The myth of the subterraneans has fired the imagination of many science fiction and fantasy writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, who describes a terrifying confrontation with messengers from the interior of the world in his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, written in 1833. But the most popular story about subterranean adventure is Jules Verne's 1864 masterpiece, Journey to the centre of the Earth, which charts the descent of a professor, his nephew and a guide into the depths of our planet's interior through the crater of Mount Sneffels, an extinct volcano in Iceland. Is such a journey possible? It doesn't seem likely, according to present theories of the Earth's geological composition. Geologists and seismologists have built up quite a detailed picture of the Earth's interior by probing its core with seismic shockwaves from earthquakes and nuclear tests. From the way the shockwaves are distorted and reflected through the planet, it has been established that the Earth is composed of three principal layers; the crust, the mantle and the core. The outermost layer, the crust, is composed of granite and basalt rock up to 25 miles thick. Beneath this layer is the mantle, which extends downwards for 1,800 miles, and is made up of magnesium silicates, calcium, aluminium and iron. Then comes the mysterious parts: the molten outer core, which is thought to be composed of molten iron. Deeper down at a depth of 3,160 miles is the boundary of the solid inner core, which is probably made up from iron. At this depth, the pressure is estimated to be over 3 million tons per square foot.
These geological facts surely rule out any notions of undiscovered races living in the Earth's interior, so what are we to make of the following story, which was recorded by William of Newburgh a reliable 12th century chronicler?
In the year 1200, William of Newburgh (a monastery in Yorkshire) took up his quill and began to record the various events which had occurred in the reign of King Stephen which lasted from 1135 to 1154. William was not given to flights of fancy, and was renowned for not embroidering events, so many historians today are intrigued by the monk's following account of a strange event which allegedly took place in the Suffolk village of Woolpit, which lies near Bury St Edmunds:
I must not there omit a marvel, a prodigy unheard of since the beginning of all time, which is known to have come to pass under King Stephen. I myself long hesitated to credit it, although it was noised abroad by many folk, and I thought it ridiculous to accept a thing which had no reason to commend it, or at most some reason of great obscurity, until I was so overwhelmed with the weight of so many and such credible witnesses that I was compelled to believe and admire that which my wit striveth vainly to reach or follow. There is a village in England some four or five miles from the noble monastery of the Blessed King and Martyr Edmund, near which may be seen certain trenches of immemorial antiquity which are named in the English tongue, Wolfpittes, and which gave their name to the adjacent village. One harvest-tide, when harvesters were gathering in the corn, there crept out from these two pits a boy and a girl, green at every point of their body, and clad in garments of strange hue and unknown texture. These wandered distraught about the field, until the harvesters took them and brought them to the village, where many flocked together to see this marvel.
Had William of Newburgh's account been the only report of the bizarre incident, it would have been interpreted as an out-of-character fairy tale penned by a monk who had perhaps imbibed too much mead, but Abbott Ralph of Coggeshall - another monastic scribe who was a contemporary of William living just 30 miles south of Woolpit in Essex, also recorded the appearance of the green children. He wrote of them:
No one could understand their speech. When they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain knight, Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes, they wept bitterly. Bread and other victuals were set before them, but they would touch none of them, though they were tormented by great hunger, as the girl afterwards acknowledged. At length, when some [broad] beans just cut, with their stalks, were brought into the house, they made signs, with great avidity, that they should be given to them. When they were brought, they opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking the beans were in the hollow of them; but not finding them there, they began to weep anew. When those who were present saw this, they opened the pods and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with great delight, and for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, he died within a short time. The girl enjoyed continual good health; and becoming accustomed to various kinds of food, lost completely her green colour, and gradually recovered the sanguine habit of her entire body.
Abbot Ralph goes on to say that the green girl was later baptised into the Christian faith and lived for many years in the service of Sir Richard, the knight who took her into his care.
Despite her baptism. The Abbot also mentions that the green girl was 'rather loose and wanton in her conduct.' All the same, the girl married a man from King Lynn and settled down there with him, according to William of Newburgh. The curious continually quizzed the mysterious young woman about her origins. She always told them that she and her brother had come from a country that was entirely green that was inhabited by green-skinned people. Even their sun, which was very feeble, glowed green. One day the girl and her brother entered a cavern when they were startled to hear a strange sound. Abbot Ralph wrote of this:
On entering the cave they heard a delightful sound of bells; ravished by whose sweetness, they went for a long time wandering on through the cavern, until they came from its mouth. When they came out of it, they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun, and the unusual temperature of the air; and they thus lay for a long time. Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wished to flee, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught.
People naturally assumed that the children had come from some unknown land beneath the ground, for how else could they have emerged from a cave? Some thinkers of the time also surmised that the children's skin had a greenish hue because of lack of sunlight. The superstitious believed that the green kids were some sort of sinister cousins of the elves and fairies who were also said to be green-skinned. Green had always been synonymous with the supernatural; the enigmatic Green Man of English folklore and the ominous Green Knight of Arthurian legend are just two examples. The green children's predilection for broad beans was interpreted by the irrational folk of the period as another indication of the youngsters real eerie nature, because beans were said to be the food of the dead, and it was thought that ghosts and other spirits dwelt in bean fields.
If we dispense with the mythological and superstitious explanations of the 12th century, can we rationalise the green children's appearance? Was there a mundane explanation? Most people have heard of 'blue babies' infants that have a bluish caste because of congenital cyanosis, a condition where there is a lack of oxygen in the baby's blood - but green babies are very rare indeed. Yellowing of the skin, commonly known as jaundice, can be caused by blockage of the bile duct by gallstones or hepatitis. Greenness of the skin in children and adults has been recorded, and the cause is usually an endocrine gland disorder or a type of secondary anaemia. The chances of such diseases and disorders occurring in two youngsters simultaneously however, are highly unlikely. The only credible possibilities seem to be the extraterrestrial or parallel world hypotheses. The green children may have been inadvertently teleported to Earth from another planet, or they may have accidentally been transported from their dimension to ours by some freak of nature. We will probably never know where they came from because of the scarcity of data we have on them, but the monastic records of the children from elsewhere will continue to tantalize us for a long time yet.
