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The Green Man

Yeh, I remember it, Sureshot! I'm surprised that British TV, which is so fond of repeats, has not shown it again (not recently, anyway).

Carole
 
Yes, I haven't seen it since then here in the U.S. either. I'm guessing it aired in 1990 or 91. It was a very entertaining program, I believe it aired in three separate parts......

sureshot
 
This seems to be the logical thread for this query, as it won't stand up to a thread of its own!

Has the town of Herne Bay in Kent any connection with Herne the Hunter, or is it just a coincidence??

Carole
 
Just a coincidence, the name seems to come from the Old English word: "hyrne" meaning a corner of land, i.e. the place at the corner of land. Earliest mention is about 1100 AD when it was called: "Hyrnan"
 
Thanks David, it's been bothering me since I thought of it!

Carole
 
Green Man Book -- RARE!!!

:( :( :( This book is rare & out of print, but I do believe it may help you...:

Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men... by Phyllis Siefker, (c) 1996,
published by McFarland & Co., which is, I think, in Florida or Texas.

It's got Cernunnos, Inkidu, Herne the Hunter, the Wandering Jew ;) , Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, St. Lucy/Lucia/Lucie, (St.) Bertha/Berchta/Bertie, The Narrenfressers ("Fool-eaters") of German carnivals, Panto (Mr. & Mrs.), Punch & Judy, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Harlequina, Columbine, The Green man, The Wild Hunt, Satan, Druids, The Venerable Bede, witches, warlocks, imps, goblins, trolls, pixies, knock-on-wood, widdershins-round-the-church, Jack the Giant-Killer, Jack & The Beanstalk, Peter Pan, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood, Puck, Ariel, Saturn, Allan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck, Little John, paganish church engravings, Corn-King-Killing, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stone phalluses, Stonehenge, goats, sheep, rams & lambs, Jesus, Orpheus, Bacchus, Pan, Peris, Djinn, Genies, Satyr-plays, Priapus, priapism, Sheela-na-Gigs, murder, lust, intrigue, the fact that we all have many of tghe same religious beliefs and a start on why,.............

Oh, and the kitchen sink, too!:D :D :D :D
 
Oops!

:eek: Ooops! Thank you, Breakfast! It must have just got back into print the minute I shot my mouth off...! Anyway, good for Phyllis Siefker! I am happy that people will still be able to purchase her book.

Actually, I have a bit of a mea culpa attached to it, though: In the US (I don't know about other places), all university textbooks are stored in the Textbooks section of the university bookstore by class. That is, if I were to teach an English Literature 101 seminar, class section 3 of 10 sections, I would order the books, as many as I needed for the anticipated number of students in my class. The books budget of my department would go towards putting the money up for the initial purchase. The bookstore would then put the books in the Textbooks section, probably under course number ENGL101.03 (SUBJCourse#.sec#). I got my book from the stack of a Folklore course I was most certainly not taking while I was attending a small suburban university. This means that someone probably had to wait another three weeks for the texbook order process to be recompleted while he or she cursed someone, probably the professor, for ostensibly not ordering enough of the book. There. I feel a bit better now. Now I have to go eat lunch and pack up my bag so that I can get to NYU in time to go to class. BYE!

Love,
Da Jew
 
green man

I've just registered with this forum, and I have been reading this thread. Very interesting.
What about the chthonic mythological figures of death and rebirth of the East such as Attis, Adonis, Thammuz, Jesus, Dionysos - and especially Mithras. Mithras was originally Persian, adopted as a deity by Romans and exported to Britannia with the occupation. Rites of Mithras (and the others) included dancing about an upright pole, sacrifices, a sacred marriage ceremony etc, etc. It is possible that a pre - existing European archetype like the Green Man (who is found in incarnations as far as Russia where he is called Kostrobunko) was melded with the incoming Mithras mythos to become the recognisable figure he is today. It is also a theory of mine (although completely unfounded and possibly extremely fictional) that the Green man and the Sheelagh na Gig may have been two characters in a sacred marriage, of whom only the GM survived the onslaught of the Church.
Any comments?:devil:
 
I don't know if anyone has heard of Mike Harding, the musician/comedian/ TV presenter?
Well he's written a cracking little book about the Green Man, in fact, there was a letter from him in FT a few years ago asking if any readers could help him with his research.
There's quite a lot of Green Man stuff on his site, which is is here
 
Re: green man

greengirl said:
It is also a theory of mine (although completely unfounded and possibly extremely fictional) that the Green man and the Sheelagh na Gig may have been two characters in a sacred marriage, of whom only the GM survived the onslaught of the Church.
Any comments?:devil:
Click to expand...
Well, I can't remember where I read it, but the latest theory about Sheela-na-gigs on churches is that they were deliberately put there to remind churchgoers of the ugliness of "sins of the flesh" :D .
 
