It seems probable accordingly that the verb _að hamaz_ was first applied to those who wore the skins of savage animals, and went about the country as freebooters; but that popular superstition soon invested them with supernatural powers, and they were supposed to assume the forms of the beasts in whose skins they were disguised. The verb then acquired the significance “to become a were-wolf, to change shape.” It did not stop there, but went through another change of meaning, and was finally applied to those who were afflicted with paroxysms of madness or demoniacal possession. This was not the only word connected with were-wolves which helped on the superstition. The word _vargr_, a wolf, had a double significance, which would be the means of originating many a were-wolf story. _Vargr_ is the same as _u-argr_, restless; _argr_ being the same as the Anglo-Saxon _earg_. _Vargr_ had its double signification in Norse. It signified a wolf, and also a godless man. This _vargr_ is the English _were_, in the word were-wolf, and the _garou_ or _varou_ in French. The Danish word for were-wolf is _var-ulf_, the Gothic _vaira-ulf_. In the _Romans de Garin_, it is “Leu warou, sanglante beste.” In the _Vie de S. Hildefons_ by Gauthier de Coinsi,— Cil lou desve, cil lou garol, Ce sunt deable, que saul Ne puent estre de nos mordre. Here the loup-garou is a devil. The Anglo-Saxons regarded him as an evil man: _wearg_, a scoundrel; Gothic _varys_, a fiend. But very often the word meant no more than an outlaw. Pluquet in his _Contes Populaires_ tells us that the ancient Norman laws said of the criminals condemned to outlawry for certain offences, _Wargus esto_: be an outlaw! In like manner the Lex Ripuaria, tit. 87, “Wargus sit, hoe est expulsus.” In the laws of Canute, he is called verevulf. (_Leges Canuti_, Schmid, i. 148.) And the Salic Law (tit. 57) orders: “Si quis corpus jam sepultum effoderit, aut expoliaverit, _wargus_ sit.” “If any one shall have dug up or despoiled an already buried corpse, let him be a varg.” Sidonius Apollinaris. says, “Unam feminam quam forte _vargorum_, hoc enim nomine indigenas latrunculos nuncupant,”[3] as though the common name by which those who lived a freebooter life were designated, was varg. [3] SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS: Opera, lib. vi. ep. 4. In like manner Palgrave assures us in his _Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth_, that among the Anglo, Saxons an _utlagh_, or out-law, was said to have the head of a wolf. If then the term _vargr_ was applied at one time to a wolf, at another to an outlaw who lived the life of a wild beast, away from the haunts of men “he shall be driven away as a wolf, and chased so far as men chase wolves farthest,” was the legal form of sentence—it is certainly no matter of wonder that stories of out-laws should have become surrounded with mythical accounts of their transformation into wolves.