Wild man
The wild man, wild man of the woods is a mythical figure and motif resembling a hairy human that appears in the art and literature of medieval Europe. Generally they are considered a large-statured race of humans who are hairy all over its body, living in the wilderness or woodlands. They are often thought to be covered with moss, or wear green or vegetative clothing, and iconically wield a club or hold an uprooted tree as a staff. They also occur in female versions as wild women.
The Wilde Mann is attested in Middle High German literature, particularly German heroic epics, while the female Wilde Weib figures in the Arthurian works, typically appear as adversaries. These beings are also called by names meaning "wood men" and in older forms of the language, "wood maiden", "wood wife", or "wood woman". In Middle English a corresponding term for the wild man is woodwose or wodewose.
In the folklore of German-speaking areas collected mainly in the 19th century, there are especially the Alpine wild men and wild women. These beings could be man-hunters or otherwise be sinister, but could also endow luck or bounty, exhibiting aspects of woodland spirits.
The folklore that had developed in the mining areas around Harz or Ore Mountains by the 16th century regarded the wild man of the mines as potentially both dangerous and beneficent, guiding humans to the discovery of ore deposits. The house of the Princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, which controlled one of the silver mines, minted silver thaler coinage with the wild man in their coat-of-arms, starting 1539.
These wild man had already frequently appeared in European family heraldic devices since the latter half of the 15th century. It also became commonplace to depict the wild man as shield-bearers of the family coat of arms. This period also roughly coincides with the popularization of the concept of the "noble wild man" or "noble savage" as can already be seen in Hans Sachs's "Lament of the Wild Men", and also reflected in artistic depictions of the wild folk from this period onward.
The defining characteristic of the figure is its "wildness"; iconography from the 12th century onward has consistently depicted the wild man as being covered with hair. Around the same transition period, biblical or other humans afflicted with madness came to be conventionally depicted with hairiness, and subsequently, literary figures who temporarily loses sanity and live in the wild also came to be associated with wild men.
Terminology
"Wild man" is a technical term in use since the Middle Ages, applied to a hairy human-like creature with certain animal-like traits but which has not quite descended to the level of ape; it may have hairless spots around the face, palms, feet, sometimes elbows and knees, and around the breasts in case of the female "wild woman". If the creature exhibits additional animal-like traits, it may not be a wild man in question, but rather the satyr, faun, or the devil."Wild man" and its cognates in some languages are the common terms for the creature in most modern languages; it appears in German as wilder Mann, in French as homme sauvage. However, in Italian, uomo selvatico is often used.
The German wild man also occurs in a more modern folklore tradition, localized in a region spanning from Switzerland to Carinthia, Austria according to the, registered under such names as wilde Frau, Wildfrau, -en, wilde Fraulein, Wildfräulein wilder Mann, Wildmannli, wilde Männle, Wildmännlein. Plural forms are: wilde Männer, or wilde Leute or wilde Menschen. Females are also called wildes Weib.
The "wild man" is attested in Middle High German as wilde man in the 13th century, once in a lyrical poem alluding to the story of the giant Sigenot, i.e., an epic featuring both giant and wild man, from the Dietrich von Bern cycle. Another attestation occurs in the Arthurian romance which gives wilde man, as well as the female form wildez wîp .
In Old High German, the term wildaz wîp together with holzmuoja, holzmoia occurs in a glossary under the heading of the Latin term lamia. The same glossary under the heading of Latin gives the gloss wildiu wîp. There are also the forms holzwib, as well as holzvrouwe and numerous others.
Another old example is the mention of "ad domum wildero wîbo", a piece of landmark or toponymy somewhere in Hessen, mentioned in by the monk Eberhard of Fulda or a redaction given by Johann Pistorius the Younger.
Wood-folk type synonyms
The wild man is referred to as waltluoder in Wolfdietrich, and in the same work, the title hero must deal with the advances of, classified as a wild woman.In the epic Laurin the wild man is referred to as a waltmann. The same term waltman is used in Iwein to characterize the herdsman as a wild man, and he is also described as being as hairy as a walttôren .
