Speaker 1: With respect to jinny green teeth. Well do I remember
Speaker 1: in childhood's days and isolated Gorton farmstead, with a yeoman's
Speaker 1: house dating back to the early part of the seventeenth century.
Speaker 1: Almost overshading It was a somber old yew tree, doubtless coeval,
Speaker 1: but then beginning to decay. The end was being hastened
Speaker 1: by the annual Yuletide custom of lopping off the branches
Speaker 1: in order to decorate the tiny leaden casemented windows than
Speaker 1: existing in the house, and also in a chapel hard
Speaker 1: by the green of a neighboring village. Lying at some
Speaker 1: depth beneath the grassy hillock on which the fine old
Speaker 1: tree had so long stood sentinel, was a deep dismal
Speaker 1: pool which had sometime been excavated as a moral pit.
Speaker 1: Of course, little lads and lasses, with no other playmates
Speaker 1: than themselves, would now and then, when other pastimes had
Speaker 1: been run through, amuse themselves by sailing mimic flats and
Speaker 1: boats in order to deter them from approaching so dangerous
Speaker 1: a spot. When caught upon the steps leading down to
Speaker 1: the lading hole, an anxious mother would affirm solemnly, as
Speaker 1: we then thought that jinny green teeth was artfully lurking
Speaker 1: in the waters below. Proof of the story was afforded
Speaker 1: to our unsophisticated minds by the exhibition of a set
Speaker 1: of human teeth enameled with green tartar. These were said
Speaker 1: to bear only a faint resemblance to those of the
Speaker 1: demonus below, who, with her long, sinewy arms, first drew
Speaker 1: children in and then devoured them. Welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey
Speaker 1: you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I'm
Speaker 1: so excited. It's October. Yes, we are into our our October.
Speaker 1: Were offerings here a full month of of Halloween flavored
Speaker 1: content Monster Science a whole month. It's it's the most
Speaker 1: wonderful time of the year. And I think I say
Speaker 1: that every year it is. Now. Granted, we do let
Speaker 1: a few other monsters, uh you know, leak out and
Speaker 1: crawl out during the rest of the year, but but
Speaker 1: we do set aside a number of different topics just
Speaker 1: for this month's celebration. So that passage that I read
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the episode was from a letter
Speaker 1: by a folklorist named John Higson, English folklorist from Lee's
Speaker 1: who chronicles stories of fairies and Boggert's uh. And it
Speaker 1: was published in Notes and Queries, a medium of intercommunication
Speaker 1: for literary men, general readers, et cetera, from Oxford University
Speaker 1: Press in eighteen seventy. And I'm going to be quoting
Speaker 1: a little bit more from Higgson's work, But as you
Speaker 1: may have detected from that passage, today we're going to
Speaker 1: be focusing on a particular malicious water spirit, a a
Speaker 1: sodden hag, a fairy of the depths named Jenny green
Speaker 1: Teeth who will pull you in Yes, to invoke one
Speaker 1: of my favorite ClickHole videos. If you don't follow the rules,
Speaker 1: Jenny green Teeth will kill you with their sharp things.
Speaker 1: And I love knowing that. Now. There are a couple
Speaker 1: of ways that you could classify Jinny Green Teeth, like
Speaker 1: what categories she goes in. I guess one would be
Speaker 1: to say that she's part of this, this class of
Speaker 1: Bogeys and Boggarts, and Higson's term fair and frightful things
Speaker 1: the sort of English or or UK tradition of frightful spirits. Yes,
Speaker 1: and nursery bogies. Uh, that's certainly the term that folkloris
Speaker 1: Carol Rose uses in her her encyclopedias of various magical creatures,
Speaker 1: including giants, monsters, and dragons. I think the nursery bogey
Speaker 1: categorization was applied by the folkloris Catherine Briggs, who does
Speaker 1: a lot on English fairies and the nursery bogie. Bogie
Speaker 1: specifically were bogies that were invoked to frighten children, often
Speaker 1: with an instructive angle, and it seems like they wouldn't
Speaker 1: usually have much in the way of of real mythic
Speaker 1: roots beyond their role, as you know, an educational and
Speaker 1: instructional entity. But on the other hand that they very
Speaker 1: much could have roots, they could have inspirations because uh,
Speaker 1: water hags like Jenny green Teeth, they're not unique to
Speaker 1: the British isles. They're not unique to Jenny Green Teeth especially.
Speaker 1: We will discuss seems to be situated in like northern England,
Speaker 1: especially northwest England around Liverpool in Lancashire. Yeah, and we'll
Speaker 1: will reference a few of her ken that live in
Speaker 1: the area, as well as some of her more distant
Speaker 1: relatives that live elsewhere. But it does make. I kept
Speaker 1: wondering as I was looking at these different examples, some
Speaker 1: of which that were very much just a folklore nursery bogie,
Speaker 1: and others that had more of a mythic air about them.
Speaker 1: You wonder, like, to what extent is a particular nursery
Speaker 1: bogie a stripped down version of some older, deeper mythological creature,
Speaker 1: or is it something entirely new or mostly new? I
Speaker 1: feel like it's probably a little bit of both. There's
Speaker 1: probably an ebb and flow uh that can be found there.
Speaker 1: If the nursery bogey is a horrific schoolhouse rock video,
Speaker 1: is it inspired by something horrific from the past, that
Speaker 1: is having that is being somewhat tamed or bent to
Speaker 1: the will of the warning instructive parent. Indeed? Indeed, so
Speaker 1: let's let's go back to Carol Rose. What what does
Speaker 1: Rose have to say about old Jenny? Alright? So Rose
Speaker 1: wrote that Jenny grin teeth is an evil quote predator
Speaker 1: of humans, and in particular awaits the unwary child who
Speaker 1: may go too close to the water. So you get
Speaker 1: too close and she'll come at you with her long
Speaker 1: green things. Then she'll pull you into the depths, and
Speaker 1: she can haunt virtually any pond that's covered in green slime.
Speaker 1: And again she's of course a nursery bogie um, a
Speaker 1: monster used to instruct children and enforce a wide variety
Speaker 1: of rules. Example, another bogey that that exists out there
Speaker 1: is the red legged scissorman uh. And there's a delightful,
Speaker 1: grotesque rhyme about the red legged scissor man. And essentially,
Speaker 1: if you suck your thumb, um, the red legged scissor
Speaker 1: Man will come and cut off your thumbs, which is terrifying.
Speaker 1: But you see, it's very much just a monster that's
Speaker 1: made up to scare children out of doing something they're
Speaker 1: not supposed to do. But then with Jenny Green teeth,
Speaker 1: the steaks are much higher. This isn't about prevention preventing uh,
Speaker 1: you know, thumb sucking. This is about preventing a child
Speaker 1: from wandering too close to the water, falling in and drowning. Now,
Speaker 1: as we go through the episode, I think we will
Speaker 1: steadily learn more and more about exactly what that water
Speaker 1: threat is. Or sometimes Jenny is deployed in ways that
Speaker 1: have nothing to do with water, though clearly her home
Speaker 1: is in the water. She she is a water fairy,
Speaker 1: a water hag. Yeah. I can't help but think of
Speaker 1: what is it, meg muckle Bones from the Riddlely Scott
Speaker 1: filmed legend exactly. I think Megma Bones is directly inspired
Speaker 1: by Jenny She She's gotta be yeah, yeah, just the grotesque,
Speaker 1: hag like monstrosity, this troll like creature, this loathsome entity
Speaker 1: that rises up out of the swampy muck. Now I
Speaker 1: want to continue with what Higson wrote, which was published
Speaker 1: in in that Notes and Queries in eighteen seventy, where
Speaker 1: he's talking about the role of Jenny Green Teeth in
Speaker 1: in English folklore. Picking up where my first quote left off,
Speaker 1: he says that some of their pits in the locality,
Speaker 1: and this is generally gonna be talking about Northwest England
Speaker 1: in the locality were likely patronized by a Jenny Green Teeth.
Speaker 1: And in my Gorton Historical Recorder, published in eighteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: there are briefly noticed a dozen places in the township
Speaker 1: once supposed to be haunted with Boggarts and fair and
Speaker 1: in addition there were nut NaN's clap cans, Wills with
Speaker 1: the wisp oh yeah, and Will of the Whisps. Buddy
Speaker 1: Jack with the landern lantern or Lanthorne it seems to
Speaker 1: be spelled and Peg with the iron teeth. And lastly,
Speaker 1: which is more to the point, he says quote, to
Speaker 1: restrain their children from venturing too near the numerous pits
Speaker 1: and pools which were to be found in every fold
Speaker 1: and field, a demonus or guardian was stated to crouch
Speaker 1: at the bottom. She was known as Jenny Green Teeth,
Speaker 1: and was reported to prey upon children who ventured too
Speaker 1: near her domain. Sometimes the water demonus was termed grind Low.
Speaker 1: This incarnation, of course, might be more familiar to fans
Speaker 1: of Harry Potter. Oh do they invoke Grendilo or the
Speaker 1: grindy Low as I've seen it written? Yeah, Rowling mentions
Speaker 1: grindy lows. I I don't really remember exactly how I
Speaker 1: think they are water dwelling monsters, but that's all I recall.
Speaker 1: I like to maybe think that the grindi Low is
Speaker 1: the species and Jenny as the individual. Oh I like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jenny is one particular grindi Low, though, as many authors
Speaker 1: point out, if there's just one Jenny, she really gets
Speaker 1: around right, because she's in every stagnant pool and marl
Speaker 1: pit filled in with water and every Dane you're a
Speaker 1: pit of any kind in northwest England. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, it makes sense that if you've just
Speaker 1: about any loathsome pool in in England, if you go
Speaker 1: back far enough in time, you'll probably encounter some sort
Speaker 1: of horrific tragedy. One thing I like about Jenny green
Speaker 1: Teeth is that, for some reason her name actually sounds
Speaker 1: scary to me, whereas many of these Boggers and fair
Speaker 1: End and stuff, they their names are funny. Unfortunately something
Speaker 1: has been lost over time. Uh, and so you get
Speaker 1: like Boum Rapid and the Grizzlehurst Boggert and cleg Hoboggert
Speaker 1: and stuff. Well, it's it's it's interesting. You have to
Speaker 1: wonder were they given fun names intentionally or was the
Speaker 1: or was the the fun name terrifying within contexts? For instance,
Speaker 1: to take Pennywise the clown. It's a pretty sinister sounding
Speaker 1: name if you have decades of familiarity with Stephen King's it.
