Sir Bedivere… Alias “Peter the Fang”

INTRODUCTION:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Camelot Chat! I’m your hostess, Shannon Watson; and today, we will be discussing “Sir Bedivere… Alias “Peter the Fang.”

From the shapeshifting Quileutes in “Twilight” to the werewolf hybrids in “The Originals,” werewolves have experienced a recent revival.

But tales of man-wolves are ancient... and they never really went away.

THE WOLF OF ANSBACH:

In a reported werewolf attack of the late seventeenth century, the Wolf of Ansbach slaughtered a number of people, beginning with livestock, and progressing to children. The late, unlamented leader of Ansbach had recently died, and the citizens believed the animal was actually a reincarnated version of him in werewolf form.

So, the townspeople held a wolf hunt. Replete with hounds and hoes and spears and pitchforks and all the usual accoutrements.

Driving the wolf from the woods, they chased it down with dogs. It leapt into an uncovered well. And after that, well, it was a turkey shoot.

The conclusion of the tale looks a little bit “Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding.” The citizens severed the dead animal’s muzzle, dressed it in a man's clothing to look like their hated former administrator, paraded the mutilated carcass through the marketplace, and hung it from a gibbet.

Apparently, once a certain level of sanity had prevailed, the wolf’s corpse was preserved and displayed at the local museum.

One begins to wonder, however: Who was worst: the cruel former administrator, the man-eating wolf... or the citizens of Ansbach?

THE BEAST OF GEVAUDAN:

One spectacular example of a medieval “werewolf scare” is that of the Beast of Gévaudan.

The story goes that, in 1764, reports began drifting into the royal court of King Louis the XV. Reports of 200 deaths in southwestern France. Specifically: deaths by animal attack. Victims partially eaten. Victims with their throats ripped out. A most persistent animal, which attacked in daylight and often, in village centers.

But no one could identify the beast.

These killings continued throughout the summer and well into September of 1764. The story was growing. Now, people were starting to ascribe supernatural abilities to the beast, including walking on its hind legs... like a human predator. There were whispers of a loup-garou, or werewolf. Now, there were two beasts. Or else, one beast, accompanied by offspring.

And so, the tale reached the King's ears. Louis XV announced that the state would pay to hunt down and destroy the Beast.

This is where it begins to sound like a passage from “Beauty and the Beast.”

It was now August of 1765, more than a year since the Beast of Gévaudan had begun its reign of terror. King Louis sent first a troop of dragoons, then two professional wolf hunters – replete with a team of eight wolf-hunting bloodhounds – south to rid his realm of the Beast. When they failed, the king directed his Chief of the Hunt to take over.

What follows reads like a comedy of errors.

Several clear shots at the beast, foiled by incompetent guardsmen. A free crossing of the river by the Beast, unhampered by the same townspeople who had just lost their 12-year-old child to its depredations… and really should have been more vigilant and motivated.

On August 11, the Beast struck again. This was the date of the famous attack on the Maid of Gévaudan. Marie-Jeanne was a young girl of 20, crossing a footbridge with a group of peasant women. The Beast appeared and leapt on her. Marie-Jeanne was just able to stick her spear into the animal, whereupon it ran off into the forest.

Hurrying to the site, Louis’ Chief of the Hunt examined the tracks and declared it to be the same animal. A little over a month later, he killed a huge wolf in the area, saying it was the largest wolf he had ever seen. Marie-Jeanne, her sister, and several others identified the corpse as that of the same beast that had attacked them. The Chief of the Hunt and his son reported the killing of the Beast to the Crown and had the hide mounted and stuffed and presented at Versailles.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t over. On December 2, 1765, the Beast – or something like it – struck again.

The renewed assault was reported to the king. But, having believed the matter already handled, Louis XV had grown bored with the subject and didn't want to hear any more about it.

With the spring thaw, the attacks intensified. The locals, seeing that no further help would come from the royal court, determined upon handling the issue themselves.

Everything they tried failed. Hunting parties. Poisoned canine carcasses.

The Beast had changed its tack. It was operating in a smaller geographical area. It was less aggressive. More cautious.

And so, time drifted on, into the year 1767. When the attacks halted.

But, once again, with the spring thaw, they resumed. The locals, having given up on the direct approach, now resorted to prayer.

Then, on June 17, the Beast was sighted.

And still, no one had any real idea just exactly what the Beast was. A lion? A demon? A wolf? A werewolf? Some other supernatural entity? No one knew.

