James Frazer has a lot to answer for.
He was born in 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland. He became a Fellow of Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. From there he leapfrogged sideways into folklore studies and comparative anthropology, two disciplines he knew nothing about (although to be fair, at the time, neither did anyone else really.) His masterwork was The Golden Bough, two volumes of meticulously researched albeit fairly wrong comparative mythology from all over the world. His research was conducted mostly by postal questionnaire since he wasn’t into travelling. The title of the book comes from one of the more mysterious bits of the Aeneid , where the Roman epic hero finds a magical golden branch which he then has to hand over to a priestess in exchange for passage to visit the land of the dead.
Frazer had some Complex Views About Religion. He basically decided that cultures moved through stages—starting with ‘primitive magic’, and then moving to organised religion, and finally arriving at science. How did he know what primitive magic was like? Well, he studied the beliefs of primitive peoples (by postal questionnaire, remember). How did he know they were primitive? Well, he was a Fellow of Classics at Trinity College and this was during the height of the British Empire, so practically everyone who wasn’t him was primitive. Convenient!
I’m not going to go into real depth here (like Frazer, I’m a classicist talking about stuff I don’t know that well; unlike Frazer, I’m not going to pretend to be an expert) but what you really need to know is people ate it up . Magic! Religion! Science! Sweeping statements about the development of human belief! Universal theories about What People Are Like! All wrapped up in lots of fascinating mythology. And he treated Christianity like it was just another belief system , which was pretty exciting and scandalous of him at the time. Freud mined his work for ideas; so did Jung—the birth of psychology as a discipline owes something to Frazer. T.S. Eliot’s most famous poems were influenced by The Golden Bough. It was a big deal.
But the main thing that is noticeable about the early-twentieth-century attitude to folklore, the post-Golden Bough attitude to folklore, is: it turns out you can just say stuff, and everyone will be into it as long as it sounds cool .
(Pause to add: I am not talking about the current state of the discipline, which is very much Serious and Worthy of Respect and therefore Not Hilarious, but about the joyous nonsense interspersed with serious scholarship which is where all the children’s folklore books my grandma had got their ideas.)
Take the Green Man.
Where does the Green Man mythos come from?
I’m so glad you asked. It comes from Lady Raglan’s article The Green Man in Church Architecture in the 1939 edition of “Folklore”, making this timeless figure out of pagan memory exactly eighty years old this year.
Lady Raglan made precisely one contribution to the field of folklore studies and this was it. She noticed a carving of a face formed out of entwined leaves in a church in Monmouthshire, and then found other examples in other churches all over England and Wales. She named the figure ‘the Green Man’. (Before that this motif in ecclesiastical decoration was usually called a foliate head, because it’s a head and it’s made out of foliage.) She identified different types of leaves—oak! That’s ‘significant’ according to Lady Raglan. Poison ivy! ‘Always a sacred herb.’
So: a human face made out of leaves, appearing in church after church. Could the sculptors have made it up because carving leaves is fun? Absolutely not, says Lady Raglan:
‘…the mediaeval sculptor [n]ever invented anything. He copied what he saw…
This figure, I am convinced, is neither a figment of the imagination nor a symbol, but is taken from real life, and the question is whether there was any figure in real life from which it could have been taken.’
You heard it here first: it is literally impossible for artists to imagine things.
Lady Raglan’s conclusion:
The answer, I think, is that there is only one of sufficient importance, the figure variously known as the Green Man, Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, the King of May, and the Garland…
Again I am not going to go into depth, so here’s the short version: this is kind of nonsense. There are like four separate traditions she’s conflating there. (To pick just one example: she’s talking about eleventh-century carvings, and Jack-in-the-Green—a traditional element of English May Day celebrations involving an extremely drunk person dressed up as a tree—is eighteenth-century at the earliest.)
The essential thesis of the Green Man myth is that the foliate head carvings you can find all over western Europe represent a survival . They are, supposedly, a remnant of ancient pre-Christian folklore and religion, hidden in plain sight, carved into the very fabric of the Christian churches that superseded the old ways. The Green Man is a nature spirit, a fertility god, a symbol of the great forests that once covered the land. He’s the wilderness. He’s the ancient and the strange. He’s what we’ve lost.
And here’s the Golden Bough of it all: this might be, historically speaking, dubious, but you can’t deny it sounds cool.
And you know what? It is cool.
Buy the Book
Silver in the Wood
As a folklorist, Lady Raglan’s historical research skills could have used some work. But as a myth-maker, a lover of stories, a fantasist , she was a genius and I will defend her against all comers. There is a reason the Green Man starts cropping up in twentieth-century fantasy almost at once. Tolkien liked it so much he used it twice—Tom Bombadil and Treebeard are both Green Man figures.