Speaker 1: But was the name initially sinister or was it initially
Speaker 1: just a ridiculous sounding clown name. That's a very good point.
Speaker 1: You know, this will actually go with something that we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about in a minute. There's a paper
Speaker 1: I read by a folklorist and sort of like a
Speaker 1: folk song researcher named Annie Gilchrist to chronicles these horrific
Speaker 1: children's songs of like early twentieth century England, and they're
Speaker 1: all about like murder and cannibalism and infanticide and family
Speaker 1: members eating each other and all that stuff. But they're
Speaker 1: set to these like happy little nursery rhyme tunes. I
Speaker 1: guess that makes them more creepy, more creepy, but also
Speaker 1: more memorable. I guess maybe it helps in in relaying
Speaker 1: the content to young minds. To explore Jenny a little
Speaker 1: bit more through Higson's letter, I want to read another
Speaker 1: passage he writes. Quote a clerical friend whose juvenile years
Speaker 1: were spent in the vicinity of Stockport, Cheshire, states that
Speaker 1: he remembers being threatened more than once with Jenny Green Teeth,
Speaker 1: but in that case, probably as there was no pond
Speaker 1: near the house, she was said to perch in the
Speaker 1: tops of the trees at least after nightfall. His young
Speaker 1: imagination having been wrought up to the proper pitch, he
Speaker 1: was led into the garden and bade to listen to
Speaker 1: the site of the night wind through the branches, and
Speaker 1: then told it was the moaning of Jenny green Teeth.
Speaker 1: It may be just then disturbed with the nightmare. Another
Speaker 1: clergyman born in Walton Ladale informs me that he remembers
Speaker 1: an old pit, since filled up, but then existing in
Speaker 1: his native village, and in which it was affirmed lived
Speaker 1: Jenny green Teeth, ever on the watch, and therefore woe
Speaker 1: betided the urchin who ventured too near her domain. Jenny
Speaker 1: was also known in Manchester. Some fifty years ago, says
Speaker 1: an antiquarian friend, shooters Brook passes in a culvert under
Speaker 1: the aqueduct which carries the Manchester and Ashton under Lynn
Speaker 1: Canal over Shore Street near the London road Station. At
Speaker 1: that period there existed an opening or break left in
Speaker 1: the culvert, forming a dangerous spot for children to play beside,
Speaker 1: and yet they often selected it. Their mother's tried to
Speaker 1: destroy the fascination by stating that Jinny Green Teeth laid
Speaker 1: and wait at the bottom in order to nab children
Speaker 1: playing there. And this highlights something that I think will
Speaker 1: come back to throughout the episode, which is that it's
Speaker 1: interesting that children are drawn specifically, it is said to
Speaker 1: these dangerous locations, the break in the culvert, the dangerous
Speaker 1: pond or pit. It's like the children specifically want to
Speaker 1: go right to where the danger to their lives is
Speaker 1: the highest, and they have to be warned with another
Speaker 1: kind of danger to keep them away. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: I I see this this all the time with with
Speaker 1: my son and his various friends, when we take them
Speaker 1: out for walks and uh, in the nature trails and whatnot.
Speaker 1: If there's some sort of dangerous little area where it's
Speaker 1: like a sheer drop off or something like, that's what
Speaker 1: they're drawn to, and then you have to you have
Speaker 1: to urge them away and say, like, look, there's a
Speaker 1: zero entry like, uh, you know, creek area up ahead,
Speaker 1: Let's go playing that, not this, uh, this scary little
Speaker 1: bog that you've picked doubt here for yourself. Uh. And indeed,
Speaker 1: some of the places that that I've seen them drawn
Speaker 1: to just in the past few weeks or are very
Speaker 1: very much the sort of place that a Jenny Green
Speaker 1: Teeth might be said to reside in. So, Robert, I
Speaker 1: have a question, have you ever invoked a fictional monster
Speaker 1: or supernatural threat in order to scare your child away
Speaker 1: from a real threat. No, I haven't um that. That
Speaker 1: being said, you know some people are against utilizing, say
Speaker 1: Santa Claus of the Tooth Fairy. We have Santa Claus,
Speaker 1: we have the Tooth Fairy, we have the Switch which
Speaker 1: for Halloween. But beyond these beneficial entities, we have not
Speaker 1: invoked any other supernatural entities in our daily practice. I
Speaker 1: guess we just try and be honest about what dangers are.
Speaker 1: But you know, I can understand the temptation here because
Speaker 1: with Jenny Green teeth, you that the parent is invoking
Speaker 1: or creating and in an imagine a monster, a fantastic,
Speaker 1: lethal monster, instead of having like a frank discussion about
Speaker 1: the more mundane but equally like traumatic dangers that are involved.
Speaker 1: And sometimes you want to protect them from the truth
Speaker 1: of of real danger, like setting down and explaining the
Speaker 1: dangers of drowning to a child like that can be intimidating.
Speaker 1: You want to shield them from drowning, but you there's
Speaker 1: also this instinct to shield them from knowledge of that world.
Speaker 1: And so I can understand the temptation to utilize the fantastic,
Speaker 1: to create something horrific but fictional as a like almost
Speaker 1: a gentler way of teaching them the same lesson, uh,
Speaker 1: which is weird because that can be they can I guess,
Speaker 1: be even more harmful in some respects uh, because you're
Speaker 1: creating this nightmare creature to live in their heads. But
Speaker 1: I can see where you could reach that point, um,
Speaker 1: with only the best intentions. That's a really interesting point.
Speaker 1: And we will talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 1: real dangers of water and drowning later in the psychology
Speaker 1: of of how this works out. But um, yeah, is
Speaker 1: it possible that the monster is actually a defanged version
Speaker 1: of the threat in a way, not a more threatening
Speaker 1: version of the threat, but putting the threat into a
Speaker 1: form that feels more comfortable and less depressing. Yes, I
Speaker 1: think so. I think there's as a strong case to
Speaker 1: be made for that, Robert, if you are right with it.
Speaker 1: I'd like to look at a couple of older a
Speaker 1: couple more older books and papers that mentioned Jenny Green Teeth.
Speaker 1: One is a book by Percy B. Green called A
Speaker 1: History of Nursey Rhymes Really Percy B. Green? Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy didn't need a pseudonym, or maybe that is
Speaker 1: the pseudonym anyway, So I want to quote him later,
Speaker 1: also because he mentions another fascinating story about a water monster.
Speaker 1: But Green writes in a middle in the middle of
Speaker 1: a section about water spirits, he writes, in England, to
Speaker 1: the north Country, people speak of a river sprite as
Speaker 1: Jenny green Teeth, and the children dread the green, slimy
Speaker 1: covered rocks on the streams bank or on the brink
Speaker 1: of a black pool. Wait, I should I want to
Speaker 1: throw in this is key too, right, because we're talking
Speaker 1: about the slime covered rocks themselves. That like, that's a
Speaker 1: key danger that kid's gonna slip and fall. Um. Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: I had I had to jump in on that. No,
Speaker 1: that's a very good point. I mean, there's actually specific
Speaker 1: information about real dangers being conveyed in the superstition though.
Speaker 1: So it's like you see the green covered rocks, that
Speaker 1: that might be a sign that the rock is going
Speaker 1: to be something you could slip off of, and the
Speaker 1: child might not know that naturally, but the child sees
Speaker 1: it and says, oh, there's green on the rocks, Jenny
Speaker 1: Green Teeth is about huh. So you know that's that
Speaker 1: feels a lot more calibrated, where the example we heard
Speaker 1: earlier about Jenny Green teeth living in the trees that
Speaker 1: felt like the tail had become unhinged. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's part of the problem with creating superstitions and
Speaker 1: myths about monsters like this is that if you're trying
Speaker 1: to do it for a specific purpose, like to warn children,
Speaker 1: myths go wild, it's always become untamed. They roam loose,
Speaker 1: and they become their own thing. Yeah, I mean, as
Speaker 1: does the logical fear itself. I mean, even as adults
Speaker 1: we can probably think of things in our lives where
Speaker 1: they're not really you know, they're not monsters, but they're
Speaker 1: at least a little illogical. And if you don't watch them,
Speaker 1: if you don't curb them, then yeah, they can start
Speaker 1: living in the trees. They go ferrell. But Green writes
Speaker 1: that a warning of a Lancashire mother to her child
Speaker 1: is quote Jenny Green teeth will have the goist onto
Speaker 1: river banks. Now, I think I already mentioned the the
Speaker 1: author An E. G. Gilchrist, who has done some work
Speaker 1: chronicling folk songs discovered in the wild, and she wrote
Speaker 1: a paper for the Journal of the Folk Song Society
Speaker 1: in nineteen nineteen that is called Note on the Late d.
Speaker 1: Dressed in Green and other fragments of tragic ballads and
Speaker 1: folk tales preserved among children. So this is about folk
Speaker 1: songs sung by children in early twentieth century England. And
Speaker 1: these songs are just messed up. They are I think
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, they're They're all about murder, cannibalism, hiding
Speaker 1: dead bodies in your house. It is fascinating that we
Speaker 1: often think that children need to be protected from horror,
Speaker 1: Like I can understand that impulse, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: This just seems to me like an indication that children
Speaker 1: naturally gravitate to themes of murder and death and gore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they can be rather severe in their invocation of
Speaker 1: these ideas. Now, the main song talks about in this
Speaker 1: paper is uh is one called the Lady Dressed in Green,
Speaker 1: which gil Christ heard sung by a girl named Margaret
Speaker 1: in a Southport orphanage, and Margaret apparently brought it from
Speaker 1: a Lancashire workhouse, and gil Chris goes on to discuss
Speaker 1: how versus of the in verses of this song, the
Speaker 1: Lady Dressed in Green is holding a baby and then
Speaker 1: she murders her baby with a pen knife, and then
Speaker 1: three bobbies come and haul her off to prison. And
Speaker 1: so gil Christ is talking about the significance of the
Speaker 1: song and it's parallels to other similar children's rhymes, songs,
Speaker 1: murder ballads, and so forth. And one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things is the significance of the color green, and this
Speaker 1: leads her to talk about the color green in its
Speaker 1: relation to curses and bogeys and evil fairies and spirits.