A group of OHG glosses for wild woman was already discussed above. In MHG, an attested synonym for wild woman is holz-wîp.
In modern regional folklore, the creatures with sylvan names that correspond to the Alpine wild folk are the Holzleute or Moosleute of Central Germany, Franconia, and Bavaria; aka Waldfräulein, Waldweiblein of the Bohemian Forest and the Upper Palatinate; the Waldweiblein and of the Harz mountains region; the Lohjungfer (;
Other aliases
Folklore in Tyrol and German-speaking Switzerland into the 20th century refers to the wild woman called Fänggen, commented as being equivalent to Selige Fräulein This name is thought to be post-medieval neologism deriving from the Latin fauna, the feminine form of faun. The wild women of the Alpine region are "identical to or closely related to" the Fänggen or the Salige. The extended form Wild-Fang is considered a male noun, but Wild-fang is still applied to a female.The wild man is called a Bilmon, Salvadegh, or Salvanel in Wälsch-Tirol, which may be spelt Salvan or Salvang, with usage extending to Lombardy. The wild man is called l'om salvadegh by Ladin language-speakers in Folgrait and Trambileno; this is readily recognizable as equivalent to French l'homme, where Old French derives from Latin "sylvan, pertaining to forest". Hence the names in this grouping are related to Silvanus, the Roman tutelary god of gardens and the countryside. The term silvaticus was in fact used in the sense of "wild woman" by Burchard of Worms in the 10th century, and it has been suggested he was referring to beings who would have been called Selvang in dialect according to modern-day folklore.
The local name Frauberte or Frau Berta was supposedly current either in Ronchi near Ala, or the aforementioned Folgrait and Trambileno areas. Likewise there are a sort of wild women known as Berchtra or Perchta in Carinthia.
It is contended that the or Orke or Orge; Lorgg or Lorge; or Nörglein, Nörkel, Örggele in folklore from parts of the Alps, particularly Tyrol, also may correspond to the wild man, with the proviso that these are names for "wild dwarf people". This appears to be connected to Italian orco in the sense of "subterraneans", or perhaps rather a "harmless wild folk" version of the orco such as appears in the literary fairy tales of the Pentamerone. The Italian orco is cognate to French ogre, as is modern literary orcs, and is related to Orcus, a Roman and Italic god of death.
The Rüttelweib, Rittelweibe of the Giant Mountains is also considered another regional fabulous being corresponding to the wild woman of the Alpine Region.
English terms
In Old English/Anglo-Saxon there is recorded wude-wāsa meaning "satyr" or "faun", a compound of wude "woodland, forest" and wasa of uncertain etymology, though perhaps meaning "forest dweller"; or else it may perhaps be a compound formed from *wāsa "being", from the verb wesan, wosan "to be, to be alive".From it has derived Middle English woodwose, wodewose, woodehouse Variant spellings include wodewese, etc. The ME term wodehose was ambiguously singular or plural.
As for examples of usage, Wycliffe's Bible, in Isaiah 13:21, used wodewoos. Latin translation gave pilosi, and LXX rendered as δαιμόνια.
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is said to have fought with worms as well as a "wodwos" that lived in the craggy rocks;
Medieval literature
Verbal descriptions of the wild folk in medieval literature will be mainly discussed here. Visual depictions during the medieval period will be discussed under.German epic
That the German epic Sigenot featureing both the giant named Sigenot and the wild man was certainly known in the 13th century, as the minnesinger Heinrich Frauenlob sings "Wa kam mit Parcivale /ris' Sigenot unt der wilde man? ", but the actual so-called elder Sigenot is lost except in a fragmentary state, so the attestations come from the Younger Sigenot as "wilde man, wild man.The female character in Wolfdietrich is also considered a wild woman example. She is a hairy woman crawling on all fours trying to get Wolfdietrich to marry her, but when he does not comply, casts a spell that turns him into a madman roaming the woods. God commands her to reverse the spell, and Wolfdietrich is now willing to marry her. Fortunately, when she dips into a spring she sheds her furry skin and transforms into a beautiful maiden, now calling herself Sigeminne. She is also mentioned as being the first wife of Wolfdietrich in the Anhang zum Heldenbuch.
