Thiess of Kaltenbrun

Thiess lived in Kaltenbrunn, in Swedish Livonia, within what is now Latvia. When the court questioned him in 1691 he said he was over eighty, which places his birth around 1610, in a Lutheran farming district where much older layers of belief were still alive. In those layers the werewolf was not the devil's servant described by German demonologists but a guardian: someone who left his body, took the shape of a wolf and went down to fight for the village harvest. Thiess did not present this as somebody else's theory but as a trade he himself practised, and that matter-of-factness was precisely what unsettled his judges.

On 28 April 1691 the district court of Wenden, sitting at Jürgensburg (today Zaube, in Latvia), questioned him for lycanthropy and other impious acts. Far from denying it, Thiess declared that he was a werewolf and had been one for years. He said that three nights a year he left his body and took wolf shape: St Lucy's night, Pentecost and St John's, though he added that the exact date mattered less than the moment when the grain was in bloom, for that was when the sorcerers carried off the blessing of the harvest. Asked how the change happened, he first said they put on wolves' pelts and later that they undressed among the bushes. The court pressed him again and again to confess a pact with the devil, and he refused every time. The final verdict came from the High Court of Dorpat (today Tartu, in Estonia) on 31 October 1692: flogging and banishment for life, not for witchcraft but for turning the people away from Christianity.

What Thiess described was not a curse but a militia. He and his fellows were, he said, the hounds of God, and they went down into hell to fight the devil and the sorcerers who served him. There they recovered the grain, the livestock and the fruits of the earth that those had stolen, and they chased the devil and scourged him with iron whips; if the wolves won, the year came out well. The dogs of hell were on the opposing side, not his, and that distinction is the heart of his testimony: it is what makes it unique among European trial records. Thiess even recalled the sorcerer Skeistan, who years before had broken his nose with a blow. He told all of it without asking pardon, convinced that he was doing the village and God a service.

The record of his interrogation remained unpublished until the historian Hermann von Bruiningk brought it out in 1924, and it has been argued over ever since, because it flatly contradicts the demonic image of the werewolf that dominated Christian Europe. Carlo Ginzburg set it beside the benandanti of Friuli in his book on them, reading it as the remnant of a far older stratum of belief; Bruce Lincoln later challenged that reading, and in 2020 the two published the debate together with the full transcript. Thiess was, so far as the records show, the last man punished as a werewolf in Livonia, and his testimony remains the clearest proof that in Baltic folklore the one who turned wolf could be the guardian rather than the monster.