To generalise, people with the capacity to transform themselves into wolves suffered from extreme hirsuity (which included hair on the palms), they had eyebrows that met over the top of their noses, long claw-like fingernails which were sometimes red and curved, small flat ears or pointed ears which were set low and far back, and their third fingers were as long as the second. They were said to walk in long, swinging strides. In some cases, the wolf-form would have some vestige of a human characteristic present such as hands or feet, which clearly differentiated them from a real wolf. Under ecclesiastical influence, werewolves became tailless, since the devil or his instruments were not permitted by God to obtain a perfect corporeal form. In a similar vein, Danish werewolves had a transitional state of a dog with only three legs between the man and the wolf. The advent of Christianity caused people either to reject the old superstitions, or else to incorporate the power of the Church into them: for example, in areas of what is now Germany, a werewolf could be forced to return back to his human form by addressing him three times by his baptismal name.
If a person did not undergo a satisfactory metamorphosis, they were sometimes said to have their "hair on the inside" instead: in 1541, an Italian farmer from Pavia in Lombardy claimed to be such a werewolf, and died of wounds from officials who vigorously investigated his claim. The idea that someone is "two-faced" and carries their true nature (metaphorically or literally) in secret is very old and the term "versipellis" was used in censure by Greek and Roman writers.
Stories were told throughout the rest of Europe too. Reputedly there was in 1542 such an infestation of werewolves near Constantinople, that the Emperor had to leave the city to go and slay 150 of them. In Livonia a boy with a lame leg went around the country summoning the devil's followers to a conclave. The reluctant were forced to attend by a scourging with an iron whip which left trails of their blood soaking into the road behind them. When they reached an appointed place, they all transformed into wolves, and ran rampant over the countryside for the next twelve days until they were returned to their human form. The Church forbade such superstition but the folk beliefs were strong and survived, in one form or another, most assaults. The lame boy is to be interpreted as Satan himself, who cannot take a corporeal form without there being some imperfection, such as (most commonly) cloven hooves. The twelve day rampage is probably derived from the notion of the Wild Hunt and Odin's Yuletide travels.
The French had one of the most enthusiastic werewolf traditions. They called the creatures "loup garou", with regional variants such as louleerou in the Perigord, where the victims were unusually likely to be bastards. They transformed them selves by jumping into fountains and then ran off to attack dogs. On an unappetising note, they were said to suffer frequently from indigestion, caused by eating tough old dogs (who were presumably easiest to catch), and were in the habit of vomiting the undigested paws. Sometimes the French loup-garou was identified as a great white dog, or as covered in chains, but these characteristics remind us again of the European graveyard dog folklore, and they more properly belong to that. The French generally held that when a werewolf was killed or had its blood drawn while in its animal state, they reverted instantaneously to their human forms, often to the embarrassment of their families.
In medieval Norway their cultural heritage left them with the belief that certain people called the "Huse-bjorn" had the power to change themselves into bears or wolves, given them by the trolls. The trolls of Scandinavia were originally derived from elemental beings related to features of the landscape, and became heavily identified with the devil after the Christian conversion. Norwegian werewolves were also said to retain their human eyes, which comes directly from the Old Norse folklore relating to wereanimals.
Greek and Serbian were extremely closely related to vampires. Werewolves were destined to become vampires after their deaths. During their lives they would fall into cataleptic trances and go forth in the bodies of wolves, frequenting battlefields to steal the last breaths of soldiers, or they would enter houses and steal children from their cradles. When the soul returned, the human body was overcome with fatigue, in the same way that the Berserkers wilted after their rages.
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