A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in
early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation. The
best-known wolves of Old English literature are the Beasts of
Battle, alongside ravens and eagles as ravenous heralds of doom who
haunt the battlefield in the hope of fresh meat plucked from
still-warm bodies. Yet to reduce these animals to mere
corpse-scavengers is to deny that they are frequently imbued with a
variety of far more nuanced meanings elsewhere in the corpus. Two
such meanings are inherited from ancient and medieval European
lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a
person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and
human outlaws. Tracing the history of these associations and the
evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in
early medieval England, this book provides new, animal-centric
readings of Wulf and Eadwacer, Abbo of Fleury and AElfric's
Passiones Eadmundi, and Beowulf, placing these texts within a
lupine literary network that transcends time and place. By
exploring the intricate, contradictory, and even sympathetic
depictions of the wolves and wolf-like entities found within these
texts, this book banishes all notions of the medieval wolf as the
one-dimensional, man-eating creature that it is so often understood
to be.
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