Speaker 1: We will talk more about the significance of the color
Speaker 1: green later, but as for Jenny Green Teeth, gil Christ writes,
Speaker 1: quote of still more sinister import is the color in
Speaker 1: the case of Jenny Green Teeth, the evil water spirit
Speaker 1: appearing as the green scum on stagnant water, what claws
Speaker 1: you in, as country children say, if you go too near?
Speaker 1: Or in the obscure and horrible English folk tale of
Speaker 1: the green Lady, who appears to be a sort of
Speaker 1: lamba or vampire, living on or delighting in blood, and
Speaker 1: perhaps deriving her name and Hugh from a classic serpent ancestry.
Speaker 1: But Jenny Green Teeth and perhaps green lay he also
Speaker 1: is allied with the German water nicks and green hats,
Speaker 1: the hat appearing to be a tuft of beautiful vegetation
Speaker 1: growing in the water, who dragged down the unwary to
Speaker 1: the depths. They're horrible fate being visible in a fountain
Speaker 1: of blood which spouts up through the surface of the water.
Speaker 1: This is interesting, the the the mention of of serpents,
Speaker 1: because as I was looking through Carol Rose and looking
Speaker 1: at various uh aquatic uh you know, fresh water especially monsters.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of serpents in various beliefs, weird
Speaker 1: serpents in uh Native American beliefs as well. And this
Speaker 1: makes a certain amount of sense, right, because you will
Speaker 1: encounter snakes around the water sometimes. Yeah, and this would
Speaker 1: be a very old fear and human culture, but also
Speaker 1: even predating some of that, you know, just sort of
Speaker 1: an ingrained thing to be afraid of. Yeah, we're all
Speaker 1: the cat with the cucumber behind us. Now. I can't
Speaker 1: move on without mentioning what Gilchrist writes about this other
Speaker 1: or the green Lady story that may have its origins
Speaker 1: in some kind of serpent ancestry. She writes that she's
Speaker 1: never found a version of the Green Lady folktale in print,
Speaker 1: but there's there's a version she heard from a person
Speaker 1: named Ethel Kidson and This is how it goes. A
Speaker 1: little girl took service with the green Lady. The next morning,
Speaker 1: after preparing breakfast for her, she called up the stair,
Speaker 1: green Lady, Green Lady, come down to your breakfast. But
Speaker 1: the Green Lady did not come down. The formula was
Speaker 1: repeated for dinner and supper, but still she did not appear.
Speaker 1: At last, the little girl went upstairs to the chamber door, and,
Speaker 1: urged by curiosity, looked through the keyhole and saw the
Speaker 1: Green Lady dancing in a basin of blood. Now this
Speaker 1: paper is actually worth a look if you wanted to
Speaker 1: just go look it up to see the absolutely depraved
Speaker 1: folk songs that children sing. Oh. Yes, one of these
Speaker 1: that you highlighted here, My mama did kill me? Uh,
Speaker 1: And it has that this sheet music with it. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna attempt to sing just a little of it, with
Speaker 1: fear warning. I'm not very good at reading sheet music.
Speaker 1: But it goes something like this, My mama did kill
Speaker 1: me and put me in a pie. My dad da
Speaker 1: did eat me and say it was I. And then
Speaker 1: it goes on, my brother and sister did pick my
Speaker 1: bones and bury them under cold marble stones, and bury
Speaker 1: them under cold Marble Stones. We we were emailing with
Speaker 1: our producer Alex about this, and Alex was trying to
Speaker 1: make sense of the line my Dada did eat me
Speaker 1: and say it was I. Now, one way of reading
Speaker 1: that could be like, I don't know the dada knows
Speaker 1: what the child's flesh tastes, like like, oh, that's that's him,
Speaker 1: that's the one I'm eating. Or maybe the dad da
Speaker 1: is saying, no, you're eating yourself. It's you that's doing
Speaker 1: the eating of you. I tend to favor the earlier interpretation,
Speaker 1: but either way you slice it, it's that pretty unsettling.
Speaker 1: One more paper came across that mentioned Jenny green Teeth
Speaker 1: I thought had a really kind of sad but fascinating
Speaker 1: story about something that happened uh in the sixteenth century.
Speaker 1: So this is a paper by Terence R. Murphy called
Speaker 1: Woeful Child of Parents, Rage, Suicide of Children and Adolescence
Speaker 1: in Early Modern England fifteen o seven to seventeen ten
Speaker 1: in the sixteenth Century Journal And so the author writes
Speaker 1: that there was a case of an adolescent suicide in
Speaker 1: Cambridgeshire in fifteen sixty five, where a quote twelve year
Speaker 1: old Agnes Adam went horseback riding with her girlfriend and
Speaker 1: accidentally got her clothes dirty. She came toward home, but
Speaker 1: fearing that her father would punish her, she rushed to
Speaker 1: a pond in her father's clothes and drowned herself. And
Speaker 1: then there's a footnote saying quote the coroner's jury swore
Speaker 1: that Agnes adams motives were timor parentium correct gonis and
Speaker 1: met us castigatitionis. The jury could or would not recognize
Speaker 1: her hostility toward her parents. How when and where she
Speaker 1: killed herself suggested that she intended to become in death
Speaker 1: a life demanding water spirit. The motive was childish and silly.
Speaker 1: This spirit was a nursery bogey, which adults customarily and
Speaker 1: cynically used to intimidate children into behaving themselves properly. Little
Speaker 1: children like Agnes believed in nursery bogies, but wiser adults
Speaker 1: did not. This is one instance where adult duplicity and
Speaker 1: terrorization of children backfired when a child believed her elders
Speaker 1: lies enough to act on them in order to get revenge. Well,
Speaker 1: there we go. We've reached a like peak bleakness for
Speaker 1: this episode. That's a sad story, but it does illustrate
Speaker 1: something interesting about how you know, we've been talking about
Speaker 1: using the idea of a specter or water hag or
Speaker 1: a monster to warn children away from real danger. But
Speaker 1: this tends to show that if, if this is really
Speaker 1: what happened in this case, a child's belief in the
Speaker 1: existence of this kind of creature could actually cause her
Speaker 1: to call it to kill herself, to cause harm to herself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's powerful magic to start messing with the
Speaker 1: magic of belief. All right, I think we should take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back we will
Speaker 1: talk about other specters of the water than All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, Robert, tell me about Nelly long Arms. All right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so these are We're gonna run through a few different
Speaker 1: versions of of old Jenny Green Teeth here and these
Speaker 1: are all from again, that that excellent book by Carol Rose. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you look up Carol Rose and Monsters or Fairies
Speaker 1: you'll find her Encyclopedia's um they're all still in print
Speaker 1: and I always highly recommend them. Lots of wonderful illustrations.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we have Nelly long Arms, and she's essentially
Speaker 1: just Jenny Green Teeth with the fangs and the green skin,
Speaker 1: but with added elongated arms and spidery fingers. And you'll
Speaker 1: find her in the folklore of Derbyshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Shropshire
Speaker 1: and york Ire. And there's also a nearly identical long
Speaker 1: armed monster named We've discussed this in already the Grindy Low,
Speaker 1: and it's tied more specifically New Yorkshire. And then there's
Speaker 1: Peg Powler. This is another creature of the same sword
Speaker 1: and this one is just straight up identical to Jenny
Speaker 1: Green Teeth. But she said to live specifically in the
Speaker 1: River Tease and belongs to the folklore of the border
Speaker 1: region between Yorkshire and Durham Now. Carol Rose also mentions
Speaker 1: a male incarnation of the same entity named Cutty Dyer.
Speaker 1: This one is from the folklore of Ashburton in Somerset, England,
Speaker 1: and he said to haunt the bridge over the river. Yo.
Speaker 1: I believe it is white yo ye. And he's in
Speaker 1: a normal He described as an enormous man with eyes
Speaker 1: like saucers, and he'd emerge behind you and either pull
Speaker 1: you into the river or slit your throat and drink
Speaker 1: your blood. And she she shares the following little ditty
Speaker 1: that's attributed to an ollably blind ash And resident in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two. Remembering this is you know from from
Speaker 1: his childhood. It goes, don't he go down the river's
Speaker 1: eyde cuttie die? Or do abide cutty dire, ain't no
Speaker 1: good cutty die, or drink your blood. This one didn't
Speaker 1: come with sheet music, so I don't know if if
Speaker 1: it had a tune to it or is just like
Speaker 1: something you might chant. I kind of like the idea
Speaker 1: of it just being a dirge. Now. Water monsters have
Speaker 1: just got to be one of the best kind of monsters,
Speaker 1: right because they can play on several different fears at once. Right.
Speaker 1: They can be near you without you knowing it because
Speaker 1: they're underneath the surface and maybe the water is dark
Speaker 1: or murky and you can't see down there. But they
Speaker 1: also play on fears of drowning. Once they get you
Speaker 1: down into their world, they've got all the power. You're
Speaker 1: not going to be able to defend yourself much underwater.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of great water monsters around the world,
Speaker 1: far too many for us to talk about today. Right.
Speaker 1: For example, we've talked about the Japanese monster, the Kappa before.
Speaker 1: That's right, the Japanese spirit. It kind of looks like
Speaker 1: a ninja turtle, but with a little pool of water
Speaker 1: and its skull and if you get it to bow
Speaker 1: to you and the water spills out, then it loses
Speaker 1: its vital essence. Yeah. So so they're all over the world.
Speaker 1: But since we're talking about Jenny Green Teeth today, I
Speaker 1: think we can specifically focus on like water monsters of
Speaker 1: the British Isles. Right, So, another one I know about
Speaker 1: that Katherine Briggs wrote about is the idea of the kelpie.
