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<blockquote data-quote="Dioltach" data-source="post: 6555591" data-attributes="member: 21843">In the Netherlands, where I live, people are getting excited because a wolf has been spotted in the wild: the first one in decades. This has made me think about how wolves are portrayed nowadays and how they used to be.There seems to be something of a romanticised view of wolves in modern fantasy -- The Wheel of Time, for example, and the Farseer Trilogy. They're presented as noble and wise animals, generally on the side of the protagonists. Yet in older stories wolves are usually a threat (one exception I can think of is The Jungle Book). Tolkien has his wolves, and in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the wolves are the secret police of the White Witch. A book that I often read as a child, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (and to a lesser degree its sequel, Black Hearts in Battersea), has packs of wolves as a threat to anyone out in the woods after dark -- and they're evil enough that the &quot;wolves&quot; in the title also refers to the figurative wolves who are the antagonists.So where did this shift come from? Is it simply because people have forgotten what a threat a pack of wolves can pose, simply because there aren't that many of them? When Stephen Fry was in America, he visited a ranch in Wisconsin I believe, where the people were frustrated by the laws naming wolves a protected species -- apparently they'd regularly wake up to find that wolves had come right up to their house in the night and savaged and killed their horses. Not very noble or wise on the part of the wolves, I have to say.Has anybody else noticed this?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dioltach, post: 6555591, member: 21843"] In the Netherlands, where I live, people are getting excited because a wolf has been spotted in the wild: the first one in decades. This has made me think about how wolves are portrayed nowadays and how they used to be. There seems to be something of a romanticised view of wolves in modern fantasy -- [I]The Wheel of Time[/I], for example, and the [I]Farseer Trilogy[/I]. They're presented as noble and wise animals, generally on the side of the protagonists. Yet in older stories wolves are usually a threat (one exception I can think of is [I]The Jungle Book[/I]). Tolkien has his wolves, and in [I]The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe[/I] the wolves are the secret police of the White Witch. A book that I often read as a child, [I]The Wolves of Willoughby Chase[/I] (and to a lesser degree its sequel, [I]Black Hearts in Battersea[/I]), has packs of wolves as a threat to anyone out in the woods after dark -- and they're evil enough that the "wolves" in the title also refers to the figurative wolves who are the antagonists. So where did this shift come from? Is it simply because people have forgotten what a threat a pack of wolves can pose, simply because there aren't that many of them? When Stephen Fry was in America, he visited a ranch in Wisconsin I believe, where the people were frustrated by the laws naming wolves a protected species -- apparently they'd regularly wake up to find that wolves had come right up to their house in the night and savaged and killed their horses. Not very noble or wise on the part of the wolves, I have to say. Has anybody else noticed this? [/QUOTE]

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