Re: Bit of a Celtic thing, isn't it?

Morris Henshaw said:
I've always been under the impression that The Green Man started out his career as a forrest-dwelling Celtic deity called Cernunnos (my spelling is suspect here).
Later known as Cerne, which became Herne...
...which became Father Christmas, via Odin!

Any link with a similar Roman tree-type-hunting-chap could be the result of a meeting of beliefs during the Roman occupation.
Click to expand...

Glastonbury used to have one of those hexagonal market crosses that had a statue on top of a primitive looking figure with stumpy horns , I think it was much older than the medieval structure . It has survived and is in the town museum , I seem to remember it is called something like 'Jack in the Wood' . It is also thought to be Roman though I don't know why ! I'm sure the Romans were better at carving than that .
Marion
 
well, as i said, the theory about S na G may be completely fictional. The church was mightily concerned about sins of the flesh. I was just wondering about the Green Man's consort. Other death/rebirth deities all have them, so I was trying to makre a link. Mike Harding (whose website and books are awesome) goes into a lot of Maid Marion type stuff, but I was looking for somehting earlier. Still, I haven't exactly got anything practical to look at down here in Melbourne!
BUT - interestingly, the old bluestone office building cum former caretakers residence (about 1870 somethng) of the Melbourne General Cemetery has two very nice mouldings of the Green man and a female consort on either side of the office door. Very pagan for the Victorians, I would have thought!
 
James Whitehead said:
The popularity of the Green Man, at least as a title, was given a
boost in the 1950s or 1960s when Kingsley Amis wrote a spooky
tale. It was dramatized for television - actually it might even have been
a telly play originally.
Click to expand...

Kingsley Amis wrote The Green Man in 1969 as a novel and the BBC did it as a (rather camp and unfaithful) miniseries starring Albert Finny in about 1990. The greenman is the familiar of a seventeenth century sorcerer Dr Underhill who's ghost inhabits the old inn.

I still remeber a scene where Albert Finny's character and his Mistress (who is also having a lesbian affair with his wife) dig up Underhills grave. As his mistress (who has done all the digging) puts the last clod of earth back into the freshly robbed grave she says words to the effect of "Lets get a move on, we've been here nearly half an hour! " :confused: :p :eek:

Actually the atmosphere in the book was quite good and I'm not sure that Kingsley Amis himself wrote such dumb lines as made it to the TV screen. The Green Man legend isn't thst prominent in the book or film though.

This link is to a 1991 reissue of The Green Man
 
Originally posted by DanHigginbottom
over the last thirty years, a number of people in the oldest part of the area claim to have seen a seven foot tall green figure wandering the more lonely places in the area.
Click to expand...

Sorry to be flippant, but do they grow sweetcorn around there by any chance?
 
The old Richard Carpenter Robin of Sherwood series from the 1980's had Robin Hood as Herne's Son.

IIRC Herne was a huntsman who hung himself from an oak in Windsor Forest. He had been given the head of a stag after some hunting accident, but the other gamekeepers didn't like him so he committed suicide. Can't find any references, but I remember reading something like that.

The Green Man is now a term used to describe the foliate heads in church architecture. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, the term 'Green Man' only applied to these from 1939 onwards. They reached England early in 12th Century from France as part of a repetoire of grotesque figures called 'Romanesque' on the Continent and 'Norman' in England. They seem to have developed from the Roman gods such as Oceanus and Silenus. Rabanus Maurus (784-856) said the leafy sprays symbolised fleshy lustss and depraved men heading for damnation. Weir and Jerman suggest it represents sins of speech. Basford suggests it represents how death rules the natural world as opposed to the spiritual. Andreson suggests death followed by rebirth. The Dictionary credits Lady Raglan with the creation of the Green Man name for these motifs - 'Lady Raglan's literalist view that medieval artists only drew what they had seen in real life - in this case, she claimed, a leaf clad mummer like a Jack-in-the-Green enacting a Spring fertility ritual. She is followed by Sheridan and Ross (1975) whos ee secretly surviving paganism as the explanation, not only for this but for many motifs in medieval art; this idea, though it lacks supporting evidence and contradicts the known history of the motif, is currently the favourite among popular writers and neo-pagans.'
 
