we need to be looking back at a our old folklore to gain insight into these intriguing figures.

The folkloric context for the Green Man is a bit of a red herring as what we are dealing with here is a didactic icon integral to the architecture and theology of pre-Reformation Roman Catholicism. Any folkloric associations are the result of a much later Zeitgeist - certainly no earlier than 1939 when Lady Raglan first put the name to the face - a fashionable sort of wishful thinking that misconstrued such imagery to the extent where now it is seen primarily as being somehow pagan. The tide is changing on this, however so slowly, and not before time....