The Man in the Moon: A Survival of Germanic Mythology?

Men and women imagined the presence of the Man in the Moon in order to account for the spots in the full moon. There are a number of references to him (and sometimes to a woman) in English folklore and literature (seal of Walter de Grendon, nursery rhymes, Neckam, ME poem, Chaucer, Shakespeare…). He was thought to have been exiled there and carries a thorn bush on his back because he once stole thorns from hedges (or violated some religious commandment). There is a variant of the legend in Snorri: the moon-god Máni (ON ‘moon’) once took two children from earth when they were coming from a spring carrying a bushel and a pole on their shoulders; as can be seen from the earth, the boy and the girl are still in the sky and follow the moon. I want to argue that this familiar Scandinavian and English figure – but also present in France and Wallonia -probably derives from an ancient Germanic myth that developed slightly differently among the Northern and Western countries, and that the two traditions eventually merged due to the contacts between the Scandinavians and the English.