>>63748185A lot of European folklore describes "unholy" (not made by god, devoid of a soul) creatures such as fey, elves, trolls, etc, having strong aversions to iron and steel.
I don't think that applies to werewolves, since unlike vampires, werewolves aren't undead. They're (mostly) living breathing humans and thus presumably have a soul.
As for how these people turned into werewolves, and if it affects the soul, that varies depending on which sources you read.
In the very oldest pre-Christian stories werewolfism is sometimes attributed to a curse directly applied by the pagan gods as punishment for a sin, usually murder or cannibalism.
More often it's attributed to magical artifacts, usually wolf skins that people can wear to transform them into wolves. Sometimes these can be voluntarily removed to transform back, sometimes they can't.
Sometimes the transformed people retain their free will and intelligence, sometimes they don't.
What is common to all the old pre-Christian stories is that people are fully transformed into wolves, not wolf-man hybrids.
The idea of werewolves as half-man half-wolf creatures, afflicted by a curse that spreads like a disease and which forces them to transform into mindless beasts when the moon is full, is a modern concept. No more than 200 years old at the very most. The concept of werewolves as we know them today was established in horror fiction from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