Finally on June 19, 1767, a marquis organized one final hunt, and a local hunter – isn't it always a local hunter? – shot and killed the Beast on a mountain slope. The corpse of the Beast was exhibited for a dozen days, before the marquis instructed his servant to transport it to Versailles to show the king. Its remains were likely buried in the grounds of the Parisian house of the marquis’ kinsman. That house was torn down in 1825, so the evidence has been lost.

But the attacks stopped.

What was the Beast of Gevaudan, you ask?

Some suggestions were a large dog. A wolfdog. A wolf. A pack of wolves. Multiple wolfpacks. A young lion escaped from a local menagerie. A hyena. Or a werewolf.

The appearance of yet another animal fits the bill. This beast, like the Beast of Gévaudan, has a tawny, grayish pelt which turns red in the summer, with dark striping down its back and on the tip of its tail. It has lighter colors on its belly and cheeks.

This animal is the Italian wolf, which inhabits the Alps of Italy on the border of France. It is distinctive for its unusually-shaped head and does not share mitochondrial DNA with other gray wolves or domestic dogs.

French peasants of the 18th century, unless they ventured into the Alps, would not have been familiar with this creature, identifying it as “like a wolf but somehow different from a wolf.”

This localized animal fits the bill of the mysterious Beast of Gévaudan and may well provide the resolution of the mystery.

LOUISIANA LOUP GAROU:

This belief in the shape-shifting man-wolf spread to the New World in the form of the loup-garou, or rougarou. Both French settlers and French-Canadian immigrants brought the nightmare legend with them to New France.

To this day, strange stories emerge from the Louisiana Bayou of terrifying beasts, with the head of a man and the body of a wolf, lurking in the shadows beneath the Spanish moss. There, just outside the Big Easy, the werewolf still slogs its savage way through the swamps and sugar cane brakes, the wetlands and woodlands – not to mention the folklore – of the Deep South.

Now, in the twenty-first century, as with so many of our childhood fairytale monsters, the loup-garou has been rendered, if not toothless, then at least slightly less scary, celebrated with its own festival by the Cajun people of New Orleans.

OTHER WOLF-SARCS:

But I digress. These are merely some of the most “recent” tales of werewolves. They serve to illustrate that, up into fairly modern times, people absolutely believed in the reality of werewolves. And they have done so for even longer.

Reports of werewolves drift down to us from ancient times. Herodotus described the customs of the Neuri of Scythia, who deliberately changed into wolves for a period of several days. Ovid reported that there was an Arcadian pack of werewolves. Saint Augustine complained of witches turning men into werewolves.

As mentioned in last week's episode, the practice of young men going on comitatus, or traveling in fianna or männerbund groups, harkens back to the still older Proto-Indo-European days on the Continent, where the warrior class may have included a subset of youthful warriors who embraced a dog and/or wolf totem. Lycanthropy, or the “act of transforming into a wolf,” may have been part of an initiation rite into this warlike sect.

NORSE / VIKINGS:

Let's jump ahead to roughly three hundred years later… when the Norse, or Vikings, had their own version of this martial brand of totemism. In my last episode, I discussed the Viking beran-sercas, or “bear-shirts,” ferocious warriors who donned bearskins in battle, taking on the persona of the bear. The Old English phrase, beran-sarc, is the origin of the modern term, “berserker.”

But there is evidence that the Vikings had wolf-warriors as well. A couple surviving traces of this practice are: The Norse king, Harald Finehair – of the History Channel’s “Vikings” series fame – kept a troop of “wolf-coats,” or Úlfhednar. And a Norse helmet plaque bears a carved warrior wearing a wolf pelt.

So, it wasn't just bear-shirts with these fierce Germanic warriors and their earlier prototypes of Arthur's day, the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes. They had “werewolves” among them, too.

IRISH WOLF-SKINS:

But let's return to fifth-century Britain and Ireland... and Sir Bedivere’s day. Or more properly, to the time of Bedrydant: “Peter the Fang.”

A good place to start his part of the story is in Dark Age Ireland. From the Primitive or Old Irish language of that time and place emerges evidence of the hybridization of man and wolf:

§  Conriocht: “Wearers of Wolf-skins”

§  Fáeliadh: “Wolf-Men”

§  Amsacha: Wild-Men,” or “Beast-Men”

§  …and the Old Irish Luchthonn: “Wolf-Skin”

When I start seeing compound words that marry the word “man” with “wolf” or indicate that men are wearing wolfskins, it speaks to me of a specific function. Having identified the existence of such a function, I sense that there is a great deal more behind it than we know. An obsolete practice that may not have survived in Christian writings. Because it was a pre-Christian, pagan practice.

