INTRODUCING THE HOMEN-GALHO – PORTUGAL'S MYSTERIOUS TWIG MAN ENTITY…OR ENT?

Green-tinted version of 'Family Tree', by Robert M. Williams, chanced upon and purchased by me as a large-sized print in a charity shop at Warwick, England, in c.2012 (© Robert M. Williams – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

One of my favourite races of being in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy are those animate trees known as ents, but I always assumed that they were totally fictitious. Thanks to some fascinating if thoroughly perplexing information received by me recently, however, I'm no longer quite so sure!

On 16 August 2016, Portuguese correspondent Tiago Cardoso kindly brought to my attention and also translated into English for me a short item from Vanessa Fidalgo's book Seres Mágicos em Portugal [Magic Beings in Portugal], published in 2014, but which I have not previously seen mentioned in any English-language publication. The item concerns a mystifying being known locally as the homen-galho or twig man, and here it is:

I will tell a story that was told to me by my grandfather, about a creature that lives in the forest near the village of Pessegueiro, in northern Portugal.

According to my grandfather, when he was a young man, that is, about 40 years ago, during an autumn night there in the village of Pessegueiro a group of friends of which he was part spotted a naked creature that moved as a man (i.e. on two legs), but the head appeared to bear tree twigs. It was exceptionally tall and thin. When it noticed them, the creature was perplexed to see them, a situation which gave the impression that its eyes were human, but also allowed them to see that it had something that looked like moss on its face. My grandfather and his friends chased the creature, entering into the forest, throwing stones at it, but when they entered the densest areas of the grove, they lost sight of it.

Then, they heard animal-like noises, and dragging of vegetation, which, in the exact words of my grandfather: "stopped everything, until the animals became afraid and fled".

At that moment, they also fled, in panic, to the village cafe, where they told what had happened. Obviously at that time no one believed their account, but, over the years, people here have heard more accounts of sightings of this creature. It seems that the descriptions were continuing until six years ago.

Front cover of the novel L'Aurore des Chrysalides written by Yanis Taieb, which features an entity reminiscent of twig man descriptions (© Yanis Taieb – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

It was six years ago when it was last reported, by a group of young people...They were in the street when they heard a strange noise, similar to the noises made by the dragging of something very heavy. They came to see what was there, and that was when one of them saw a very thin, strange figure, and he exclaimed: "Look that man, he looks like a twig!".

Then, they all remarked about the man having tree-trunk-like structures on its head, and they associated this immediately with the description that they had heard from old men. Like the group containing my grandfather, they ran to the nearest cafe to find people and to claim that they had seen the 'twig man'.

At first, no one understood what they were talking about, but after a more detailed explanation everyone ran to the place of their sighting, but there was no longer anything there. Only a total silence.

Since that day, no 'forest creature' or 'twig man' has been seen, but in the village the story never died and everybody knows that in the forest exists something that is not human.

When I first read this, I wondered about wild men or woodwose, as such entities have been reported in Spain right into modern times, but the repeated claims that Portugal's twig man has tree-like twigs or trunks projecting from its head are certainly very difficult to explain via this identity. Having said that, moss on its face is less problematic, so might the twigs simply be vegetation caught up in the hair on the creature's head?

Yet even if this is so, its extreme thinness and tallness does not recall wild man reports, in which their dimensions tend to be little different from those of modern, civilised humans.

'The Takkenman', a life-sized Dutch bronze statue by Henk Vos that mirrors descriptions of Portugal's twig man (© Henkvosb/Wikipedia CC SA 3POINT0 Unported)

Conversely, what the twig man does closely resemble is the LOTR ent, typified by the stately Treebeard, and who knows, perhaps this fictitious yet famous entity has indeed directly inspired and coloured the twig man reports. Yet it seems unlikely that such a blatantly invented creature as an animate tree would do this. So at present, the Portuguese twig man is a notable enigma - a legend come to life, or even a fictional entity made factual.

If any ShukerNature reader knows anything about the twig man, I’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile, my thanks to Tiago Cardoso for alerting me to this incongruous Iberian.

Treebeard, an ent, depicted in spectacular fashion by world-renowned fantasy artist Rodney Matthews (© Rodney Matthews – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE? IN SEARCH OF THE WOODWOSE, EUROPE'S ELUSIVE MAN-BEAST

Captive wild man being tamed by virtuous woman - Swiss tapestry, late 1400s

Homo sapiens was not the only species of human named and recognised by Linnaeus when publishing Systema Naturae, his revolutionary binomial system of zoological classification, in 1735. Among several others was Homo ferus, the wild man, which according to Linnaeus was covered in hair, moved on all fours, was mute, and lived apart from H. sapiens in forests, hills, and mountains. Today, none of Linnaeus’s ‘other’ species of human is recognised by mainstream science.

