Julia Somerset, née Hamilton, only published one article on folklore in her lifetime. Her husband, Major FitzRoy Richard Somerset, the fourth Baron Raglan, was noted for his independent scholarship (as well as his beekeeping), having written “The Hero” (1936), a comparative study, in which he enumerates twenty-two things often found in stories of heroes, including dying on hilltops. Lady Raglan’s single article appeared three years later, in the journal Folklore—formerly The Folk-Lore Journal (1883–1889) and The Folk-Lore Record (1878–1882)—and it almost certainly had a more lasting influence than anything written by her husband. She, too, investigated the supposed mythic-ritualistic origins underlying popular cultural motifs, but her object of study was the foliate head design seen everywhere in European medieval church decoration of the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. Before Lady Raglan’s intervention, this figure had been anonymous. She gave him a name: the Green Man.
The Green Man is a decorative design with a human face. Leaves and stems twist around the features, usually originating from the mouth. He can leer, he can grin. Sometimes he looks as if he is screaming in pain. He usually looks down from a ceiling. Wherever there’s an ecclesiastical surface, there you are likely to find him. In New York, you’ll find him, among other places, on Ninth street, in the East Village.
Lady Raglan’s term for the figure was adopted by the scholar Sir Nikolaus Pevsner—best known for his forty-six-volume series “The Buildings of England”—and that was pretty much that, as far as terminology was concerned. British enthusiasm for folklore was at a great pitch, still under the long-reaching influence of James Frazer’s compendium of comparativism, “The Golden Bough” (1890). Frazer emphasized continuity with and preservation of a native tradition, and Raglan, thinking very much in those terms, posited that the Green Man was an ancient pagan icon of fertility. “The fact is that unofficial paganism subsisted side by side with the official religion,” Raglan writes, “and this explains the presence of our Green Man in a church window with the Virgin beside him and below him the sun.” His existence in the many churches of northern Europe, then, suggested a connection to a pre-Christian, spiritual relationship with the land, one we perhaps might still access.
Unlike the folklorists of the völkisch movement in Germany, neither Raglan nor Frazer had any explicit interest in building a nationalist project through romantic visions of European myth. But Raglan’s desire to connect with an authentic, deep-time form of British culture—to reach beyond the church’s stronghold, beyond industrialization, to touch an ancient and therefore true tradition—was political, and nationalistic, anyway: it sought out pure origins where really there were none.
But, over the last fifty years, the Green Man has become a specifically countercultural icon. It was adopted by New Agers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and recast by the changing status of folkloric imagery into a surprisingly durable alt icon. The Green Man Festival in Wales, for instance, which proudly identifies itself as “non-corporate,” was founded in 2003. In 2007, “Green Man” was the theme of Burning Man. It’s a remarkable trajectory for a figure who, on one level, doesn’t even exist: despite his face being everywhere in the medieval period, a historical Green Man story seems to be attested precisely nowhere.
Lady Raglan’s theory is bunk, but it became extremely popular bunk—and two new books about the Green Man and his myth attest to a recent uptick in his popularity. Carolyne Larrington’s “The Land of the Green Man” isn’t squarely focused on its titular figure; it is a survey crammed with every myth, legend, elf, giant, and fairy tale related to the British landscape. These old stories are interwoven with references to contemporary authors who have fed British folklore into their fiction: Susan Cooper, Neil Gaiman, Alan Garner, J. K. Rowling. That the Green Man is there in the title is typical of the symbolic importance he has assumed in discussions of all things pertaining to British folklore.
Larrington takes the twenty-first-century scholar’s perspective on the Green Man: as a “vegetation god,” she insists, he has “been shown not to exist.” He was, rather, invented in 1939, “for a world which was beginning to need him, a world in which people were gradually realising how industrialisation was stealthily degrading our planet.” He came to represent “all that the modern world undervalues, excludes or lacks.” He doesn’t appear in stories, “except those invented for him by modern writers,” Larrington explains, but his “appearance, as a hybrid of man and plant, insists that humans are inextricably part of that natural world which we in the West are so keen to subjugate.” The Green Man may not be locatable in some named hill or brook, Larrington tells us, but he speaks to us profoundly in our time of ecological crisis. He is nowhere but everywhere.
Nina Lyon, on the other hand, in “Uprooted,” testifies to the continued power of the Green Man just as Lady Raglan understood him. Lyon, who lives in rural Wales, describes her own attempt to “revive” a theoretical cult of pagan fertility symbols inspired by the Green Man of her local church. She decides to propagate a sex cult in his honor. The Green Man, Lyon writes, is “a sort of forest-god, an emblem of the birth-death-rebirth cycle of the natural year. He was worshipped in hope of good harvests, and guards the metaphysical gate between the material and immaterial worlds.”
