Medieval Monsters: Bisclavret the werewolf
How a wild beast becomes a paragon of chivalry
Of all the monsters of Western folklore, the werewolf is among the most iconic and enduring. From the ancient Greek lycanthrope, to the Roman versipellis, to the “man-wolf” of medieval Europe’s Germanic and Celtic peoples, to the Early Modern witch-hunts, to its widespread presence in modern popular culture, the werewolf has enjoyed near-constant popularity throughout the ages. He appears today in a variety of media and genres — film and television, video games and books, romance and horror.
And the way werewolves are depicted is equally varied. At times they are straightforwardly monstrous, preying on the weak and innocent. At others, they are misunderstood outcasts, operating at the margins of an unwelcoming society.
We might assume that this second kind of story, the monster-subversion narrative, is a modern, or even postmodern, phenomenon. That until fairly recently, werewolves were always presented as unredeemably wicked. But history is almost always more complex and nuanced than we assume, which is, coincidentally, part of the reason I love reading old texts so much.
So how did medieval storytellers approach werewolves? Are they simply villainous? Certainly, we do often see a conventional depiction of the werewolf as fundamentally evil, his powers deriving from and associated with witchcraft, black magic, sorcery, and devil worship (this association becomes a lot more pronounced during the Early Modern witch trials).
But, alongside these more straightforward depictions, medieval storytellers also engaged in trope subversion, playing with audience expectations and questioning our very definitions of monstrosity.
It is one of these very monster-subversion stories we will be exploring in this article. The tale of a werewolf who defies our expectations and questions our assumptions about monstrosity.
2. The werewolf in Bisclavret
The Story:
Our second medieval monster story, Bisclavret, comes from the Lais of Marie de France, written in the latter part of the twelfth century. A lai (or lay) is a short romance written in rhyming poetry, originating from the French region of Brittany. These lais began as part of a rich oral tradition, and were meant to be performed accompanied by music. The stories draw on Celtic folklore and function, in many ways, as a forerunner of the European fairy tale.
Bisclavret, the shortest piece in Marie de France’s book, opens with a brief introduction in which Marie lays out the subject of her poem: the werewolf (“bisclavret” is Breton for “the werewolf”). While werewolves might be legendary figures now (as in the 12th century), Marie assures us they were very common in the past: “indeed it often used to happen, that many men turned into werewolves and went to live in the woods.”
Now, a word of caution before we proceed. We need to be careful, when reading a specific piece of folklore, not to project onto it all of our assumptions and expectations, especially if/when those expectations have been shaped by modern fantasy. It’s tempting, for instance, to assume that when Marie de France mentions a werewolf, she is drawing on the whole corpus of werewolf lore — silver bullets, full moons, etc. Much of these tropes did not exist at the time, and even medieval authors differ on the “rules” governing werewolves.
We should attempt, as much as is feasible, to encounter the monster on the author’s own terms. A werewolf for Marie de France and her medieval Breton context means something different than it means for us.
Helpfully, Bisclavret begins by providing us with a succinct definition of the monster in question:
A werewolf is a ferocious beast which, when possessed by this madness, devours men, causes great damage and dwells in vast forests.
In order to subvert the werewolf trope, the story must first establish it. This definition provides us with a quick shorthand of what people should expect a werewolf to be and give us a standard to interrogate.
Having laid out the subject matter of her poem, Marie begins her narrative by establishing a conventional romance setting in which physical beauty is a reflection of inward character. According to this logic (which is also the logic of most early fairly tales), a handsome knight must be courageous and a beautiful lady kind and faithful. Any discrepancy between outer beauty and inner character must be resolved by the story’s end.1
Bisclavret, the hero of this tale, is “a good and handsome knight who conducted himself nobly. He was one of his lord’s closest advisers and was well loved by all his neighbours.”
So far so good. Our hero is good, goodlooking, and well integrated into the social order of feudalism. He is a loyal vassal and a well-loved peer, getting along well with his lord and fellow vassals.
Bisclavret is married, and his wife, who remains unnamed throughout the poem, at first blush also passes the medieval romance character test with flying colours. She is “worthy and attractive in appearance.” And, to make things even better, “He loved her and she returned his love.”