Lady Raglan might or might not have been right about pagan figures carved into churches. It is true that there are foliate heads in pre-Christian traditions; there’s Roman mosaics that show a leaf-crowned Bacchus, god of fertility and wildness. It is true that there are several European folk traditions of wild men, ‘hairy men’, people who belong to the uncultivated wilderness. But foliate heads are only one of several Weird Things Carved Into Churches, and no one has proposed that the grotesques and gargoyles (contemporaneous, show up in the Norman churches where foliate heads are most common, pretty weird-looking) are actually the remnants of pagan deities. Mermaid and siren carvings have not been assumed to represent a secret sea goddess. The pagan-deity hypothesis has been put forward about the Sheela na Gig, little female figures exposing their vulvas posted above the doors of—again—Norman churches, especially in Ireland. (What is it with the Normans?) But there are other explanations for all of these. Are they ugly figures to scare off demons? Abstract representations of concepts from Christian theology? Could it even be that Sometimes Artists Make Stuff Up?
Do we know?
No, we don’t.
And I’m not sure it matters.
The Green Man mythos—eighty years old this year, in its modern form, its syncretic form that pulls together half a dozen scattered and separate strands of folklore, many of them also dubiously historical—doesn’t have to be Real Authentic Definitely Pre-Christian Folklore to be a good concept, a good story, a good myth. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that our Green Man was born in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. As Europe hurtled for the second time towards the nightmarish meat-grinder of industrialised warfare, it’s not surprising that Lady Raglan’s discovery—Lady Raglan’s creation—struck a chord.
Early folklorists—many of whom seem to have been basically just frustrated fantasy authors—were right about this: you can just say stuff, and everyone will be into it as long as it sounds cool. Which is to say, as long as it sounds right , and meaningful , and important : because a myth is a story that rings with echoes like the peal of a church bell. And by that metric the Green Man is as authentic as any myth as can be. The story almost tells itself. It says: he’s still here. The spirit of ancient woodlands, the enormous quiet of a different, wilder, less terrible world. You can see him lurking in the church; you might glimpse him striding through the forest. He is strange and strong and leaf-crowned. The fearsome forces of civilisation might try to bury him, but his roots are deep, and he will not die.
He is a mystery, but he has not left us yet.
Photo: Simon Garbutt (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Emily Tesh grew up in London and studied Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, followed by a Master’s degree in Humanities at the University of Chicago. She now lives in Hertfordshire, where she passes her time teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to schoolchildren who have done nothing to deserve it. She has a husband and a cat. Neither of them knows any Latin yet, but it is not for lack of trying. Tesh is the author of Silver in the Wood.
Ok, now that is fascinating. A perfect example of something that feels so much like it *should* be a myth, despite being recently made up. Another good example would be Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen books, where the Wizard of the Edge story only seems to date back to around 1800 and conflates with the classic King under the Mountain myth.
Intriguing article, and interesting hypothesis, but even though Frazer and Lady Raglan were not scientific in their studies, that doesn’t mean they didn’t occasionally stumble across the truth. I am no historian, but the fact that the archetype of the Green Man exists in so many traditions seems to point to it being a lot older and more durable than just one woman’s musing eighty years ago.
I’m reminded of the Roswell UFO myth. The so-called “Roswell incident” was just one of many instances of the nationwide flying-saucer sighting craze in the weeks following Kenneth Arnold’s reported sighting of a formation of “flying discs” in the summer of 1947 — which I imagine was because the American population had been conditioned during WWII to watch the skies for enemy aircraft, and that reflexive vigilance was floating free and in need of a new target. So it was a minor incident that was quickly discovered to be just a weather balloon and was thus forgotten. But some UFO researcher in the late ’70s dredged up the account and misinterpreted the Army’s report of finding a “flying saucer” (which at the time was just a newly trendy word for an unknown round object in the sky and hadn’t yet taken on the connotation of an alien spacecraft) as a confession of the capture of an alien ship, so that the subsequent identification as a weather balloon had to be a coverup. And the researcher put forth that theory in a book around 1980, about the same time as the movie Hangar 18 told a similar story about a fictional UFO crash, which probably helped popularize the Roswell book. And eventually the theory osmosed out of UFO circles into the popular consciousness and started showing up in fiction in the 1990s, most prominently The X-Files, plus the Roswell High books and their TV adaptation. Try to find references to Roswell in UFO lore before the late ’70s, or in popular fiction before the early ’90s, and you’ll find essentially nothing. But these days, most people assume that Roswell has been a central part of UFO lore since the original 1947 incident. Many people even mistakenly assume that Hangar 18 was about Roswell, when in fact it was about a present-day UFO that crashed in Arizona after colliding with an orbiting Space Shuttle.
Part of the problem is that these days, the Roswell myth and the associated Area 51 myth have completely dominated UFO-related fiction to the point that it’s never about anything else anymore. It’s become the only UFO story anybody ever tells, which is presumably why people today assume that it’s always been part of the lore. It’s weird how quickly and completely this one story has monopolized UFO lore. Looking back at older UFO stories, they have a lot more variety, because they don’t automatically default to centering on that single place and time.
Ooh, do Graves’ White Goddess next!
The preponderance of pubs named “The Green Man” all across England is one of the many things that has delighted me since moving here less than a year ago. Whether it’s tapping into an actual ancient myth or merely the idea of one, it contributes to the sense of antiquity that is everywhere in this land. It helps that most of the pubs themselves are 100 years old at least!
