The Wolf of Latvia and the Baltic amber gods

Baltic folklore is among the oldest surviving pagan tradition in Europe, and Latvia’s dainas, over a million short folk verses collected in the 1800s and now UNESCO-listed, preserve a pre-Christian world of Dievs the sky god, Saule the sun, and Jumis the field spirit. Latvia also produced one of the most famous werewolf documents in history: the 1692 trial of Thiess of Kaltenbrun, an old man who cheerfully told the court he was a werewolf and, more startlingly, that werewolves were the “hounds of God” who fought witches in hell to bring back the harvest.