Green Children of Woolpit 5: Parallels January 26, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval , trackback
Beach must start with apologies. He promised four posts on the green children but he was not able to contain himself. Here, then, is a fifth dreamt up in the outer rings of fever in the last couple of days (flu now been ravaging for a week). Beach set himself a simple question: to what extent can the experience of Woolpit be paralleled in other encounters with fairies or supernatural creatures? Note that there are lots of examples of human beings straying into the other world, but the green children are something much rarer, namely, other worldly creatures getting lost in our world. Well, there are instances of fairies being caught in British and Irish folklore, though note that these examples tend to be late and south-western or from the west in Ireland. However, Beach has only come across three other European cases that are worth comparing to the Woolpit saga: we’ve limited ourselves to cases where there seems to be a hard fact behind the tale (whether the fact was understood correctly or not) and Beach has avoided the ancient world. The three cases follow.
1) Magonia: Magonia was the great medieval cloudland, or at least that is how modern researchers often interpret the name. What we do know is that a ninth-century writer described medieval weather magic and duels with sky sailors in ships from Magonia bringing storms. In southern France, in the ninth century, three men and one woman were imprisoned by locals who were convinced that they had come from Magonia to earth. They were lucky to escape with their lives, and were rescued by the solicitude of a local bishop.
2) Spanish Pygmies: in De animalibus of Albertus Magnus, the great one describes various types of primates including pygmies. Albert went further though and claimed that two pygmies were caught in Spain, though one seems to have died while being captured. Annoyingly Beach has not been able to look at the Latin here. (Beach owes this reference to Richard Green with thanks.)
3) Wales: In the early 1740s two young children were washed up on the coast of North Wales: they were probably of Georgian origin or at least this is what a later DNA test suggested. There is no proof that the locals saw them as being from another world. But one became a bone-setter of uncommon skill, a quasi magical career, and in North Wales there seems to have been a tradition (still alive in the nineteenth century) of ascribing fairy origins to powerful outsiders. Much was made of their colour, but they were swarthy not green.
Can anyone add others? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
26 Jan 2015: Invisible plays the mermaid card, more specifically the mermaid of Edam.
