[MJC4]

Ever wonder why we carve Wood Spirits on our walking sticks?

When I saw my first WS I was hooked on them but the artist that had carved it couldn't really tell me much about him so I went home and searched the net for the origins of the Wood Spirit. I found several variations of the same story, essentially they are all pretty much the same. I liked this one and have since given a copy of this story to everyone that receives a WS from me. Thought I'd share it with all of you.

If you have a different story about the Wood Spirit please by all means share it with us. As I said I found several variations to the WS story and all were interesting in their own right, this one just appealed to me the most.

Mark

 

[Rad]

Thanks for sharing -- I'd not read that before!

 

[gdenby]

I wasn't surprised to see wood spirits carved on sticks, altho' I was a little surprised at how often they appeared. I suppose the story is as good an explanation as any. As Cobalt wrote some time ago, the image seems rather like a "green man" crossed with another figure.

For me, the ultimate wood spirit is an "ent." If you happened to watch the P. Jackson production of LOTR, there is a section where the hobbits Merry and Pippin are with the ent Treebeard. Personally, not what I had hoped for, the ents and Treebeard being some of the best parts of the tale IMO. Also in the story is the ent gone bad, Old Man Willow. Much more like the scary personifications of trees that are common in the illustrations by Arthur Rackham, among others.

Something I find peculiar is that for the Greeks, and the Romans, wood spirits were young women, wood nymphs either living in their trees, or the spirit within them who would be killed if the tree was cut down.

 

[vanderstock]

I am intrigued by the wood spirit faces carved on walking sticks.

They give the stick a magical mystical aura.

I have never been much of an artist but after reading a few tutorials

about carving wood spirit faces I believe I will give it a go.

I figure the worst that can happen is if I do a poor job I will incur the wrath of the wood spirits and they will turn me into a frog or a cricket.

That might not be too bad....

 

[cobalt]

I dont think any one person knows about the wood spirit /green man its all lost in folk lore But its the american s who make more wood spirits than anyone ,it must be the most common form over there .

You can hardly get a american carving book without some referance to it

Yet for myself i have never seen one here or in north europe being used .

Its a very pagan belief lost in the mist of time and reinvented .

The green man and wood spirti has been passed down and interperatted in different ways by different cultures and have been around before stonhenge was built and no one knows why that was built and again its all folklore ,but there must be a element of truth behind these ideas or it wouldnt have lasted so long .

But the academic research on it has been interestimng but never proven

Even the catholic church used these ideas of the green man and wood spirits in 11 centy to use them for there own benifiets .

You only have to look at the father figure christmas figure to see that ,originally he wore a green suit , but cocola changed all that in the early 1900s with its advertisment.So all is not what it seems .

 

[yaxley]

I read somewhere that in Germany the "wood spirits" could also take the form of demons and people would tap on the wood before bringing the wood inside. Legend has it that there is where the expression "knock on wood" came from.