In the Arthurian Wigamur there is the wildez wîp who dwells in a hole in a rock. In another Arthurian epic Wigalois, the dwarf named Karriôz is explicitly stated to have a wildez wîp as his mother. In Wigalois there also appears a monstrous female of the woods named Rûel as an adversary to the title hero, and though she is also described as a "wild woman" by modern commentators, she is not to be confused with Karriôz's mother.
French epic
In the epic Renaud de Montauban, the title hero Renaud turns rebel against Charlemagne, and as fugitives living in the Ardennes forest, they have turned "black and hairy like a bear ", so that "neither stone nor rock could scathe" them. Renaud's band thus became chevalier sauvage or wild men, in the sense that in medieval society, the outcast consigned to live in forests separating settlements were regarded as a sort of wild man.The romance of Valentine and Orson, about a civilized brother separated from his bearlike brother Orson living in the wild, may count as an example of a wild man's tale, however, this might be more recognizable as a fictional treatment of the feral child.
Welsh and Irish literature
For the Myrddin Wyllt Suibhne Geilt driven to live in the wilderness and interpreted by some modern commentators as exhibiting the Wild Man of the Woods motif, cf. below.Medieval to Renaissance transition
As the name implies, the main characteristic of the wild man is his wildness. Civilized people regarded wild men as beings of the wilderness, the antithesis of civilization. Such had been the medieval view through the High Middle Ages. That is to say, the wild man had been something that civilized people strove to reject.The regard for the wild man as such an abominable fearsome character began to blunt, and by the 14th century in the example of the Bal des Sauvages held by King Charles VI of France the wild man was being employed in costume, not so much as embodiment of evil and savagery, but as a toything of court nobles.
The paradigm had reversed and the Wild Man became the Noble Savage by the time of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Hans Sachs's Klag der wilden holtzleut uber die ungetrewen welt and it became an iconic model. Bernheimer analyzes this as a backlash reaction by the nobility of having to live within the constraints of aristocratic conventions and chivalric code.
Although emergence of the concept of the "Noble Savage" had occurred post-discovery of the Americas, according to one observer not inconsistent with the foregoing 16th century examples, much of the scholarship on the Noble Savage pertains to thinking of the Enlightenment Period. The coinage of the term "noble savage" itself has often been attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though refuted; as Rousseau never actually used that term himself, even though the philosopher did profusely use the construct of "savage" to critique various aspects of civilized society.
Modern folklore
The purported nature of these wild folk or wood people in folklore, like the lore of demons in general, is highly ambiguous, unpredictable and mutable.When the wild men appear in solitary fashion, they are similar to giants and ogres, while the women tend to be more goddess-like.
Physical characteristics
Giants or dwarfs
The wild people can be dwarfish or be gigantic in size. And this may not necessarily be regional variations: the wild folk of Bernhardswald are purported to be giants or dwarfs depending on the season.They can be of different temperaments, but they may exact vengeance on those who are frightened by them or mock them. In that case, the smaller wild folk are more easily appeased, while the giant types will tear their tormentors apart or curse them with "seven times seven generations of curses and woe."
Friedrich Ranke argues that the legends concerning the wild people in Central Germany became less frightening because the forests themselves shed much of their eeriness due to development and deforestation, so that only the low rolling hills remained. Thus in these regions, the folklore concerned the wild little folk of "harmless good nature."
Attire
The wild man stereotypically carries an uprooted fir tree, or an iron club or an iron pole, etc.Alpine wild man
There are also the Alpine wild men recorded by modern folklorists, whose lore is generally found in the lore of Alps. The wild men of the Alps had the reputation of abducting women and devouring humans, particularly children. In Grisons, they are also accused of depositing their changeling child, swapping it with a human baby. Allegedly peasants in the Grisons tried to capture the wild man by getting him drunk and tying him up in hopes that he would give them his wisdom in exchange for freedom. This is noted as paralleling the capture of Silenus already described by Xenophon, with Silenus being described as a satyr which Midas caught by getting him drunk with wine.Legend also has it that humans were able to capture it once by getting it drunk, thereby learning the manufacture of cheese.
