Professional folklorists see a big gap between werewolf trial records and werewolf folklore. Unfortunately, comparatively little of the werewolf folklore has made it into books that are devoted to werewolf legends, partly because no comprehensive work written by a professional folklorist has ever been devoted to werewolves ("In Search of the Swan Maiden" by Barbara Fass Leavy is devoted to all kinds of animal shapeshifters, with most of the shapeshifters being female because she wants to interpret it as a gender studies thing; "Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania" by Harry A. Senn is professional but not comprehensive, because its scope is regional and because it spends more than half of its short length discussing vampires, dragons, fairies or other non-werewolves; and nearly every other book was written by authors with little or no training in folklore studies).Rhuen wrote:However this is not to say I know little of the center countries, I know a great deal regarding the nordic influenced lore as well as those spread during the Roman Empire. But little on things other than late christian era in regards to werewolves "all I could find on the subject were court cases really, all of which can be seen as false accusations, or caused by some sort of madness"
This means that, if you want to read many werewolf folktales that are not connected to the werewolf trials, you have to get a book on, say, Polish folktales and find the one little werewolf folktale hidden somewhere in the back, then you need to track down a book on French ghosts and goblins, and maybe you'll be lucky enough to find two werewolf folktales, and so on and so forth.
I must warn you, though, most werewolf folktales have little detail and are kind of nonsensical; they are not like the werewolf trial records, which are detailed and combine statements from multiple actual people.
This happens constantly in folklore, and is not limited to Christianity, or even to religions. Any change in society's outlook will generally change the interpretation given to mythic creatures and phenomena. This is not to say that the new interpretations always stick or that they are accepted by everyone, or that a bunch of competing Christianized explanations don't appear - because all these processes occur also. When Japan changed from Shinto to Buddhism (yes, I realize that Shinto is still the official religion and now lives in harmony with Buddhism, but most scholars consider it a shadow of its former self, as it was severly changed in the encounter of the two religions and had to absorb a lot of Buddhist ideas to survive), many of the interpretations of the legends changed. This also happened when ancient Persia changed from paganism to Zoroastrianism (this was long before Islam). All the old gods were reinterpreted, along with much of mythology (however, later some of the demonized gods were rehabilitated and accepted back into the Zoroastrian religion).Rhuen wrote: on the fairies thing, christian influence is a pain to get past in such things. They even made up some sillyness about Pixies being the souls of lost pagans who refused to convert to christianity.
They even diminished their power from grand almost god like beings of nature to minor imp like fiends.
You can also see this process in work today, even on this very board. When people want to believe (or hypothetically believe) in folkloric creatures, they first try to reconcile them to science, the current dominant paradigm. Today, if people can't reconcile a mythical creature with science to their satisfaction, they are more than likely to discard the idea that said creature might be real.
It is also probably wrong to think of the "original" (for example, in Europe, pre-Christian) version as the one true correct version (though it may very well be closer to the original ideas that spawned such creature). Why? Because there is a strong liklihood that the earliest version we know of was also a product of its times, and may have been considerably changed from an even earlier version that was interpreted under yet another paradigm.
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