From Fridays visit to the Classic Motor Hub. A Porsche 550 Spyder Replica (Martin & Walker) 1924 Bugatti Brescia A childs ATCO training vehicle. Me trying to be arty with a set of Riley exhausts A take me home Frazer Nash & I quote "Powered by a 1500cc Meadows 4ED mated to a GP Maserati ‘Roots type’ blower and running on pure methanol it develops 203 bhp from 3500 thru 4500 rpm and over 200 ft./lb torque at 5600 rpm – and a very satisfactory 190 ft./lb at 2750 rpm. Weighing only c650kg with 30l fuel it has a power to weight ratio in the region of 315 bhp/tonne."
I put these pictures in my wallpaper collection on the PC. The centre one just came up. That's the first time I've seen it on a big, wide-screen monitor. Filled-and-cropped. It looked like a werewolf. That's a Kodiak, which is really just a slightly larger Grizzly, which is basically a Brown Bear. Whether either are more aggressive than the European Brown Bear used to be, who knows. They were hunted almost out of existence in much of Europe, so the ones left were probably the more retiring. Anyway they were everywhere in the middle ages, even here in the British Isles. And even the retiring ones are liable to attack if stumbled upon - or particularly hungry - when they typically do stuff like bite your face off then eat you alive. And, of course, they stand on two legs. They still are in Central and Eastern Europe, where the werewolf legends are supposed to come from. They're on the same evolutionary branch as wolves. Facially they look much the same head on mid-snarl, but bigger, more ferocious - and stand like a human. To me it suddenly seems obvious.
Interesting. I’d never made the werewolf link before, but now you mention it, I can see there might be something in that theory.
And when you consider the strange animals - and people - they believed in in medieval Europe, it's not a stretch to imagine them interpreting bears that way. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't.