A legend from Folgrait has it that a certain man heard the noise of the wild man hunting, and called out to him in rhymed couplet to give him a share, and received half a human corpse at his doorstep, subsequently having to take the trouble to have the hunter take back the unwanted gift. There are also variant versions with different rhymes from Ritten and Barbian. However, in a cognate tale from Vallarsa, the wild hunter is not specified as a "wild man". It is comparable to a similar wild hunter myth from Northern Germany, that if anyone calls out to heckle the hunt, the hunter forces a "half portion" of foul-smelling game or human part, reciting a couplet that if you join in the hunt, you must help out with the chewing.
A legend held that Wildmannli dwelled in the Gross Windgällen mountain in the canton of Uri, Switzerland that disapproved of humans hunting on Sundays, and a hunter who breached the taboo and shot a chamois was turned to stone.
Alpine wild woman
Meanwhile, the Tyrolian and Swiss Fängge as well as the Austrian Salige Frau are wild woman.The wild woman basically matches the female version of the wild man in appearance, and notably has drooping breasts however, she may appear in the form of beautiful women.
The wild woman, the Fängge, and the Salige Frau are all associated with protecting alpine game, especially the chamois The legendary protectress called Kaiserfrau of Nachtberg is not explicitly called a wild woman in the original telling, but is classified as such. In the tale, the tall woman dressed in a green robe commands a shepherd to kill all poachers, otherwise she will destroy his entire flock. He obliges, and due to the reputation that the Kaiserfrau harms hunters, the stock of game in the forest rebounds.
The wild women of Styria, Austria were said to reside mostly on Mt. Schöckl. They have a hollow or trough-like back, so they can pretend to be old tree trunks instantly by turning their backs, even when a hiker senses the presence of the beautiful wild woman. The wild women of Schöckl are said to be hunted by the Wild Hunt that travels on flying sleds carrying demons.
Iconography
In art the hair more often covers the same areas that a chemise or dress would, except for the female's breasts ; male knees are also often hairless. As with the feather tights of angels, this is probably influenced by the costumes of popular drama.By the 12th century the wild folk were almost invariably described as hairy all over, having a coat of hair covering their entire bodies except for their hands, feet, faces above their long beards, and the breasts and chins of the females.
Around the same 12th century, the conventions of hairiness came to be extended to certain legendary personages in mentally altered states. A prime example was the biblical Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon who went mad and was no longer depicted as a smooth-bodied human but as a hairy creature. Other examples were ascetic saints or literary hermits such as the Merlin of the Welsh or Arthurian Ywain who were overcome by a spell of madness or lovelorn dementia.
Bernheimer asserts that medieval paintings of Nebuchadnezzar came to be conventionally depicted as a wild man in crouching positions as according to contemporary ideas, even though that image contradicted the verbal biblical description in Daniel 4, which ascribed feather-like growths of hair like eagles, and bird-like claws.
The wild man was used as a symbol of mining in late medieval and Renaissance Germany. The town of Wildemann in the Upper Harz was founded during 1529 by miners who, according to legend, met a wild man and wife when they ventured into the wilds of the Harz mountain range. For use as heraldic devices in the German mining area and elsewhere, cf. below.
Some early sets of playing cards have a suit of Wild Men, including a pack engraved by the Master of the Playing Cards, some of the earliest European engravings. A set of four miniatures on the estates of society by Jean Bourdichon of about 1500 includes a wild family, along with "poor", "artisan" and "rich" ones.
Medieval iconography
Manuscript illuminations
The wild folk are featured in the marginal paintings in a number of illuminated manuscripts. There are wild men and women painted in the narrative border around the miniature of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Book of Hours held at the Syracuse University Library.In the Taymouth Hours, there are a series of miniatures recounting a story of a wild man abducting a maiden. Though the captions in this work are written in Anglo-Norman French, the wild man is called wodewose, which is a Middle English term.
There is also the drollery of a wild man being baited by three dogs, in the Queen Mary Psalter.