Speaker 1: Katherine Briggs wrote that Scotland has a kelpie in every
Speaker 1: lonely lock. Yeah, the kelpie is very interesting. This is
Speaker 1: this is one um. I don't know if I read
Speaker 1: about it before Dungeons and Dragons or if I was
Speaker 1: initially introduced to it in Dungeon Dragons, but it's I
Speaker 1: think long been um, an inmate of the monster manual.
Speaker 1: But it's a traditional Scottish monster said to haunt the
Speaker 1: shores of locks forwards and fairy points. And it seems
Speaker 1: to be more robust than a mirror nursery bogie, or
Speaker 1: or at least it evolved beyond that point. Maybe it
Speaker 1: ended up the influencing some of these other entities we've
Speaker 1: been discussing, but it does have a far more robust
Speaker 1: air of legend about it. It can appear as a
Speaker 1: shaggy old man, a handsome young man, or most famously,
Speaker 1: a beautiful black or gray horse. WHOA, that's a departure. Yeah. Never,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful woman though, which it seems unnecessary for
Speaker 1: it to take that form, because the horse form was
Speaker 1: sufficient to attract women, young men, and children alike. Everybody
Speaker 1: loves a gorgeous horse. Do they do you when you
Speaker 1: just see a horse? Do you walk up to it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, especially back in the day, like like this,
Speaker 1: it was value. I love also the mythic dimension of it.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this kind of idea that maybe more
Speaker 1: tender individuals they want to go and meet the animal,
Speaker 1: and maybe harsher individuals they just see maybe the monetary
Speaker 1: value or the raw power of the thing. I guess. So,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, the monetary value is I guess like seeing
Speaker 1: a horse without an owner or a parent would be
Speaker 1: what kind of seeing like a free car are somewhere?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean horse thieves were everywhere, right, So
Speaker 1: there's kind of this idea that unattended horse is also
Speaker 1: you know, it's something that maybe it belongs to somebody
Speaker 1: and maybe you're just gonna try and steal it. But
Speaker 1: the idea here is that the creature the Kelpie was
Speaker 1: was a portent of drowning an aquatic doom. But if
Speaker 1: you could force a bridle over it, you could harness
Speaker 1: the power of the kelpie and ride it. And there
Speaker 1: are various tales of like individuals who successfully rode the
Speaker 1: kelpie and and what one might do with the harnessed
Speaker 1: power of the kelpie that sort of thing. What would
Speaker 1: you do? Um, you would basically just just run them
Speaker 1: up for a little bit. There are also some tales
Speaker 1: of like the kelpie powering water wheels at mills. So
Speaker 1: there's this interesting idea of like the kelpie being this, uh,
Speaker 1: the embodiment of just the raw power and danger of
Speaker 1: of water. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: a horse, you know, something that may be tamed and used.
Speaker 1: I've done so respectful, but that ive you if you
Speaker 1: step out of line or you don't know what you're doing,
Speaker 1: you can easily be killed by it. Yeah, And of
Speaker 1: course a brook can gallop the same way a horse can. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we see some more dualities like that in other
Speaker 1: water creatures. Like one that comes to mind I think
Speaker 1: is is it would it be the marrow or the
Speaker 1: mirrow marrow of Ireland. Yes, there there's some versions of
Speaker 1: this that are more purely monstrous, and other versions that
Speaker 1: appear to be less less dangerous, less monstrous. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: is described by Carol Rose. He gives a pretty friendly
Speaker 1: account of them, that they're peaceful and they generally get
Speaker 1: along with humans. They have a little red cap that
Speaker 1: allows them to shape shift and walk on land and uh,
Speaker 1: and that they sometimes breed with humans as well. But
Speaker 1: from that Percy B. Green book I mentioned earlier. Now,
Speaker 1: who knows this is from the eighteen hundred, so maybe
Speaker 1: Green's folklore work is is not super rigorous. But Green
Speaker 1: has a much darker vision of the mirrow. He writes,
Speaker 1: quote the Irish fisherman's belief in the soul's cages and
Speaker 1: the mirror or man of the sea was once held
Speaker 1: in general esteem by the men who earned a livelihood
Speaker 1: on the shores of the Atlantic. This mirrow or spirit
Speaker 1: of the waters sometimes took upon himself a half human form,
Speaker 1: and many a sailor on the Rocky coast of Western
Speaker 1: Ireland has told the tale of how he saw the
Speaker 1: mirrow basking in the sun watching a storm driven ship.
Speaker 1: His form is described as that of a half man,
Speaker 1: half fish, a thing with green hair, long green teeth,
Speaker 1: legs with scales on them, short arms like fins, a
Speaker 1: fish's tail, and a huge red nose. He wore no
Speaker 1: clothes and had a cocked hat like a sugar loaf,
Speaker 1: which was carried under the arm. Never did be put
Speaker 1: on the head unless for the purpose of diving into
Speaker 1: the sea. At such times, he caught all the souls
Speaker 1: of those drowned at sea and put them in cages
Speaker 1: made like lobster pots. Oh wow, I love how that
Speaker 1: this invokes plenty of you know, much older ideas of
Speaker 1: aquatic human It's and even like an old man of
Speaker 1: the sea. Uh, you know, much like like Proteus himself,
Speaker 1: but present there is this weird twist of him essentially
Speaker 1: taking out lobster pots to catch souls. Well, it strikes
Speaker 1: me as a perhaps intentionally ironic or blasphemous inversion of
Speaker 1: the Christian idea of being a fisher of men. The
Speaker 1: marrow is a fisher of men. Interesting. Now, I also
Speaker 1: have to mention one of one of my favorite depictions
Speaker 1: of of of a fresh water monster, and that's the
Speaker 1: illustration What Came of Picking Jessamine by Henry Justice Ford,
Speaker 1: an illustration in Andrew Lang's The Gray Fairy book. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a great illustration, right, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: make sure to include this on the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. It's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
Speaker 1: so everybody can check it out. But it's but that
Speaker 1: the book itself, The Gray Fairy. This is available as
Speaker 1: well on the web. I think Project Gutenberg has it
Speaker 1: and you can you can get the PDF and scroll
Speaker 1: through it and read these various uh fairy tales from
Speaker 1: throughout Europe and uh and and even beyond I believe,
Speaker 1: but they all have these wonderful illustrations as well. But um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna kind of just roll through the story really quickly.
Speaker 1: It's an illustration though from the Portuguese fairy tale What
Speaker 1: Came of Picking Flowers? And I'm gonna try and roll
Speaker 1: through it real quick for everybody. Basically, a woman's three
Speaker 1: daughters are lost in the process of picking three different plants.
Speaker 1: A pink carnation arose, and then some Jessamine or or Jasmine.
Speaker 1: Their brother, the only survivor in the family, grows up,
Speaker 1: acquires some magical items, and decides to get his lost
Speaker 1: sisters back. But as it turns out, the first sister
Speaker 1: was not dead, but locked away in the magic castle,
Speaker 1: trapped in I guess you can just say a magical
Speaker 1: marriage arrangement with the King of the Birds. So he
Speaker 1: fixes that, and then he becomes a friend of the
Speaker 1: King of the birds. Wait, so removes the King of
Speaker 1: the Bird's wife who is his sister, but also becomes
Speaker 1: friends with the King of the Birds. Well, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna just just to to simplify things, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: say he fixes their magical scenario because the first two
Speaker 1: sisters here are are less important for our purpose this here.
Speaker 1: But then he goes off and seaches searches for the
Speaker 1: second sister. He finds that she too is trapped in
Speaker 1: a magical marriage to the King of the Fish. And
Speaker 1: here it sounds like there's more of a Lady Hawks
Speaker 1: scenario where husbands a fish half the time, and it's
Speaker 1: it's a kind of annoying. So he manages to fix
Speaker 1: this scenario as well, and becomes a friend of the
Speaker 1: King of the fish is the brother Rutger Howerd And
Speaker 1: when I was reading, I certainly pictured him like that,
Speaker 1: like Rudgar Howard, but with more of a fishy look
Speaker 1: to him. And then finally he sets out for the
Speaker 1: third sister and find finds that she was in fact
Speaker 1: captured by a monster. This monster that we see in
Speaker 1: this illustration. What came of picking Jessamine. This troll like
Speaker 1: entity that grabbed her, came up out of the water
Speaker 1: and pulled her in. But this monster has been keeping
Speaker 1: her prisoner in his castle because she refuses to marry him.
