#source checking

Ok so...Idk if you're jewish and/or have much knowledge about this kind of prejudice, but do you have advice for how to avoid (or at least to pay attention) in case a certain post has some antisemetic misinformation?

(If you didn't understand, I could try to make it clear)

If you're asking how to avoid misinformation in posts, the answer is the same as with any validity verification of information:

Check who is posting it. Do they post a lot of contradictory information? Do they claim to be a certain ethnicity, religion, race, ect? Do they speak in certain ways? Do they post or reblog a lot of the same content or information? Are they politically bias? (E.g; they might claim to be British but is the way they speak distinctly Irish or American?)

Research the information given in the post for yourself. Make sure to look at a variety of sources, not just one. Is there a lot of people referencing this information? Has anyone called this information false on other platforms? Can you find any evidence to support the information given? Are there news articles, broadcasts, ect?

I've flat out had someone in my inbox try to warn I was reblogging something from a TERF when not only could I not find any stuff like that in their blog no matter where I looked, but their username was literally highlighted as green in Shinigami Eyes

Yes! Although there aren’t many I recommend, I’m afraid. I don’t have a very good opinion of many pop culture werewolves... I wish I did.

At any rate, though, I do have a post on my top 3 favorite pop culture werewolf things! (And after finishing a recent rewatch of Teen Wolf, the entire thing, I want to reiterate my statement there that you can stop watching it after the first season, especially if you are looking for cool/good portrayals of werewolves. The werewolves become lamer and lamer over the course of the show, but they are fantastic in the first season. Also I DO NOT recommend Elder Scrolls Online for werewolves, but I do recommend all the other Elder Scrolls games, especially Morrowind/Bloodmoon and Skyrim)

As for good folklore sources, there really aren’t any good online resources - but there are lots of books available online, such as through Project Gutenberg and Google Books! I have a list of my favorite folklore sources (at least as far as werewolves and vampires are concerned) here, and these authors have many other books on folklore and myth that are very good. I especially recommend looking up the works of Montague Summers, who is one of our foremost folklore and magic scholars! He has a lot of great vampire, witch, and magic work, too.

I very highly recommend looking around on Project Gutenberg for books on folklore and mythology - there are so many great ones up there, because most of our very best and most unfiltered sources are old enough to be up there. Same for Google Books, which also has plenty of good resources available for free or mostly for free.

You can find so much great stuff available for free on Project Gutenberg - it has Bisclavret, many Norse sagas, and so much more. Of course, the translations they have are not always the most recommended, but they are often still serviceable (and you can buy the other translations later if you want them, of course). A lot of my favorite sources that I linked to in that post earlier are on either/or Project Gutenberg and Google Books wholly or in part, though a few aren’t.

I would also recommend my own werewolves, if that’s acceptable. I have lots of werewolf books coming out in the future, you know. You can get started on my setting right here, though, with my newly-released monster hunt stories (including a werebear! And a character who is a werewolf, though he doesn’t turn in this book!). /innocentface

Sorry, that was a totally shameless plug.

There are no good websites for folklore. :)

It’s difficult (and a pain) to list sources to individual posts, especially considering I’m pulling this from a lifetime of study and a massive collection of books (the likes of which I can’t contain to one shelf). My bibliography for each post would be longer than the post itself!

But when asked, I will often list some of my favorite sources, such as I did here.

You can find a few more sources in this post, when I was asked directly for sources on werewolves having tails.

It would take... a very long time to list every source, but maybe I’ll do that sometime. It’s not a bad idea, really - I do like letting people know that I’m legitimate instead of the myth wiki or something.

If there is any particular thing you doubt, please feel free to ask me for my source(s) on whatever you like. I can gladly answer. But as I do this in my spare time, I don’t academically list each source on each post, since that would be a whole lot of work.

Good question, though! Always important to know sources are legitimate.

No problem!

Before I get into it, though, I will say that part of my personal stake in werewolf studies is to push for a less broad definition of the word “werewolf.” Personally, I don’t hold to many scholars’ ideas of calling every single person turning into a wolf a “werewolf,” and this applies doubly to things involving witchcraft. For example, I don’t approve at all of the now popular idea of calling Peter Stubbe a werewolf.

Personally, I think a “werewolf” needs to fit a certain, meaningful criteria, instead of any old person or thing who has the ability to turn into a wolf.

In particular if their wolf shapeshifting is based in illusionary magic, accompanied by shapeshifting into other animal forms, or their wolf form was not undertaken with any particular meaning (i.e., could’ve just as easily been any other animal with no actual wolf motifs), they aren’t really “werewolves,” in my opinion.

All that being said, as you can probably guess, I butt heads a lot with what scholars sometimes refer to as werewolves.

My sources on the “werewolves always have tails” come from a few different places…

Firstly, there’s Henry Boguet in “Of the Metamorphosis of Men intoBeasts,” from 1590 (my version was republished in A Lycanthropy Reader:Werewolves in Western Culture, edited and compiled by Charlotte F. Otten). On page 79 of this edition, Boguet marks a difference between werewolves and witches that have turned into wolves, repeating a common belief that, when witches turn into animals, they have “no tails.”

Secondly, there’s the Malleus Maleficarum, specifically question X of part I, “Whether Witches can by some Glamour Change Men into Beasts.” I’m pulling this from Monatgue Summers’ translation.