Eeek, I read all the above then went out & found myself in a waiting-room situation...nothing else to do but read the magazines..aha, 'The Lady', don't see that much around here...What's this?? An article on the Green Man??? Arrgh!
 
My brother bought me a book called Images Of Lust - Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Routledge 1986, ISDN 0-41515156-2), which has got some fascinating descriptions and pics of Sheelaghs, amongst all the other things like Exhibiting Acrobats, Megaphallic Males, Femmes aux Serpents, Homoseual encounters, Tongue-pullers etc, all to be found on or inside churches in the UK, Ireland, France and Spain.

The authors don't make too much of the fertility angle (suggesting that the ugliness of a lot of these carvings was designed to put the churchgoers off sex, rather than arousing them), and the poor old Green Man gets a solitary mention, but its still worth picking up for its ideas as to what went on in the minds of the clergy and masons who were responsible for the things.
 
escargot said:
Eeek, I read all the above then went out & found myself in a waiting-room situation...nothing else to do but read the magazines..aha, 'The Lady', don't see that much around here...What's this?? An article on the Green Man??? Arrgh!
Click to expand...
I'm going to the doctor's today, and the dentist on Wednesday. I'll let you know...!

I do find interesting synchronicities in waiting room mags. Once I recognized a picture of the Kiel Canal (without reading the caption) because I'd seen it on TV the previous night.
 
Synchronicity of reading matter-

I once came into a college biology class late and was sarcastically asked, 'So you can afford to miss class because you know all about the spinal column, eh, Ms Clever Clogs?' To which I replied, 'I certainly do', and proceeded to give an informative talk on this very subject, concentrating on the process of spinal taps, which I had read about in a battered copy of 'The Exorcist' the night before!
 
wasn't it an arteriography in the film? nastiest bit of the whole thing by the way.
 
The term "green man" is a recent name given to foliate heads with no supporting evidence for any origin in tradition, my new dictionary of english folklore seems to suggest. It also says that they are part of a selection of grotesque imagery imported from france in the 11th century to warn people of the punishment for their sins. I was kind of hoping it was some throwback to ancient and pagan beliefs, but it seems survivalism is no longer the rage as far as anthropologists are concerned.
 
Green Man - Mr Higginbottom

Hi, hope I'm doing this right, its my first post!

Dan, can you tell me exactly where in Sheffield the Green One has been sighted? Is it reachable on public transport, and is it suitable terrain for someone recovering from an ankle injury? (poor limping me!)

I'd love to investigate it for myself...
 
Hi Auntie Peach, nice to meet you!
Get some ice on that ankle RIGHT NOW young lady!
Only kidding.
 
Hi Escargot and thank you for your warm welcome!

Actually, I overdid it with the icing, and the fluid in the swelling semi-froze, kind of like a slush puppy.

A slush-puppy covered in flesh. Nice.
 
Green Man, Sheelagh-na-Gig etc

There's quite a bit on this in Colin Wilson's "Mysteries" (where do these books go when you need them??) - he takes the usual line that a lot of Christian Churches are built on old Pagan sites (all about one belief system supplanting another; also in a lot of cases the church in question would be dedicated to St Michael, cos 'twas he who vanquished Lucifer, apparently: the ruin on the top of Glastonbury Tor was once one of these) anyway, to entice the previously Pagan congregation they'd put familiar archetypes in the architecture, henc the Sheelaghs, Green Men, etc.
Wilson also tells us that if you look under the altar stone of a really old church you'll probably find a huge stone phallus.
Now, if it's under the altar stone, how would that entice anyone?
Unless, of course, the vicar kept promising to whop it out during Harvest Festival - and if that's not a Pagan Festival I'll eat my painted bowler hat, complete with bells.
:cool:
 
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