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The Green Man

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!

I recently went in on a Crowdfunder to support a community arts project celebrating the connections of the medieval poem to Leek in Staffordshire. I knew I couldn't get down for the creative workshops and so on :( so I went for pictures of some of the art as my tangible reward. One of the benefits of the project is that, even at a distance, I feel I am part of the project!

For those who would like to enjoy the art, here is the link to the Fulfilled funding page, and also the FB group - where completed pictures have just been unveiled!

I find it fascinating, and enjoyable, that these things are so current and that places are so keen to claim them!

As well as (factually tenuous and mythically firm) links to the green man idea, this has links to the importance of heads in folklore.... I havered about where to put it!
 
The surprising roots of the mysterious Green Man
In this video, Alastair Sooke meets with Common Ground, the environmental charity that is the custodian of one of the largest collections of Green Man photography, donated by the late British botanist Kathleen Basford. She was known for her research into the cultural significance of this mythical figure, arguing that it acted as a motif for the "spiritual dimension of nature".
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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190104-the-surprising-roots-of-the-mysterious-green-man
 
Met this fine bearded fellow in Carlisle recently. Quite a modern-looking carving, likely a reference to Carlisle Cathedral's Green Men.


Oz8ATk2.jpg
 
Late to the party as ever.... I went to Jordan in 2002, mainly to see Petra, but the trip took in a lot of other places, including the Roman city at Umm Qais, the Gadara of the Bible. The ruins were quite small, and there were lots of bits strewn around, including a piece that looked like it had come from a column or frieze, and it was very definitely a Green Man. Ok, a “foliate face”. I have a photo somewhere that I’ll try to dig out if anyone is interested?
 
Mrs Migs said:
... The ruins were quite small, and there were lots of bits strewn around, including a piece that looked like it had come from a column or frieze, and it was very definitely a Green Man. Ok, a “foliate face”. I have a photo somewhere that I’ll try to dig out if anyone is interested?
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I'm interested ...
 
Mrs Migs said:
The ruins were quite small, and there were lots of bits strewn around, including a piece that looked like it had come from a column or frieze, and it was very definitely a Green Man. Ok, a “foliate face”. I have a photo somewhere that I’ll try to dig out if anyone is interested?
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Yes please!!!!!!!! :twothumbs:
 
Mrs Migs said:
Late to the party as ever.... I went to Jordan in 2002, mainly to see Petra, but the trip took in a lot of other places, including the Roman city at Umm Qais, the Gadara of the Bible. The ruins were quite small, and there were lots of bits strewn around, including a piece that looked like it had come from a column or frieze, and it was very definitely a Green Man. Ok, a “foliate face”. I have a photo somewhere that I’ll try to dig out if anyone is interested?
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Hello, Mrs. Migs? Photo? Please?

(I'm only seeing this a year and a half after it was posted, talk about being late to a party!!!)
 
Frideswide said:
So does this look like the same artist? https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/bryonydrew

I know I can contact the artist but I'm shy

:oops:
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I would say it could be. The thing that strikes me about the puzzle is the dark black outlines in it which she certainly uses in her drawings. I think the puzzle just looks very different as it is not a drawing but "a mix of illustration, photography and photoshop".

This is just my uneducated opinion though. I am sure that more arty types would know more.

Anyway, the real question is, did you find them all? :) (I am going to need a bigger screen that my mobile to tackle it).
 
A long thread here:


Twitter: Dr Robin Douglas @Robin_C_Douglas
Right, you bastards, you've driven me to it.
WHY THE GREEN MAN IS NOT A PAGAN SYMBOL