But all is not so perfect as it seems with this good-looking lord and and good-looking lady. Bisclavret has a secret, and it’s eating his wife up inside.
Each week he was absent for three full days without her knowing what became of him or where he went, and no one in the household knew what happened to him.
Hmm. This all seems highly suspicious. Could our “good and handsome” Bisclavret be having an affair? That’s certainly the conclusion his wife jumps to. When he returns home from one of these mysterious three-day absences, she confronts him and demands:
“Please tell me where you go, what becomes of you and where you stay. I think you must have a lover and, if this is so, you are doing wrong.”
Bisclavret insists that he cannot tell her his secret, because if he does “great harm will come to me, for as a result I shall lose your love and destroy myself.”
Unsurprisingly, this response does little to allay his wife’s fears. She continues to press for information, until finally he relents:
“Lady, I become a werewolf: I enter the vast forest and live in the deepest part of the wood where I feed off the prey I can capture.”
This is definitely not what the lady expected, but she keeps her cool and asks him “whether he undressed or remained clothed.” When he tells her that he “goes about completely naked” she requests to know where he leaves his clothes.
Bisclavret balks again at this, and, in trying to explain why he cannot tell her, reveals important aspects of the text’s in-world werewolf lore:
“That I will not tell you, for if I lost them and were discovered in that state, I should remain a werewolf forever. No one would be able to help me until they were returned to me.”
She insists, however, invoking “true love” as a reason why he “must not hide anything.” Eventually, Bisclavret gives in and reveals to her his secret hiding place.
Immediately, the lady makes plans to get rid of her husband:
She was greatly alarmed by the story, and began to consider various means of parting from him, as she no longer wished to lie with him.
But she cannot act alone; she needs an ally if she is to exploit Bisclavret’s secret and trap him as a werewolf forever. The lady sends a message to a nearby knight “who had loved her for a long time, wooed her ardently and served her generously.” It is clear that these feelings are one-sided and that “she had never loved him.” Now, however, that she has need of him, the lady appears to have a change of heart:
“Friend,” she said, “rejoice: without further delay I grant you that which has tormented you; never again will you encounter any refusal. I offer you my love and my body; make me your mistress.”
The knight is, of course, delighted: after all this time of trying to seduce her, he has won the affection of Bisclavret’s wife.
But in order to clear the path for their affair, they need to get rid of her husband. This they easily accomplish because the lady now knows where Bisclavret keeps his clothes. They wait for him to transform into a wolf, then the knight steals his clothing, and everyone who has noticed his frequent, inexplicable absences assumes he is gone for good this time. Having betrayed Bisclavret, “the knight married the lady he had loved for so long.”
The narrative now jumps ahead by a year. Bisclavret, still trapped as a wild wolf, is on the run, pursued by the king’s own hunting party. Just as the dogs are about to “tear him to pieces and destroy him,” Bisclavret runs to the king and “kissed his foot and his leg.”
The king is astonished. He calls together his hunting companions and notes that the wolf has “the intelligence of a human and is pleading for mercy.” Calling off the dogs, he places the wild wolf under his protection.
The king brings Bisclavret back to his castle and commands that no one is to treat him badly, even letting the wild beast sleep among his knights. Everyone is surprisingly cool with this arrangement, and Bisclavret the wolf quickly becomes just as popular as Bisclavret the man:
It was loved by everyone and so noble and gentle a beast was it that it never attempted to cause any harm. Wherever the king might go, it never wanted to be left behind. It accompanied him constantly and showed clearly that it loved him.
The wild wolf has been tamed. Or so it seems. Until, one day, who should come to court but the very same knight who betrayed Bisclavret and married his wife. As soon as Bisclavret sees him, he attacks “sinking his teeth into him and dragging him down towards him.” The king calls him off and threatens Bisclavret with a stick, preventing him from killing the knight. Everyone in the royal household is shocked, “for never before had he shown signs of such behaviour towards anyone he had seen.” They conclude, therefore, that their friendly wolf must have good reason to hate this knight.
The matter is forgotten until later, when the king travels to Bisclavret’s old region and his wife comes to pay her respects. Seeing her, Bisclavret flies into another murderous rage:
When Bisclavret saw her approach, no one could restrain him. He dashed towards her like a madman. Just hear how successfully he took his revenge. He tore the nose right off her face. What worse punishment could he have inflicted on her?
