Greetings, Children of Misrule.
These days my head is full of Wild Men.
I am reading about the Wild Man trope in medieval text and image. Although there is an element of rampant sexuality in the picture, this is not what caught my interest this time.
The Wild Man is the Other, the one who is not like you. Stranger, foreigner, outsider. As such, his home is not in civilised society. He lives outside the city walls, in the forest, in the wild (bad pun intended). He lives in the Antipodes, the places that you have not been yet.There is also the opportunity for an interesting discussion on gender issues, and how Wild Men are different from Wild Women in medieval literature, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Visually, their appearance varies, but it always has elements that denote vulgarity, savagery, animalism. They can be hairy, like beasts. They can be giant in size, terrifying and barbarous. They can have one eye, as Polyphemus, the Cyclops Ullisses encounters in his travels. They can be part man-part animal, like the Cynocephali that populate the Antipodes, in the extremities of Medieval maps.
Richard Bernheimer traces the origin of the trope to Enkidu in Gilgamesh. An embodiment of nature and wilderness, the hairy Enkidu was raised by animals, and was ‘tamed’ only after the temple prostitute, Shamhat, took him as her lover and teaches him the ways of civilisation. Typical brute that needs a woman to teach him manners, I say, and I leave an asterisk to this one because there is a gender discussion to be had in the future.
In the Arthurian legend, they have a field day. As dwarves, they usually live in the forest and they are ugly, deformed, composite creatures with distinct animal features. In Yvain, the hero runs into the creature that lives in the enchanted forest of Brocéliande.
‘I saw sitting upon a stump, with a great club in his hand, a rustic lout, as black as a mulberry, indescribably big and hideous; indeed, so passing ugly was the creature that no word of mouth could do him justice. On drawing near to this fellow, I saw that his head was bigger than that of a horse or of any other beast; that his hair was in tufts, leaving his forehead bare for a width of more than two spans; that his ears were big and mossy, just like those of an elephant; his eyebrows were heavy and his face was flat; his eyes were those of an owl, and his nose was like a cat’s; his jowls were split like a wolf, and his teeth were sharp and yellow like a wild boar’s; his beard was black and his whiskers twisted; his chin merged into his chest and his backbone was long, but twisted and hunched. There he stood, leaning upon his club and accoutred in a strange garb, consisting not of cotton or wool, but rather of the hides recently flayed from two bulls or two beeves: these he wore hanging from his neck’.
Chretien DeTroyes, Yvain, 288–293.
- Gorleston Psalter, British Library, Manuscript Additional 49622
Usually, the encounter with the creature will lead to the beginning of a new adventure that will allow the hero to fulfil their purpose, whatever that may be.
Note here, that when heroes like Tristan or Lancelot lose their mind and run into the forest, where they live like wild men, eating fruit and sleeping in nature, they are not the same thing. Their condition is more connected to lovesickness, rather than an inner, almost hereditary wildness, and this is why they eventually come to their senses and return to civilisation. Most of the time, it is because of another girl that saves them.
Lovesickness and the madness of love is also a story for another time.
Medieval Wild Men lived away from civilised society, literally and conceptually.
“This interiorization of the Wild Man coincided with the disappearance of the dark places of the planet”
Dudley and Novak, The Wild Man Within
But the more we conquered our physical landscape, the more we knew of the world, the more the Wild Man was running out of wilderness. There came a moment in human history that there were no more Antipodes, because we have explored every corner of the earth. There only were two options: to go in, or to go out.
The going out can be traced in movies like E.T. and Alien, where the extra-terrestrial otherness is combined with strongly identifiable human elements: E.T. wants to return to his home, and aliens have a strange concept of motherhood. The element of savagery, brutality, and lack of civilisation remains: typically, none of these creatures speak when they encounter humans. Aliens remain monsters throughout the narrative. ET manages to utter some words after a while, after having spent sufficient time with humans. I find it particularly interesting that E.T.’s chief aim is to go home: learning to speak does not make one human. E.T.’s homesickness emphasises that idea of not belonging here, despite having used human speech. Wild Man trope, check.
When the Wild Man turns inward things get more interesting. In this case, savagery and brutality resides inside. Frankenstein could count as a Victorian Wild Man, a construct of human parts that regains enough human conscience to repent in the end. And die, a sacrifice to Victorian horror and human civilisation.
Who is the Wild Man, the beast within, in the 21st century narrative?
Hannibal Lecter and other serial killers, in paper and film, are good candidates. Savage, monstrous, inhuman, impulsive, like wild beasts of prey that roam contemporary societies, they hold the same allure for audiences as their medieval counterparts. And they serve the same function, pushing to adventure the heroes of the story, and leading them to personal fulfilment: the monster needs to be captured and punished, and the police force assumes the role of the medieval knight who went adventuring. In most cases, the hunt leads them to discovering something about themselves, so more connections there.
I find it fascinating how we are ever terrified of our inner, wilder, darker self. How will our increased mental health awareness impact the Wild Man figure? Will he, once more, run out of habitat the more we map our brain, just as he was kicked out of our physical space the more we mapped the world?
I remain curious.
Read More:
Bernheimer, Richard, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology, 2013.
Husband, Timothy, and Gloria Gilmore-House, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (Metropolitan museum of art, 1980).
Friedman, J. B., The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Harward, V.J., The Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance and Celtic Tradition (E.J. Brill, 1958).
Hubble, Elizabeth A., ‘Hideus a Desmesure: Monsters and Monstrous Knights in Early French Romance’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 35 (2004), 45–70.
Huber, Emily Rebekah, ‘“Delyver Me My Dwarff!”: Gareth’s Dwarf and Chivalric Identity’, Arthuriana, 16 (2006), 49–53.
Hess, Erika E, Literary Hybrids: Indeterminacy in Medieval & Modern French Narrative. (Place of publication not identified: Routledge, 2013).
“The Coming of Enkidu”. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Assyrian International News Agency.
Four Arthurian Romances, By Chretien de Troyes (SMK Books, 2018)
Kleio Pethainou 