Mural art
The herdsman character who is only a in Chrétien's Old French Yvain, the Knight of the Lion is literally a wild man in Hartmann's Middle High German Iwein. The wild herdsman is depicted as a club-carrying wild man on one of the fresco murals of the Iwein cycle at in South Tyrol. The wild man is similarly painted on the mural at Schmalkalden Castle. The man wears a skin with two paws attached to it, perhaps the influence of the Greek hero Hercules.There is a giantess room series among the Runkelstein Castle fresco murals, and the label "Fraw Riel" suggests identification with the female Rûel of Wigalois. The Runkelstein frescos are themed on a set of triads on heroes, giantesses, and giants, etc. The giant Schrutan is one of them, who figures in the epic Rosengarten zu Worms as one of the single combat participants. Although clad in knightly armor, he holds an uprooted tree, and the Schrutan in this painting is "encoded as a giant-wild man hybrid" according to one art critic.
Engravings
Albrecht Dürer depicts the wild man pursuing the maiden in his "Coat of Arms of Death", of which it is commented that the wild man springs to life from the conventional immobile role as shield-bearer of heraldic device.English examples
Carved image of a group of wild men engaged in battle with a beast form a roof boss in Canterbury Cathedral, and is grouped among a number of Green Man bosses present in the cathedral. There is also a furry wild man depicted in the crypt of the Canterbury Cathedral. The visual artistic depictions of the English wild man and the green man merged during the Middle Ages to form a single type.Classical influences
There are instances where medieval depiction of satyr or faunus lose their beastly traits, turning into creatures not so far apart from wild men.Medieval myth and art also adopted a convention of depicting the Greek hero Heracles, clad in lion skin and carrying a club as a wild man, sometimes of a more conventional type or more outlandishly as a tailed monster with clawed feet.
Heraldry
Wild Men as shield-bearer
By the second half of the fifteen century, it became widely conventional to have engravings made of a wild man holding up a shield bearing the family's coat of arms. Particular examples include the Princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and later by the royals of Brandenburg–Prussia.To avail themselves to this needs, the engravers came up with the idea of having a prototype or template at hand of a wild man holding up a blank shield, so that the proper emblem can be filled in to cater to the particular patron. Martin Schongauer was one such engraver, four heraldic shield engravings of the 1480s which depict wild men holding heraldic shield.
Dürer in his Portrait of Oswald Krell drew two wild men supporting family heraldic shields. The one on the left wears a green garment made of moss, the one on the right is hairy all over.
The wild man appears in the coats of arms of e.g. Naila and of Wildemann.
Numismatics
The so-called was a type of taler denomination coins featuring a standing wild man on the reverse, first struck by Duke Henry the Younger of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in 1539, using the silver mined from the Upper Harz mountains. Thus, much of this wild man is really part of silver-mining folklore, rather than alpine or forest region folklore. The standing wild man on the early coin depicts a wild man holding a club and a clump of burning flame in the other hand. The folkloric explanation of the flame is that it represents a light source or beacon of light to guide humans through the dark mine tunnels to the ore source or silver vein, as clarified by the work of and Ina-Maria Greverus. Heilfurth regards the wild man in this context to be a type of Berggeist or "mountain spirit", better known as Bergwikt:Mönch or "mountain monk" in the folklore of the Harz mountains. The explanation of the "monk" name comes from the historical fact that the neighboring Walkenried Monastery held control of the workings of the Harz mining operation at one time.The lore of the mining spirit type wild man was localized mainly in the Harz and the Ore Mountains. The folklore is attested in the following piece of 16th century writing, which stated that in the community of Wildemann :
There is also the political and polemical interpretation of the wild man and flame emblem, namely, Henry the Younger was insinuating threat of violence, even the burning down of townships. When Henry's less quarrelsome son Julius succeeded as duke, the flame on the coin was replaced by a candle or taper, and these coins are known as the Lichttaler or "Light taler" among numismatists. Later, Julius added other objects, the skull, the hourglass, and eyeglasses to the composition.
