Green Man Conference, Trinity College Dublin

It's been a busy summer and I haven't been blogging as much as I would have liked, but I wanted to tell you about one of the great things I got up to last week, which was participating in the Green Man and Wild Man in Children's Culture Conference. The conference, which took place in Trinity College Dublin and the Botanical Gardens, explored the Green Man or Wild Man theme in twentieth and twenty-first century children's literature, looking at everything from the late Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are to Siobhan O' Dowd and Patrick Ness' A Monster Calls.

The Green Man is a vegetative deity of the natural world, who springs up in different forms in cultures around the world. In sculpture or drawings, the Green Man is usually represented as a face composed of or encircled with leaves, with vines or shoots sprouting from the mouth, nose or ears. He represents the spirits of trees, foliage and plants and is believed to have powers of causing rain and increased fecundity in in land and livestock. 

As a symbol of renewal, the Green Man represents the cyclical patterning of the natural world, of death and rebirth. Perhaps this is what makes the Green Man such a potent symbol in children's literature where he appears as a manifestation of the chaotic griefs and joys that occur in life. Professor Amanda Piesse's excellent plenary lecture discussed the Green Man as a figure traversing boundaries of clock time, cyclical time and mythic time, a chaotic mediator of ungovernable emotion and the dark forces in the world.

Highlights of the conference included a talk by illustrator Jim Kay in the Botanical Gardens as well as plenary lectures by author Sally Nichols and Professor Roni Natov. My own paper looked at intertextual links between Eva Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea and the novels of her predecessor Frances Hodgson Burnett; I focused mainly on the authors use of the natural world as a site of regeneration.

The diversity of approaches was impressive and I can say with all honesty that this was one of the more inspiring conferences I have attended in a while. There were some excellent papers considering wild things in literature, comics and film. Jane Carroll look at medieval mumming gave an excellent overview of that tradition, mapping its survival and corruption through time and place. And after hearing some excellent papers on that fascinating figure I'm left too with a renewed interest in the god of the wild hunt: Herne the Hunter.

All in all, it was a highly enjoyable and edifying event. Many thanks for the organisers and helpers for facilitating this conversation.