The pub nearest to me, alas, is named “The Red Bull,” which brings up an entirely different mental image for an American familiar with the energy drink craze of the early 2000s …
Wheel of Time has a Green Man too :)
But you’re right, it sounds like it *should* be a thing. Maybe it’s one of those convergent things where different times/cultures seek out similar images – fertility, greneery, etc are likely fairly common images to fall back to, even if there’s not one particular monomyth it’s pulling from.
‘Poison ivy!’
Not in the U.K. It’s not indigenous to Britain.
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 3:
I’m reminded of the Roswell UFO myth….
There’s a classic study of that by a pair of anthropologists and an atmospheric physicist — Saler, Ziegler, and Moore’s UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth — which shows how the evolution of the story (in its published book forms, starting, I think, with the 1980 book you refer to) follows classic folklore patterns (there’s an entertaining and informative review by Cosma Shalizi here). From the linked review:
@@@@@ 5: Alas, when presented with a place called “The Red Bull,” this reader will always remember The Last Unicorn…
The Green Man may tie into other folkloric threads that go back a ways. Take, for instance, the Green Knight of “Sir Gawain And The …” His skin is green, his hair and beard are described as being like leaves or moss, he is definitely supernatural, and the fact that he is tied to the Winter Solstice, gives him a relationship to the end of winter and the return of the sun. His story dates back to the 14th century. Just saying …
Re. the Roswell incident, you might want to check out a pair of science fiction authors, Frederick Pohl and Jack Williamson. When the UFO at Roswell was seen, it caused quite a stir in the news. Williamson lived in Portales, in the same part of the country. He and Pohl decided that, if this was a genuine alien space ship, they should investigate. They did. They had both been Army Air Corps weather men during WWII, and it didn’t take them long to realize, from the descriptions of the UFO’s track and antics, that it behaved just like a weather balloon. It was a major disappointment. They each mention the trip in their memoirs.
@8/PeterErwin: Thanks, interesting. I guess that idea about the myth being a “charter” to be imitated might help explain why it’s monopolized UFO lore, though it’s probably just as much because The X-Files was such a hit show, so whatever UFO myth it had built itself around would’ve ended up being the dominant one from then on. I remember some PBS special on the subject documenting how “close encounter” descriptions of aliens over the decades have tended to conform to whatever media image of aliens was dominant in fiction at the time, from little green men (hey, there it is again) in the late ’40s to scary monsters in the B-movie ’50s to idealized humanoids in the early ’60s, and so on. I figure that the “Gray” image, which was probably derived from predictions about future human evolution that had been cropping up ever since H.G. Wells, was then popularized by Close Encounters and again, eventually, by The X-Files, which created a feedback loop between UFO myth and pop culture and thus solidified the “Gray” image permanently. So it’s no wonder that modern UFO lore is so heavily rooted in the same mythology as The X-Files — the same tendency of the true believers and/or frauds to copy their core ideas from pop-culture images of aliens.
Hmm… I wonder if there could be any influence of the Green Man on the Little Green Men trope. I read somewhere that the LGM image had been around in supernatural folklore (e.g. leprechauns) well before it became associated with creatures from space, but now I wonder if the people who wrote that could’ve been buying into Lady Raglan’s claim about the Green Man being iconic for centuries.
We never watched X-files, but my first big mainstream exposure to Roswell was Independence Day, although I do remember being aware of it (my dad always liked kooky/obscure historic stuff – not that he personally believed the theory, he was just aware of it). I did watch a ton of Unsolved Mysteries as a kid though (and recently rediscovered the series on YouTube, lol) – I’m wondering if they ever did a Roswell segment. They did do a segment on the Kecksburg UFO which is a similar story of government collusion, as well as a general lost time/alien abduction segment.
@12/Lisamarie: I looked up an episode guide for Unsolved Mysteries on Wikipedia, and it turns out that they first did a Roswell segment in 1989, revisiting it a few more times later on. That’s years earlier than I thought it started to become widely known. Other than that, the earliest thing I can find on IMDb with “Roswell” in the title is a 1992 documentary feature. The X-Files began in ’93, then there was a ’94 TV movie dramatization of the “true story” with Martin Sheen and Kyle MacLachlan (I probably saw that one), then DS9: “Little Green Men” in ’95 (earlier in the trend than I thought), then Independence Day in ’96, then an increasing number of documentaries starting in ’96. The Roswell High YA book series began in ’98 and spawned the TV series Roswell the following year. Also in ’98, the time-travel series Seven Days posited that its time machine was reverse-engineered from tech found in the Roswell crash, so by that point the myth was spreading even into other genres.
@@.-@:
Graves came right out and admitted that a lot of this White Goddess stuff came to him in some sort of poetic trance.
@14
That is code for “high”, right?
@15. Probably.
@15- Entheogens are certainly one way to occasion a mystical experience (Graves theorized about classical use of psychoactive mushrooms in “Centaur’s Food,” but it’s a little disheartening how many people seem to jump to it as the only one. The brain is not such a rugged device but that there are any number of ways to send it off kilter and away with the fairies.
@12/13: This intrigues me, because when I went to see Independence Day in 1996, Roswell was already pretty ubiquitous in my mind from what I recall (although I might have conflated it with Area 51 prior to that). I’m not sure how it got onto my radar, though, as I hadn’t yet started watching the X-Files, and never read the Roswell High books. Having been pretty sheltered as a kid, I’d have assumed that anything I did know about was mainstream or something you’d learn about in school.
