A werewolf is also known as a lycanthrope (" wolf-man"), is a mythological or folkloric human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf or a therianthropic hybrid wolf-like creature, either purposely or after being placed under a curse or affliction.
Werewolves are shape-shifting creatures with unusual speed, strength, reflexes, and senses. They can be like other supernatural creatures, a werewolf is known for having extraordinary abilities.
They have super senses of sight, smell, and hearing. Furthermore, werewolves are very fast and have speedy healing abilities. A werewolf can share its thoughts with other werewolves.
Wolves have 42 teeth, they have four toes with claws in an oval shape, they mate for life. A litter of wolves is usually 4 to 6 pups. The pups are born deaf and blind with bright blue eyes, a pack of wolves can range from 2 to over 30 wolves but it depends. Wolves can run at 36 to 38 MPH.
However, a werewolf cannot be killed by silver crosses or holy water like vampires but they are killed with silver bullets. When they die, they turn back to their human forms, a werewolf's main weakness is their vulnerability to silver or any substance containing silver, as they can be killed with a silver knife or bullet. Contact with silver will hurt them, an injection of silver nitrate was able to kill one.
To become a werewolf, it is necessary to be bitten by a werewolf in its wolfish form at the time of the full moon. When the werewolf's saliva mingles with the victim's blood, then contamination will occur.
Werewolves have enhanced senses like vampires, albeit less developed, they can hear things humans cannot, such as the Gilbert Device, however, they were not shown to have the hearing capabilities of vampires. They also have heightened taste senses.
The werewolves don't live forever but they don't age for some time until they can stop fasing into wolves, but they live in the woods, far away from the human world. They are hiding not all human knowledge of their existence, they believe humans as weak creatures.
werewolf in European folklore, a man who turns into a wolf at night and devours animals, people, or corpses but returns to human form by the day.
One of the earliest known werewolf legends comes from a greek mythology. According to the legend, a man named Lycaon angered Zeus, the lord of the Gods, when he served Zeus a meal made from human flesh. As punishment, the enlarged Zeus turned Lycaon into a wolf and that was how werewolves came into existence.
werewolves are scared of transgressing the border between human and animals, werewolves illustrate a fear of the devil and his followers undermining human, particularly christian, society. Accounts of the humans turning into wolves are found as early as the ancient Norwegian Volsunga Saga or Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The werewolf is a widespread concept in European folklore, existing in many variants, which are related by a common development of a Christian interpretation of underlying European folklore developed during the medieval period. From the early modern period, werewolf beliefs also spread to the New World with colonialism.
Belief in werewolves developed in parallel to the belief in witches, in the course of the late middle ages and the early modern period. Like the witchcraft trials as a whole, the trial of supposed werewolves emerged in what is now Switzerland ( especially the Valais and Vaud) in the early 15th century and spread throughout Europe in the 16th, peaking in the 17th and subsiding by the 18th century.
It's unclear exactly when and where the werewolf legend originated. Some scholars believed the werewolf made its debut in the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known western prose when Gilgamesh jilted a potential lover because she turned her previous mate into a wolf.