A Fairytale in Question: Historical Interactions Between Humans and Wolves ed. by Patrick Masius, Jana Sprenger (review)

A Fairytale in Question: Historical Interactions Between Humans and Wolves. Edited by Patrick Masius and Jana Sprenger. Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 2015. 318 pp.The essays making up A Fairytale in Question are an invaluable resource- and a source of disturbing enlightenment-to those studying the effects of fairy tales and folklore on the historical extermination of wolves through- out Europe, North America, and Central Asia. In the preface Manfred Jekubowski-Tiessen describes the wolf as a symbolic animal that has gathered negative connotations, such as "hungry, cunning, and dangerous," as a result of fairy tales, ultimately leading to a deadly misunderstanding of the "real wolf" (vii). Editors Patrick Masius and Jana Sprenger have assembled an impressively researched collection that provides historical and contemporary analysis of interactions between humans and wolves through a consistently critical yet sensitive lens. Each chapter reveals how our perception of wolves has influenced our behavior toward them-from Roman and Norse mythology to Grimms' fairy tales to Tlingit traditions.Of particular interest to readers of Marvels & Tales will be the essays examining the eradication of wolves from the medieval era to the nineteenth century in Sweden, France, and Germany. Roger Bergstrom, Karen Dirke, and Kjell Danell explore the extermination of wolves in eighteenth-century Sweden and the government's alarming use of war language to accomplish this task in their chapter "The Wolf War in Sweden During the Eighteenth Century: Strategies, Measures, and Leaders." Although ostensibly launched to protect livestock and wild ungulates from wolves, the extermination efforts stemmed primarily from perceptions of Swedish identity: "Being Swedish was viewed as not being 'wolfish'-that is, greedy, gluttonous or, for that matter, foreign" (58). The result was organized hunting (a forced activity for many peasants despite bounties awarded for pelts), trapping by use of pitfall traps and enclosures, and the killing of pups in dens-a practice that eventually became known as the "Swedish system" (72). In addition, the increased use of poison in the eighteenth century was seen not only as an effective means of eliminating wolves but also as a fitting manner of death, because wolves were known for gluttony, as evidenced in popular fairy tales.In "The Story of a Man-Eating Beast in Dauphine, France (1746-1756)," Julien Alleau and John D. C. Linnell investigate concerns for human safety in the Early Modern Era of France in light of wolf attacks-the fears originating both from occasional real-life wolf attacks and from folktales that portray wolves with rapacious appetites for human prey. Primarily interpreting data from parish registers, the accounts of wolves eating shepherds, who were often children working near forested areas, prove as chilling as anything in the pages of the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales (1812) or Gustave Dore's subsequent fairy-tale illustrations. The strategy to kill wolves in France was similar to Sweden's in terms of mandatory battues, where wolves were ineffectively hunted, but there was also the formation of the louveterie-professional wolf hunters working exclusively for bounties. The increased attacks on humans during this time period and the simultaneous upsurge in the number of wolves were attributed to the Thirty Years' War, famine, and the Black Death.In "Where Is the Big Bad Wolf? Notes and Narratives on Wolves in Swedish Newspapers During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Karen Dirke studies representations of wolves in Swedish periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although state-controlled newspapers clearly outlined goals to eliminate wolves by depicting them as vicious and insatiable, they also provided information on how to kill them. The wolf narratives themselves read like "Icelandic sagas" or "folkloric tales, such as Little Red Riding Hood or Peter and the Wolf" (108). …