Speaker 1: So the brother sneaks in and he talks to her
Speaker 1: about this, and he says, look, here's what you need
Speaker 1: to do. Promise to marry the monster, but only if
Speaker 1: he tells you how he can die. Tell make sure
Speaker 1: that he tells you the secret of his death, because
Speaker 1: like a lot of magical creatures, you know, there's only
Speaker 1: one way, one specific way you can kill it. That
Speaker 1: is a smart pre nup. Yeah, so I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're a horrible monster. But anyway, this uh, the
Speaker 1: monster here He just kind of laughs and says, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you because this information will be completely useless,
Speaker 1: especially to you. And he tells her that there's an
Speaker 1: iron casket at the bottom of the sea and it
Speaker 1: contains a magical dove, and that dove's egg, if dashed
Speaker 1: against the monster's forehead, will kill it. Okay, so um,
Speaker 1: you know he la has a good laugh at that.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile the brother uh sneaks away and he goes
Speaker 1: to the King of the fish and convinces the King
Speaker 1: of the fish, who you know owes in one to
Speaker 1: fetch the casket, which he does. Uh. They're running the
Speaker 1: cast it up, and then the bird flies out of
Speaker 1: the casket. So he asked the King of the birds
Speaker 1: to grab the dove and bring it back. So the
Speaker 1: King of the Birds goes off, gets the dove, brings
Speaker 1: it back. He ends up with that egg, and he
Speaker 1: rushes back to where the monster is waiting impatiently for
Speaker 1: the go ahead to marry the sister. He's becoming, you know, impatient.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna read the last little bit from
Speaker 1: Andrew Lang's version of the story quote. At a sign
Speaker 1: from her brother, she sat down and invited the old
Speaker 1: monster to lay its head on her lap. He did
Speaker 1: so with delight, and her brother, standing behind her back,
Speaker 1: passed her the egg unseen. She took it and dashed
Speaker 1: it straight at the horrible head, and the monster started
Speaker 1: and with a groan that people took for the rumblings
Speaker 1: of an earthquake, he turned over and died. That's a
Speaker 1: boss fight for the ages. Yeah. I love it. It
Speaker 1: it it's it's one of those fairy tales. It's maybe
Speaker 1: a little shaky in the early goings, but it totally
Speaker 1: delivers at the end. I like how the the alliance
Speaker 1: with the King of the Birds and they of the
Speaker 1: fish comes through. Yeah. Yeah, this is one I would
Speaker 1: have loved to have seen Jim Hinson's storyteller bring the
Speaker 1: life because it's it's it's a little bit. It's perfect
Speaker 1: because it's a little bit weird and it has a
Speaker 1: really hideous monster in it and a kind of whimsical
Speaker 1: way of defeating it. That is a great story. But
Speaker 1: I want to go back to Jinny Green Teeth and
Speaker 1: discuss a little bit more about what the Jenny Green
Speaker 1: Teeth lore means, like what it tells us about culture,
Speaker 1: about our values, our psychology, and so one of the
Speaker 1: things that's explored is the the importance of the color
Speaker 1: green in the jinny green teeth lore. Anny Gilchrist, in
Speaker 1: her paper on the Lady Dressed in Green, talks about
Speaker 1: this a good bit. She says that in in England
Speaker 1: at the time, the color green is widely believed to
Speaker 1: be a quote ill omened hue for a garment because
Speaker 1: it symbolizes the loss of maidenhood or the loss of
Speaker 1: a lover. Uh. And there's this saying apparently that green
Speaker 1: is forsaken and yellows forsworn, or green can also symbolize
Speaker 1: being passed over for younger bride quote, as in the
Speaker 1: case of the green stockings or garters, in which the
Speaker 1: elder unmarried sisters had to dance at a younger sister's wedding.
Speaker 1: But she also writes that quote the unluckiness of green
Speaker 1: clothing must be a very old belief and perhaps had
Speaker 1: reference originally to a fear of incurring the hostility of
Speaker 1: the spirits of the woods by borrowing their livery. So
Speaker 1: the idea there is that the fairies, the fairies are
Speaker 1: not nice. I mean this is a sort of modern
Speaker 1: thing that we think fairies are. Oh, fairies are sweet,
Speaker 1: they're fun traditionally, I think fairies are much more nasty creatures.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the fairy folk are are generally best thought
Speaker 1: of as uh, poorly understood, magical alien folk that kind
Speaker 1: of lived and live in the folds of realities. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so if the fairies dress in green, they can
Speaker 1: easily be made jealous to see humans dressing in green apparently.
Speaker 1: Uh and so gil Christ talks about how there's a
Speaker 1: book called folk Floor of the Northern Countries by a
Speaker 1: writer named Henderson and hend person Rice quote. Green, ever,
Speaker 1: an ominous color in the Lowlands of Scotland, must on
Speaker 1: no account be worn there at a wedding. The fairies
Speaker 1: whose chosen color it is would resent the insult and
Speaker 1: destroy the wearer. Henderson also claims that mothers in the
Speaker 1: south of England sometimes forbid their daughters from wearing green,
Speaker 1: and avoid even having green furniture in their houses. And
Speaker 1: also there's a general belief in the folk rhymes of
Speaker 1: the time that the color green is a sign of
Speaker 1: hatred when given as a token from someone, So like,
Speaker 1: you would give someone a blue ribbon as a sign
Speaker 1: of true love, but you'd give someone a green ribbon
Speaker 1: as a sign of hatred. Gil Christ also says that
Speaker 1: a tailor once told her that his workers hated to
Speaker 1: see a green garment come into their come into their
Speaker 1: shop for mending. Says, they believe that there's this rotten
Speaker 1: curse of the color and it could fall on them
Speaker 1: as well, for for for working on it. And then
Speaker 1: she also says, of course that the color green is
Speaker 1: associated with poison. So I think this is interesting because
Speaker 1: I think of green as a very nice, RESTful, pleasant color.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think green is my favorite color. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of of modern individuals associated with green, Like,
Speaker 1: what's the greenest superhero? I guess like green Lantern, writer's green.
Speaker 1: There's another green, Well, there's green Goblin, but he's he's bad.
Speaker 1: What's the green Hornet? Green Hornet. I don't know much
Speaker 1: about green Hornet, and I'm sure he wears all that
Speaker 1: much green. Confession, I don't know that much about superheroes.
Speaker 1: There's Peter Pan, kind of a superhero. Well he you know,
Speaker 1: Pan embodies sort of the spirits of wildness in the forest.
Speaker 1: He's sort of wearing green because he is a fairy
Speaker 1: in a way. Peter Pan is like Pan. You know,
Speaker 1: Robin Hood as well, yeah, these green garments, I think
Speaker 1: are associated with the fact that that a person is
Speaker 1: sort of is of nature, is of the fairy world,
Speaker 1: is untamed and uncivilized, and not not necessarily subject to
Speaker 1: say the Christian authorities. You know, this would I think
Speaker 1: this would be a topic for another day. But then
Speaker 1: you could you could also explore the whole realm of
Speaker 1: the green man or the green night from our thirty
Speaker 1: in legend. Well, yeah, I think that that would be
Speaker 1: a great thing to explore. And whatever is going on
Speaker 1: with the color green in in gilchrist time is is definitely,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, not reflected in the
Speaker 1: color psychology of late twentie in early twenty one century
Speaker 1: scientific journals, and as far as I can tell, most
Speaker 1: of this research appears to be on Americans. And I
Speaker 1: can see how color psychology could be hugely influenced by culture,
Speaker 1: of course, like it would really depend on like the
Speaker 1: culture of the people you're testing. Yeah, I mean one
Speaker 1: modern example of this, if I'm remembering the antidote, the
Speaker 1: anecdote goes correctly. Um, we've touched on before the importance
Speaker 1: of red uh in Chinese culture. Uh, and I believe
Speaker 1: it has to do with phone uh smartphone design. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea of something going from red to green being
Speaker 1: a positive movement and say checking off a tab or something.
Speaker 1: But I've i've my understanding was correct. For Chinese markets,
Speaker 1: you'll often see an inversion of that, like to go
Speaker 1: to the positive movement cannot be away from red. It
Speaker 1: must be towards red, because red is the most auspicious color. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, and so I think it's pretty clear that
Speaker 1: color psychology is going to be heavily influenced by culture.
Speaker 1: I doubt that there is just like a you know,
Speaker 1: a universal color association thing across human beings that's part
Speaker 1: of our biological brains or something. Oh yeah, Like I've
Speaker 1: read before about interpretations of the color pink and about
Speaker 1: how we we fell into this kind of you know,
Speaker 1: grotesque cohole of just assuming that like pink is a
Speaker 1: feminine color, whereas you see older traditions where pink was
Speaker 1: very much a masculine color, and ultimately like what is
Speaker 1: what is the color of fresh wounds on the battlefield?
Speaker 1: You know? But pink and red? You know, I think
Speaker 1: of the I believe pink is the color and Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones attributed to the Bolton's, it's like red and
Speaker 1: pink or their colors because they don't like flaying human flesh,
Speaker 1: those creeps. Yeah, well, anyway, just what whatever all the
Speaker 1: caveats are and how this is influenced by culture and everything.
Speaker 1: I was poking around in a few studies about color psychology,
Speaker 1: and generally what it seemed to be. What seemed to
Speaker 1: be the case to me is that green is not
Speaker 1: usually viewed by the subjects of these studies as something
Speaker 1: that's cursed or scary or or an ill omen Blue
Speaker 1: and green are generally seen as more psychologically relaxing, whereas
Speaker 1: red and yellow or more arousing and more associated with anxiety.
Speaker 1: States Um and the authors of one study described how
Speaker 1: green was described the word green was associated with the
Speaker 1: quality of being good, whereas like the word yellow was
Speaker 1: associated with the quality of being bad, and that blue
Speaker 1: and blue, green and green were colors that cause subjects
Speaker 1: to feel more pleasure than colors like yellow and yellow. Green.
Speaker 1: Here's another significant thing in the ginny green teeth folklore,
Speaker 1: and it is the significance of a articular green plant.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk about a paper called Lemna
Speaker 1: Minor and Jenny Green Teeth by a botanist, an English
Speaker 1: botanist named Roy Vickery, who has apparently written a good
Speaker 1: deal about the folklore of plants. And this was published
Speaker 1: in the journal Folklore in nine three. And this was
Speaker 1: a great paper about Jenny Green Teeth because he's picking
Speaker 1: up on the work of people like Catherine Briggs and
Speaker 1: Vickery wants to give a fuller account of Jenny Green
Speaker 1: Teeth and explore the relationship between Jenny and this water
Speaker 1: plant known as lesser duckweed or Lemna minor. Now Limna
Speaker 1: minor you've probably seen before. I added a picture to
Speaker 1: our our outline here Roberts, so you can take a
Speaker 1: look at it. But Lemna minor the duckweed is a
Speaker 1: is a green plant that floats on the top of
Speaker 1: stagnant water in ponds and pools. And it has very
Speaker 1: small leaves and can end up looking like a flat
Speaker 1: matte of green on top of the water. If it
Speaker 1: collects enough, it can make a watery surface look just
Speaker 1: sort of like a flat putting green or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like the hard phone cap atop an old school cappuccino,
Speaker 1: except green. It totally is so uh so. Vickory writes,
Speaker 1: the stories of Jinny Green Teeth are still told around
Speaker 1: the Liverpool area, and Liverpool is of course northwest England,
Speaker 1: near Lancashire, and he writes quote, Usually she's considered to
Speaker 1: be a bogey who inhabits quiet pools and drags venturesome
Speaker 1: children down into the depths. Sometimes she's considered to be
Speaker 1: the harmless water plant lesser duckweed, and occasionally she can
Speaker 1: be found far away from any pool. And in his
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty nine book of book The Flora of Liverpool,
Speaker 1: author TV Hall notes that quote, marl pits abound on
Speaker 1: both sides of the Mercy, which is a river going
Speaker 1: through that area, and are caused in most instances by
Speaker 1: excavating clay for the purpose of making bricks. Before these
Speaker 1: pits are a year old, they're filled with aquatic plants,
Speaker 1: and specifically, of course that plant is general really lesser duckweed.