@18/SpaceJim: Yeah, that’s why I was so surprised to find no film/TV references prior to the ’90s (or ’89, now). There was never a point where I can remember hearing about Roswell and thinking “That’s a new one.” I also assumed it was just a story that had been around for a long time, until I finally thought about it more and realized I didn’t remember it being mentioned in Close Encounters or any of the UFO stuff I ate up as a gullible kid in the ’70s.
I guess it eased its way into popular consciousness through those books that came out in the ’80s, maybe the odd articles here and there, before it started getting mentioned on TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries. And the similarity with Hangar 18 probably created a Mandela Effect and convinced people they’d seen a movie about Roswell back in 1980 — I know I thought it was a Roswell movie until I investigated and found otherwise.
I also assumed it was just a story that had been around for a long time
It wouldn’t surprise me if part of that effect was due to the story being set in the late 1940s. After all, if it happened that long ago, we must have known about it for a while, right?
I’m impressed (in a negative way) at how effective Charles Berlitz was at promoting this sort of thing. He was the author or co-author of the most popular early books on the Bermuda Triangle (1974), the Philadelphia Experiment (1979), and Roswell (1980).
@20/PeterErwin: Oh, yeah, the Bermuda Triangle was a big thing in the ’70s and ’80s. There were TV shows and movies based on it, it got conflated with all sorts of other fantasy and SF plots — even the ’70s Wonder Woman TV series put Paradise Island in the Triangle. It was the Roswell of its day. As a kid, I believed it was real, but then I saw a NOVA episode that totally debunked it. It showed that the rate of disappearances in the Triangle was no greater than over any other comparable area of the Earth’s surface (even the land surface!); it’s just that disappearances there get more attention because of the attached hype. It’s surprising to me in retrospect how new the Triangle myth was when I was exposed to it as a kid in the ’70s. There were intimations of something odd about the area in the ’50s and ’60s, in the wake of the 1945 disappearance of Flight 19 (featured in the opening of Close Encounters), but the idea didn’t begin to mature until the mid-’60s and didn’t erupt in popularity until the ’70s, just about the same time I became aware of it as a kid. Again, the same as Roswell.
A number of modern myths are a lot less ancient than we believe. The Loch Ness Monster myth began in 1933, although there have been retroactive attempts to associate one or two earlier, isolated accounts with the legend. The Sasquatch and Yeti appear to be rooted in indigenous lore (although it’s a risk to assume that a concept told to explorers/settlers by an indigenous culture is ancient rather than a recent invention, since all cultures innovate and change), but it seems they didn’t really get popularized until the 1920s or thereabouts.
I cannot remember the details, but a few years back I heard a talk organised by the Folk Lore Society which theorised that the church green man carvings were based on a firm Judaic/Christian belief. If memory serves, it was something to do with Adam, or it may have Abraham, having a seed placed in his mouth when he died and a tree growing from it. It might have been tied in with the Jesse Tree motif that was very popular in late medieval church art. Apologies for the vagueness.
Another example of ‘not as old as you think’ is the Wicca belief system. Far from being a survival of pre-Christian religion, it arose in the earlier twentieth century and was popularised in the 1950s by one Gerald Gardner.
@21
James Thurber was a firm believer in the Loch Ness monster and an Italian newspaper during the second world war claimed that it had been killed by one of their bombers. The story did arise in the 1930s though there is, I believe, an early Christian account of St Columba exorcising a monster that tried to stop him crossing the loch.
And I’ve seen it by the way:)
@22/a-j: Wicca is a modern interpretation of older spiritual ideas, but that’s pretty much how every religion starts out. Also, most fundamentalist movements that purport to be returning to the pure, original state of their faiths are actually reinterpreting them to suit modern beliefs and needs.
And yes, the St. Columba story is one of the couple of isolated stories I mentioned that have been retroactively tied into the Loch Ness Monster myth. That doesn’t mean it was seen that way before 1933. This article is about the danger of that kind of back-projection, the attempt to force unconnected older things to fit a newly invented pattern and pretend they were always part of that pattern.
fascinating stuff, thanks![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
Enkidu? Enkidu, is that you?
@25 Spoiler warning, but he’s dead.
RE: Roswell
Wasn’t it mentioned in Chariots of the Gods? Or no?
@27/srEDIT: I profoundly doubt it. Like I said, people today have been so inundated in Roswell, Roswell, Roswell ad nauseam that they reflexively assume it’s part of every UFO-related story they’ve ever heard. But it’s a phenomenon of the 1980s onward.
Frankly, as someone who (in my gullible youth) was a consumer of UFO lore back before Roswell monopolized everything, I feel sorry for modern audiences, because they only ever get told the one story anymore. It’s so much more boring now.
Nessie is simultaneously the oldest and newest of Scotland’s many water-monster legends. Oldest because of the Columba story; newest because the idea of anything still being there dates to shortly after King Kong was released (think of the bizarrely carnivorous sauropod in the swamp), while plenty of other similar legends have Victorian or older attestations.
