t change back to human form. He waits for the king to show up and hangs around his court until the wife arrives to be threatened into returning the clothes.

But his wife is understandably terrified of being married to a werewolf, considering how the poem opens. They rampage, right?

Nonetheless, she’s the villain for immediately jumping to a knight who had a crush on her to save her from being married to a werewolf. (This is why divorces need to be no-fault. The alternative is trapping your husband in his wolf form. Also, as a note, this whole thing could have been avoided if he had told her before they married that this was his thing.)

So…what does this indicate about popular beliefs about werewolves?

Marie was a French troubadour who had quite a name for herself, but, just like Chaucer, she didn’t make up any of the stories that she sang about. IP wasn’t a thing at the time, nor copyright, and almost all great ‘literature’ was what we would call fanfiction.

This means that this story about a nice knight who just randomly has to disappear for a few days out of every week to run with the wolves was already in circulation early in the 1200’s in France.

Now, werewolves were, in the popular imagination at least starting in the 1300’s, child-murderers. Feels like a tone shift, going from Bisclavret to a tale like the one about child-eating and incest-having Peter Stumpf which appeared in the 1500’s.

And both stories seem aimed toward nobles. Marie of Paris would be singing in the French court to royalty, who would know full well that the church would consider Bisclavret a heretic for thinking he could turn into a wolf. Clearly, they didn’t care, but still the poem gives five sentences to saying werewolves were bad.

So, I guess we’ve always been a little conflicted about werewolves.