Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 2, 2013

The green children of Woolpit is the name given to two children who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century. They were of generally normal appearance except for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an unknown language, and the only food they would eat at first was green beans. Eventually they lost their green pallor, but the boy was sickly and died soon after baptism. After learning English, the girl explained that they had come from an underground world whose inhabitants are green. The only near-contemporary accounts are contained in Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicum Anglicanum and William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum, written in about 1189 and 1220 respectively. Between then and their rediscovery in the mid-19th century, the green children seem to surface only in Bishop Francis Godwin's fantastical The Man in the Moone. The story also provided the inspiration for The Green Child, the only novel written by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read. The main explanations of the story are that it is a typical folk tale describing an imaginary encounter with the inhabitants of another world, or it is a garbled account of a historical event. (Full article...)

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