A 3.3 is a low score by this survey’s standards – but the name blends two potent old symbols: the stag and the colour green
The Green Stag holds a 3.3 from eighty-six people – one of the lowest scores in this Kensington survey, low enough to give genuine pause – but its name combines two of the most potent old symbols in English folklore: the stag, and the colour green.
The low score
Let us be honest about the number first. A 3.3, by the standards this survey has developed across two hundred venues, is a low score – not disastrous, but well below the 4.2 to 4.7 range where most decent venues sit, and low enough to suggest genuine and consistent disappointment among a fair sample of eighty-six people. Unlike the tiny samples this survey usually cautions about, eighty-six reviews is enough to carry real information, and the information here is that a meaningful number of people came away unimpressed.
This survey has always tried to be fair about scores, reading them in context – but it has also insisted on honesty, and honesty here means acknowledging that a 3.3 across eighty-six people is a below-average result that a prospective visitor should weigh. The name, however, is far more interesting than the number.
The stag
The stag – the male red deer, crowned with its great branching antlers – is one of the most magnificent and symbolically loaded animals in European culture. It is the king of the forest, an emblem of nobility, strength, virility and the wild. The hunt for the stag was the supreme aristocratic pursuit, and the stag’s head, mounted, became the classic trophy of the hunting hall.
The stag carries deep mythological weight. In Celtic myth, the antlered god Cernunnos – a horned deity associated with animals, fertility and the wild – was a powerful figure. In Christian legend, several saints (Saint Hubert, Saint Eustace) were said to have converted after seeing a vision of a stag with a glowing cross between its antlers. The stag appears constantly in heraldry, in folklore, in the deep symbolic vocabulary of the forest and the hunt. It is an animal of genuine power and mystery.
The green
And then there is the green – the colour of the forest, of nature, of growth and life, but also, in English folklore, a colour touched with the uncanny and the otherworldly. Green is the colour of the Green Man, that mysterious foliate face found carved in so many old English churches – a pagan spirit of vegetation and rebirth peering out from the stonework, half-hidden, never quite explained.
Green is the colour of Robin Hood and his outlaws in Lincoln green, of the greenwood where the free and the wild lived beyond the law. It is the colour of the fairies, who were often dressed in green, and of the uncanny “green” figures of folklore, like the Green Knight of the great medieval poem, who rides into Camelot entirely green and challenges the knights to a deadly game. Green in English folklore is nature, yes – but nature as something powerful, wild, and not entirely safe.
The combined symbol
“The Green Stag,” then, combines two potent images of the wild, the natural and the faintly magical – the noble beast of the forest and the uncanny colour of the greenwood. It is an evocative, atmospheric, slightly mysterious name, rich in old English resonance, whatever the disappointments recorded in its score.
The bar
A low-rated Kensington venue, at 3.3 across a fair sample – a below-average score by this survey’s standards – carrying an evocative name that blends the noble stag and the uncanny green of English folklore.
Verdict
Below average by the numbers, but named with two of the most potent symbols in English folklore – the forest king and the uncanny colour of the greenwood.
The score gives pause, in honesty. But the name – the Green Stag, king of the wild wood – carries an old magic that the rating cannot touch.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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