Werewolf, Fog, Vagabond

Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf, by Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, is a marvelous book. In it, the authors discuss and debate the significance of a 1691 court record of an old Livonian man, Thiess, who admitted to being a werewolf. His admission, though, confounded the court’s judges, who were there to try another man accused of theft. Thiess was supposed to testify in this case, but others protested: “Everyone knows that he goes around with the devil and was a werewolf. How could Old Thiess swear an oath . . . ?” However, Old Thiess refused to accept that being a werewolf meant he was evil or incapable of swearing an oath. Instead, Thiess claimed, werewolves were good. Every Saint Lucia’s eve, he and his fellow Livonian werewolves gathered to fight sorcerers. Werewolves were the “Hounds of God.” The sorcerers, though, were aligned with the devil. The devil and his sorcerers annually stole the earth’s bounty and took that bounty to hell. The werewolves stormed hell—a hell specific to them, found near a marsh—and they stole back the bounty, which they used to fill the streams and fields.

 

Lincoln and Ginzburg take different stances on the meaning of this testimony. Ginzburg aligns Thiess’s testimony with his reading of the inquisitorial record of the Italian benandanti. In his Night Battles, Ginzburg recounts some of these testimonies: “When the harvest is good, that is, when the crops are plentiful and beautiful, that is a year when the benandanti have won; but when the witches win, the harvest is bad.” These “do-gooders” would fall asleep and small animals would emerge from them—field mice and so on—and go off with fennel stalks to fight the witches. In other words, according to Ginzburg, multiple European fertility rites persisted and were being sniffed out and squashed by Christian authorities. Lincoln, however, argues that Thiess was simply unfolding a story as part of his resistance to the German landlords.

 

There’s more about the dispute that’s fascinating, but I want to talk about a 1555 passage from Olaus Magnus quoted in Old Thiess. Magnus writes, “Between Lithuania, Samogetia, and Kurland is a wall, the remains of a demolished castle. There, at a fixed time of year, several thousands of them assemble and test their agility by jumping over it.” No fog is mentioned in this quotation. But I can see it: some fen, a ruined castle, a fog, midday, a December light, a close horizon.

 

This same feeling haunts, for me, this passage from “The Ruin.” Here are the final lines of Jennifer Neville’s prose translation of that fragmentary Old English poem: “Their fortifications became waste places, the city crumbled. The restorers, the troops, fell dead to the earth. Therefore these dwellings are dreary, and this wide, red, wooden-beamed roof sheds its tiles.”

 

That midwinter fog feeling fills the trees, too, in Jay’s latest post.

 

And here too is the feeling in this moment late in Agnès Varda’s Sans Toit Ni Loi (1985).

The protagonist (Sandrine Bonnaire) rises in the morning and emerges from a greenhouse into a cold winter morning.

Nearby a man burns debris at the edge of a small vineyard.