In dance and festival
Aspects of German folk traditions about the wild man were preserved in performances of Wildemannspiel and Wildemanntanz, which tended to be held during Shrovetide/Carnival season.In the of the Carnival of Basel a wild man would take the first dance alongside other masked figures; this wild man held an uprooted tree in hand, and was entwined with leaves around the head and loins. There is a 1435 account of the wild man dance in Basel featuring 23 such wild men.
In the 15th century Fastnachtspiel "Ein spil von holzmennern", two men of the woods quibble over the female of their kind. In Etschland, Ulten, and Vinschgau in South Tyrol,. An example given of the Wildemannspiel conducted at Marling in South Tyrol: a youth and two younger boys are dressed up in beard moss hair with a jangling chain of snail shells and holding a young tree as staff, they waited in a cave towards St. Felix and dressed up schoolgirls were tasked to enter the forest and find the three of them.
More examples come from civic celebrations or processions. At the Schembart Carnival of Nuremberg there were participants dressed up as wild men holding up a dwarf as captive, together with a wild woman, likely a man in "drag" .
In Swiss locales of Vitznau, Weggis, Gersau, and Küssnacht, there is the Schämeler or Tschämeler representing the wild man, with the local folk dressing up as them using moss, bark, leaves, etc. and holding a whole tree as staff.
Outside of German-speaking regions, the ludus de homine salvatico, a large-scale Pentecostal play about the wild man was put on in Padua in the year 1208 and 1224; not much is known about these except they featured giants. Another ludus was held in Aargau, Switzerland in 1399.
It also became fashionable at one time for participants in the carousels at court festivals to dress up as club-carrying wild men.
King Charles VI of France and five of his courtiers were dressed as wild men and chained together for a masquerade at the tragic Bal des Sauvages which occurred in Paris at the Hôtel Saint-Pol, 28 January 1393. They were suited up "six quilts of fabric coated with pitch then stuck with flax fibers in the form and shape of hair", making themselves out to be "hommes sauvages, covered in hair from head right up to the soles of their feet". A careless torch set the costumers aflame, and all but one of the courtiers died; the king's own life saved by his aunt the Duchess of Berry, who covered him with her dress. There exist paintings of this scene in copies of Froissart's Chroniques. It is supposed that "dyed tufted flax" was used to simulate the hair.
England's Henry VIII held a wild man dance on the Twelfthnight at the Great Hall of Greenwich in 1515
The Burgundian court celebrated a pas d'armes known as the Pas de la Dame Sauvage in Ghent in 1470.
A knight held a series of jousts with an allegoric meaning in which the conquest of the wild lady symbolized the feats the knight must do to merit a lady.
Medieval parallels
Old High German had the terms schrat, scrato or scrazo, which appear in glosses of Latin works as translations for fauni, silvestres, or pilosi, identifying the creatures as hairy woodland beings. Some of the local names suggest associations with characters from ancient mythology. Slavic has leshy "forest man".Scandinavian folklore
The wild women of Styria, Austria were said to reside mostly on Mt. Schöckl. They have a hollow or trough-like back (hence comparable to the skogsnuva of SwedenCeltic mythology
There are medieval Welsh, Irish, and Scottish mythical narratives about men going mad and living in the wilderness, considered as part of the Celtic Wildman tradition according to scholars.The Welsh tradition regarding Myrddin Wyllt is that he went mad after the Battle of Arfderydd which took place in 573 CE in the wake of the battle that resulted in the death of Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio who was the king he served. It is recorded as such in the annals, though it may not be historically accurate. Myrddin then fled to the forest, living life as a man of the woods, according to Giraldus Cambrensis. The battleground became identified as a place near the Scottish border, making plausible the legend that Merlin's flight took him to the Caledonian Forest in Scotland. Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts the Myrddin Wyllt legend in his Latin Vita Merlini of about 1150, and the attachment of the madness motif may or may not have been Geoffrey's invention.