@29/Makhno: Interesting — I hadn’t made the King Kong connection. It explains the timing — an attempt to encourage tourism by riding on the coattails of a hit movie.
Hey… come to think of it, that 1939 “Green Man” article came out just a year after Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood.
This topic brings to mind Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Woods series. I remember being particularly blown away by Lavondyss.
@26 I just did a spit-take. Well done.
ChristopherLBennett (@28): I empathize with your bewilderment over the paucity of UFO stories, unlike the days of our gullible youth. Roswell was of little significance compared to the Betty and Barney Hill “abduction”, or the Exeter NH “incident”, or the McMinnville OR photo. Heck, Socorro NM (1964) was the famous UFO encounter in the US southwest, back in the day.
While I have not researched the topic, my impression, based on personal reading and knowledge of the field, is that Roswell came to prominence thanks to David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace’s best-selling The People’s Almanac (1975), which featured a long, detailed article on Roswell and the debris found on Mac Brazel’s ranch land. Then, with Charles Berlitz following up with his Roswell best-seller in 1980, the current phenomenon seems to be fully launched.
This has turned out to be a really interesting thread.
@ChristopherLBennett: I suspect you and I are of similar vintage, and we definitely had similar youthful obsessions. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you must have been a faithful viewer of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of, which ran from 1977 to 1982 (I believe). UFO lore, naturally, got a great deal of air time each season, but, consistent with Christopher’s findings, they didn’t get around to directly addressing Roswell until around 1980.
@34/wizard clip: Ohh, yeah, In Search Of… was a staple for me. Also Jack Webb’s Project UFO, which dramatized Project Blue Book investigations using neat miniature effects for the spaceships even though they usually turned out to be hoaxes or delusions (I think every episode had a couple of solid debunkings and one left ambiguous).
It’s also troubling in retrospect that I was into the whole von Daniken/ancient astronauts business, because I’ve since learned that von Daniken’s ideas were grounded in some pretty blatant racism (not to mention that he was a plagiarist and a convicted fraudster). The hidden core of the ancient astronaut theory is the assumption that nonwhite cultures are too primitive and unintelligent to create great things on their own and therefore must have had outside help.
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/
https://badarchaeology.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/is-pseudoarchaeology-racist/
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/02/close-encounters-racist-kind
That last article from the Southern Poverty Law Center brings up another myth of fairly recent vintage that’s relevant to this thread — Atlantis. Sure, Atlantis was originally written about in Plato’s dialogues, but it was obviously allegorical, and was used that way in Renaissance revisits of the concept. The idea that Atlantis was a physically real place that was the ancestor of all world cultures was the product of an 1882 pseudoarchaeology book called Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, which was basically one of a series of attempts to formulate theories that attributed all human civilization and achievements around the world to white/European origins (like the earlier belief that Native Americans were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which is how the concept of “tribes” got projected onto Native Americans even though it wasn’t part of how their cultures were traditionally organized). I’ve often wondered how it was that anyone ever started taking Plato’s Atlantis literally and believing that it actually existed. I guess it tracks back to that book, and the way it co-opted the myth to serve its ideological agenda. So the idea of Atlantis as a real place is less than 140 years old, another modern myth that we mistake for an ancient one.
I have an abridged copy of The Golden Bough, which I had read was created after Frazer received accusations of paganism and witch craft? Googling it now I can’t find any of the articles I read about it as a teenager back when I was reading my copy of The Golden Bough. I’ve always wondered what the unabridged edition is like but not enough to read it because that thing is Long.
My favorite Weird Thing Inexplicably Carved On Christian Churches is hunky punks. They are adorable.
Yeah, you can’t really get away with criticising other people for sloppy research in an article where you assert that poison ivy is native to Britain. What Raglan presumably meant was ivy. NOT THE SAME THING.
A lot of these created myths succeed because they match up with things that people want to believe at the time. It gives your own beliefs weight if you think they have a good solid historical background – “the invention of tradition” is definitely a thing.
So if you’re Irish, and you’re bitter about the Norman Conquest… aha! Look! Right there on that church is evidence that your Irish ancestors were keeping their culture going under the noses of the invaders!
Or if you’re German, and you’re bitter about the Treaty of Versailles… look! Here’s a learned archaeologist talking about how your noble Aryan ancestors brought civilisation and learning to the lesser peoples of Europe!
Or if you’re British, and a bit unsure about how long your empire can last because you’ve read your classics and know what happened to Rome… here’s a Trinity man explaining that your culutre is just the natural end stage of all superstition and religion around the world, and thus you’re provably superior.
Or if you’re Hindu Indian, and you’re upset about the whole Mughal/British conquest thing and the way that your country isn’t nearly as scientifically advanced as you feel it ought to be… here’s a convincing argument that quantum theory was invented in India three thousand years ago and written down in code in Vedic scriptures.
And yes, the St. Columba story is one of the couple of isolated stories I mentioned that have been retroactively tied into the Loch Ness Monster myth. That doesn’t mean it was seen that way before 1933.
