Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies second podcast series, episode three Fairies and Children.
Hello, I'm Faye Heild. And I'm Caroline Larrington. There are so many stories about fairies and children in the folders given to artists.
The idea that fairies might snatch away your child is a potent one.
Just as they might take away your wife or more rarely, your husband.
But there's also a fascinating story recorded in two different historical chronicles from the late 12th,
early 13th century that really got Murray's imagination going.
Yes. The tale of the green children is drawn from the two late 12th and early 13th century.
Overlapping accounts by Ralph Cockshell and William of Newburgh.
And it's a bit different in its structure from the familiar patterns of folk tales about fairy to bright green.
Children appear at the edge of a wheat field one August, and they're found there by harvesters.
And the two children have great difficulty in adjusting to the human way.
They can't eat human food. They can't speak human language. And the boy looks as if he's pining and dying.
But eventually they managed to signal that they can eat beans and that maintains their green colour.
The boy still dies, but the girl manages to adapt and to get integrate into human society.
And the mediaeval chroniclers tell us that the girl, when she could speak English,
talks about simpleton's land is the place that she came from, an underground country where there's neither sun nor moon.
And here the two children were hurt in their fall, the sheep. And they were drawn into this world by following the sound of church bells.
So modern commentators have noted the ways in which these two accounts and the historical chronicles
do seem to be in some ways assimilated to mediaeval traditions about fairy land for marry.
This chimed with a poem that she knew by the American writer Jane Yolen on the same story, and she adapted it into this incredible song.
Is the sky line. The cold stones, their arms and legs green, not the dark green.
They know the rain. That and some not the deep greying of the sea.
It's half the break. When they owe Panopto.
And I spoke great language, which the.
By the way, stay back.
It's broad. I reached.
Married. Whites and blacks.
Why so see? Oh, gosh.
She was so shy, so nervous.
There's an animation to be drawn by Natalie Reid and animated by Mary Jane that goes along with the song.
And it shows the boy and the girl in the different shades of green and white.
You can see it on the Modern Fairies website. One of the things that fascinated Murray and Terry, along with some of the other artists,
was the idea that the green girl married and had descendents maybe still living in Suffolk today.
Terry wrote a monologue from the perspective of one of the descendants describing what it was like
listening to his grandmother talking about her childhood and and this the history of this story.
And, of course, it's completely made up, completely fictional.
But Terry, with her magical powers as a writer, made it incredibly personal and believable.
And we recorded that script read by Martin Carfi onto Wax Cylinder and played it at the same gathering's using a wax and then de player.
And so the medium of sharing the story became part of the show as well.
And that's been really interesting in all our. Well, for me and several of the artists, not everybody,
but we were interested in the artefacts and the sources and the the formats in which these stories,
the forms, the modes of transmission that these things come to us with.
So we basically fabricated some authentic medium for artistic purposes.
And I found that whole process really interesting.
And to see audiences sense of belief or disbelief played with by providing an authentic wax cylinder,
but obviously fictional and created in contemporary times.
So let's hear some of the story of the green children's descendant and what he remembers about his grandmother.
I say that I was too young when my grandmother died to remember her.
I do. Could I ever forget her? My granny was not like anybody else.
She was small and thin, bright eyed as a bird with a long white braid called on.
I had white skin that never browned in the sun in a wild way about her that made people gossip and shake their heads.
I say that she'd be strange as a child, and she remained a bit old till the end of her life.
Sometimes she spoke in her own secret language, but only when she was speaking to me, said some of her seventh son.
She told me the tale of a place where she came from, and now I'll turn it to you.
She came from another country. She said she didn't know its name. It wasn't like here.
It had no night and it had no day. Just a low, steady light.
Never changed. And in that light, everything was green.
She called that place the green country. So that's what I'll call it, too.
She had a brother a little older than her. The two of them were inseparable.
One day they were walking in the hills in low rolling hills like the ones we have here.
And they found a cave. Or maybe she said it wasn't it was not a cave, but a hole in the hill.
Inside is a beautiful night. And the children walk towards it.
Hand in hand. They entered the cave. The light seemed to back on the moon.
So they kept walking, entranced. They walked and they walked until the passageway turned and spit it back out on the hill.
Then they stepped outside. Still following the light, I found everything had changed.
The light was now a gold ball in the sky.
They had never seen the sun before. I've never seen a sky so blue.
I had never felt so cold on my skin or grass, so brittle under their feet.
They knew suddenly that this was not their world and they turned around to go home again.
The cave was gone. It had vanished completely. And they sat down under that alien sky,
clutching each other in silence and fear until men returning home from the fields crossed over the hill and found.
Now, my mother, she always insisted that grandma was a foreign girl from across the sea, from France maybe, or Germany.
Well, that's not the story my grandmother told. I know which story is true.
The man who took those children home, they knew exactly what they had found.
Keri's. They found fares to while children of the otherworld, that boy and girl was.
We knew that because was their skin.
Eyes, teeth. The clothes they wore, the shoes on their feet.
They were small and thin and green all over.
I could not speak the king's plain English. They could not eat plain country food.
They could only be cheese, which is just what the fairies eat, beans and milk.
I saw that boy. He'd be my great uncle if he had lived.
But he did not. He never learnt to eat our food. He pined inside and faded away.
Tom and Apple grew to the day. They buried him at a crossroads.
My gran. She took to human ways. She later porridge.
She hates her brain and the green, her skin slowly faded to white.
She learnt our language and ran with the other children.
The village children laughing and bright. The vicar's wife took charge of her and she was christened on a bright summer's day.
