Feast of Fabulous Wild Men Day

What the day is

Feast of Fabulous Wild Men Day is observed on January 12. Its origin is undocumented, and searches for one turn up nothing. The figure the name stumbles onto, however, has a long and well-recorded history.

Origin and background

The wild man is a fixture of medieval European art and literature: a human figure covered in hair, living in the forest beyond the boundaries of settlement, sometimes violent, sometimes merely outside society. He appears in manuscript margins, on tapestries and carved into church woodwork, and he was respectable enough to be adopted into heraldry, where wild men still stand as supporters on several European coats of arms.

He represents the line between the cultivated and the uncultivated, and what people suspected lay on the far side of it. The oldest version of the character predates Europe entirely: the companion figure in the Epic of Gilgamesh begins as a hairy man living among animals and is civilized through contact with human society, which is the same story told four thousand years earlier.

What makes him more than a literary curiosity is that the costumes are still worn. Across the Alps, the Pyrenees and Central and Eastern Europe, winter festivals feature masked figures in straw, fur, horns and bells, parading through villages between the turn of the year and Lent. Photographers documenting these traditions have found hundreds of surviving local variants, many of them unbroken.

Mid-January sits squarely inside that season, which makes this absurd little observance better placed than it has any right to be.

How to take part

• Look up photographs of European winter masquerade costumes, which are genuinely startling.
• Read about the woodwose and look for one in a museum's medieval collection.
• Find out whether your own region kept a midwinter masking tradition.
• Go into some woods, which is the least this day can ask.
• Read the opening of Gilgamesh, which is short and much stranger than expected.