Hans the Werewolf

Hans is barely a name. The records give no surname, no trade, no family. In 1651, aged eighteen, he came before the court at Idavere in Livonia, the Baltic province that is now Estonia and then belonged to the Swedish crown. He was one more peasant in a land where the lords spoke German, the administration wrote in Swedish and the country people spoke Estonian, and that mismatch explains much of what happened in that room.

Throughout the seventeenth century Livonia held more werewolf trials than anywhere else in Europe. There they were neither rare nor exotic: they were the local shape of the witch hunt. Where Germany charged people with flying to the sabbath, here they were charged with running as wolves.

Hans confessed without needing much pressing. He said he had been hunting in wolf form for two years. And he explained where that form had come from: a man dressed in black had given it to him. He spoke of no belt, no salve, no formula to be recited. He said the man had given him a wolf's body, and nothing more.

The difference matters. In the French and German trials the accused acquires an object (a skin, a strap, a grease) and uses it at will. Here there is no object: there is a handing over. By his own account Hans did not transform; he had been given the means to be a wolf. His statement stands closer to the Baltic belief in a soul that leaves the sleeping body than to the lycanthropy of the demonological manuals circulating on the continent.

The court then put to him the question that really mattered, the one that makes this trial a remarkable document: when he went out hunting, did his body go, or was only his soul transmuted? That was the theological heart of the matter. If only the soul travelled, it was diabolical illusion, a trick of the devil upon the senses, and the accused was one more victim. If the body went, there had been a real transformation, and that was another thing entirely.

Hans answered with the only thing he had. He had found on his leg the marks of a dog's teeth, a bite received while he was a wolf, and he added that he felt himself to be a beast. That scar decided his fate. The judges took it as proof that he had not gone about disguised or dreaming but had truly changed shape: a mark in the boy's flesh that the animal had received.

With the transformation taken as proved, it remained to establish where the power had come from, and there Hans's own answer closed the case: a man in black had given it to him. To the court that man in black could only be Satan. The charge accordingly ceased to be lycanthropy and became witchcraft, which was the capital offence. Hans was sentenced to death.

That leap, from wolf to pact and from beast to devil, is what defines the Livonian trials and makes this one of their cleanest examples. He was not killed for anything he had done, because no one produced victims, or bodies, or complaints from ruined neighbours. He was killed for what the bite on his leg proved about who had given it to him. Forty years later, in that same Livonia, an old man called Thiess of Kaltenbrun would turn the argument inside out and maintain before another court that werewolves were the hounds of God, not the servants of the devil.