Scotland, like (I am going to guess) pretty much every culture except those that live in the Arctic or deserts, has a lot of myths about lakes and rivers, including about various sorts of monster that live in them, such as kelpies https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2010/11/scots-word-of-the-season-kelpie/
Saints and holy men defeating monsters is a regular feature of Christian mythology, and, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, other mythologies as well.
@38/ajay: Yes, but nobody at the time called St. Columba’s adversary “the Loch Ness Monster.” There is a difference between something that is retroactively absorbed into a modern tradition and something that was seen by the ancients the same way we see it now. The Roswell UFO scare happened in 1947, but the Roswell myth as we know it began in 1980. Atlantis was written about in antiquity, but the genuine belief in its reality began in 1882. And so on. Just because a modern belief has co-opted or reinterpreted historical antecedents, that doesn’t mean it’s a single continuous tradition going that far back.
@35, Plato’s Atlantis is also a fairly ordinary empire that isn’t elaborated on that much, in contrast with the heavy mysticism the modern versions usually include.
This article is both accurate and a hoot, and I enjoyed it no end. I sent it to a friend who is a highly respected medievalist (whose name I shall not take in vain, since I don’t even use my own real name here!), and his message back to me began, “Absolutely fabulous. Thank you! Memorable lines abound. The first being ‘two volumes of meticulously researched albeit fairly wrong comparative mythology.'” Ah, if only we’d had so funny a send-up of Joseph Campbell, back when he was wowing America with his monomyth that conflated everything but sounded cool.
39: yes, I agree.
No love for the Woses and Ghân-buri-Ghân?
By my count his folk make it 3, if you’re willing to include Tom Bombadil, but him I’d classify more as Beorn writ large.
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 35:
Sure, Atlantis was originally written about in Plato’s dialogues, but it was obviously allegorical, and was used that way in Renaissance revisits of the concept.
I don’t think that’s quite true — there were some later ancient authors (some Neoplatonists and Christian Fathers) who apparently thought that Atlantis had been a real place, and there were certainly Renaissance and later scholars who thought it was real as well. For example, the 17th Century German polymath Athanasius Kircher produced a popular map of Atlantis, and was apparently the first to suggest that the Azores and the Canary Islands were its mountaintop remnants. Various other writers suggested that it was real, and was in fact the Americas (e.g., the 16th Century Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara[1]). And then there was Olaus Rudbeck:
Genuine (if goofy) belief in the reality of Atlantis definitely predates Igantius Donnelly, even if much of the contemporary Atlantean zaniness is due to his influence.
[1] Who helpfully pointed out that the Mexican (Nahuatl) word for “water” was “atl” — half of Atlantis!
The Green Knight in Sir Gawain is not described as having hair and a beard “like leaves or moss”. His beard is described as hanging over his breast “like a bush” which just means he has a bushy beard. He is green and wears green clothing, but this seems to be a mistranslation or misreading of an earlier antecedent story where the giant in question is grey, not green.
Modern historian of folklore Ronald Hutton has shown pretty conclusively that the “Green Man” motif can be originally traced to Franciscan chapels and from there to manuscript illuminations ultimately based on Islamic art. So, far from some distant “pagan” origin, they actually have their origin in Islam’s prohibition on depicting the human form in art and Islamic artists’ inventiveness with human-like decorations based on foliage, flowers and geometry. See Hutton, “How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?”, Folklore Vol. 122, No. 3 (December 2011), pp. 235-249 (hint – the answer to the title’s question is “not very”).
@44/PeterErwin: Oh, okay, thanks. It’s just weird to me that anyone would believe Plato’s Atlantis was real. That’s like thinking Brobdingnag or Omelas was a real place, mistaking allegory for history. But I guess maybe not everyone who heard of Atlantis actually knew where the idea came from or had ever read Plato’s dialogues.
I guess I was looking for a “myth” of my own. I’ve wondered how people started confusing Atlantis for a real place, and I was looking for a single, pat explanation. I should’ve known better.
Great piece. For those disputing the author’s research because they think she doesn’t know her UK plants, ivy (the English creeping kind) IS poisonous. I don’t believe the’s referring to what is known as poison ivy in the US.
@47 Divided by a common language once again.
You have set the standard, Emily Tesh. Now who will do the appreciative debunking of EA Wallis Budge?
Interesting article. Getting back to green man rather than UFO, and in response to Carls query (Number 25) “It is true that there are several European folk traditions of wild men, ‘hairy men’, people who belong to the uncultivated wilderness.”
Wild men have their equivalent in churches as the Woodwose. They are found across the UK and Northern Europe but have a high incidence in Suffolk churches of the 14th / 15th century. They are full figured (as opposed to just heads) and bear clubs. They especially seem to appear on 14th century octagonal fonts, but can also be found on misericords, bench ends and triangular spandrels over doorways. They have hairy bodies and wield wooden clubs, sometimes in opposition to wyverns or dragons. I am currently in the final stages of a book about them and their varied history which should appear hopefully at the end of August “THE WOODWOSE IN SUFFOLK & BEYOND: A pictorial guide.” It deals with wild men and women as well as woodwose – Pete Jennings
The Virginia ‘Mothman’ doesn’t get a lot of airtime these days, but that was a pretty big myth back in the 1970’s. Links with all that MK-Ultra malarkey and dosing the public with LSD wasn’t it? I was quite happy to see Moth-person in Fallout ’76.
