Thereupon he clenched his teeth on her tongue and a desperate struggle ensued. The brute drove its feet against the stocks and broke them, but Sigmund tore out her tongue by the roots. And that wolf was the mother of King Siggeir, who had assumed the vulpine form by her magic arts, and now perished miserably.
Many years ago, in fact in 1865, I published a Book of Werewolves that has long been out of print. In it I collected all the stories I could find of transformation into wolves, and I have come across others since. In fact it is apparently a universal belief that certain persons have the faculty of assuming a bestial form at pleasure.
Herodotus says: ‘It seems that the Neuri are sorcerers, if one may believe the Scythians and the Greeks established in Scythia; for each Neurian changes himself, once in the year, into the form of a wolf, and he continues in that form for several days, after which he resumes his former state.’
Ovid tells the story, in his Metamorphoses, of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, who, entertaining Jupiter one day, set before him a hash of human flesh to prove his omniscience, whereupon the god transformed him into a wolf.
