Horror, like anything else, has its trends. Vampires have gone mainstream thanks to Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer; zombies are the new vampires, if 28 Days Later and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are any indication; and ghosts, while they haven’t made waves since movies such as The Sixth Sense and The Others more than ten years ago, are the only spooky creatures that people actually still believe in. Where, then, does that leave werewolves?
Posts Tagged with Sabine Baring-Gould
Parson, composer, werewolf hunter: Sabine Baring-Gould
Sabine Baring-Gould is by no means a celebrity today, but in the 19th century he brought a modern sensibility to an ancient body of superstitions: werewolf lore.
I first came across his name thanks to A Very Special Christmas, of all things. On the 1987 compilation album, among the carols recorded by the then-current crop of rock stars was “Gabriel’s Message,” by Sting. The liner notes credited S. Baring-Gould as the composer.
Born in 1834, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould was a prolific writer, composer and collector of folklore. Among his scores of published works are a multi-volume Lives of the Saints, hymns including “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and The Book of Were-Wolves, a classic survey of werewolf folklore first published in 1865.
For fans of gothic literature, the first chapter alone makes the book worth picking up. As the introduction in the edition I have puts it, Baring-Gould’s account of his stumbling across pervasive belief in werewolves while on holiday in France is worthy of a Victorian novel.