As for myths Down Under, we have heaps of cryptids; Yowies, Bunyips, The Nargun, (this is Australia, all of those are lethal) and we have a modern one – the poor Thylacine – who still gets spotted (or striped!) on a regular basis, so maybe, maybe, there’s still a few out there.
@51: Ahem, that’s WEST Virginia.
I already disproved similar claims last September in my blogpost. Sorry to see the misinformation lives on. Hope scholarship comes back to the informed and sensitive approach we had back in Frazer’s times and the first half of the 20th century, before they invented and spread opinion biases which for some reason none gets actually informed to question.
https://greengirdle.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/the-green-man/
What’s really disturbing about this piece is its postmodern mocking tone intended to dismiss previous scholarship through ridicule, but doing so without providing any solid evidence to the contrary. For instance, Ms. Tesh’s assumption that because the four traditions Lady Raglan posits as the origin of the Green Man are from disparate traditions, one of them as late as the 18th century, means that her conclusions about the Green Man myth are false. Since when do myths have to have a single origin?
Ms. Tesh begins with a similar mocking of James Frazier as a simply an exemplar of British colonialism whose theories can be dismissed by enlightened minds of the twenty-first century. She may have a point, but she hasn’t made it in this essay.
I am not sure what Frazier was doing qualfies as scholarship.
@53: “First of all, it does not only appear in the Middle Ages, but is traceable to much earlier antiquity. In fact, the Green Man in the Grave Slab in St Peters Church, Northampton, dates to the 10th-11th century”
Well, my friend, you have a strange definition of “Middle Ages”. Ms. Tesh’s piece makes it entirely clear that that is precisely the time that she believes these carvings date to… And the Norman conquest has always been firmly in the British concept of “Middle Ages”.
@54: She hardly had to make the case against Frazer in this essay; it’s been made enough times elsewhere.
@47: English Ivy is poisonous—and from the looks of it, probably because of the same chemicals in Poison Ivy—but it’s not called “poison ivy”. Which makes it odd that Lady Raglan really did say that: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0015587X.1939.9718148 (p.47). So, despite the poor citation, Ms. Tesh is not wrong.
56.last: good Lord. I was about to confidently assert that no British English speaker would ever refer to European ivy as “poison ivy”. How odd. Apologies to Ms Tesh.
“And he treated Christianity like it was just another belief system …” This is thrown out there as if to imply that the statement is incorrect. The mythology of the god of the Jews/Christians/Muslims is certainly the most currently successful, but that doesn’t make it any less a belief system or any more real than any other. Trace it back to its Canaanite polytheistic roots and it doesn’t appear much different in substance to the Greek or Egyptian or any other pantheon.
Frazer might have been wrong about a lot, but pioneers of the field usually are. Alexandra David-Neel and other early western writers on Tibetan Buddhism got a lot wrong, but they got the ball rolling. In science, we don’t fault Newton for not coming up with quantum mechanics and building lasers, we credit him for advancing the field from the state it was at the time.
@58/Jason: “This is thrown out there as if to imply that the statement is incorrect.”
I think you’re misreading it. The paragraph it’s in wasn’t talking about the correctness or legitimacy of the book’s concepts, merely about what made it fresh and different and exciting to readers at the time it came out. She isn’t saying it was wrong to treat Christianity as just another religion, but that it was innovative in doing so.
Meh. Lady Raglan was over enthusiastic, but so were those many followers who seized upon her. I’m not sure I’d agree @45 that the Gawain poet’s green man was a “Misunderstanding”; I would argue instead that Hutton, and a number of other scholars who don’t read Old Irish (Hutton gets Middle English wrong, reliably, and SGGK is in a bizarre form of Middle English; Hutton doesn’t do Middle English, and is neither a trained folklorist or a Medievalist) are a little to eager to assume earlier poets misunderstood or made errors. I’d argue instead that it works really well in the context of the poem for the Green Man to be green, and that the poet wasn’t making a mistake. But then I’m fairly convinced that the Green Man/Bertilak is a big green fairy.
Best example of this I can think of is Ossian/ MacPherson. This Scotsman’s tales of Celtic Britain were fashioned largely from his imagination. Nevertheless, many were inspired by what they thought were ancient writings, including William Blake. In the world of myth in which we live, it is all grist for the mill.
I was sufficiently charmed by your sense of humor that I bought your book without even reading the excerpt.
…except, of course, therevare literary references to the Green Man going back six centuries before 1939.
Which makes a nonsense of the author”s entire assertion.
@63/Tim Chiswell: Cite your sources, please. Which literary references? Did they actually mention “the Green Man” by that name? Were they actually considered to be part of an extant “Green Man” mythos at the time, or were they separate references that have been retroactively reinterpreted as part of a shared mythos, which is the point of the article?
