Who was Wilhelm Mannhardt and how did he know anything about Christmas trees and maypoles.

The first question that I had when I read Mannhardt’s theory on the Christmas tree was “who was this guy?”  Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880) was a student of Jacob Grimm - the same Jacob Grimm who had terrorized generations of children with his scary German folk tales.  Mannhardt was an anthropologist.  His main area of interest was folklore and folk traditions as they pertained to pre Christian societies in Europe.  During his lifetime he collected stories and recorded folk traditions throughout Europe.  He sent out thousands of questionnaires on local traditions and recorded the results in a masterwork titled Wald und Feldkultes or “Forest and Field Cults”.  Sadly, he was plagued by poor health his whole life, limiting his research, and died at age 49 before he could complete his work.

I wondered what information Mannhardt had about the maypole which no one else seemed to know.  Quite a bit, it turned out - he was the preeminent expert on maypoles in our modern era and a large section in Forest and Field Cults is dedicated to them.  I decided to look into what he had discovered to see if I could establish a link between the maypole and the Christmas tree.  As I looked at what he said about maypoles, I realized that the maypole he was describing was only distantly recognizable compared with what we know as a maypole these days.