Woodwose

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Woodwose


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Woodwoses support coats of arms in the side panels of a portrait by Albrecht Dürer, 1499 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)



The Woodwose or hairy wildman of the woods was the Sasquatch figure of pre-Christian Gaul, in Anglo-Saxon a wuduwasa. Woodwoses appear in the carved and painted bosses where intersecting ogee vaults meet in the cathedral of Canterbury, in positions where one is also likely to encounter the vegetal Green Man. The Woodwose was a link between civilized humans and the dangerous elf-like spirits of natural woodland, such as Puck. The wildman, pilosus or hairy all over, often armed with a rough club, survived to appear as supporter for heraldic coats-of-arms, especially in Germany, well into the 16th century (illustration, right).
A British example can be found on the coat-of-arms used as the pub sign for the Woodhouse Arms in Corby Glen, Lincolnshire. As this illustrates, various spellings of the word have been used over the centuries, for example woodhouse and wodehouse (pronounced 'wood-house', with the accent on the first syllable, as in the surname of the author P.G. Wodehouse); wodwo, the Middle English version, appears (as 'wodwos', the plural) in the 14th-century poem Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knyght; it was used by poet Ted Hughes as the title of a poem and, in 1967, a volume of his collected works.
King Charles VI of France and five of his courtiers were dressed as woodwoses and chained together for a mascarade at the tragic Bal des Sauvages at the Queen Mother's Paris hotel, January 28, 1393. In the midst of the festivities, a stray spark from a torch set their hairy costumes ablaze, burning several courtiers alive; the king's own life was saved through quick action by his aunt, the duchesse de Berry, who smothered the flames in her cloak.
The woodwose was unsettling to Christian writers, needless to say. Augustine reports the Gaulish name of "Dusii" in City of God XV, ch. 23: "Et quosdam daemones, quos Dusios Galli nuncupant, adsidue hanc immunditiam et efficere, plures talesque adseuerant, ut hoc negare impudentiae uideatur." ...and perhaps the early 7th century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville has picked up Augustine's reference, for his Etymologies book viii:

Pilosi, qui Graece 'panitae', Latine 'incubi' appellantur - hos daemones Galli 'Dusios' nuncupant. Quem autem vulgo 'Incu-bonem' vocant, hunc Romani 'Faunum' dicunt "Satyrs are they who are called Pans in Greek, Incubi in Latin, these daemons the Galls call Dusi. What vulgarly are called "Incu-bonem", these the Romans name "Fauns"
Another variant of the Gaulish Dusi may lurk in the misunderstanding of fauni ficarii "fig Fauns" in Jerome's Vulgate translation of Jeremiah 50:39, describing the coming desolation of Babylon: "Therefore shall dragons dwell there with the fig fauns." Fig fauns exist nowhere except in dictionaries mentioning this passage. Is this a slip of the copyists for Jerome's fauni Sicarii ("fauns of the Sicarii", the ancient tribe of Gauls in Sicily?) Apparently, the King James' Version committee thought so, rendering the passage "Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein: and it shall be no more inhabited for ever; neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation." (See http://bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Def.show/RTD/ISBE/Topic/Wild%20Beast )
Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Life of Merlin (ca 1150), describes the agonized mourning of Merlin after a bloody battle, when

"a strange madness came upon him. He crept away and fled to the woods, unwilling that any should see his going. Into the forest he went, glad to lie hidden beneath the ash trees. He watched the wild creatures grazing on the pasture of the glades. Sometimes he would follow them, sometimes pass them in his course. He made use of the roots of plants and of grasses, of fruit from trees and of the blackberries in the thicket. He became a Man of the Woods, as if dedicated to the woods. So for a whole summer he stayed hidden in the woods, discovered by none, forgetful of himself and of his own, lurking like a wild thing." [edit]


Other uses


The term wood-woses or simply Woses is used by J.R.R. Tolkien to describe a fictional race of wild men in his stories, called also Druedain. According to his legendarium, other men, including the Rohirrim, mistook the Druedain for goblins or other wood-creatures and referred to them as Pukel-men (Goblin-men).
His fiction might imply that (in his fictional timeline) the 'actual' Druedain of ancient Middle-earth, were the origin of the legendary Woodwoses of more recent folklore.
Tolkien was, of course, an expert in Old and Middle English literature, who translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see above).