Uhhh… about the presence of poison ivy in the Old World… there will always be individuals, typically ‘upper class twits’, who like to plant exotic plants as ornamentals, and poison ivy IS showy, with nice shiny foliage in the summer that turns a gorgeous red in the fall. Looking at all of the Japanese knotweed around here, the trend of planting noxious garden plants is not confined to any one continent. As an odd aside about ‘invasive’ plants, the vast number of mulberry trees in the northern Bronx near the Bronx River are due to a failed attempt at starting a silk industry in NYC in the 1930s.
My upstairs neighbor is an Armagh gal, and she is paranoid about things possibly being poison ivy. I actually ended up putting a leaf of something in my mouth to prove to her that it wasn’t poison ivy.
@@@@@ 22. a-j Why even bring up Wicca? Seems like you have an ax to grind and, frankly, it’s a fairly boring one. There aren’t any claims for “ancient” trads in Wicca in 2019, except by wannabes and critics on the internet (such as yourself).
This was a fascinating read. The “weird things carved into churches” theme is a good one! Lots of grist for the novelist, there.
@66
I have no axe to grind and if it is the case that 2019 Wiccans no longer ascribe to that belief, then I am happy to be corrected. I would however ask that you do not publicly accuse me of having malicious intent. I have none.
Current Wicca seem to accept they are a modern movement.
The Golden Bough is only two volumes in the first edition. A decent library will have the third edition which numbers twelve volumes
Ever been to the crypts of the Basel Historical Museum in the Barfusskirche? They have a large collection of tapestries – the Strassburger Bildteppiche – with not only images of the Green Man, but the whole life cycle of the Green Folks – men, women and children, believed to live in the woods around civilization. Medieval folks met them sometimes when venturing out, and the Greens were folks to be reckoned with, but benign when left in peace and treated respectfully. This is a more comprehensive account than I have so far come across in the UK.
Great article with a lot of good points well made and certainly food for thought. However, while in terms of attempting to tie in foliate faces, the Green Man, Robin Hood, and so on, into one entitiy the tradition may only date back as far as the 1930s, there’s evidence for the Green Man existing as a concept further back, as evidenced by pub names. For example, in the village where I grew up (Fownhope, Herefordshire), there’s a Green Man Inn that dates back to the 15th-16th century. While the name may not be as the inn that bears it, it’s recorded at least as far back as the 1800s.
@71/deklazer: I don’t think the article is claiming the parts of the concept didn’t exist before — just the notion that they were all a single unified mythology.
@67 @68 Yeah, all the Wiccans and Pagan folks I know pretty much acknowledge that it was created by Gerald Gardner in the 1930s and that, while he might have cribbed from bits of folklore from all countries, it was something he created out of his own personal spirituality.
Sadly, Prof. Hutton still insist there’s nothing remotely Pagan about the Green Man, only…there is evidence, such as Dr. Samantha Riches (her monograph, “St. George”) whom he dismissed as a “non-academic” in a private e-mail, as if her work was utterly irrelevant. She was able to trace the Green Man (often known as “Green George”) back to an ancient Greek pagan cult that inspired both The Green Man and St. George. Whilst Gary R. Varner (“The Mythic Forest, the Green Man and the Spirit of Nature”) demonstrates that the Green Man may have come to Europe from the Roman woodland god, Silvanus due to a 13th century Parisian carving of a Green Man inscribed with “Silvan.” Yet, Prof. Hutton doesn’t mention this in any of his one-sided pseudo-academia where whatever disproves oneself gets tossed to the side and ignored.
@@@@@73. random22 Actually, you might want to re-think that since Prof. Hutton, who convinced Wiccans that Wicca was invented by Gardner, confessed back in 2003 that not only couldn’t he prove his argument–which he is doubling down on–but, as he was writing “Triumph of the Moon,” he discovered unequivocal evidence tracing modern paganism to remote antiquity only to intentionally ignore that evidence because it would have disproved him and it would have made his book pointless. Therefore, this makes “Triumph of the Moon” an exercise in Confirmation Bias. It also has deep flawed methods! I was recently reading Lydia Cabrera’s anthropological study, “El Monte” in it’s original Spanish and she proclaims how well known it is that the Grimoire, The Key of Solomon, deeply influenced Santeria because it was widely traded across western Africa/ Latin America as “El Libro de San Cipriano.” Yet, I know of NO scholars who would point to this evidence (as Hutton has done with Wicca) and accuse Santeria of being a modern fabrication! A better book than “Triumph” that examines the mirror-like parallels between modern and ancient paganism is: “The Pagan Heart of the West,” a Doctoral dissertation by Prof. Randy P. Conner.
I just have to say, all the dumb ‘storm Area 51’ memes on the internet actually made me think of CLB and this comment thread, ha. I actually saw a news story talking about Area 51 as a central feature of UFO lore :)
Belated, but the first chapter of The Golden Bough itself is about the Green Man, styled as the “King of the Wood”. I just wanted to mention that here in case people aren’t aware of it. It explores the idea with the all-encompassing, anarchistic methodology described in this article. So if you think using literature to create syncretic myths is cool, check it out.
Too much irrelevant conversation about aliens and x files. Would have been an interesting read but spoiled by baggage of space invaders.
I understood that Green Man was a character that challenged (3) innocents to battle at winter solstice, a reference to surviving the long cold months of mid winter.
That’s all I can recall I’ve read thus far.