The legend of the Scottish Lailoken who lost his wits in battle is so similar in background to the Myrddin legend, it is considered a version of the same myth, and in fact, there is an aside comment that Lailoken might have been Merlin of Britain though that cannot be ascertained in the source itself, namely the Lailoken fragment or more precisely the Latin fragmentary The Life of Saint Kentigern. There is also a geographical proximity of the battlegrounds involved, pinpointable as present-day Arthuret in Cumbria, England.
The Irish analogue is the legend of Suibhne Geilt, a king of the Dál nAraidi who himself went mad during the combat of the Battle of Mag Rath of 637 CE The legend is accounted for in Buile Shuibhne.
It is commented by James George O'Keeffe the Welsh and Irish versions exhibit the dispersed Wild Man tradition.
In Chrétien's Arthurian Romance Yvain, in the episode when the title hero, estranged from his lover Laudine, loses his wits and lives in the wilderness; this has been characterized as a wild man episode by modern commentators. Bernheimer lists Yvain, Lancelot, and Tristan among the Arthurian knights who chose to live as wild men in the aftermath of mental anguish having earned the disfavor of their beloved lady.
The fragmentary 16th-century Breton text An Dialog Etre Arzur Roe D'an Bretounet Ha Guynglaff tells of a meeting between King Arthur and Guynglaff, who predicts events which will occur as late as the 16th century.
King's mirror
The notion of the Irish geilt, gelt, which Grimm's notes glosses as equivalent to wilder mann or waldmann, is discussed in the Old Norse Konungs skuggsjá, which points to the Northmen having learned about the Suibhne legend from Ireland.There is also another item of Irish Mirabilia considered possibly relevant, namely, a sort of beast-man with a horse-like mane, which stooped when walking, and could not surely demonstrate the ability to comprehend speech. Meyer thought this may have been a version of the "half-ox man" related by Giraldus . William Sayers thought it may be connected to the Irish water horse despite lack of connection with water.
Slavic mythology
Wild people are the characters of the Slavic folk demonology who are mythical forest creatures. Names go back to two related Slavic roots *dik- and *div-, combining the meaning of "wild" and "amazing, strange".Among the Bohemian populace, the wild man is known as, who abducts a girl to forcibly make her his married wife. The Bohemian wood woman has the reputation of forcing a girl to dance the night, but to undertake the yarn-spreading chore the girl missed, in fact endowing her an inexhaustible supply of yarn, but if the dancing partner is a boy, the wood woman tickles him to death. The female Bohemian wild woman is called or divá žena.
In the East Slavic sources referred: Saratov dikar, dikiy, dikoy, dikenkiy muzhichok – leshy; a short man with a big beard and tail; Ukrainian lisovi lyudi – old men with overgrown hair who give silver to those who rub their nose; Kostroma dikiy chort; Vyatka dikonkiy unclean spirit, sending paralysis; Ukrainian lihiy div – marsh spirit, sending fever; Ukrainian Carpathian dika baba – an attractive woman in seven-league boots, sacrifices children and drinks their blood, seduces men. There are similarities between the East Slavic reports about wild people and book legends about diviy peoples and mythical representations of miraculous peoples. For example, Russians from Ural believe that divnye lyudi are short, beautiful, have a pleasant voice, live in caves in the mountains, and can predict the future; among the Belarusians of Vawkavysk uyezd, the dzikie lyudzi – one-eyed cannibals living overseas, also drink lamb blood; among the Belarusians of Sokółka uyezd, the overseas dzikij narod have grown wool, they have a long tail and ears like an ox; they do not speak, but only squeal.
Ancient parallels
Figures similar to the European wild man occur worldwide from very early times. The earliest recorded example of the type is the character Enkidu of the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.Classical parallels
Classical wild races
"Classical antiquity like the Middle Ages, had its wild men", according to Bernheimer. This included savage races of humans supposedly found in exotic places. Herodotus,'s wild men and wild women supposedly lived in western Ancient Lybia where there also lived marvels such as men with eyes in their chest and dog-faced humanoids. Ctesias 's Indika and Alexander the Great 's conquest influenced Europeans into thinking that such wild men lived rather in the East, in the Indian subcontinent.Megasthenes, wrote of two kinds of men to be found in India whom he explicitly describes as wild: first, a creature brought to court whose toes faced backwards; second, a tribe of forest people who had no mouths and who sustained themselves with smells. Both Quintus Curtius Rufus and Arrian refer to Alexander himself meeting with a tribe of fish-eating savages while on his Indian campaign.