Bestiary depiction of European wild man

Nevertheless, his European wild man, also known as the woodwose or wudewasa, has such a richly intertwined history of folklore, depictions in medieval art and architecture, and reported true-life encounters, including certain very recent ones, that some cryptozoologists and primatologists wonder whether such beings might indeed have existed in the not-too-distant past, and may even still linger on today in some of Europe’s more remote, secluded localities. But what could they be? As will be seen from the following selection of cases, several very different identities could be involved, collectively yielding a composite, polyphyletic woodwose entity rather than any single-origin, monophyletic being.

Woodwoses (Albrecht Dürer, 1499)

WILD MEN, OR FERAL CHILDREN?

Linnaeus himself delineated various subcategories of Homo ferus, of which the most significant was Juvenis lupinus hessensis – ‘wolf boys’, or feral children. That is, children believed to have been abandoned or lost by their parents in the wild but subsequently raised there by wolves or other animals. According to legend, moreover, Romulus (alleged founder of Rome) and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There is little doubt that such children were indeed responsible for certain reports of alleged woodwose.

Depiction of Mowgli, the wolf boy from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, by Kipling's father, J Lockwood Kipling (1895)

As recently as 1934, for example, a supposed woodwose was briefly spied running through some trees by a party of hunters in the forests near Uzitza in Serbia. Pursuing it, they fired and the entity dropped to the ground, shocked but unharmed. When the hunters approached, they discovered to their great surprise that their quarry was a completely naked and somewhat hairy but otherwise normal-looking human youth, approximately 15 years old, terrified, and covered in mud. Taken back by the hunters to their home village, he was unable to speak any language, but was found to be remarkably fast-moving, could run naturally on all fours, and was able to imitate with startling accuracy the sounds and songs of the various beasts and birds sharing his woodland home, where he had apparently lived for much of his life, feeding upon berries and roots.

Famous statue of Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf

Another such case was the Wild Girl of Champagne, France, cited by Linnaeus himself (dubbing her Puella campanica) as support for his Homo ferus species. She had been confirmed to have survived 10 years (November 1721-September 1731) in this region’s forests before being captured at the age of 19. Unusually for feral children, she then learnt to read and write, and became totally rehabilitated intellectually and socially.

RETURNING TO THE WILD?

A number of so-called wild men have proven to be ordinary humans that for a variety of different reasons – from poverty, mental health issues, or escape from persecution or criminal retribution to a simple desire to shake off the burdens of modern life – had abandoned their normal life and dropped out of human society, seeking solace and solitude in the wild and regressing to an almost bestial existence.

A possible woodwose statue inside St Mary's Church at Woolpit, Suffolk, where the famous Green Children allegedly appeared many centuries ago - could they have been abandoned children, left to fend for themselves in the wild? (Dr Karl Shuker)

In autumn 1936, for instance, a team of foresters inspecting one of the great forests near Riga, Latvia, unexpectedly encountered an extraordinary apeman-like entity crouching at the base of a tree. When it saw the men, it fled rapidly, swinging itself onto an overhanging branch and climbing upwards with remarkable speed and agility to the very top. When shot at by one of the foresters, the entity shrieked and crashed down onto the ground, where it was seized by the men, who discovered that it was covered in hair and bereft of any clothing. When it was taken back to a village close by, however, the being was recognised there as a farm labourer who had disappeared many years earlier, but he was now no longer able to speak or understand speech, and was capable only of yelling gleefully when meat or fruit was placed before him.

Wild man of Orford sculpture on font in Church of St Bartolomew, Orford (Simon K/Flickr)

A similar, more famous entity was Suffolk’s “wild man of Orford”, who, during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), was captured in the nets of some sailors while he was swimming in the sea. According to a description penned by chronicler-monk Ralph of Coggeshall in his Chronicon Anglicanum, the being was completely naked but resembled a man in every way, with a profuse and pointed beard, hair that seemed torn and rubbed on his head, and very hirsute breasts. Brought back to the local castle and guarded day and night, he was unable to speak, did not display any sign of reverence when taken into the local church, and preferred eating fish raw rather than cooked. He escaped into the sea once, but eventually returned of his own accord; when he escaped a second time, however, he did not return and was never seen again.

