Neanderthal Woodwoses (Wildmen)

  

 

Several of my friends at Facebook are involved in a search of old historical documents

looking to find depictions of Wildmen or Woodwoses in the illustrations and illuminations. This one example shows several Wild People of both sexes and are better than usual pieces of artwork

In this case though the bodies of the creatures are unusually burly and muscular, and are hence much closer to the way Neanderthals really were in that respect. The males in this set all wield clubs. One of the Wild Men is also fighting a small Dragon or Wyvern, and in this case  it is plausibly enough a representation  of a large winged and two-legged bird such as we have guessed is  the culprit  in the case of the "Winged and feathered serpents" of Wales.

                                  Reconstruction of a Neanderthal from the journal CELL
                                                                Burly like our Bigfoot

                                                                             
                                 

An Exemplary Wildman

 

From one of the many sources on Facebook comes this intriguing picture of a father Woodwose (Wood Man or Wildman) defending his child against an armed and armoured knight using one of the Wodewose's main weapons-a log. This is probably from the Holy Roman Empire in the 1500s and hence is probably Renaissance rather than strictly medieval. The interesting part of this is that the Wodewose "cub" is covered with thick short reddish hair, which Ivan Sanderson had noted seemed to be a characteristic of the Cental Asian Almas (Or Wildman once again)

 

The classical source on Wodewoses is Wild Men In The Middle Ages; A Study In Art, Sentiment, And Demonology by Richard Bernheimer

 

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3278885-wild-men-in-the-middle-ages-a-study-in-art-sentiment-and-demonology

 

http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Men-Middle-Ages-Demonology/dp/0374906165

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_man