# The Green Children of Woolpit: A Legend



## Guttersnipe (Apr 6, 2022)

Green children of Woolpit - Wikipedia
					






					en.m.wikipedia.org
				














I expect those living in the UK may be more familiar with this legend. I just posted because I've always thought that this would be great material for fiction. Anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read wrote his only novel based on it. 









						The Green Child - Wikipedia
					






					en.m.wikipedia.org


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## sknox (Apr 7, 2022)

So of course the first thing I thought of was the movie, _The Boy with Green Hair_.


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## Danny McG (Apr 7, 2022)

It was explained best on Horrible Histories


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## Ray Zdybrow (Dec 5, 2022)

The Green Children have been featured in the podcast "Weird Norfolk", worth a listen. Interesting that the children would only eat raw broad beans, which can cause jaundice... which would mean yellow skin rather than green


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## BAYLOR (Dec 18, 2022)

Guttersnipe said:


> Green children of Woolpit - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...



They were precursors to the Hippies.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 19, 2022)

The existence of the 'green man' dates back at least a couple of thousand years, so 'green children' would come as no surprise for those seen as 'other'. In fact even today aliens are often described as 'little green men'. Some things never really change.


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## Toby Frost (Dec 19, 2022)

I used to know a guy who wrote books about UFOs (he was a sceptic). He once suggested that the idea of being abducted by aliens was so similar to being taken away by the fairies that either (i) aliens had been mucking about with farmers for centuries or, more interestingly, (ii) the abduction story was just one that humans instinctively told each other, with era-appropriate trappings.


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## Guttersnipe (Dec 19, 2022)

Toby Frost said:


> I used to know a guy who wrote books about UFOs (he was a sceptic). He once suggested that the idea of being abducted by aliens was so similar to being taken away by the fairies that either (i) aliens had been mucking about with farmers for centuries or, more interestingly, (ii) the abduction story was just one that humans instinctively told each other, with era-appropriate trappings.


We do have the expression, "away with the fairies," and, before "horse and hattock" was used to mean a spell a witch uses to fly, it indicated a spell that would cause someone or something to be spirited away by the fairies. Speaking of "spirited away," there are instances in myths of both Japan and Finland that creatures of some sort tended to abduct humans quite a bit. Also, the incubus and the succubus probably had some influence on modern UFO mythology.


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## Guttersnipe (Dec 19, 2022)

paranoid marvin said:


> The existence of the 'green man' dates back at least a couple of thousand years, so 'green children' would come as no surprise for those seen as 'other'. In fact even today aliens are often described as 'little green men'. Some things never really change.


That term was quite common for aliens until the Greys came along to ruin it all.


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