The punishment of having her nose torn off resolves the discrepancy between the lady’s treacherous inner character and her beautiful outward appearance. The logic of the lai requires her beauty to be marred so that her face reflects the ugliness within.
But while Marie de France is clearly gleeful about this event, the king and his court are deeply disturbed. Bisclavret is on the point of being killed when a highly convenient wise man intervenes. He reminds the king of the wolf’s gentle nature up until this point (and the attack on her husband) and argues that the wolf must have a rightful vendetta against them. This wise man also brings up the knight who used to be the lady’s husband and has been missing for over a year now. His suggestion is simple, if cruel: torture the lady until she confesses “why the beast hates her.”
The king agrees, the lady is “subjected to torture,” and she reveals everything. Under threat of yet more torture, the lady brings Bisclavret’s clothes to court. Once he is dressed, the wolf transforms once more into a handsome knight.
Everything ends happily. The king restores Bisclavret’s lands to him and banishes his wife and her new husband. And, as a final comeuppance for the lady, Marie adds:
She had a good many children who were thereafter recognizable by their appearance. Many of the women in the family, I tell you truly, were born without noses and lived noseless.
What we learn from this story:
In my last post about the Giant of Mont St. Michel, I mentioned that medieval monsters are “often held up as a kind of distorted mirror to the civilized world.” In Bisclavret, we see Marie de France engaging in a similar exercise, using the figure of the werewolf to interrogate contemporary masculine ideals.
The werewolf in this story serves as a metaphor for chivalry. Medieval chivalry requires that a knight possess both ferocity and meekness. He must be capable of violence but exercise restraint, limiting the use of force to legitimate channels such as warfare. And the werewolf dramatically embodies this duality, transforming between the states of wild animal and civilized gentleman.
One of the most interesting and concerning aspects of the werewolf is how easily he can switch between these two extremes. All the trappings of chivalry, civilization, Christian ethics, etc. are really nothing more than a thin layer of clothing covering up the wild beast underneath. When he transforms from man to wolf, the werewolf effortlessly sheds this clothing. He reverts to a primal beast, running naked and free in the woods, satisfying his bloodlust without any concern for religion, social mores, or conscience. He is, as Marie states at the outset of her lai, a “ferocious beast” who “devours men.”
This is why the werewolf is such a fascinating and terrifying monster. Like the Giant of Mont St. Michel, he is a hypermasculine distortion of the chivalric masculine ideal. He reveals just how easily a knight may cast off the restraints of chivalry and the nightmarish scenario if he does. If the codes of conduct demanded by chivalry and courtly love are merely optional, then the knight is free to prey upon others, devouring them without conscience.
This is the conventional picture of the werewolf and the one with which Marie opens her tale. But Bisclavret is a highly unusual monster, a subversion of the trope. Even as a savage wolf, he is able to achieve the chivalric ideal. He joins the king’s household, earns the respect and admiration of his liegelord and fellow knights, and acts like a tamed, domesticated dog while still retaining all the ferocity of the wild wolf. This tightrope balance between violence and meekness is exactly what is required of the chivalrous medieval knight.
By the end of the tale, Bisclavret has undergone a significant character transformation from a wild beast who feeds off his prey in the woods to a chivalrous wolf who only employs violence against deserving enemies. His physical transformation from wolf to man reflects the inward journey he has already taken, and comes after he has achieved a balance between the dual polarities of man and beast. In this, he serves as a model of the ideal chivalric knight, the union of savage ferocity and gentle restraint.
I hope you enjoyed this second instalment of my medieval monster series. In the next post, we will explore the tale of a green knight, a Christmas feast, and a grisly game of beheading.
Thank you,
Andrew LiVecchi
If you enjoyed this post, please consider checking out my epic fantasy novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess. It builds on a lifelong love of mythology and literature and engages with a lot of the themes I wrestle with in my Substack posts.
For a more familiar example, think, for instance, of how Cinderella’s stepsisters become physically deformed by the end of the Grimm brothers version of the tale, so that their cruel character is reflected in their outward appearance.
very interesting, thank you!