When I read terms like “wolfman,” “beast-men,” and “wearers of wolfskins,” this suggests a warrior cult centered around the wolf as totem. Like the berserkers and the Proto-Indo-Europeans before them, these were a sect of warriors who selected a particularly fearsome animal as their talisman and used it to help them fight more fiercely in battle under its banner. Or guise. Or skin.

To transform, in essence, into a wolf. Or… a werewolf.

PICTS:

The Picts were doing it, too. The Pictish counterparts of the Irish wolf-skins dressed in pelts and fought as beasts. In Angus and Shetland, Picts carved wolf masks or wore “dog-heads.” And the Old Brittonic placename, Viroconium,means “the place of the man-dogs…” or “werewolves.”

These, then, were the Dark Age equivalents of the “werewolf.” Of Peter the Fang, his closest cohorts, and… his enemies.

PA GUR:

Pa Gur, a tenth-century Welsh poem, tells of the exploits of Bedivere, Bedrydant, or Peter the Fang – known in Welsh sources as Bedwyr. The poet sings:

They fell by the hundred

Before Bedwyr of the Perfect-Sinew
On the shores of Tryfrwyd

Fighting with Garwlwyd…

The Welsh monk, Nennius, repeats this tale.

In this battle, the “Knights” of the Round Table were fighting in the north, in the Borders area. Specifically, in or near the mountains of Edinburgh. However, “on the shores of [Trif-rid] Tryfrwyd” indicates the shores of a tributary, or confluence, such as that of the River Forth near Stirling, just north of Edinburgh.

The chief adversaries of King Arthur’s crew in this fight were named as an army of cinbin, or “dogheads.” The dogheads’ champion was a feral warrior named Gwrgi Garwlwyd, which may mean “Man-Dog,” or “Rough-Grey,” although a simpler rendering gives “Honored Man.”

The poet of Pa Gur claims Gwrgi killed one opponent every day and two on Saturday to avoid killing on Sunday. Certainly, that latter suggestion is a later Christian gloss; but on the whole, it conveys Gwrgi’s ferocity, if not bestiality. And doesn’t he sound just like Fenrir Greyback in the Harry Potter series?

In fact, I think that this Gwrgi “Rough-Grey” may be cognate with Hueil, the eldest son of Cawr of Strathclyde, who was known as a fearsome giant, and that both are the same as the eldest son of the great boar Arthur and his men once hunted. That son’s name meant “Silver Boar-Bristle.” So, in this case, the totem animal was a boar, and the warrior may have been a sort of “were-boar.” Such conflations occur throughout Arthurian legend.

Whoever he was in life or myth, it was this man against whom our Peter the Fang squared off in the terrible Battle on the River Tribruit. There, Bedrydant fought on the riverbank, killing hundreds of “dogheads.” Perhaps, as a “wolf-shirt” himself, Bedrydant was expected to lead the assault against this contingent of other wolf-warriors?

Neither man fell there, for Gwrgi is said to have died later when a chieftain-bard – also of the north – killed him in what became Northumbria… not far south of the Tribruit and Edinburgh. The Welsh Triads called that “One of the Three Fortunate Slayings of Britain.”

So, we have a mighty warrior known as “Peter the Fang,” fighting another warrior known to be a “doghead,” in a time and place where it seems to have been a recognizable practice for warriors to don dog masks and wolfskins. These can be considered the proverbial “tip of the iceberg”, so far as cultural practice goes. If this much survives to us in contemporary writings, as well as in the archaeological record, how deep did the practice of lycanthropy run?

However elite the forces of wolf-shirts and dogheads might have been, they appear to have been well-known in “Sir Bedivere’s” day and may well be the source of his fearsome moniker, “Peter the Fang.”

CONCLUSION:

In next month’s topic, we examine Queen Guinevere’s Ogre Father. Why did some call him an ogre? Did she really have three fathers, or were they different versions of the same man? What were the meanings of his strange names? And what do they tell us about him?

Stay tuned.

If you can’t wait for more Arthurian lore till the next episode, I have a special treat for you: a longer version of the tale of the Beast of Gévaudan. More details. More wolf hunts. More werewolves. More wolfy fun. Check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube!

You will also find my historical fiction novel, The Wanderer and the Wolves, told from Queen Guinevere’s perspective, on Amazon.com. The link is included below. And be sure to check out my author page at ShanavereStudios.com.

Until next week: People who read live in many worlds. Books are the surest portals to those worlds. So, keep living, keep reading, and keep dreaming... till we meet again.