Speaker 1: This small green plant that floats on the top of
Speaker 1: the water has these little root ten drils that extend
Speaker 1: down into the water, but can look like this matt
Speaker 1: from above, and Vickery writes quote, In summer, such pools
Speaker 1: are frequently covered with a dense mat composed of thousands
Speaker 1: of floating duckweed plants so that their surfaces appear solid Lesser.
Speaker 1: Duckweed is one of the world's smallest flowering plants, each
Speaker 1: plant measuring one point five to four millimeters in diameter,
Speaker 1: with tiny and significant flowers and a thread like root
Speaker 1: which may reach several centimeters in length. Obviously, any child
Speaker 1: who attempted to walk across a pond covered with duckweed
Speaker 1: would soon find himself in serious difficulty, and so, of
Speaker 1: course this creates an interesting association that for some children. Apparently,
Speaker 1: Jenny green Teeth was not a name for a magical monster,
Speaker 1: but was literally the name for the duckweed itself. And
Speaker 1: Vicary quotes the experience of a woman who recounted her
Speaker 1: childhood memories about Jenny Green Teeth to him in the
Speaker 1: December of nineteen eighty. She starts by talking about the
Speaker 1: area where she was brought up, and then she says, quote,
Speaker 1: it was and still is, largely a farming area, and
Speaker 1: many of the fields contained pits, never ponds, which I
Speaker 1: believe our old moral pits. Some of them have quite
Speaker 1: steep sides. Jenny was well known to me and my contemporaries,
Speaker 1: and was simply the green weed duck weed which covered
Speaker 1: the surface of stagnant water. Children who strayed too close
Speaker 1: to the edge of these pits would be warned to
Speaker 1: watch out Virginny green teeth. But it was the weed
Speaker 1: itself which was believed to hold children under the water.
Speaker 1: There was never any suggestion that there was a witch
Speaker 1: of any kind there. And then another firsthand account, the
Speaker 1: vicary quotes quote, as a child in the countryside of Cheshire,
Speaker 1: I heard the name Jenny green Teeth given to the
Speaker 1: bright green water plant that lies on the surface of
Speaker 1: stagnant ponds. The minute leaves are rather like tiny teeth,
Speaker 1: and imagine that if one fell into the pond, the
Speaker 1: green scum like plant would close over one's head. Thus
Speaker 1: Jinny green Teeth had got you. Now that's an interesting
Speaker 1: development there. There's still this predatory aspect being imputed to
Speaker 1: Jenny Green Teeth. But she's not a hag, she's not
Speaker 1: a witch. It's the plant that kills you. It lures
Speaker 1: you into the water by making it look like a
Speaker 1: solid surface, and then when you fall in. The children
Speaker 1: imagined this plant would close over top of you like
Speaker 1: a like a membrane ceiling you under the water interesting,
Speaker 1: So we kind of have a they're meeting is halfway
Speaker 1: between like actual realistic fear and an outlandish monstrous invention,
Speaker 1: right because there's no indication that duck weed will actually
Speaker 1: close over you and prevent you from getting out of
Speaker 1: the water. But it can be dangerous because it can
Speaker 1: make a deep pit of water look like a solid
Speaker 1: surface that you could just run straight into. So one
Speaker 1: question is did this association between the Jenny green teeth
Speaker 1: monster and duck weed begin earlier late? Like, was Jenny
Speaker 1: a pre existing bogey figure who later came to be
Speaker 1: identified with duck weed or was she always a creature
Speaker 1: of the weed? And I think the answer is not
Speaker 1: quite clear. Vicary cites one scholar who wrote that the
Speaker 1: association had to be recent, since he believed Jenny quote
Speaker 1: had descended from the water spirits of Gothic mythology, whose
Speaker 1: great seductive beauty was somewhat marred by their green teeth.
Speaker 1: And of course this makes me think about a principle
Speaker 1: we've talked about several times from that book The Demon
Speaker 1: Lovers by Walter Stevens, Yeah and Demon Lovers, Witchcraft, Sex,
Speaker 1: and Crisis of Belief. He examines a number of different
Speaker 1: texts associated with which with witchcraft, persecution, witchcraft, theory of
Speaker 1: the day, and one of the texts that he looks
Speaker 1: at is The witch or on the Illusions of Demons
Speaker 1: by Jeanne Francesco Pica del Mirandola, who died in fifteen
Speaker 1: thirty three. Now Pico was the nephew of the influential
Speaker 1: philosopher Giovanni Pico, and Pico the younger here was wasn't
Speaker 1: was an influential thinker of the days. Well, he was
Speaker 1: an intellectual who championed, quote, the truths of Christianity against
Speaker 1: the crescendo of skepticism that he felt Aristotelian science fostered
Speaker 1: by encouraging an empirical attitude towards the world. So Stevens
Speaker 1: wrote that he quote brilliantly understood the way to fight
Speaker 1: skepticism was with skepticism itself. So, in other words, Pico
Speaker 1: was an enemy of reason who used his intellectual gifts
Speaker 1: to champion religious worldview over skepticism. His works enforced quite
Speaker 1: literally the idea of a demon haunted world. But Pico,
Speaker 1: in his work, he describes a conversation between four individuals,
Speaker 1: including the inquisitor dicasti, so which means judge who quote
Speaker 1: helpfully explains that all the trial records of the inquisition
Speaker 1: revealed that the devil can create a nearly perfect facsimile
Speaker 1: of the human body, but never can get the feat
Speaker 1: to come out right. Never the feat. God makes the
Speaker 1: feat come out in verse those at preposteros, so that
Speaker 1: people will know that they are in the presence of
Speaker 1: a devil and not be fooled into thinking that he
Speaker 1: is human. Thus they have no excuse for sinning. The corollary,
Speaker 1: which Decosts does not state, is equally important. Imperfect feet
Speaker 1: are an infallible way of recognizing demons, so we should
Speaker 1: not fear that which is mistake ordinary humans for demons.
Speaker 1: So perhaps you know Jenny works along some more lines
Speaker 1: or or plays upon these trends and storytelling, right, well,
Speaker 1: I think the idea here would not necessarily be Jenny herself,
Speaker 1: but would be the creatures that this scholar is saying
Speaker 1: that Jenny descends from. The idea of the green teeth
Speaker 1: comes to us from the fact that there would be
Speaker 1: the seductive water spirits who might they might be beautiful
Speaker 1: to lure men into the water and drown them. But
Speaker 1: like like the witches that Dacostis is talking about here,
Speaker 1: would have one feature that would be a tell that
Speaker 1: would let you know that God has not allowed this
Speaker 1: demon to be a perfect mimicking of human beauty. And
Speaker 1: that tell is that she's got disgusting green teeth. Well,
Speaker 1: and from a storytelling standpoint, it's always great to have
Speaker 1: that that little uh, that that little detail at the
Speaker 1: last minute that clares everyone in, Oh, it's not a woman,
Speaker 1: it's a demon, etcetera. Uh. Incidentally, this also reminded me
Speaker 1: of a line from C. S. Lewis is The Lion,
Speaker 1: the Witch and the Wardrobe, where it's written quote, when
Speaker 1: you meet anything that is going to be human and
Speaker 1: isn't yet or used to be human once, and isn't
Speaker 1: now or ought to be human, and isn't you keep
Speaker 1: your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet. Sound advice,
Speaker 1: sound violent advice, sound advice. Alright, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take one more break and we'll come back. We're
Speaker 1: gonna discuss duckweed a little bit more. We're gonna discuss
Speaker 1: Jenny Green teeth a little bit more, and then we're
Speaker 1: going to close out. Thank thank alright, we're back. So.
Speaker 1: Vickery also in his paper sites other first hand accounts
Speaker 1: that the association with duckweed also also goes the other way.
Speaker 1: It's not just that Jinny green Teeth is a nickname
Speaker 1: for the lesser duck weed. It's that lesser duck weed
Speaker 1: could be a sign that Jenny green Teeth is lurking underneath. Uh.
Speaker 1: In an interview with a thirty four year old woman
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty uh, the interview goes quote, I remember,
Speaker 1: as a very small child being told by my mother
Speaker 1: to stay away from ponds, as Jenny green Teeth lived
Speaker 1: in them. However, I only recall Jenny living in ponds
Speaker 1: which were covered in green weed, of a type which
Speaker 1: has tiny leaves and covers the entire surface of the pond.
Speaker 1: The theory was that Jinny enticed little children into the
Speaker 1: ponds by making them look like grass and safe to
Speaker 1: walk on. As soon as the child stepped onto the
Speaker 1: green it of course parted, and the child fell through
Speaker 1: into Jenny's clutches and was drowned. The green weed then
Speaker 1: closed over, hiding all traces of the child ever being there.
Speaker 1: This last point was the one which really terrified me.
