The Green Children of Woolpit: a weird allegory of isolation, otherness and belonging

This performance paper introduces the tale of the Green Children of Woolpit and contextualises the author's own creative retelling, 'Green is the colour' (2021). The paper considers the earliest written accounts in the chronicles of William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, and the relationship between these sources, contemporary retellings, and multiple theories about the children's origins, from the scientific to the speculative, with reference to the scholarship of John Clark.

The presentation considers ‘Green is the colour’ as a piece of lockdown literature, exploring liminality, thresholds and portals, reduced social contact and heightened awareness of the non-human.