They call me Mary. They told her not to speak of the child that she wants me.
They thought she'd for that. She never forgot.
I know when I. Terri story then picked up on ideas about losing contact with where you came from.
Ideas about losing your roots and then having children and eventually grandchildren in your new home.
And you struggle to try and describe what the place you've lost was like and how you remember it.
The pictures, your memories are fading. Barry wrote another song,
this theme where the two green children become child migrants or the babes in the
wood that lost little ones who have to take their chances in the harsh world.
One of them makes it and the other doesn't. The girl is the tough one.
The one who figures out how to survive and to compromise. Murray has recorded some version of this.
But here's Brime mom reading the lyrics Green in My Growing Pains.
The Swift and the crane carry full play.
My brother and I, along a fly way, turtle doves led us.
Even the stork knows its season. Fiery colours of the fall.
Catch the flame, throw the ball from the hands of war.
The hounds of war into the eye of a storm.
My childhood songs in Borrowed Tongue say I am a child of a lesser God.
Wait for friends to call on foreign shores. I am a child of a lesser God in safety now.
I have found I never felt so weak, stood on firm ground.
You turn me around and knock me off my feet.
The Swift and the cranes sailed away. My brother died along the byway.
Childhood songs in borrowed tongue say I'm a child of a lesser God.
And I'm green in my growing pains. In the wake of moonless sway.
So Murray and Terri and several of us were really interested in the old stories and representing the tales of her LA or the green children as stories,
but we were also interested in how it resonated with contemporary news,
contemporary issues and problems that we're facing in the contemporary society.
And obviously, this idea that you could be displaced and have to navigate a new harsh world chimed hugely with ideas of immigration,
immigration and refugees in contemporary society. As we were in the workshops that the camps at Calais were quite big news going on at the time.
So there's an undercurrent of while we're talking about these songs and presenting them very much as folk tales.
The process of engaging with them chimes with contemporary concerns and issues that we're all having to navigate.
Even if you don't change the material to be a contemporary folk song,
there's still a deep sense that these are contemporary stories and have contemporary resonance.
I think that was really interesting for some of the the more familiar with working
with folklore and traditional song artists that they don't feel outdated.
They're not just rehashing traditional stories.
They they do sense a very deep connexion with contemporary concern, even if they don't directly say that through the lyrics.
And that was important, wasn't it? I think because the key parts of the project was making the fairies modern.
And some people did that through transposing them into different modern settings.
But some, like Mary here,
reached down into the old story and brought it up into the light of these contemporary issues around child migration and child refugees,
and that suddenly, somehow, without making it sound as if it's set in the contemporary world.
Nevertheless, it does speak to those really timeless problems,
timeless questions about what happens to the child who has to leave the place where it really belongs.
And so then the audience is brought in because the audiences have to actually do a bit of work
there to contextualise the art and to come to their own sense of reality with it as well.
And I think maybe it's not just down to artists to make work.
Modern audiences have to find their place for it as well. Really interested in that side of it, too.
Another theme that was taken up by the artists was the Changeling theme.
And that's one that really does speak to parents about their fears for and in some ways their fears of their children.
And that was something that patients worked out.
Patients was interested in how just at that key age, suddenly you start seeing developmental problems or deficits in your baby.
And that child that is seemed quite normal that they used to smile and used to respond to suddenly
doesn't seem to be there and looks as if it's being replaced by another baby all together.
And that's very much what the changing story is all about. In traditional folk tale that your baby suddenly seems a complete stranger to you.
It's in fact being taken away by the fairies who've left a fairy baby, a wizened language, less creature that doesn't thrive.
And if you know how you can get your baby back again, if you don't get the changeling to admit it's a changeling.
But that's not really how things work in the real world with babies like this.
Patients wrote a poem double that's a spectacular a kind of mirror poem.
Halfway through, there's a pivot. And then the lines from the first half are repeated.
But working backwards towards the beginning. But now they take on a whole new meaning because of the events that have happened within the story.
So here we've got patients reciting double accompanied by Ben and Barney at the Sage Gates at.
Something's happened to my son. He's not the same child.
I respect. He was healthy, haven't slept in three nights watching over his colleagues the signs of a change when his eyes click open.
Like a China doll. He can't remember how to be Samuel.
He looks at me as if I'm not his mother. His eyes and grey, green, they say baby's eyes change colour in the middle of the night.
He used to call me mama. Now he only makes noises.
I don't understand. I don't understand.
Now Jodi makes noises. My mom used to call me in the middle of the night.
They say baby's eyes change colour. His eyes are grey.
Green. I not his mother.
He looks at me as if he can't remember how to be Samuel when his eyes blink open like a China doll watching over his calls for signs of a change.
I haven't slept in three nights. I respect he was healthy.
He's not the same child. Something's happened to my son.
Patients is writing something deeply personal here. Drawing on her own experience, but also speaking to the questions that frighten a. banks.
And the issues faced by anyone who has to come to terms with the fact that the baby they
thought they had is not the one that they'll have to live with and look after and love.
The idea of loss is closely linked to the fairy world.
The feeling that once there was a time when the magical was more real to us, more apparent, and you might see fairies dancing on the green.
As the calling on song introduced in Episode one suggests those days have gone.
Except where we can reach through to the fairy world through art and the imagination.
In the next episode, we talk about one of the projects, really modern themes, fairies and the environment.
Don't forget to take a look at the Modern Fairies website,
where you can find more of our work with illustrations film of the performance at the stage in Gateshead.
Lots of interesting blog posts from our.