Speaker 1: And kept me well away from the ponds. And indeed
Speaker 1: my own children have also been told about Jenny, although
Speaker 1: ponds aren't as numerous these days. As far as I know,
Speaker 1: Jenny had no known form due to the fact that
Speaker 1: she never appeared above the surface of the pond. So
Speaker 1: here the matt on the surface of the pond is
Speaker 1: it's like a trick that Jenny green Teeth uses. She
Speaker 1: is a hag, she is a witch, but she uses
Speaker 1: the duck weed to lure people to her. But then,
Speaker 1: also interestingly, Vickery mentions that Jenny would sometimes get dislocated
Speaker 1: from her home turf like children who grew up in
Speaker 1: Liverpool recount how they believe Jenny Green Teeth didn't live
Speaker 1: in ponds or pools, but in churchyard cemeteries, and that
Speaker 1: she would reach out and drag children into the graveyard
Speaker 1: and then into burial vaults. And then here's a really
Speaker 1: interesting one. In the nineteen forties, parents in South Cheshire
Speaker 1: told children that Jenny would get them if they ventured
Speaker 1: too close to the railroad tracks. So Jenny Jenny green
Speaker 1: Teeth of the the industrial world. Now, that is interesting
Speaker 1: because it seems like the idea that the train could
Speaker 1: run you over. That seems far more over, Like, do
Speaker 1: you really need to invoke mythology uh to make that
Speaker 1: that uh, that threat reel. Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1: I think we can come back to that at the
Speaker 1: very end. But you know, one of the things that
Speaker 1: we haven't really talked about yet is the idea that, uh,
Speaker 1: that water's edge attacks strategies are actually a pretty common
Speaker 1: ambush tactic of some predators. Right. Oh yeah, Well, let's
Speaker 1: let's discuss a few of them here, because some of
Speaker 1: them are are really impressive. I think the most obvious
Speaker 1: one and maybe it's just most obvious to us because
Speaker 1: we watch enough nature documentaries uh and or terrible movies,
Speaker 1: but croco crocodilian species their attack strategies. So crocodilians, you know,
Speaker 1: everything from alligators and crocodiles to more you know, to
Speaker 1: lesser known creatures such as the cayman. Uh. Crocodilians are
Speaker 1: specialized in hunting both in the water and at the
Speaker 1: water's edge, so they they're ambush predators. They wait for
Speaker 1: prey to come close, such as near the water to drink,
Speaker 1: and then they lash out with amazing speed. Uh. And
Speaker 1: there's some fabulous Nature documentary documentary footage out there of,
Speaker 1: for instance, nile crocodiles attacking will the beast that are
Speaker 1: either drinking or preparing to cross bodies of water during migration.
Speaker 1: And much like the stories of Jenny Green Teeth, one
Speaker 1: of the things about a lot of crocodilian attack strategies
Speaker 1: is that they get you into their world, into the
Speaker 1: water world that they control. So like, if you're just
Speaker 1: out on land, you might easily be able to get
Speaker 1: away from a crocodile, But if the crocodile can get
Speaker 1: up close to you and can snatch you and get
Speaker 1: you into the water and do this thing that's often
Speaker 1: referred to as the death roll, this twisting ocean in
Speaker 1: the water that breaks your bones, that disorients you, and
Speaker 1: then you can allow it to drown you in the
Speaker 1: water before it feasts on you. Um. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a way that it gets you into its domain. It's
Speaker 1: like Jenny Green Teeth pulling you down undernea the mat
Speaker 1: of the duck weed. I have to admit I was
Speaker 1: nearly pulled in and overtaken by just research related to
Speaker 1: crocodilians because I ran across a paper titled on terrestrial
Speaker 1: hunting by crocodilians by Vladimir Dennets Uh. And and he points, uh,
Speaker 1: you know out that purely terrestrial attacks yea, even on
Speaker 1: humans are documented. So we're talking about attacks that take
Speaker 1: place not in the water, not at the water's edge,
Speaker 1: but outside of the water. Now, I don't mean like
Speaker 1: you know, you know, downtown New York City or anything.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about area near the water wouldn't rule anything out,
Speaker 1: but but it but that they do occur, uh. For
Speaker 1: and this is a particularly interesting You have the Cuban crocodile,
Speaker 1: which apparently is is the most terrestrial of of of
Speaker 1: today's crocodilian species in that it is more adapt at
Speaker 1: at moving about and uh and even hunting out of
Speaker 1: the water. And uh, it's thought that the Cuban crocodiles
Speaker 1: ancestors may have used pack hunting behavior to take down
Speaker 1: giant ground slots in the past, giant ground slots. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's just again just a tantalizing tidbit that maybe
Speaker 1: we can come back to in a later episode, the
Speaker 1: idea of pack hunting Cuban crocodile ancestors. So that would
Speaker 1: be the what the megatherium? Yeah, those things look like
Speaker 1: I wouldn't imagine anything would mess with them. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: if you have enough enough land crocs, then who knows. Now.
Speaker 1: Another really impressive organism to talk about here is the
Speaker 1: archer fish. And this one also is kind of superstar
Speaker 1: of certain nature documentaries. So it's a family of fish
Speaker 1: that's evolved an amazing means of hunting prey. Uh. They
Speaker 1: shoot a highly specialized stream of water at insects on
Speaker 1: branches that are overhanging the water, and they spit this
Speaker 1: stream in such a way that high the higher velocity
Speaker 1: rear portion of the stream catches up to the lower
Speaker 1: velocity front portion of the stream right before it hits
Speaker 1: the target, jamming everything into a glob, just one solid
Speaker 1: globe of water. So it just really pops. It's like
Speaker 1: a it's a water bomb. Yeah, it's it's just a
Speaker 1: water bomb that hits them and then knocks the insect
Speaker 1: off into the water where it can get them. It
Speaker 1: uses exceptional eyesight to aim, as well as an ability
Speaker 1: to compensate for the refraction of light as it passes
Speaker 1: through the air water interface, which is impressive in and
Speaker 1: of itself. And then it's also interesting to know that
Speaker 1: they're they're not born dead eyes. They actually have to
Speaker 1: practice and learn by observing other fish in their school. Interesting,
Speaker 1: so usually think of fish is learning very much. I
Speaker 1: know that these are from several different angles. These are
Speaker 1: fascinating creatures. They also use their water jet attack underwater,
Speaker 1: and they've been observed jumping out of the water to
Speaker 1: catch prey as well. Now their their jet of water.
Speaker 1: It has a functional range of something like one to
Speaker 1: two meters or three ft three inches to six ft
Speaker 1: seven inches, but they can shoot it farther than that,
Speaker 1: but it just doesn't have particularly good aim beyond that point,
Speaker 1: you know. Another example I would like to mention is
Speaker 1: the fact that we all know seals and sea lions
Speaker 1: can be fearsome predators themselves, right, but sometimes, of course
Speaker 1: they have to flee a more powerful flesh gobbler, which
Speaker 1: is the orca, the killer whale. Oh goodness, and this
Speaker 1: is another superstar of nature documentaries. Yes, Now, normally, if
Speaker 1: you're a seal of sea lion, the best way to
Speaker 1: escape a killer whale is going to be what swim
Speaker 1: full speed for sure, get onto the beach or the
Speaker 1: rocks of the orca can't reach you. Right then, you
Speaker 1: can just lay around all day and for the most part,
Speaker 1: nothing's gonna miss with you. Right, I'm thinking of the
Speaker 1: you know the swim Charlie swim scene in Jaws. Right,
Speaker 1: the shark won't follow you onto the beach. There are
Speaker 1: no land sharks. But one of the strangest attack strategies
Speaker 1: I've ever seen in nature is the way that the
Speaker 1: orca has learned to defy this logic. Sometimes orcas will
Speaker 1: deliberately beach themselves to catch prey that has escaped onto land.
Speaker 1: For example, the orcas of the Valdes Peninsula on the
Speaker 1: Atlantic coast of Argentina are known for doing this. They
Speaker 1: will chase a seal or sea lion that's on the
Speaker 1: ground or in the in the shallow water like the
Speaker 1: surf or just up on the rocks, and the orca
Speaker 1: will rock it towards the water line, crash over it
Speaker 1: onto land, snag a seal, and then flop around and
Speaker 1: slide back into the water, dragging the seal with them.
Speaker 1: It's an impressive and just awesome site. And and it's
Speaker 1: like the ultimate nightmare. Right, There's so many just unbelievably
Speaker 1: powerful predators in the water that you always think like, well,
Speaker 1: at least I'm safe on land. And to be clear
Speaker 1: with the target here is the seal. So yes, humans
Speaker 1: are safe from beach based orca attacks. Right, at least generally,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't rule out that it could never happen. Well,
Speaker 1: but I would not lose any sleepover right, No, yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing to go about your life worth and about. But hey,
Speaker 1: let's go to another similar example, Robert, I want you
Speaker 1: to put yourself in a in a city in France.
Speaker 1: Imagine yourself wandering along the river Tarn in southern France,
Speaker 1: in the commune of Albi. Like a lot of urban areas,
Speaker 1: Albi has its resident population of pigeons. We all know
Speaker 1: about city pigeons, and they're probably out there getting fat
Speaker 1: off of the bread that falls off the edges of
Speaker 1: cafe tables and stuff like that. The winged rats of
Speaker 1: civilization now in the river dwells a mighty leviathan, the
Speaker 1: European catfish. The European catfish Silarus glanis is not not
Speaker 1: native to this river, but it is this invasive species
Speaker 1: that has taken over rivers in in all throughout Europe,
Speaker 1: and it is Europe's largest freshwater fish. I believe it's
Speaker 1: the third largest freshwater fish in the world. And these
Speaker 1: things get big. I've read like a meter to even
Speaker 1: a meter and a half long, and they are thick. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to remind everybody that the catfish are generally
Speaker 1: regarded as a bottom feeder. Um. I imagine you you
Speaker 1: haven't grown up in Tennessee like I like I have,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of stories of the catfish that
Speaker 1: grow gigantic in the like the depths near dams, for instance. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And there weren't a lot of stories about them being
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess they were occasionally stories about them,
Speaker 1: you know, biting or whatnot. But for the most part, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're down there in the deep. They're not really concerned
Speaker 1: with the surface until you catch one on your reel
Speaker 1: and you bring it up right. So you're in albeit,
Speaker 1: you're going along the river and the river tarn, and
Speaker 1: you notice the pigeons are hanging out on a little
Speaker 1: gravel island to clean themselves by the water, and you,
Speaker 1: of course also see these invasive catfish, the monstrous catfish,
Speaker 1: floating around at the water's edge. And then suddenly what
Speaker 1: you see is that one of these leviathans lashes out
Speaker 1: of the shallows, partially beaches itself, clamps its jaws down
Speaker 1: on a pigeon's head or leg or wing, and then
Speaker 1: drags the bird down into the deeper part of the
Speaker 1: water to feast. There was a study into thousand twelve
Speaker 1: and pl Os one that that characterized this behavior by
Speaker 1: Julian coukros Set, Stephanie Bullatrow, Frederick Asamar, Arthur Compeen, Matthew Guillaume,
Speaker 1: and Frederick Santool, and the authors characterized the catfish in
Speaker 1: this case as freshwater killer whales. And now they noticed
Speaker 1: something interesting. Only moving pigeons were attacked, and the catfish
Speaker 1: that hunted pigeons would tend to hold their you know
Speaker 1: those whiskers catfish have on their faces, the barbels, They
Speaker 1: would tend to hold those erect while they were hunting.