William Blake's famous depiction of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness (1795)

During the Middle Ages, insane people or simpletons were sometimes released into the wilderness to fend for themselves, so that they became little more than wild beasts. According to the Holy Bible’s Book of Daniel, moreover, the once-mighty Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II underwent a seven-year period of madness during which time he lived alone in the wild, crawling on all fours eating grass, and allowing his hair and nails to grow unchecked until he resembled a man-beast instead of a man.

AT THE SIGN OF THE WILD MAN

There is no doubt that an appreciable component of the woodwose composite is the wild man as a symbol rather than a corporeal entity, personifying Nature or various aspects of it. In traditional rural folklore, the wild man most commonly represents strength, fertility, rebirth, and the ‘noble savage’ uncorrupted by modern civilisation. Very popular in medieval times but still occurring in certain rural areas of the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe even today are countryside pageants and festivals that feature dancers dressed in elaborate, ostentatiously hairy wild man costumes and taking part in symbolic wild man hunts, in which the latter is the quarry, to be captured and killed but afterwards resurrected.

The wild man and his family (De Negker David, Renaissance Period)

Moreover, the symbolic wild man is often closely allied to the green man, in which the former’s hair is replaced by a leafy profusion of foliage but its symbolic significance remains much the same.

Green man sculpture (Dr Karl Shuker)

CORPOREAL HUMANOID OR PARANORMAL PRESENCE?

In modern times, there have been reports of man-beasts in regions of Britain where it is simply not possible for such a species to exist without having been discovered by science long ago.

Visiting Cannock Chase (Dr Karl Shuker)

Persistent sightings of troll-like entities in the forests of Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for instance, and even a 6.5-m-tall hairy bipedal giant allegedly encountered on Ben MacDhui, Scotland’s haunted mountain where the panic-inducing Big Grey Man is said to roam, cannot be readily explained (if accepted as genuine and not hoaxes) by normal cryptozoological theories.

Does a huge hairy man-beast entity exist on Ben MacDhui?

Consequently, it has been suggested that beings like these are not corporeal man-beasts at all, but instead are zooform entities – preternatural creatures assuming visible, humanoid form but of occult, paranormal nature and origin.

WAS GRENDEL A WOODWOSE?

The eponymous hero’s deadly foe, Grendel, in the famous Anglo-Saxon epic poem ‘Beowulf’, is generally thought of as a totally imaginary monster, and has been depicted and classified in many different ways. Intriguingly, however, some cryptozoological researchers, including American chronicler Thomas J. Mooney, have speculated that perhaps Grendel was actually a man-beast - because he is described in the poem as bipedal, clawed, larger and stronger than humans but somewhat humanoid in shape, very ugly, and residing in gloomy seclusion with his mother inside a cave hidden deep within a forest in Sweden.

Grendel, portrayed as a man-beast by J.R. Skelton (early 1900s)

If we assume (though it is obviously a very big, unsubstantiated assumption) that Grendel was based upon a real creature, a woodwose or similar man-beast would correspond more closely than any known animal species, including bears.

LAST OF THE NEANDERTHALS?

By far the most exciting suggestion on offer is that at least some woodwose reports are based upon relict Neanderthals. Variously deemed a subspecies of Homo sapiens or a separate species in its own right, Neanderthal Man first appeared in Europe as a distinct hominid with a complete set of recognisable characteristics approximately 130,000 years ago and officially became extinct here 24,000-30,000 years ago.

Reconstructions of Neanderthal man and woman at the Neanderthal Museum (UNiesert/Wikipedia)

Co-existing alongside our ancestor, Cro-Magnon Man, for around 10,000 years, Neanderthals are widely believed to have interbred with Cro-Magnons, and such interbreeding may even have brought about the Neanderthals’ extinction, via absorption into the Cro-Magnon population.

Neanderthal skull (Dr Karl Shuker)

It was veteran American cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson who first widely popularised the notion that perhaps the reports and legends of wild men in Europe arose from encounters with late-surviving Neanderthals, quietly persisting reclusively in various scarcely-traversed localities across Europe long after their official extinction date. This was subsequently championed by none other than the ‘Father of Cryptozoology’ himself, Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, who believed that the satyrs of Greek mythology also belonged to this category, and included the following paragraph in his comprehensive annotated checklist of cryptozoological creatures, published in 1986:

"[In Europe:] Wild hairy men, most probably Neanderthals having survived into historical times. Known as satyrs in classical antiquity – a name borrowed from the Hebrew se’ir (“the hairy one”) – and as wudewása (“wood being”) in the Middle Ages, they were reported until the 13th century in Ireland, until the 16th century in Saxony and Norway, until the 18th century on the Swedish island of Öland and in Estonia, in the Pyrénées ([known there as] iretges, basajaun) up to 1774 at least, and in the Carpathians (“wild man” of Kronstadt) up to 1784 at least."