They say that, “the devil can deceive the human fancy so that a man really seems to be an animal.” This specifically refers to deception. Thus, illusion. Not a true, physical change as we get with a werewolf.

Furthermore, however, they say that “when it says that no creature can be made by the power of the devil, this is manifestly true if Made is understood to mean Created. But if the word Made is taken to refer to natural production, it is certain that devils can make some imperfect creatures.”

“Imperfect,” in this instance, generally thought to refer to “tailless,” along with a few other legends, such as a witch in animal form still bearing human eyes.

Bear in mind that the Malleus Maleficarum was written and compiled during a time period in which werewolves were considered a form of witchcraft, although not equal to it. One could become a werewolf via a curse, without directly practicing that witchcraft.

This also came from a time period when werewolves were considered negative (obviously), unlike in earlier time periods, and much more like today.

Moving on, we also have Albert the Great in his book On Animals, as cited by Montague Summers, who says that devils can indeed make animals: “they can, with God’s permission, make imperfect animals.” Again on the imperfection.

There is one scholar who disputes this very, very briefly in his writing, and that is actually one of my prime sources: Montague Summers. In his book The Werewolf, he remarks, “many–but not all– authorities hold that the werewolf has no tail.”

Something to remember about Summers, however, is that firstly, he truly believed in werewolves as a form of witchcraft. To him, werewolves are more closely connected with those aforementioned witches (that I think werewolves need to be separated from). Secondly, when he makes this sweeping statement, he provides absolutely no sources whatsoever and doesn’t really make any kind of argument to back up or to defend that idea. I’m calling his BS on that one.

Thirdly, we have an overwhelming number of other sources on werewolves being depicted with tails as opposed to without. We have imagery from various time periods (as appeared in my post on werewolf appearances that you referred to; there are a few more images here), in which they are virtually always depicted with tails or mid-transformation, thus leaving us unsure if they are going to grow a tail or not. One of the only depictions we have of a tailless werewolf is the wolf-man woodcut of the one eating the baby, which is in itself a rare sight, as werewolves weren’t generally “wolf-men” very often in folklore.

Descriptions of werewolves in folklore frequently refer to tails, or else refer to the werewolf as simply a “wolf” and thus lead us to assume they must have a tail, or such a radical difference would’ve been noticed by the narrator (Niceros’s tale, Bisclavret, Melion, the curse of Lykaon, Chinese legends, and many more).

If I dug through my mountains of books, I’m sure I could find more citations/discussions/arguments on this, but hopefully this helps for now! :) In my opinion, I think it makes sense to say that werewolves have tails, whereas witches don’t if or when they choose to turn into a wolf via illusion or otherwise.

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff!

I’m about to let my inner my inner English degree nerd loose on this post, because I feel like it’s important. While this post is geared towards fandom (the Blacklist fandom specifically), the point behind it really can be taken into every part of life when it comes to the news we accept as fact. That said, I would like to encourage everyone to check the source of an article whenever possible. You’ll find that many professional bloggers and article writers alike have their own opinions, just as we do, and sometimes that sways them to writing to their opinions. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes their wrong, but just because a headline says it doesn’t always mean it’s true.

For example, I happened across an article that was linked here from Tumblr that said:

‘The Blacklist’ Season 4 Air Date & Spoilers: Tom And Liz Breakup; James Spader Teases More On Red And Liz’s Relationship

As an avid Keen2 shipper that has a very positive outlook after the articles that were delivered quoting the show runners, it caused me to pause. Tom and Liz break up? Well that’s something I hadn’t gotten from any of the interviews with the Jo(h)ns, so the first thing I did after crushing the swell of panic was to go to the link itself. The article is hosted on ParentHerald.com, which was the first thing that caused me to pause. Okay, not EW, not any of the other usual sites. That’s not a definite cause to toss it out, of course, but I started reading closer. 

I’m reading along and I see that it’s a piece that doesn’t appear to have directly interviewed either of the Jo(h)ns. Instead, they’re quoting an EW article that they link to in their own article. That is totally fine, not knocking it, but once again it’s something to look at as this is not strictly an interview, but more of a commentary on an interview, which leaves much more room for personal opinions.

This is the collection of lines that they seem to have gotten their headline from:

source [x] 

Okay, if that’s all you’re looking at and you don’t go back and look at the original source content, that looks bad for the Keens, because that’s the opinion that’s being pushed in this article. If you go back and look at the original quote that they’re talking about from the original interview, you’ll see that they clipped it to fit their own bias. I have that quote in full below with the bit that I’ll be comparing highlighted:

source [x]

Amazing the difference when you clip a piece of Eisendrath’s quote out of context. The article from ParentHerald.com, with the way it is clipped, seems to support their theory that they state so boldly, almost as fact, that the Keens are breaking up in S4, but if you read John’s entire quote, you see that he was referring to them (Tom and Liz) in the past tense because he was discussing what he and Jon had been looking at since the beginning of the show. The rest of the quote is very positive towards the couple and the struggles that they’ll face. 

I’m not saying this to rag on this site. To be honest, I don’t know anything about it. This is the first article I’ve come across, but the situation is not new. There’s no question that every person has their own biases, but depending how much you allow those biases to cloud your writing is what will be the deciding factor between an informative piece and an opinion piece.