Lyon doesn’t care for medieval scholarship, a fact made plain not only by the rather unfounded declaration quoted above, but also by her reluctance to even read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the most entertaining of medieval poems—and, for some scholars, a potential source of analogues for the Green Man himself. Although she “accepted that medievalists existed,” Lyon writes, she has never had much time for them:
Lyon does read “Gawain” in the end, and likes it: “Gawain was an act of anarchy against medieval poetry,” she concludes. But she is utterly disengaged with the medieval world, and she brings that same spirit of disengagement to such varied topics as modern psychiatry (“interventions are basically determined by the practitioner’s metaphysics”), German people (“there is something identifiable in the practice of German culture, something fixed and formal, which seems to lead to a black-and-whiteness about the world”), and the possibility that the Green Man could have been made by and for religious believers. (He may not look terribly Christian to us, and Lyon may really loathe organized religion, but there isn’t much getting around the fact that the Green Man does live in churches.)
Seeking a spiritual relationship with ‘Nature,’ Lyon hunts high and low for an authentic kind of vegetal spirituality that will let her understand the strange world in which we live. She more or less repeats the moves made by twentieth-century New Age enthusiasts, who adopted the Green Man as a countercultural symbol. Collectives such as the Peace Convoy travelled solstices at Stonehenge; they named themselves after Arthurian characters and believed in the power of ley lines. This countercultural tradition still blooms today, and in the best parts of her book Lyon vividly chronicles several British festivals, as well as the rave circuit of her own youth. She gives an excellent account of the merging of New Age hippie-dom with rave culture.
But, for the most part, Lyon’s book is a journey not through culture, but around her own mind, as she looks for meaning in a landscape soaked in the sublime. When Lyon listens, rapt, to the silence of the wood, detecting the “sounds of life, of earthly process” beneath the “rush of the waterfall,” she thrills to an idea of nature’s power. What Lyon, like many before her, fails to see is that the idea of “Nature,” as she describes it, perpetuates the misbegotten project of amateur anthropologists like Lady Raglan, who lusted after a deeper past than could ever be available to them. The idealization of the forest as sublimely special because it does not contain people or concrete or modernity or disease represents the same impulse that pushed certain Romantics to conceive of definitive mythic pasts for their muddy, industrialized, confusing modern nations.
As the environmental historian William Cronon wrote twenty years ago, wilderness “hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural.” This is an insight that has lately been seized on by medieval scholars, who study an era in which that particular distinction between nature and culture had not really been made yet. The current environmental crisis pushes us to think anew about the world, and the categories we apply to it. Why not choose as your aide to thought a mind-bending entity like the Green Man?
A new essay by Carolyn Dinshaw in the forthcoming volume “The Middle Ages in the Modern World,” edited by Bettina Bildhauer and Christopher Jones, takes up the Green Man for precisely this purpose. Dinshaw, with whom I studied at New York University, traces the Green Man specifically as he is used by Radical Faeries, a group founded, in 1979, by gay men in the U.S. “inspired by lesbian-feminist collectives” and “countercultural back-to-the-land movements.” The Faeries, who are still active, hold maypole rituals, espousing Raglan-esque pagan performance as paths into spiritual dimensions of sexual liberation. Dinshaw notes that the Radical Faeries “derive a sense of authentic, transhistorical, universal gay subjectivity and belonging” from a land that has itself been violently colonized; their adoption of pagan practices, while seen perhaps as part of an attempt to address colonial trauma, is liable to some critique. While they may not be wholly successful, however, we can “at least appreciate the complex political context” that links the Radical Faeries’ appropriation of Green Man imagery “to a challenge of settler colonial logic.”
Dinshaw sees further political importance in the Green Man theme of Randolph Stow’s 1980 novel “The Girl Green as Elderflower,” which is set in Suffolk, England, but shot through with powerful reconsiderations of colonialism. (The protagonist, a man trying to recover from an unnamed experience in a colonial setting that had taken from him “the feeling of being a white man,” is haunted by dream visions of a speaking face of “summer leaves.”) The Green Man confronts us, Dinshaw writes, with our own expectations about “who and what is deemed human, who and what is not, who decides, and what the costs of those judgments might be.” Those judgments are shaped by race, gender, and history. But when we linger with the Green Man and “think with” him awhile, we may find something “experimental and unpredictable,” a “radically enlarged field of agents,” something, ultimately, very queer. “Remember histories,” Dinshaw urges. “Sprout leaves. Breathe tendrils. Utter vines.”
Even with her historical caveats, then, Dinshaw, like Larrington and Lyon, still sees the Green Man as a rich and vocal emblem connecting contemporary concerns with mythic thought, specifically as it pertains to our relationship with the land. In our present moment of ecological disaster, such emblems of pre-industrial, premodern “green” principles seem to arise in our intellectual culture almost unbidden. They tell complicated stories about our place in a world we’ve harmed—some so complicated that they hardly seem to exist at all.