Satyr statue by Frank 'Guy' Lynch, Sydney Botanic Gardens (Dr Karl Shuker)

In fact, it is possible that such beings have survived far beyond even those times in certain mountainous regions of Spain, with sightings there having being reported as recently as the 1990s, and which have since been researched by several cryptozoologists, including Sergio de la Rubia-Muñoz, who documented the following reports.

Neanderthal reconstruction (Dr Karl Shuker)

On 4 May 1993 at around 3.45 pm, in a sparsely-populated area known as Peña Montañesa (in Huesca) in the Spanish Pyrenees, woodsman Manuel Cazcarra was working with five others when, after they had all heard a scream and some squeals nearby, he went off to investigate and encountered a hairy man-beast, standing 1.7 m tall. It immediately clambered swiftly up a pine tree, where it remained, clutching a branch with its arms and legs, and screaming loudly. When Cazcarra called the other men, they came running up and one of them, Ramiro López, was just in time to see the entity climb back down to the ground and hide itself behind a dense thicket before hurling a hefty tree branch in their direction. Not surprisingly, they chose not to pursue it further!

'The Fight in the Forest' - a woodwose-featuring engraving (Hans Burgkmair, early 1500s)

These eyewitnesses were woodsmen, they were used to working in forests and were very familiar with bears, but they stated categorically that what they had seen was no bear. Mysterious footprints that could not be identified with any known species in the area were found there later that same week by a patrol of the Guardia Civil, accompanied by one of the woodsmen. And soon afterwards, an ape-like figure was seen crossing a road near the French border by a family travelling in their car towards Prats de Molló.

Wild man design for a stained glass window, generally (though not universally) believed to be by Hans Holbein the Younger

During the late spring of 1994, another putative woodwose sighting was made in this same region. While hiking from Peña Montañesa to the village of Bielsa close by, Juan Ramó Ferrer, a mountain climber from Andalusia, encountered a very hirsute but distinctly humanoid entity jumping from tree to tree and giving voice to ape-like squeals. According to the description later given by Ferrer, who had duly fled, terrified, to a campsite near Peña Montañesa, the entity was shortish, was covered with reddish hair, had very long ape-like arms, and exuded a musky odour.

Humorous set of figurines depicting a woodwose family (Dr Karl Shuker)

It would be easy to shrug off the woodwose as merely a medieval legend, but reports such as those documented here suggest that there is much more than that to this mystery.

Woodwose (Albrecht Dürer, 1520s)

Reports of hairy man-beasts in Europe and the Middle East (not to mention the Himalayan yeti, Mongolian almas, Chinese yeren, North American bigfoot, and numerous other similar beings reported elsewhere around the globe) date back to antiquity, and some of these definitely bear comparison with Neanderthal Man.

Wild man depiction in Omnium Fere Gentiumr - Jean Sluperji, Antwerp, 1572

EVIDENCE FROM THE BIBLE?

But perhaps we should not be too surprised that a second species of human, a hairy wild man far removed from our own naked ‘civilised’ species, may well have existed alongside us since the earliest days and even into the present day.

Wild man with shield (Martin Schongauer, 1490)

We have only to turn to the Holy Bible (Genesis 25: 21-27, referring to the brothers Esau and Jacob) for a highly unexpected yet remarkably precise corroboration of this dramatic cryptozoological prospect:

  "And Isaac intreated the Lord for his wife...and Rebekah his wife conceived.

   And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the Lord.

   And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.

   And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.

   And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.

   And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob...

   And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents."

Esau portrayed as a hairy wild man, alongside an ape (left) for comparison (Johann Scheuchzer, 1731)

What better way of describing to non-scientific laymen, back in the ancient days when this Old Testament passage was written, the existence and development of two separate species (nations) of human, one of which is modern man and the other the wild man? Perhaps Linnaeus was right after all.

'Wild Women with Unicorn', c.1500-1510, Basel Historical Museum

AND FINALLY:

Woodwose riding a unicorn - one fabulous beast, or two?