Green Man Contention

It is debated whether or not The Green Man is a product of Pagan belief or not, as its presence and origin is untraceable, seemingly coming out of thin air. This mystery is retold on every website you go on, with nobody holding the key to its secret.

Two views of a Green Man on the exterior of St. Lorenz Church, Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Germany. The carving shows a man's face with branches emerging from his mouth, growing into a bush that surrounds his face with large flowers.

https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2021/02/what-was-the-green-man/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man

The Green Man motif has many variations. Branches or vines may sprout from the mouth, nostrils, or other parts of the face, and these shoots may bear flowers or fruit. Found in many cultures from many ages around the world, the Green Man is often related to natural vegetation deities. Often used as decorative architectural ornaments, where they are a form of mascaron or ornamental head, Green Men are frequently found in architectural sculpture on both secular and ecclesiastical buildings in the Western tradition. In churches in England, the image was used to illustrate a popular sermon describing the mystical origins of the cross of Jesus.

"Green Man" type foliate heads first appeared in England during the early 12th century deriving from those of France, and were especially popular in the Gothic architecture of the 13th to 15th centuries. The idea that the Green Man motif represents a pagan mythological figure, as proposed by Lady Raglan in 1939, despite its popularity with the lay public, is not supported by evidence.

/ ALTERNATIVELY IT IS ARGUED

In the first Green Man post, I took issue with several other scholars who claimed that the phrase “Green Man” was coined in the 1930s by amateur folklore scholar Lady Raglan. I pointed out that the name “Green Man” goes back to the 16th century at least. I disagreed with the same scholars’ claims that the idea of a mythos around the Green Man involving death and resurrection was likewise created by Lady Raglan, and showed an earlier instance of the mythos in English scholarship: a 1903 passage by E.K. Chambers.

The problem with the analyses I mention is that Lady Raglan did not invent the term “Green Man”; she applied the existing term “Green Man” to the leaf-covered face carved on her local church. Lady Raglan borrowed the name “Green Man” from a similar figure from traditional art and drama, and this figure was already associated with calendar customs, and already the subject of a death and resurrection mythos, when she borrowed his name. Thus, when the architectural historian Richard Hayman claims that the association of the Green Man with calendar customs is a recent phenomenon, or when the classicist and fantasy author Emily Tesh claims that the mythos around the Green Man only dates to 1939, they’re not telling the whole story. They can only make these claims by limiting their understanding of “Green Man” to the faces carved on churches, even though they are aware of the older meanings of the term.

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