Notebook: The Green Children

Thomas Keightley:

"Another wonderful thing," says Ralph of Coggeshall, "happened in Suffolk, at St. Mary's of the Wolf-pits. A boy and his sister were found by the inhabitants of that place near the mouth of a pit which is there, who had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men, but they differed in the colour of their skin from all the people of our habitable world; for the whole surface of their skin was tinged of a green colour. No one could understand their speech. When they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain knight, Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes, they wept bitterly. Bread and other victuals were set before them, but they would touch none of them, though they were tormented by great hunger, as the girl afterwards acknowledged. At length, when some beans just cut, with their stalks, were brought into the house, they made signs, with great avidity, that they should be given to them. When they were brought, they opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking the beans were in the hollow of them; but not finding them there, they began to weep anew. When those who were present saw this, they opened the pods, and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with great delight, and for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, and he died within a short time. The girl enjoyed continual good health; and becoming accustomed to various kinds of food, lost completely that green colour, and gradually recovered the sanguine habit of her entire body. She was afterwards regenerated by the laver of holy baptism, and lived for many years in the service of that knight (as I have frequently heard from him and his family), and was rather loose and wanton in her conduct. Being frequently asked about the people of her country, she asserted that the inhabitants, and all they had in that country, were of a green colour; and that they saw no sun, but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset. Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy, she replied, that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern, on entering which they heard a delightful sound of bells; ravished by whose sweetness, they went for a long time wandering on through the cavern, until they came to its mouth. When they came out of it, they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun, and the unusual temperature of the air; and they thus lay for a long time. Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wished to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught."

The Fairy Mythology (1828)

The incident described, which reportedly took place in the 12th century, has prompted various explanations, all of which seem superfluous. The town where they were found is today known as Woolpit, a corruption, but what connection if any the story may have with wolves is unclear. A laver, according to Merriam-Webster, is "a large basin used for ceremonial ablutions in the ancient Jewish Tabernacle and Temple worship."

Wild Thing

I found this tiny red eft in the street in front of our house one rainy morning a few days ago. It was torpid and I didn't much like its chances against car tires, so I managed to flip it gently onto the only thing I had available — a plastic bag — and carried it off to a safer location next to a seasonal runoff stream. The delicacy of the animal was remarkable, considering that it was, after all, a fellow vertebrate and distant relative, though less than two inches long. There are brawnier insects, some of which might well have made a snack out of it, though efts do produce a formidable neurotoxin.

It's become a thing in the northeast to go out on rainy spring nights and help migrating amphibians across the road. As far as I know no one does this for earthworms, vast numbers of which wind up squashed or dessicated on the pavement. Chalk it up to "vertebratism."

I may have saved the salamander's life, but I don't expect that it felt gratitude or even consented to being moved. Its ability to conceptualize cause and effect or make rational decisions is presumably limited. As with most wild animals, its attitude towards us is grounded in simple fear.

There's a group of five or six deer living in the woods around us, and some days they come grazing within sight of our kitchen window. They may benefit from our presence, in that young vegetation prospers where we've created a clearing, but they beat a hasty retreat if we step outside. I've seen deer and owls, when I encounter them on a trail, hold their ground with something that might border on curiosity or at least indifference, but there's no reason to think that my presence is valued or welcome. Our domestic animals, of course, are capable of feeling most or even all of the emotions with which we regard each other, and this can also be true of some animals that haven't been "domesticated" but merely tamed, but these are exceptions. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man, captured some entrancing footage of a wild fox interacting with him with something like mutual joy, but Treadwell's misjudgment of his ability to cross the boundary between the human and animal worlds led to his being eaten by a bear.

Note and Queries (Borges)

I've probably read Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" at least a half-dozen times over the years, in English and in Spanish, but I've only now discovered an error — or at least a discrepancy — in the published Spanish text.

For those unfamiliar with it, the story concerns the accidental discovery of an account of a previously unknown and possibly fictional region of the Middle East called Uqbar, a discovery that leads in turn to the revelation of the supposed existence of a previously unknown planet that turns out to be, at least at first, an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scholars over the course of several centuries. The story begins when the narrator — unnamed, but we are justified in calling him Borges — is having a conversation with his fellow writer and occasional collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares. Both men are unsettled by the presence of a mirror in the villa where they are staying, and Bioy observes "that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man." Borges is intrigued by the citation and asks its source; Bioy says that he found it in the article on Uqbar in The Anglo-American Cyclopedia. By chance, there is a set of that work in the villa, but it proves to have no article on Uqbar. Borges half suspects that his friend has concocted a false source to cover his own witticsm, but the next day Bioy telephones to say that he has checked his own copy and found the article in question, which he subsequently shows to Borges. And it goes on from there.

According to my commemorative hardcover edition of Ficciones (El libro de bolsillo, Alianza Editorial, 2006), at the villa Borges and Bioy first look for the article on Uqbar at the end of Volume XLVI (46), which ends with "Upsala" and the first pages of Volume XLVII (47), which begin with "Ural-Altaic Languages." The missing article on Uqbar, however, is found in Volume XXVI of the set Bioy possessed, that is, in the twenty-sixth volume, not the forty-sixth. The narrator makes no comment on this curious fact.

My copy of Ficciones was bought to replace an essentially identical paperback copy that had fallen apart (and which I have since discarded). The copyright information has been updated, but the cover art, layout, and typography are presumably identical to the edition I used for years, except for the garish belly band and a small green square on the cover. In either form, the text originated as a Libro del Bolsillo in 1971 and was revised in 1974 under the author's supervision; it has presumably sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I have two translations of the story on my shelves, both from the early 1960s. One, in a volume that uses the Spanish title Ficciones, was translated by Anthony Kerrigan. The other, in a collection entitled Labyrinths, was translated by James E. Irby. (I don't have a copy of Andrew Hurley's newer translation.) In both editions, it is in Volume XLVI that Bioy finds the article on Uqbar; there is no discrepancy.

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was orginally published in the literary magazine Sur in 1940. (In the version that was published in book form there is a postscript dated 1947, but that date may be a fiction.) It's possible that both Kerrigan and Irby noticed the "error," if that's what it was, and silently corrected it, but it seems more likely that the misprint crept into a later Spanish-language edition. I haven't been able to access Sur online, but I have found online versions with both readings of the passage: "Me dijo que tenía a la vista el artículo sobre Uqbar en el volumen XXVI de la Enciclopedia" (Ciudad Seva) and "Me dijo que tenía a la vista el artículo sobre Uqbar, en el volumen XLVI de la Enciclopedia" (Borges todo el año). So a story that hangs, in part, on the instability of a printed text turns out to have fallen prey to the same circumstance.

The translated text in the second paragraph above is from Anthony Kerrigan's version.