I’m trying to find more information concerning the practice of carving faces on living trees in pre-modern Europe. Some people call them “wood-spirit” apparently.
This practice is a prominent feature in the books/TV show Game of Thrones, but it seems to have been a real and ancient practice in Baltic/Slavic countries. Problem is I can’t find any publication, or historical analysis of this practice with Google.
Maybe someone here is smarter than Google !
Seems? Based on what?
Based on seeing examples in the Baltic countries that were decades-old…
Easier than chiseling into rock?
Decades old carvings are not evidence of an ancient practice. And the fact that there’s no mention of carved faces in pages on Baltic paganism, where tree worship does exist, speaks volumes.
And then there’s this authoritative cite from “Terry” on Yahoo Answers: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090920121350AALyydc
Carved? You mean they don’t just grow that way?
Having come back from the Baltics, Latvia and Lithuania, I never saw anything like this, nor heard anything about such carvings. I do know that the Lithuanians do like to carve large sculptures out of wood, but I never saw any in living trees.
I will talk to my friend, who’s Latvian, about this and see what she says.
I just asked my friend and she said she’d never heard of such a thing. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t go on, but it doesn’t seem like it’s any kind of tradition, at least in Latvia.