The Wulver: The Kind Wolf-Man of the Shetland Isles
Nearly every wolf-man in the world's folklore is a warning. The werewolf of the European mainland is a neighbor turned devourer; the loup-garou prowls the Quebec woods as a punishment for broken faith; from the Baltic to the Balkans, to mix man and wolf is to describe a catastrophe. And then there is Shetland — that scatter of treeless, wind-scoured islands halfway between Scotland and Norway, where the Atlantic and the North Sea grind against each other and the winter sun barely troubles to rise. There, and apparently only there, the old crofters told of a wolf-headed man who never harmed a living soul. He lived alone in a cave dug from a hillside. He spent his days fishing from a flat rock in a deep loch. And when he had caught more than he needed — which was often, for he was a patient fisherman — he would walk quietly through the dusk and leave fish on the windowsills of families too poor or too frail to feed themselves. They called him the wulver, and he may be the gentlest ...