Speaker 1: And this led the authors to conclude that the catfish
Speaker 1: were probably hunting by sensing vibrations in the water. But
Speaker 1: fascinating question, how did this hunting strategy come about? How
Speaker 1: did the how did the catfish start going from just
Speaker 1: you know, normal aquatic feeding behaviors to saying, yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: jump out of the water into the air, onto the
Speaker 1: land that would probably kill me, grab a pigeon and
Speaker 1: drag it in. How did it this side to become
Speaker 1: Jenny green teeth? I'm guessing it probably started off as
Speaker 1: a like a crime of opportunity, right, Yeah, But it's
Speaker 1: always I mean, it's just hard to imagine, like how
Speaker 1: behaviors like that originate. What how did it start happening? Well,
Speaker 1: it makes me think of our old friends, the squirrels,
Speaker 1: the scugs, and uh, their their their predatory side. And
Speaker 1: what point does a creature that is not that is
Speaker 1: clearly not evolved for such behavior begin, you know, dipping
Speaker 1: its little toes into that, right? Yeah, But then again,
Speaker 1: when you think about it, I mean, it is a
Speaker 1: great opportunity, right because the water's edge is sort of
Speaker 1: a perfect ambush. Point is the crocodilians have caught onto
Speaker 1: the attacker can get so close to the prey while
Speaker 1: remaining hidden, just like Jenny lurking under the duck weed.
Speaker 1: And and this emphasizes that there are actually multiple reasons
Speaker 1: that water's edge fears are not just you know, psychologically salient,
Speaker 1: but they're entirely justified in many ways, especially when you're
Speaker 1: talking about children. Yeah, this, this really brings us back
Speaker 1: to a we talked about a very beginning, the the
Speaker 1: idea that there is this, this real and perhaps you know,
Speaker 1: very honest reason for for crafting these myths or at
Speaker 1: least embracing these these folkloric beliefs and then passing them
Speaker 1: onto children. Uh. You know, And I definitely want to
Speaker 1: be sensitive about this because accidental drowning deaths are are
Speaker 1: a very serious matter and a traumatic matter, especially when
Speaker 1: it concerns children. I've known people personally affected by tragedies
Speaker 1: like this, and and it is it's difficult to find
Speaker 1: words to even and even talk about them. You know,
Speaker 1: there's just such a such a you know, a bleak
Speaker 1: traumatic experience to even contemplate. Uh. And I know that
Speaker 1: some of you out there listening to this episode you
Speaker 1: may have lost people in this matter. And I do
Speaker 1: want to drive home that you do have our our
Speaker 1: sympathies even as we discuss the you know, the human
Speaker 1: myth making that builds up around the truth. But but
Speaker 1: let's let's stop just to consider some of the modern
Speaker 1: stats about accidental drowning according to the CDC from two
Speaker 1: thousand five to two thousand and fourteen, there were an
Speaker 1: average of three thousand, five hundred and thirty six fatal
Speaker 1: unintentional drownings non voting related annually in the United States,
Speaker 1: about ten deaths per day. An additional three hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty two people died each year from drowning in boat
Speaker 1: related incidents. About one in five people who die from
Speaker 1: drowning our children fourteen and younger, and for every child
Speaker 1: who dies from drowning, another five receive emergency department care
Speaker 1: for non fatal submersion injuries. This is worth noting here
Speaker 1: as well, because if you haven't if you don't have
Speaker 1: any firsthand account with drowning, or you're not trained as
Speaker 1: a lifeguard, you might not realize that it's it's not
Speaker 1: just this definite line between drowning and almost drowning, between
Speaker 1: you know, dying in the water and surviving um. The
Speaker 1: CDC page points out that uh more than fifty percent
Speaker 1: of drowning victims treated in emergency departments require hospital treatment,
Speaker 1: and non fatal drowning injuries can will cause severe brain damage,
Speaker 1: the result in long term disabilities. I mean, this kind
Speaker 1: of thing emphasizes and we should be clear that these
Speaker 1: are modern statistics. These are based on a time where
Speaker 1: I think it is more common for people to know
Speaker 1: how to swim, like to have been taught how to swim. Um.
Speaker 1: That this is probably not referring as often to people
Speaker 1: living in places where it's common for there to be
Speaker 1: stagnant pools that are covered in a map that make
Speaker 1: them look like grass. Um. I mean, so, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is different circumstances even but it highlights how dangerous
Speaker 1: water can be. If you're an adult who knows how
Speaker 1: to swim and you don't think about dangers to children,
Speaker 1: you just really might not realize how real of a
Speaker 1: threat a standing body of water is. So the myth
Speaker 1: making of Jenny Green Teeth as a as a warning
Speaker 1: to keep children away from the duckweed ponds and the
Speaker 1: moral pits filled in it seems like a very very
Speaker 1: reasonable thing to do in a way. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not necessarily advocating making up fictional monsters to scare children,
Speaker 1: but you can see why people did it, and so
Speaker 1: Jenny is often used educationally as a safety warning. The
Speaker 1: monster is invoked to keep children from playing near dangerous
Speaker 1: bodies of water or in other contexts that are dangerous,
Speaker 1: like around railroad tracks like Vickery talked about. But here's
Speaker 1: this interesting part we were talking about earlier that I
Speaker 1: feel like we still haven't necessarily solved The thing you're
Speaker 1: warning children to stay away from is real life threatening danger,
Speaker 1: And in order to get the message across, you have
Speaker 1: to create a fictional, supernatural, life threatening danger. Children are
Speaker 1: obviously motivated by self preservation, or the fictional supernatural life
Speaker 1: threatening danger wouldn't work. But for some reason, some risks
Speaker 1: to their body safety and their survival don't seem to
Speaker 1: be as salient or as as effective as others. And
Speaker 1: apparently mothers and fathers are wagering that children are just
Speaker 1: not likely to obey warnings about the risks of deep
Speaker 1: water that says you could fall in and round. They
Speaker 1: think children are more likely to obey a warning that
Speaker 1: says the green Lady will get you. So why is
Speaker 1: the fictional threat more compelling and more useful than the
Speaker 1: actual threat? Now I come back again to what I
Speaker 1: said earlier about how I feel like the monster is
Speaker 1: actually still a sanitized version of the threat um And
Speaker 1: and isn't it interesting too that we see these examples
Speaker 1: where you're personifying the threat, you're turning the threat into
Speaker 1: a humanoid entity. But then you're making it an old woman,
Speaker 1: which also feels like a sanity, like you're sanitizing it
Speaker 1: because you're not making it into a man, which if
Speaker 1: you look at the if you look at the chances
Speaker 1: of a of an individual posing a significant bodily and
Speaker 1: certainly a lethal threat to a child, that individual is
Speaker 1: far more likely to be male, um, you know, without
Speaker 1: certainly getting into into stranger danger and the more or
Speaker 1: you know, inflated aspects of this sphere. But but you've
Speaker 1: you've You've chosen. There seems to be there's an active
Speaker 1: choice here in making Jenny Green Teeth, making it an
Speaker 1: older female entity instead of a male entity, which would,
Speaker 1: again I think, bring it too close to horrific real
Speaker 1: life situations that you're trying to avoid and crafting the myth.
Speaker 1: I think I agree with that, though, then again I
Speaker 1: wonder if this is this is a sort of modern
Speaker 1: American cultural bias on our part that makes us feel
Speaker 1: this way. I mean, we might not feel like old
Speaker 1: women are necessarily less dangerous. If we say we're in
Speaker 1: a context in which we believed witchcraft was real. That's true,
Speaker 1: that's true. If we have we're taking this and we're
Speaker 1: we're steeping it in. Uh, the age of witchcraft persecution
Speaker 1: and the an age in which which tales of hags
Speaker 1: and witches are are are found everywhere. Then again a
Speaker 1: lot of this is taking place, and say the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century, in which case I don't know how many
Speaker 1: people in north Northwest England in the early twentieth century
Speaker 1: thought witchcraft was real. But then again it wasn't that
Speaker 1: far removed from from witchcraft persecution. Again, we have to
Speaker 1: remember that witchcraft persecution was what was what was not
Speaker 1: a medieval um uh practice, it was post medieval early
Speaker 1: modern yeah. Um. Before we we closed out here, I
Speaker 1: do want to quickly reference another green entity that I
Speaker 1: forgot to mention that I should have mentioned, that I
Speaker 1: can only imagine is based in part on some of
Speaker 1: these ideas, and that is the Hitcher from The Mighty Bush,
Speaker 1: the green skinned hag like male Cockney character. I'm not familiar.
Speaker 1: Oh you haven't he sings the song about Eels. No, well,
Speaker 1: those of you out there who have watched The Mighty Bush,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about. If not, um, do
Speaker 1: a do a search for for Bush and Hitcher and
Speaker 1: I think you'll be delighted with what you find. I
Speaker 1: thought you were going to say, cheddar goblin, ch cheddar goblin.
Speaker 1: It is more recent for dominant, but but I think
Speaker 1: probably unrelated to this particular fairy tale. Well, Robert, I
Speaker 1: have had massive fun with this epic exploration of water
Speaker 1: hags and Jinny Green teeth. Yeah, this has been a
Speaker 1: good one. Uh, there was, there was. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more beneath the depths than one might think. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't know how deep that pond really is. All right,
Speaker 1: If you want to check out more episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, our other October offerings, October offerings
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