Free Serpents and Werewolves by Lari Don

shape-shifting stories in almost every culture, and most shape-shifter stories are wonderful: vivid and exciting, with lots of sharp teeth and dark magic. So it’s been difficult choosing which stories to include in this book. I’ve tried to include lots of different kinds of animals, in stories from lots of different parts of the world.
    In myth, legend and folklore, it’s not just the characters who change shape. The stories themselves can change shape too. I believe that all oral stories, stories told and heard and remembered and told again, change as they pass from teller to audience to teller.
    I’ve altered all these stories as I tell them, to make them work for me and for the audience I’m telling to. And if you tell them, I hope you’ll change them a little bit too!
    I’m very grateful to the storytellers, collectors and writers (many of whom are listed in the sources below) who inspired me and this collection. I hope you’re inspired to track down more shape-shifter stories, or even make up your own. What animal would you like to become, just for a little while?

The Snake Prince
    Punjabi folktale
    It’s quite common for people in folklore and fairy tales to marry snakes accidentally, and this is my favourite version of that widespread story, because I really like the snake becoming a necklace, then becoming a baby. This tale was told to a Major Campbell in the Punjab, then published in Andrew Lang’s
The Olive Fairy Book
(Longmans, Green and Co., 1907). The Princess in Lang’s version is a bit inclined to weeping and fainting, so she has more backbone in my retelling.

The First Werewolves
    Greek myth
    This is one of many stories from Greek mythology about shape-shifters. I first came across it in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
(Penguin Classics, 2004; originally published around 8AD), which is a great source for stories of unfortunate people turned into plants and animals when they fall foul of the gods. (Though Lycaon deserved it more than most!) Ovid tells the story about Jove, because it’s a Roman version of the older Greek myth. The nasty detail that Lycaon cooked his own son comes from Robert Graves’s
Greek Myths
(Penguin, 1955). In many versions, it’s this bowl of boy stew which leads to the gods’ anger and the great flood, but that’s a different story!

Catching Loki
    Norse myth
    I often tell the story of how Loki tricked Hodur, the god of winter, into killing his brother Baldur, the god of summer (you can find my retelling in
Winter’s Tales
, A&C Black, 2013). And sometimes, if the audience want to know what happened next, I tell the story of how Loki was caught by his own cleverness. I found Loki’s house with four doors in
Teutonic Myth and Legend
by Donald A Mackenzie (The Gresham Publishing Company, 1912).

The Ashkelon Witches
    Jewish folktale
    I loved this story the moment I found it in Howard Schwartz’s book
Elijah’s Violin
(Oxford University Press, 1983). I love the clever way the rabbi defeats the witches with the rain, and the way the witches are all transformed into something appropriate at the end. In this retelling, the idea of a baby being turned into a caterpillar rather than a butterfly isn’t mine – my younger daughter suggested it, when I was telling her the story on a bus.

Turnskin
    Breton folktale
    I first caught sight of this tale when I was researching a novel about werewolves, and finally tracked it down to
The Lais of Marie de France
(Penguin Classics, 1986). I’ve told this story many times, and like most of the stories I work with, it has changed as I tell it, often in response to queries and questions from the audience. The particular ending I’ve used in this collection is one suggested by P5 pupils at Trinity Primary School in Edinburgh. Thanks for sharing your ideas!

The Swallow’s Search
    Egyptian myth
    The story of Isis and her lost husband Osiris has been told in many