Odd Wikipedia Article of the Day - Green children of Woolpit

[CommRLock78]

Do any of you English Ooliteers know of this story? I find it quite interesting, and I wonder if it was a pair malnourished children, or a myth (or maybe a mixture of both?). I sure had never heard of it before - gotta love the featured article of the day!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_children_of_Woolpit

[Smivs]

Odd indeed. I've not heard the tale before, but in Medieval times strange events were commonly reported and it seems that people accepted that demons and 'strangers' etc were abroad in the land. What we might today call the supernatural was believed to be fact and was commonplace, so a tale like this from the 12th Century is not too surprising.
A good find though...thanks for sharing.

[Disembodied]

I'd heard of the story (although I'm not English ... ) ... It is, I think, one of those weird stories that's just on the fringes of the utterly fantastical, and it's tempting to look for "explanations", for the real and explicable events which might have been built up and become the legend. But with all these sorts of things, just as there can be some nugget of actuality hiding under the myth, it's just as likely that the whole thing was made up out of thin air around a fire one night: "My brother, right, he's got this mucker from over Wolpit way, and his father, right, his father swear blind that ...". It's like modern urban myths: there's no actual reality behind "The calls are coming from inside the house!"

But it's a good story: there are all sorts of hooks in there to hang stuff on, whether for science fiction, fantasy, or the history of medicine.

[Commander McLane]

There may be an easier explanation:

The legend of the green children of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen Stephen King.

See?

[CommRLock78]

There may be an easier explanation:

The legend of the green children of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen Stephen King.

See?

- very clever.

[Cmdr Darkstar]

I'd heard of the story (although I'm not English ... ) ... It is, I think, one of those weird stories that's just on the fringes of the utterly fantastical, and it's tempting to look for "explanations", for the real and explicable events which might have been built up and become the legend. But with all these sorts of things, just as there can be some nugget of actuality hiding under the myth, it's just as likely that the whole thing was made up out of thin air around a fire one night: "My brother, right, he's got this mucker from over Wolpit way, and his father, right, his father swear blind that ...". It's like modern urban myths: there's no actual reality behind "The calls are coming from inside the house!"
.

There's also the tendancy for stories to get garbled very quickly as they're passed from one teller to another.

I was once reading an article about the reports of big cats on the loose in the UK, and it had a very good example of how reports can get inflated. There was a woman in Scotland putting out her rubbish one night, when she disturbed a large cat that jumped out at her and ran off. She thought it was a wildcat, but the expert who examined her report reckoned (based on her description and it's behaviour) that it was more likely to have been a particularly large domestic tabby. The whole thing got reported in the local paper as "Woman startled by large cat" (or something along those lines). But then another paper picked up and re-reported the story, but now "large cat" became "big cat". And then another paper picked it up and re-reported it, but now the "big cat" became "puma".

So there we had an example of the utterly mundane becoming the extraordinary, in just three steps, when it should have been entierly straightforward to check the facts and yet people who's job it is to do so didn't. Imagine how much easier it would be for something like that to happen in the past, when newspapers and the internet didn't exist, and people's world-view made such things seem plausible.

[Disembodied]

So there we had an example of the utterly mundane becoming the extraordinary, in just three steps, when it should have been entierly straightforward to check the facts and yet people who's job it is to do so didn't.

This is definitely true - but I think you misrepresent the job of a journalist. A journalist's job is not to "check the facts", except in rarified cases (e.g. if they're working on a story for the a public broadcaster like the BBC, and the story doesn't deal with certain broad political areas deemed "in the national interest"). For most journalists - virtually all print journalists - their job is to help sell newspapers (and, increasingly, to write articles that get a lot of clickthroughs online). A "large cat" sells fewer papers and gets fewer online eyeballs than "puma", so ... they're mythologising for money.

The modern media, even more so in the age of the internet, is a wonderful machine for spreading disinformation, half-truths and lies: if anything, this sort of situation gets worse all the time. See the "moon landing hoax" nuts: before the internet existed, they were a scattered bunch of conspiracy weirdos. Now, their views are almost mainstream. OK, it looks like - maybe - this particular myth no longer gets the attention of the media, thanks to years of dedicated debunking, but still: there's a hefty percentage of the population who'll say, at the very least, "Well, I think you should keep an open mind about it: I mean, how do we really know?", etc. Then there's the "MMR vaccines cause autism" tripe: "HUGE SCREAMING THREAT TO YOUR CHILDREN" sells more papers than "Doctors dispute one small (and, as it happens, badly designed) set of test results" - hence, tens of thousands of kids go unvaccinated.