An Irishman's Diary

IT'S ONLY a myth, apparently, that wolves howl at the moon. And it's not true regardless of their nationality, contrary to what Shakespeare implied when, in As You Like It, he had Rosalind quell an argument with the line, "Pray you, no more of this; 'tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon." No, Rosalind, with all due respect, 'tis not. Wolves, Hibernian and otherwise, do indeed howl, to communicate with each other and to protect their territories. But any lunar involvement in the cacophony is coincidental. It's just that on clear nights, when the moon is visible, all sounds – howling included – travel further and so are more likely to be heard.

This insight, and others, I owe to a fascinating book called Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History, by Kieran Hickey, which traces the history and lore of the species from ancient times into the modern era and the death of the last known survivor.

That was probably in Carlow in 1786, perhaps a full century after the species was wiped out on Shakespeare’s island. Yet in his time and even later, the Irish wolf still thrived here to an extent that made it synonymous with the country, and by extension with what England insisted on calling the Irish problem.

No, not even the wolf could escape politicisation. Here, for example, is Cromwell blaming a lupine population boom in the 1640s (a phenomenon probably not unrelated to the amount of human carrion available throughout that grim decade) on the natives he had been forced to chastise: “For if the priests had not been in Ireland, the trouble would not have arisen, nor the English have come, nor have made the country almost a ruinous heap, nor would the wolves have so increased.” Such was the English tendency to identify the wild animal with the wild Irish, the wonder is that the wolfhound, rather than the wolf, should have become a national symbol. Not, it should be added, that the wolves themselves had any obvious nationalist sympathies.

On the contrary, they were equal-opportunity predators, attacking settler and native alike. In 1601, for example, the Irish routed at the Battle of Kinsale had immediately to deal with another old enemy when, as O’Sullivan Beare recorded, wolves came “out of the woods and mountains [and] attacked and tore to pieces the people enfeebled by want of food”.

Even so, the colonists had a habit of conflating the two native species. Just before Kinsale, for example, in the wake of England’s disaster at Yellow Ford, the Duke of Ormond had complained (as paraphrased by Hickey) that it was madness to expect poorly trained conscripts to defeat people “as tireless and savage as the wolves still lurking in the forests of Ireland”.

It was sometimes suggested, indeed, that the Irish and the wolf were related. The poet Edmund Spenser mentions a belief that, like the Scythians of ancient Iran, the Irish turned into wolves once a year. And half a century later, a captain in Gen Ireton’s regiment went further, reporting the actual possession of tails by a number of the Irish garrison slaughtered at Clonmel in 1647.

In fairness, the notion that wolves and humans could become mixed up is international. Hickey notes that in 16th- and 17th-century France, hundreds of people were executed on suspicion of being werewolves, while as recently as 1927 in Strasbourg, a policeman stood trial for murdering a boy he believed similarly afflicted.

In many cases, the victims would in fact have been suffering from one of several clinical conditions not then understood. Lycanthropy, for example, is a psychiatric problem in which those affected believe themselves to have been transformed into a dog or wolf. Symptoms include developing a taste for raw meat and for “running around naked”.

Then we have lupus erythematosus, which involves sensitivity to light and, in severe cases, a vampire-like aversion to the daytime. Finally there is that rare but dramatic condition, hypertrichosis, which makes people unusually hairy and, affecting as it does both sexes, explains most of the bearded ladies of freak shows past.

The book doesn’t mention any local equivalents of the unfortunate Petrus Gonzales, a 17th-century Canary Islander, who had the disease and bequeathed it to two daughters and a son. But it does mention that the Irish term fear breagh – “wolf man” – is still heard in the Slieve Bloom mountains of Laois and Offaly, an area long synonymous, if not with wolf men, with wolves.

Based on place names, however, the most lupine county in Ireland, by far, is Clare, in which Hickey identifies 11 townlands with wolf references, including Knockaunvicteera and Cahermactire, both featuring a poetic Irish term for a wolf, mac tire (“son of the country”).

Donegal and Wexford have five names each, as (when you include English-language names like “wolf island”) does Armagh. Dublin, suggests the author, has only one – Feltrim, from another Irish wolf word, faolchú, meaning “wild hound”.

A geography lecturer at NUI Galway, Hickey has spent two decades gathering information on his subject. But he admits there is “easily a lifetime” of work remaining and suggests that much of it needs to be done by specialists. As for himself, he pledges to carry on his researches on the Irish wolf. And he adds, in what I hope is just a metaphor, “it is in my blood now anyway”.

Wolves in Irelandis published by Four Courts Press.