Talk:Green children of Woolpit

CP concerns
Hey all. This was a fascinating read, and I'd like to thank user:drmies and others for writing it. However I have some concers re close paraphrasing and over-reliance on certain sources. I gather from the FAC that no spotchecks were done, which I find a bit bewildering. Anyway, let's have a look:


 * Article: In a modern development of the tale the green children are associated with the Babes in the Wood, who were left by their wicked uncle to die; in this version the children's green colouration is explained by their having been poisoned with arsenic. Fleeing from the wood in which they were abandoned, possibly nearby Thetford Forest, the children fell into the pits at Woolpit where they were discovered.


 * Source: In what seems to have been a recent development of the story […] the children are identified with the familiar "Babes in the Wood" […] According to this version, their green coloration was due to arsenic administered by their wicked uncle; fleeing from the wood where they were abandoned (perhaps nearby Thetford Forest), they stumbled into the pits at Woolpit


 * Article: The second is that it is a garbled account of a real event


 * Source: Others accept it as a garbled account of an actual occurrence


 * Article: Ralph's account in his Chronicum Anglicanum, written some time during the 1220s, incorporates information from Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes, who reportedly gave the green children refuge in his manor, six miles (9.7 km) to the north of Woolpit.


 * Source: Ralph of Coggeshall's version, in his Chronicon Anglicanum (English Chronicle), was not finally written down until the 1220s; but it incorporated information from a certain Richard de Calne of Wykes, who had reportedly given the Green Children refuge in his manor.

I found those instances only after spending five minutes spotchecking the first source, which the article IMHO is over-reliant on. I also think it's kinda weird that no pages are cited for journal articles (which can have rather long page ranges, like Clark 2006, Lawton 1931, Lunan 1996, Orne 1995, Walsh 2000, etc.). FWIW Eisfbnore  (会話) 21:35, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I haven't seen new comment for more than a year, so I will submit to FAR for this.--Q28 (talk) 20:43, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Not Folkloric Enough?
Since the people who edit this "encyclopedia" presumably have access to the back issues of folklore journals and other online resources which are free if you can log on as a member of the relevant university, but cost everybody else so much it isn't worth it, perhaps a little research in that area would be useful? I mean proper research, not the wikipedia version of research that autistically lumps together everything that references the subject of the article in any context and gives it all equal weight, whether it's an academic treatise or a passing mention on The Simpsons.

In this instance, we have an extremely improbable tale derived from only two sources, both secondary at best and written long after the alleged events. The earlier of the two makes the only mention anywhere of a named primary witness, Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes, whoever he was. Thus if Sir Richard was for any reason not telling the truth, it's just a tall story that he told, Ralph of Coggeshall believed, and William of Newburgh also believed when he heard about it in some other way a few decades later. And unless we assume these bizarre events to be literally true in every detail, Sir Richard, who claimed to have known the Green Children quite well, either told his own story very inaccurately or was very badly misquoted.

So if we treat the tale as history, we have a straight choice between believing that a lost tribe of green people live in mysterious subterranean villages beneath England from which they sometimes emerge through caves no-one can ever find afterwards, or that the story is possibly to some degree true, but every extant version of it leaves out important facts and inserts impossible ones, so basically the number of reliable sources is zero.

On the other hand, from a folkloric perspective, almost every detail fits an extremely generic narrative about fairies which somehow made the transition from pure fiction to a rumour which people came to believe was true. I said "almost" every detail. The two points which don't fit are that fairies aren't mentioned at all, the place from which the children came being called "Saint Martin's Land", a mysterious realm which as far as I know is unique to this story, and that there's a reference to this strange land having Christian churches. Which makes perfect sense if you assume that whoever invented the tale - possibly Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes, to wind up a gullible monk - simply retold a traditional fairy story as fact, but left out all mention of fairies and inserted a couple of Christian references because otherwise it would have been a direct accusation that the villagers of Woolpit consorted with pagan creatures that according to official Christian doctrine were literally devils.

Modern attempts to make the narrative fit whatever agenda the writer is obsessed with are all desperately contrived. At best we have to assume that the inhabitants of Woolpit somehow didn't know of the existence of another village within walking distance entirely populated by immigrants who didn't speak English, and they never, ever found out about it. At worst, we have to swallow the barking mad word-salad of professional eccentrics like Duncan Lunan and accept that it's perfectly plausible for Star Trek transporter beams to accidentally whisk people across the galaxy from strange medieval planets inhabited by little green men who live on beans.

If the article was rewritten so that the bulk of it treated the story as the folklore it obviously is, and compared it with other traditional tales of fairies, fairyland, intermarriage between humans and fairies, and so on, it might be more objective, and perhaps even encyclopedic. You could still have a little bit at the end listing the nonsense. And nonsense it is. Your own page on Duncan Lunan, which reads as though it was written by a very close friend of his, contains statements like "On his mother's side, he traces his ancestry back to Mitochondrial Eve", and cheerfully recounts his claim (since retracted) to have decoded radio messages from an alien probe in orbit around the Moon. I would be disinclined to take seriously any theory about anything proposed by this fellow, particularly if it was published in a magazine mainly devoted to science fiction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.52.224 (talk) 05:13, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Historical Historical Explanations
Is it worth adding to this interesting page the historical interpretations of the Green Children, e.g. how the authors of the Historia rerum Anglicarum and the Chronicon Anglicanum perceived and framed the incident? (Thinking here of the miracula/mirabilia distinction, and the relationship of this passages with other parts of these work?

Thinking here of Gordon, “Social Monsters and the Walking Dead", Plumtree, "Placing the Green Children", Ruch, “Digression or Discourse?", Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England. JoeBlogsDord (talk) 01:57, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

'Legacy / appearance in media'
Ended up on this page as I was doing a search for the Green Children featured in the Ubisoft computer game Assassins Creed Valhalla. Turns out it's based on a 'true' story which I didn't realise and I thought that a nice touch on Ubisofts part.

Just thought It might be worth mentioning here incase someone cares to add it to the page. Might get round to it myself at some point if not. VSTAMPv (talk) 18:39, 9 February 2024 (UTC)