The wild man races described by the learned writings of ancient historians may have had influence on the Medieval wild man folklore but establishing the degree would be difficult given the separation in time. But one can catalogue which ancient pieces of writing were accessible to medieval men.
Distorted accounts of apes may have contributed to both the ancient and medieval conception of the wild man. In his Natural History Pliny the Elder describes a race of silvestres, wild creatures in India who had humanoid bodies but a coat of fur, fangs, and no capacity to speak – a description that fits gibbons indigenous to the area. The ancient Carthaginian explorer Hanno the Navigator reported an encounter with a tribe of savage men and hairy women in what may have been Sierra Leone; their interpreters called them "Gorillae," a story which much later originated the name of the gorilla species and could indeed have related to a great ape. Similarly, the Greek historian Agatharchides describes what may have been chimpanzees as tribes of agile, promiscuous "seed-eaters" and "wood-eaters" living in Ethiopia.
Silvanus
The medieval wild man lends itself to easy comparison with a number of classical woodland divinities. However, the aforementioned definition laid out by Bernheimer clearly distinguishes the faun and satyr from the wild man. Grimm states that the German shaggy wood-sprite schrat answers to the classical faun, satyr, and perhaps even Silvanus. Old High or Middle High German glossaries equating forms of the word schrat with faunus or sylvestri hominus. Grimm speculates on the possibility schrat might have been a being of larger stature in olden times.The medieval wild man typically depicted holding an uprooted tree may have derived from the classical Silvanus who is lord of the gardens and uprooter of trees, though the latter is more prone to be holding a cypress sapling he is about to transplant. The centaur is more likely to hold a club, though this creature is of course, half horse.
Christian parallels
Early Christian writings on Desert Fathers as found in the Apophthegmata Patrum are similar, but less outlandish: typically their head of hair has grown long enough to cover their naked bodies. A general term to describe such ascetics living in the wilderness was Grazers coined among the Greek or Eastern Christians. There is the hypothesis that the notion of the "noble wild man" that emerged in the 15th century may have been influenced by the notion of these "grazers".Although not authentically the stuff of antiquity, regarding the Christian Saint John Chrysostom, there developed an apocryphal legend in the Late medieval period that he began as a soul of a child in purgatory taken into tutelage by the Pope, but considering himself unworthy went to live a life of austerity in the wilderness. Later, in a fateful meeting with the emperor's daughter who had gone astray, he succumbs to temptation and not only has carnal knowledge with her but pushes her off a ravine in the aftermath, for the penance of this sin and crime, he lives life on all fours, eventually developing body hair, when he is captured in order to perform a baptism for the Imperial prince, upon which the accumulated hair, etc. drops off. Accompanying illustrations may contradict the text and show a smooth, naked man on all fours, e.g., the Günther Zainer edition of Leben der Heiligen, vol. II. Whereas Anton Koberger's edition of Leben der Heiligen depicts the crawling saint as a hairy man.
In modern fiction
In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, the dance of twelve "Satyrs" conflates wild men and satyrs. The dance is held at the rustic sheep-shearing, described by a servant:Petrus Gonsalvus was referred to by Ulisse Aldrovandi as "the man of the woods" due to his condition, hypertrichosis, and it is believed that his marriage to the lady Catherine inspired the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.
The term wood-woses or simply Woses is used by J. R. R. Tolkien to describe a fictional race of wild men, the Drúedain, in his books on Middle-earth. According to Tolkien's legendarium, other men, including the Rohirrim, mistook the Drúedain for goblins or other wood-creatures and referred to them as Púkel-men. He allows the fictional possibility that his Drúedain were the "actual" origin of the wild men of later traditional folklore.
British poet Ted Hughes used the form wodwo as the title of a poem and a 1967 volume of his collected works.
The fictional character Tarzan from Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes has been described as a modern version of the wild man archetype.