![]() ![]() We think humans began to see blue as a colour when we started making blue pigments around 6000 years ago. But it is also partly due to the fact that the concept of ‘blue’ took longer than you might expect to be a thing. The sea sometimes does look green, so that explains that. Green is frequently the colour of the sea.Lou Marchetti (1920-1992) 1961 book cover illustration for Sing Me A Murder by Helen Nielson For instance, he lives in a mound (which is where fairies are meant to live), he has power over the chilly landscape, seeming like a metaphor for the coldness of it (same as fairies). The story turns into a bit of a deal with the devil plot when this massive green man says anyone can hit him, so long as he can hit them back with equal force in a year’s time.Īlthough this Green Knight is never overtly a fairy there are many things in the text which links him to fairyworld. The knights at the roundtable don’t know if he’s real or some fantasy creature. Although he is bright green all over his eyes are red. He is a gigantic man holding an axe and a holly branch. Sir Garwain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian poem which begins with a beautiful Christmas feast. (For a contemporary picture book example of personified seasons see The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg.) This poem may have come from a pop-culture idea of the time: belief in a Green Man who represents the seasonal cycle. There’s a famous medieval poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.Many landscapes remain green over summer (not here in Australia, where we should be using Aboriginal concepts of seasonality) but anyway, green can symbolise summer as well as spring.The common Latin idea with this family of ‘v’ words is ‘juicy’ or ‘sappy’. Green symbolises spring, hence the adjective ‘vernal’. ![]() Since green can mean virtue and naivety, it follows that green can also symbolise virginity, a bullshit concept made up to control people, mainly women. I bet he tells everyone, “You look a little peaky today.” From The Australian Women’s Weekly, March 19, 1975. This may have meant youthful and vigorous as well as naïve, but thanks to that age-old gender hierarchy, ‘virile’ and ‘manliness’ are overlapping ideas. Young things tend to be moist (sorry) whereas old things tend to be dry (also sorry, blame those Ancient Greeks). Vital and vigorous (because Greek ‘chloros’ may have mostly meant ‘having sap’, independent of colour).What does green symbolise in art and storytelling? ![]()
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