Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018
The Old Ways: Mystery Girl by Linda Raedisch
Mabon
WE THINK OF “LITTLE green men” as the product of the mid-twentieth-century imagination, but one harvest season sometime in the early twelfth century, a little green girl and a little green boy materialized outside the Suffolk village of Woolpit. The children’s strange story was not captured by the pen until fifty years after the fact when two chroniclers finally jumped to the task: William of Newburgh (c.1136—1198) and Ralph of Coggeshall (fl. 1200), both of whom claimed to have interviewed people directly involved in the events.
We’ll call the girl Agnes, because that’s how she was eventually christened. After Agnes had learned to speak the local dialect of Old English, she explained how she and her brother had wandered into a cavern not far from their home and become hopelessly lost among the tunnels. They had been minding their father’s flocks when an irresistible tolling music had led them into the caves. The sheep forgotten, the children scrambled onward through the narrow passageways, ears straining to hear the chimes through the rushing darkness.
Moments or perhaps hours later, they emerged within a cavity, perhaps one of the village’s clay-pits. Shielding their eyes against the terrifying blaze of light, they knew at once they had not returned to the quiet meadow in which they had left their flock. Looking around, they could make out trees and tall, heavy-headed grasses shimmering in the light of a dazzling sun. By this time, the music had stopped, its place taken by ominous hissing and slashing sounds. The children turned back, hunting for the cave mouth, but the rocks had unaccountably closed up behind them.
Now they were truly lost in this strange, bright world. They had not traveled far into it when they were seized by the reapers, for it was their scything the children had heard. The children were carried in with the harvest and dropped off at the nearest guild hall, a place of wood, bricks, and guttering candle flames, commonplaces with which the children seemed entirely unfamiliar.
In their own country, as Agnes explained later, there was neither day nor night but perpetual twilight. There were churches but apparently no bells, and her people regarded St. Martin “with peculiar veneration.” And everyone was startlingly green.
For a long time, neither Agnes nor her brother could speak. And when they could, their speech was unintelligible to the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Woolpit. The boy soon succumbed to melancholy, while the girl survived into adulthood, William of Newburgh adding that she married a man of King’s Lynn and Ralph relating that she was given a position in the household of one Sir Richard de Calne where her behavior was “rather loose and wanton.” The chroniclers disagree over the question of baptism—Did both children receive it or only the girl?—but agree that it must have been the tolling of the church bells at nearby Bury St. Edmonds that had drawn them from their own land.
To be lured inside the earth by enchanting music is typical of the British fairy story, but the subject is more usually drawn out of the mortal realm and into Faerie, not the other way around. Lingering twilight is another hallmark of the Celtic fairy realm. Agnes maintained that she and her green-skinned countrymen were Christians. If they were stray Picts, they may have belonged to the older, more tolerant Celtic Church founded by St. Ninian. Christianized Picts also maintained a special fondness for St. Martin of Tours whose follower St. Ninian had been. But Scotland was a long way from Suffolk, and it is doubtful that any Picts of this time would have been dying themselves either blue or green as their Pagan ancestors had.
It is well known that humans must abstain from eating fairy food or be trapped forever in the fairy banqueting hall. In both William’s and Ralph’s accounts, the Green Children refuse to tough the local fare until, that is, they are presented with green beans. That’s “green” as in freshly picked, not the long thin haricots, which were unknown in England at the time. These beans, given to the children with the haulms still attached, may have been Celtic beans, Vicia fabor minor, which have been eaten as an early fall vegetable since Neolithic times, or horse beans, Vicia fabor equine, which are better fed to livestock than to people. Rather than wait for the beans to be cooked, the children tried to eat them raw but had to be shown how to find the beans inside the pods.
Agnes eventually developed a taste for more conventional foods and in doing so lost her green color. If her skin had been dyed green with the herbs woad and weld, the color may simply have been worn or washed away. Or, her greenish pallor could have been a symptom of severe malnourishment. Starvation was an ever-looming specter in those days. Perhaps the children had been abandoned, like Hansel and Gretel. Woolpit was home to a sulfurous well dedicated to the Virgin Mary, renowned for its healing powers, so perhaps the children had been intentionally lost amid the throng of pilgrims.
Ralph claimed that the girl had been “regenerated” by the rite of baptism, illustrating his belief that she was a lapsed or heretical Christian rather than an aboriginal heathen or some species of fairy. As for the boy, William tells us that he “surviv[ed] baptism but a little time” and “died prematurely,” which is exactly what one would expect of a vegetal spirit at summer’s end.
So was the appearance of the Green Children in Woolpit a historical event or just another fairy story? There are a few more intriguing details to consider. The children did not pop up in the clay-pits naked but in clothing “of a strange colour, and unknown materials,” as William describes it. This was the twelfth century, not the Stone Age, so it’s hard to imagine what sort of cloth would have perplexed the people of Woolpit. The Anglo-Saxons had been working with wool and flax since time immemorial and would certainly have heard of silk, furs and cloth-of-gold even if they did not own any. The ability to weave cloth so fine that no human can hope to duplicate it is a typical fairy skill, just as shiny fabrics have become a time-honored means of distinguishing the aliens from the Federation-folk on “Star Trek.”
Through William, Agnes tells us that her home country of “St. Martin’s Land” was divided by a wide river. “The sun does not rise upon our countrymen,” she assured her listeners, “but it seems to have shone fully upon this nearby land.” Outside the human imagination, there is only one kind of place that fits this description and it is not on Earth.
Could the Green Children have come from a tidally locked planet? Tidal locking occurs when physical events far outside this author’s understanding cause one side of a planet to always face the sun much as the same side of our moon always faces the earth. Thus, on one side of the planet it would be forever daylight, on the other, night. The only region where life as we know it would be possible is the narrow “twilight zone” in between, where the inhabitants would enjoy everlasting crepuscularity. This is the state of affairs on the planets Proxima Centauri b, Kepler-1866 b, c, d and e and Star Trek’s Daled IV. (Only Daled IV is known to be inhabited.)
But even if the Green Children were aliens, how did they end up in Woolpit? In a ship built to weather the eons, its sails billowing in the solar wind? Or through that fallback plot-saver, the wormhole, this one opening onto a clay-pit in medieval Sussex, just as one would expect to see in an episode of Doctor Who. Perhaps the best question to ask is not whether the Green Children were fairies, extraterrestrials, or starving children, but if William of Newburgh should be counted as the world’s first science fiction writer.