Wolf Symbolism in Folklore

Few animals carry as much weight in human imagination as the wolf. It is the predator that took the straying sheep, the beast that walked the forest at night, the shape that the werewolf wore. Across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the wolf has been feared and honoured, hunted and worshipped, driven from the land and then brought back. The image of the wolf is one of the deepest in world folklore, and the figure is alive, in some form, in nearly every tradition.

The Wolf of the European Farm

The European farmer lived, for ten thousand years, at war with the wolf. The wolf took the sheep, the goat, the calf, and the foal. The folk of Europe had a long and bitter knowledge of the wolf, and the stories of the wolf are stories of fear, of hatred, of occasional respect, and of a kind of grudging recognition. The wolf was a sign of danger, but it was also a sign of the wild. The French loup and the German Wolf carry the fear of centuries.

The werewolf of the medieval French and German trials, the loup-garou, was the man or woman who walked the night in the shape of the wolf. The trial of the werewolf is one of the most striking episodes in the history of European folklore, and it is a reminder that the figure of the wolf was felt, for centuries, to be a real threat to the human community.

Fenrir and the Norse Doom

The Norse Fenrir is the great wolf of the Old Norse tradition, and he is the doom of Odin at the end of all things. Fenrir is the son of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, and the gods of Asgard tried to bind him with a chain of iron. When he broke it, they asked the dwarves of Svartalfheim to make a chain of impossible materials: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird. Fenrir agreed to be bound only if one of the gods would place a hand in his mouth as a pledge of trust. Tyr, the god of justice, placed his right hand in the wolf’s mouth, and the gods bound Fenrir. The wolf bit off the hand, and he remained bound until the day of Ragnarök, when he broke free and swallowed Odin whole. The story of Fenrir is one of the deepest of the Norse images, and the wolf is the figure of the final, unstoppable chaos.

Romulus and Remus and the Roman Founding

The Roman myth of Romulus and Remus is the story of the wolf that suckled the founders of the city. The two brothers, sons of Mars and the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, were thrown into the Tiber by their great-uncle Amulius, and were rescued by a she-wolf who suckled them in a cave on the Palatine Hill. The image of the she-wolf and the two children became the central image of the Roman state, and the bronze statue of the lupa and the twins was carried through the streets of Rome in the funeral processions of the great.

The wolf, in this story, is the foster-mother of the people. The same image appears in many other traditions: the wolf in the Iranian myth that suckled the ancestors of the royal line, the she-wolf in the Turkic origin myths of Central Asia, the wolf-mother of the founders of the Mongol court. The wolf is the being that stands at the beginning of the people, the figure of the wild that gives the human its first milk.

The Wolves of Ossian and the Irish Hero Cycle

The Irish tradition has its own wolf figure, and the story of Ossian, the son of Finn mac Cumhaill, is one of the great examples. Ossian was sometimes said to have been changed into a wolf, and the figure of Ossian as the wolf is one of the great images of the Gaelic folk tradition. The Irish and Scottish werewolf stories are gentler than the continental ones, and the wolf is more often a protector than a predator. The faoladh, the werewolf of the western seaboard, was a man who walked the night in wolf’s shape, often protecting the children of the village from the wild dogs.

The Slavic Vlkodlak and the Werewolf Trials

The Slavic vlkodlak is the werewolf of the Slavic tradition, and the figure is one of the deepest in the Slavic folk imagination. The vlkodlak is a man who, in life, had been marked for the wolf, and who, after death, returns as the undead. The trial of the werewolf is a regular feature of the legal records of the Slavic lands in the early modern period. The Russian peasantry had a long knowledge of the wolf, and the figure of the wolf is in many of the most beautiful of the Russian folk tales. Baba Yaga of the Slavic folk tradition is sometimes said to be a wolf-woman.

The Wolf-Children of India and Central Asia

The stories of the wolf-children are some of the most haunting in world folklore. The most famous is the story of the two girls, Amala and Kamala, who were said to have been raised by a she-wolf in Midnapore, India, in the 1920s. The girls were found in a wolf den, and they were said to walk on all fours, eat raw meat, and howl at the moon. The Mogul emperor Babur tells the story of a boy raised by wolves in the forests of Hindustan. The wolf-child is the figure of the human raised by the wild, the being that lives on the edge.

The Cherokee Wolf and the American Traditions

The Cherokee tradition has a long and rich relationship with the wolf. The Wolf clan is one of the seven Cherokee clans, and the figure of the wolf is the figure of the pathfinder, the scout, the soldier. The same figure can be seen in many of the other American Indian traditions: the Pawnee, the Blackfoot, the Lakota, the Dene, the Ojibwe. The wolf is a figure of the wild, a teacher, a helper, and a being that walks alongside the people.

The wolf was hunted nearly to extinction in the lower forty-eight states during the westward expansion, and the reintroduction of the wolf to Yellowstone in 1995 is one of the great conservation stories of the modern era. The wolf, brought back to the land, has begun to change the ecology of the park, and the figure of the wolf is, once again, a sign of the wild in a continent that had nearly forgotten it.

The Japanese Ōkami and the Mountain Wolf

The Japanese Ōkami, the great wolf, is a figure of the mountains of Japan, and the cult of the wolf is one of the most fully preserved of the Japanese folk religious traditions. The Ōkami is not a god; it is a great spirit, a kind of kami of the wild, and it is honoured at the shrine of Mitsumine in the mountains of Saitama. The Ōkami was a protector of villages against the wild boar and the deer, and the farmers of the mountain regions left offerings of millet and rice at the wolf shrines.

The Lone Wolf in Modern Popular Culture

The figure of the wolf has migrated into modern popular culture in a striking way. The “lone wolf” of the modern vocabulary is the figure of the individual, the solitary, the self-reliant. The sports teams of the United States, Canada, and Europe are often named after the wolf: the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Chicago Wolves, the Cardiff Wolves. The dire wolves of Game of Thrones, the wolf pack of the Russian film The Wolf’s Message, the great grey of the Scandinavian thrillers, the mother wolf of the modern children’s books — all are descendants of the older folklore. The wolf is one of the great constants of the human imagination, and the figure is alive, in some form, in every generation.

Sources and Further Reading

Boitani, Luigi, ed. Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Lopez, Barry H. Of Wolves and Men. Scribner, 1978.
Germonpré, Mietje, et al. Palaeolithic Dogs and Wolves (in Journal of Archaeological Science, 2009).
Sax, Boria. The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature. ABC-CLIO, 2001.