Green Man

What it is

The Green Man is not one fixed character but a label that folklore study uses for a few connected things. One is a person wearing a garment of leaves and moss who walked in English pageants and parades. Another is the foliate head: a carved face with foliage around it, set into medieval church architecture. Lady Raglan, writing in 1939, gave the carvings this name and tied them to the costumed figures, to May Day and to the Jack in the Green custom. In her reading the Green Man stood for a pagan fertility power. Others treat the carving as ornament, and the links she drew are still argued over.

Where it comes from

By the 16th century at the latest, people in England called a man covered in leaves and moss a green man, and such figures appeared in parades, pageants and ritual. He usually carried a club and was often the whiffler, the person who pushed a way through the crowd for a procession. The figure belongs to a wider European pattern, the Wild Man or woodwose. In 1939 the name was extended to the church carvings by Lady Raglan, whose article in the journal Folklore proposed a pagan fertility reading. Folklorists since then have questioned whether the carvings, or the customs she linked to them, held any pagan content.

How it is done

In early modern England the custom was a piece of street theatre. A man was dressed from head to foot in leaves, moss among them, and usually carried a club, so that he looked like a wild creature of the woods. In a parade his task was often that of whiffler: he cleared a way through the crowd so the procession or performance could pass. From the 17th century the same figure was painted on inn signs and supplied pubs with their names.

Tools and materials

The costume was the central piece of equipment: leaves and moss over the whole body, and a club the wearer carried. From the 17th century painters put the figure on signboards, which is how it reached pub names. In church architecture the medium is carved stone. Writers looking for an older identity for the figure have pointed to Silvanus, a Roman god of woods and countryside, since more than 40 inscriptions to him have been found in Britain.

What it is for

In the processions the costumed man had a practical job: making space for the parade to move. For pubs, the figure served as a name and a painted sign that customers could recognise. Lady Raglan's argument gave it a larger meaning, a pagan fertility figure tied to the growing season, and that is the sense that travels today. Modern pagans take it up as an image of the turning year and of care for the natural world, and Wiccans have used it for the Horned God.

Peoples and places

The costumed figure and its name are English, on record from the 16th century, with painted pub signs following in the 17th. It is one local version of a figure known across Europe, the Wild Man or woodwose. A link with Silvanus, a Roman god of woods, has been proposed on the basis of more than 40 inscriptions found in Britain. From the 1960s the idea spread past England, into New Age and Neopagan circles elsewhere.

What people believe

The question at the centre is what a leaf face in a church was for. Lady Raglan held that it carried an old pagan fertility power, and that reading became popular. Some writers have seen a forest god behind it, with Silvanus of the Roman pantheon the named candidate, and others have called it a Jungian archetype, a recurring pattern in the mind that shows up in images. Among Wiccans the Green Man is often taken as a face of the Horned God, a mixed deity drawing on the Celtic Cernunnos and the Greek Pan. Folklorists who reject the pagan case treat the carving as decoration.

When it is done

The costumed figure belongs to public celebration: pageants, parades and ritual use are the settings the English records give, and Lady Raglan placed it alongside May Day festivities and the Jack in the Green custom. Her argument is what ties the figure to the cycle of the seasons, so modern pagan seasonal use grows out of a 1939 reading rather than out of the medieval carvings themselves.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Folklorists were sceptical soon after the pagan case was made. Lady Raglan, they point out, offered no evidence that the foliate head, the pub name or the May customs were pagan in origin, and some hold that the carving is simply an architectural motif. One verdict on the mythological reading is recorded as bunk. The figure as a whole has been called a product of 20th-century folklore. Literary study cut both ways: post-war critics read the Green Knight of the Middle English poem about Sir Gawain as Lady Raglan's Green Man, which strengthened the belief that a medieval folk figure existed.

Compare and confuse

The Green Man is easily mixed up with neighbours in the same family. The Wild Man, also called the woodwose, is the broader European figure of which the costumed Englishman was one variant. Jack in the Green is a separate May custom that Lady Raglan folded into her argument. The Green Knight, the huge green challenger in the poem about Sir Gawain, has been read as a literary relative, and so have Robin Hood and Peter Pan in one 2016 study. The name also lives on ordinary pub signs.

Today

Since the 1960s New Age and Neopagan writers have kept Lady Raglan's version of the figure alive, and Wiccan use of it as a face of the Horned God comes from the same period. Fiction carries it further: a run of children's novels at the end of the 1990s gave it leading roles, and it appears in Max Porter's Lanny, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, in K. J. Charles's The Spectred Isle, and in the Rotherweird trilogy by Andrew Caldecott. Alex Garland's 2022 film Men drew on the figure and on related carvings such as Sheela na gig.

Days linked to Green Man

Questions people ask about Green Man

Good reading and sources

• The Remarkable Persistence of the Green ManThe New Yorker, Article
• What Was the Green Man?Library of Congress, Article

• Green Man (folklore) on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data