The invitations for the coronation of King Charles, which were released this week, are whimsical and colorful, a riot of springtime flowers. The design, based on a British wildflower meadow, features the coats of arms for Charles and Queen Camilla and invites its recipient to “the Abbey Church of Westminster” on May 6 to witness the king and queen being anointed and crowned.
It’s a nice-looking card. But it’s causing some drama. The most prominent feature on it—which is also the feature prompting said drama—is a green, human-like face, transforming at its edges into a jumble of foliage, crowned in primrose and narcissus.
As the announcement explains:
Central to the design is the motif of the Green Man, an ancient figure from British folklore, symbolic of spring and rebirth, to celebrate the new reign. The shape of the Green Man, crowned in natural foliage, is formed of leaves of oak, ivy and hawthorn, and the emblematic flowers of the United Kingdom.
But when Francis Young, a historian and folklorist specializing in the history of popular religion, saw the invitation, he had one simple response: “I thought it was a joke.”
To find out why some British folklorists were surprised by the Green Man’s inclusion on the invitation, and why Young spent so much time addressing “this week’s Green Man furore” in multiple outlets, Slate called up Young to talk about the leafy symbol. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Slate: What went through your mind when you saw the invitation?
Young: Well, my initial reaction was I thought it was a joke. I thought, “This must be some kind of joke, to have the Green Man on it.” But then I saw it had been tweeted by the royal family.
And it’s a very beautiful invitation. It’s really lovely. But it’s rather surprising to find the Green Man on something as important and weighty as the official invitation to the coronation. My thoughts went to, What is this? What’s going on?
Why was this so surprising to you?
I spend a lot of my time trying to debunk the idea that the Green Man is an ancient figure from British folklore. He’s a made-up figure of 20th-century folklore. Quite a lot of journalists in the U.K., since the invitation went out, have already reported, “The Green Man is included here as an ancient figure from British folklore.” But he isn’t actually an ancient pagan symbol.
What do you mean? How can a whole country believe something is an ancient figure when it’s not?
It all goes back to an article that appeared in the journal of the Folklore Society in 1939, written by Lady Raglan, who was a prominent folklorist at the time. She came up with this ingenious argument, but it’s not an argument that any scholar would ever go with today.
Churches, cathedrals, and abbeys have these figures that pop up from time to time: It’s a humanoid face with either leaves coming out of its mouth or face, or biting down on leaves, or being consumed by leaves. They are normally described by art historians as foliate heads, and they are, essentially, a decorative trope. The likeliest explanation for them is that they are simply a visual joke, a bit like medieval stonemasons depicting people taking their trousers down. I don’t think that it’s anything more than that.
So Lady Raglan said, Isn’t it strange that we’ve got this figure who pops up again and again and again? And she links that with the names of pubs. There are quite a lot of pubs in England called the Green Man. In the early modern period [the 15th through 18th centuries], when most of these pubs were named, if you talked about “a green man,” it meant a man who was dressed in green, not a man who was green. It’s a reference to May Day celebrations, when you would have somebody dress up in green clothes to dance and celebrate the beginning of spring. She also linked it with various other figures from English folklore, like the woodwose, a wild man covered in fur. The woodwose has never been referenced in any sources as a green man. So it seems a bit of a tenuous connection to make. This idea that there was a Green Man doesn’t really rest on any real scholarly foundation.
Huh! So you’re telling me that the British royal family is presenting the Green Man as an important ancient British symbol, but that it actually only dates to the 20th century?
Well, the idea of a humanoid face coming out of foliage is an ancient theme.
So how did this modern Green Man take off?
Within a few decades of Lady Raglan’s paper, the Green Man became a very popular figure. Cathedrals and churches started producing copies of their Green Man sculptures and selling them. Certainly by the 1970s, when you look at popular accounts, the Green Man is everywhere as a personification and symbol of English folklore. Many people today think that the Green Man was a god, because that’s what they’ve been told. There are pagans in the U.K. today who venerate the Green Man.
What do these modern-day pagans believe about it?
Contemporary pagans see the Green Man as the sort of vegetation spirit who is born in spring, and then lives throughout summer, and then has to kind of give up his place to the Holly King at Christmas. This is part of modern pagan mythology. It doesn’t have any connection to anything ancient.
And it’s become so deeply associated with paganism that it’s difficult now to separate it out. And if you look closely at the image on the invitation, the Green Man is also wearing a crown made of hawthorne with an acorn on top. This is very, very closely associated with witchcraft and paganism in the U.K. It might be that the designer had these things in mind, even if the king was unaware of those associations.
How is the public responding to this pagan symbol on this invite?
Early indications are that people are quite polarized on it. Quite a lot of people like it, because they see the Green Man as quite a positive figure, who represents a kind of cheeky thumbing your nose at traditional Christianity—the idea that the Green Man is this figure you find in churches, hidden in plain sight, that represents an older pagan cult.
Other people have been scathing about it, either because they think that the Green Man isn’t serious because he’s made up, or because they actually think that it’s wrong for the king to include a pagan figure. There are a few people who would say this is a terrible pagan idol that should be torn down. That’s why I was so surprised to see the invitation. It’s loaded with these cultural connotations. Nobody would just say, Oh, that’s pretty. So it seems quite a potentially controversial image to use.
Setting aside those who actually venerate the Green Man, what cultural associations do Brits have with it?
There’s no real story behind the Green Man. He is a figure without a myth. I think if most people were presented with a Green Man figure, they would see it as something that’s nice to put in the garden, a bit like a garden gnome but maybe not quite as silly. It’s just a light-hearted thing that you might put up as a symbol that you’re connected to nature.
Do you think King Charles asked for the Green Man on the invitation?
I don’t know exactly what was going through the designer’s mind or the extent to which the king himself was involved in designing it. It’s unlikely that the king himself said, “I would like a Green Man to go into this design.” But clearly, he’s given his approval to this.
It could just be that the king was adamant that he wanted nature celebrated in this invitation. He probably was; the centrality of nature is very important to the king. So it could be that the designer just thought, Well, what is the personification of nature in contemporary English culture? It’s the Green Man.
What does the inclusion of this on the invite say about King Charles?
King Charles is a man of the 1960s, and although he wasn’t a hippie, his love of nature and his obsession with conservation and sustainable farming are things that he picked up in the ’60s and ’70s, way ahead of most people. There is, I think, a hint of the nature worshipper in King Charles. Not to the extent that he’s not an orthodox Christian. But I think he’s a bit less pinned down, spiritually, than Elizabeth II was. So I think we shouldn’t be that surprised when we look at the imagery that King Charles is using that there’s a hint of the 1960s and ’70s there. And the Green Man is very much a figure of that era.
And it has attracted a lot of attention from people who are culture watchers in the U.K. It speaks to deeper questions that we have in Britain about what kind of king Charles will be, what his priorities will be. And it raises questions about the nature of his commitment to tradition, which I think is quite complicated. In one sense, he is somebody who is willing to subvert tradition to a much greater extent than his mother. He was willing to do things differently when he advocated conservation, sustainability, and environmentalism in the 1970s. But on the other hand, he is also deeply committed to tradition.
How is the scholarly community handling this whole controversy?
There’s a lot of frustration with the misinterpretation. But you could also take a rather more wry view of this and look at this as the perfect symbol for what we do brilliantly in the U.K., which is invent traditions. And coronations, famously, are one of those places where invented traditions get center stage. A lot of the things that happen in a coronation are presented as being very, very ancient. And they’re not quite as ancient as they seem.
