What Is the Origin of ‘Silver Bullet’?

In werewolf myths, silver is one method to kill the powerful creatures, so a silver bullet is sometimes the hero’s weapon of choice. When “silver bullet” is used in everyday English, however, it is usually in the negative sense: “There is no silver bullet for …” You can complete that sentence with any seemingly intractable, complex problem.

How did a silver bullet earn a reputation as an all-powerful weapon? There’s a long tradition in folklore and literature.

The ancient Greeks believed that silver was a gift from the moon goddess, Selene, and that it had mystical powers. In Norse mythology, silver was believed to have protective properties, useful for warding off evil spirits. And in medieval European folklore, silver was imbued with magic used to repel werewolves and other supernatural creatures.

Silver’s reputation of mystical powers has endured through the centuries. In 1804, American poet Thomas Green Fessenden wrote about killing a witch: “how a man, one dismal night, / Shot her with a silver bullet.”

In the Grimm brothers’ 1812 fairy tale “The Two Brothers,” a huntsman shoots a witch with a lead bullet, but it has no effect. Then, the story continues, he “knew what to do, tore three silver buttons off his coat, and loaded his gun with them, for against them her arts were useless, and when he fired she fell down at once with a scream.”

A few decades later, in 1858, French writer Élie Berthet authored a novel based on the true story of the Beast of Gévaudan, a wolf that killed about 80 people in south-central France. In the real occurrence, a local hunter killed the beast using lead bullets, but in the novel, the facts were embellished by the use of silver bullets.

More recently, starting in 1949, the TV series The Lone Ranger featured a masked lawman who left a silver bullet for grateful law-abiding frontier folks before moving on to capture more desperadoes. Although the Lone Ranger used lead bullets to injure the bad guys, he named his horse “Silver.”