The Magical Giftbringers of Yule:
St. Lucia & the Holly King (continued)
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It is clear that the Green Knight is an aspect of the Holly King, slain in his prime at Midwinter at the hands of Sir Gawain, the young Oak King. The Green Knight embodies the death of the old year that gives way to the new. “And so this Yule to the young year yielded place,” the story reads. But as always in these stories, restoration follows dismemberment. The Green Knight gallops away, and in a year’s time, it is his turn to slay Sir Gawain. In a twist on the story of the slaying of the sacred kings, the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight, as Robert Graves has pointed out.4
The Green Knight (or Holly Knight) links the Green Man to the Wild Man, yet another embodiment of primal Nature. Like the Green Knight, the Wild Man is fiercer and more Dionysian than the Green Man. The Wild Man of the Woods is often depicted as an outlaw who has escaped civilization for the forest and there developed the habits and appearance of an animal. He is covered with hair and fur, and has the unpredictable behavior of a wild beast. In one medieval mummer’s play, a Wild Man is chased out of the woods, killed, then restored to life by one of the mummers acting as a doctor. After his resurrection, the Wild Man is bound and paraded around the village. In the tradition of the slaying of the sacred kings, the “sacrifice of the Wild Man took place after the death of nature had been transferred to him. The evil of old age and barrenness died with him.”5
It has been said that “the Holly King is the true origin of Santa Claus,”6 but it is more accurate to say that it is the Wild Man who is the ancestor of Santa. Phyllis Siefker makes a case for this theory quite persuasively in her book Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men. She writes: “Our Santa is one of the last descendants of a long line of dark, sooty, hair-covered men, the remnant of a pre-Christian god of awesome power. . . The Wild Man was . . . a godhead so strong, so universally worshipped by ‘pagans,’ that Christianity found him the major impediment to its goal of European salvation. In Europe, Christianity and the old god clashed in anger and violence. To undermine his grip on the people, Christianity labeled his worship evil, and called his followers devilish. . . The fact is that Santa and Satan are alter egos, brothers; they have the same origin. . . The old god traveled two paths into the twentieth century. On one path, he came to personify evil for the growing Christian church. On the other, he became the symbol of holiday, carnival, and new hope.”7
The idea of a figure who is split into two — the dark and light aspects, waxing and waning, young and old, beneficent and punitive — is a recurring theme in European winter folklore. We see it in the battling Holly and Oak Kings, in the stories about Frau Holda and Frau Berchta, and in the tales of St. Nicholas and Black Peter (a classic Santa/Satan split). More than just a device for naming the halves of the year, the division speaks to the acknowledgment of the whole: without dark, there is no light. Without consequences of actions, there is no reward. Without winter, no summer.
4 Williamson, p. 68.
5 Williamson, p. 75.
6 Janet & Stewart Farrar, The Witches God, Phoenix Publishing 1989, p. 38.
7 Phyllis Siefker, Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men, McFarland & Company 1997, pp. 5-6.
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