Why are we afraid of the big bad wolf?
TALES AND LEGENDS 5/5. From the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Today, the darling of ecologists, the wolf, a source of myths and legends, long terrorized our ancestors. Not without reason, reminds “die Welt.” To conclude our series on tales and legends, we invite you to read or reread this article, republished for the occasion.
[This article was first published on our site on December 13, 2019 and republished on August 14, 2025]
In 1744, Georg Wilhelm von Aschersleben, President of the Chamber of Stettin, Prussia [now Szczecin, Poland], undertook an inspection trip to Further Pomerania.
He recorded his observations in logs that contain the rare reliable statistical data from a time when the wolf was not yet the darling of nature conservationists, but above all a wild animal. According to Aschersleben, during five wolf hunts organized since 1738, 465 animals had been killed. During the same period, the predators are said to have killed 4,294 sheep, 2,343 geese, 1,858 pigs, 1,571 horses, 808 cattle, and 125 goats.
Andreas Deutsch, a legal historian in Heidelberg, was able to deduce from an analysis of legal texts and judgments what contemporaries thought of these predators. For example, when an ordinance from Lohr am Main [in Bavaria], dated 1425, stipulates that the costs of hunting such a harmful beast should be shared between the city and the hunters, it must be assumed that this was nothing exceptional, but rather a recurring measure in a context of “almost daily danger.”
The Meissen Code (1357-1387) made shepherds responsible for defending their livestock against “wolves and thieves.” If, during an attack, they escaped “unharmed by wolves,” it was proof that they had not fulfilled their duty, and they were liable to end up in prison.
Even the means used to combat wolves were subject to legal action. Anyone who attempted to evade a winter wolf hunt had to pay a fine, for example. Passersby who accidentally fell into a wolf trap, where sheep or geese served as live bait, were entitled to demand compensation from the person responsible for the trap. The manufacture of mechanical wolf traps was one of the obligations imposed by lords on their vassals or serfs.
Other episodes of our “Tales and Legends” series
Legends travel, are passed down, and are transformed over generations and cultures, even being twisted to serve religious or political purposes. They continue to tell us about our humanity and the bonds that unite us. It is this resonance in our contemporary lives that we have chosen to explore with this series: from Greenland to the Congo, via the United Kingdom, what do tales mean today?
Episode 1 – Building the Family Tree of Tales, a Scientific Epic
Episode 2 – Greenland, the land of spirits
Episode 3 – The mokélé-mbembé, spirit of the Congo transmuted into a dinosaur
Episode 4 – British Patriotism in the Age of Legends
By the end of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, the wolf population around Paris had increased so much that in 1438 alone, between 60 and 80 people died from their attacks.
By the end of the 1630s, in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, disorder had so reigned that chroniclers in the city of Darmstadt had to report that no horse was safe from wolves. In Waren [in eastern Germany], survivors of the conflict discovered with horror that wolves were feeding on their dead. In Württemberg, 4,000 wolves were killed between 1639 and 1678, another testament to the extraordinary proliferation of these animals.
In 1812, when the remnants of the Grande Armée retreated towards their homeland, they were not only hunted by the Cossacks, but also by wolves. The latter found an easily accessible food source there, along the roadsides, where tens of thousands of corpses lay, and thus infiltrated into Central Europe. It was the civilian population who suffered the consequences. In the Poznan region alone, in 1814-1815, 28 children were reportedly victims of packs. As late as the First World War, there were reports of injuries and deaths caused by wolf attacks in Masuria and the Carpathians.
Wolves had become accustomed to human flesh, but that was not the only danger to be feared. They brought rabies with them, which made them even more aggressive and for which there was no cure. Andreas Deutsch, for example, reports an incident that supposedly took place in 1815 in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler [in Rhineland-Palatinate].
[According to the sources,] a wolf first attacked a horseman and two women. Then attacking another woman, it was stopped by a farmhand, whose nose it tore off. Then the beast attacked three more men and three children before finally being finished off by a courageous haymaker. All those injured by the beast died. It was not until the French chemist Louis Pasteur that a vaccine was found that would definitively end the deadly threat of rabies, in 1885.
Rabies is also said to be the cause of the mythical exaggeration of the danger posed by wolves. In the Appenzell Chronicle, for the year 1537, Andreas Deutsch found this mention: “Wolves everywhere committed great mischief; their bite was so poisonous that the men who suffered from it howled like wolves before dying.” It was only a short step to imagine irascible men transforming into the legendary creature that is the werewolf. The minutes of witchcraft trials are also full of accusations of lycanthropy.
We are unable to know how many people may have fallen prey to wolves in Europe during the historical period, concludes Deutsch. In France, historian Jean-Marc Moriceau suggests a figure of 10,000 attacks. One thing is certain, however: the terror aroused by Canis lupus, transmitted through chronicles, tales, and fantastical stories, is indeed rooted in reality.