Lots of foliate heads survive from the Christian middle ages (esp. 1150-1500), both on physical monuments and in manuscripts. (They weren't all human - interestingly, some were feline).
NO-ONE HAS EVER SUCCEEDED IN PROVING THAT THESE HEADS HAD ANY ONE SINGLE UNIFYING MEANING.
The motif probably meant different things to different people.
Sorry to be boring!
There were ancient pagan iconographical precedents for the motif - these were associated with many gods, including Bacchus and Oceanus.
But the usage of the motif in the Christian middle ages, which began in the C10-12, seems to be independent of these ancient precedents.
The mediaeval Christian motif *may* have been "pagan" in the sense of originating from the Indian iconography of Shiva and Vishnu, mediated through the Islamic world. This has been argued by Mercia MacDermott. But that history was not known to the people who used the motif.
So why do people like P*ter H*tchens think that the "Green Man" was a pre-Christian British pagan god?
This theory comes from an article published in 1939 by Lady Raglan, an aristocrat and amateur scholar.
Etc ...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1645413390116962306
 
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-green-man.435/#post-4570
from earlier in thus thread.

Have we tracked down details of this (now sadly) anonymous post?

I live on the edge of one of the biggest city (Sheffield) parks in the country, which is based on the remains of a much older country estate that kind of got swallowed up. If you go far enough, it's still possible to see the remains of moorland and farmland. There are ancient villages reborn as modern suburbs and ancient Saxon remains.

And I'm coming to the point: over the last thirty years, a number of people in the oldest part of the area (bang next door to a church on an apparently pre-Christian worship site) claim to have seen a seven foot tall green figure wandering the more lonely places in the area. Now I know this isn't exactly what you were looking into, but it is interesting that an area with such history (and a fair bit of evidence for nature worship of the Green Man type) should attract this kind of spookiness?

There's also a long tradition of eerie May Day celebrations still ongoing; up till a few years ago, one of the city pubs used to disturb people with a guy in full Green Man costume dancing about outside. The Cathedral even features a carving of him!
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There is considerable discussion and some lovely examples of green men adorning church corbels in this interesting documentary.

Much time is spent at the Parish Church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck, which is home to a good example of a sheela na gig as well as a variety of angels, demons, a fish-man, lion-man, a tail-eating snake and a human-eating elephant--oh, and there's a bit of dowsing going on.

It's all good, but skip to 9:30 if you only want the material mentioned above.

Superb gallery of the carvings here:
https://raggedrobinsnaturenotes.blogspot.com/2018/08/kilpeck-church-part-1-church-exterior.html

Several images and more information here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_St_Mary_and_St_David,_Kilpeck
 
Here's a transcript of a lecture by Ronald Hutton, where he seems to dismiss the idea of an ancient Celtic origin for the Green Man.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/sites/default/files/transcript/2023-06-07-1800_Hutton-T.pdf
After that, the component parts of Lady Raglan’s construct of the Green Man were dismantled. The medieval foliate heads were studied by Kathleen Basford in 1978 and Mercia MacDermott in 2003. They were revealed to have been a motif originally developed in India, which travelled through the medieval Arab empire to Christian Europe. There it became a decoration for monks’ manuscripts, from which it spread to churches. The Jack-in-the-Green was studied by Roy Judge in 1979, and proved to have appeared in London at the end of the eighteenth century. It was initially a feature of chimney sweeps’ processions, enacted to collect money in May as the onset of summer extinguished domestic fires and removed much of the sweeps’ income. The Green Man sign was studied by Brandon Centerwall in 1997, and shown to derive from the medieval motif of the Wild Man of the forest. This figure, of a human dressed in leaves, passed into Tudor and Stuart pageants, then became a brand symbol for distillers, aided by the connection between vines and wine, and so ended up as a name for pubs. None of the three things had anything to do with each other or with a pagan god.
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The Green Man was in around this time, when Kingsley Amis' novel The Green Man was dramatised for TV.

Can remember watching the TV series and the Omnibus episode in short order and thinking 'Green Men everywhere, what's goin' on'ere then?' :thought:
 
catseye said:
I've been watching his series of lectures at Gresham College. Brilliant stuff, he did witches, paganism, all that sort of stuff. He's very erudite and amusing - I've got a lot of time for Ronald Hutton.
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A brilliant scholar and speaker. I try never to miss his lectures.
 
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