ON THAT AUTUMN afternoon spent turning the pages of the manuscripts housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library, Barry Holstun Lopez reached through time to the ‘people who wrote or printed’; the texts over which he pored, ‘people who sat down to dinner like you and me, who marveled at the universe, who stood up and stretched at the end of the day’;. Although these people ‘have long since turned to dust, […] what they wrote remains behind’;, a textual ‘heritage’; to which ‘even we in a more modern age are bound’;; for, while time divides us from them, we are connected to these people by the threads of traditions found within the books that they wrote. Along these threads travel the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of our forefathers, cultural memories from which we construct our own imagined ‘wolf’; today. So too were our ancestors connected to those who had come before them. They pored over the manuscripts of their forefathers as we do ours; they too were bound to the textual ‘heritage’; of their ancestors by the threads of tradition found within, their conceptualisations of the wolf and the natural world constructed from associations inherited and borrowed from earlier and analogous cultural and literary traditions.

Yet the wolf is not merely ‘a passive slate upon which humans scratch and erase meaning’; but ‘an active agent’; in human history and culture, the texts in which it appears shaping and shaped by wolf-human relationships in the real world. Hence, by ‘mediat[ing] between semiotic culturalism on the one hand and factual naturalism on the other’; when we read these texts, we may reach a deeper understanding of the wolf-human relationship in early medieval England, discovering hints of the ‘real’; wolf and its interactions with the people who wrote these stories. In turn, deconstructing the textual wolf allows us to consider how such literature may have impacted upon the attitudes of its readers and listeners towards the wolves whom they lived alongside. ‘The social and cultural wolves that are imagined and constructed from […] biological wolves’; are ‘imposed back on them’;, cultural perceptions confirming and confirmed by the behaviour of wolves and wolf-like people, a cyclical process whereby art imitates life and so life imitates art.