Jenny's ancestry

On the strange interconnections between folklore, mythology, and language

I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.

It’s manifested in other realms of study. My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I’m endlessly interested in taxonomy and systematics, the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction. More personally, I’ve been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne’er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.

It’s why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy. Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England—the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.

Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a “river hag”—a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them. She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds. (Certainly it’s no basis for a system of government.)

Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn’t come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories. (I’ve written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologists Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani, wherein they used an evolutionary technique called a molecular clock to analyze the ancestry of various versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”) And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn’t because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.

The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she’s still called “Ginny Grendith”—and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either. That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and “green teeth,” her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.

So where does “Greenteeth” come from? It turns out the name—and its alternative form, Grendith—are linguistic cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow. Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers. They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.

It’s a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn’t become permanently phobic.

What’s fascinating, though, is that the story doesn’t stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots. The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.

Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero. In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:

... the other, miscreated thing,
in man’s form trod the ways of exile,
albeit he was greater than any other human thing.
Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

Grendel was called a sceadugenga—a “shadow walker,” a creature who came out at night. He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water. He was said to be a “swamp-dweller,” living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.

I’ve always felt sorry for Grendel. He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way. He didn’t ask to be put together from spare parts. It’s why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel. He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.

Maybe it’s just that I always root for the underdog.

Where the name Grendel came from isn’t certain. Some linguists believe it comes from gren (“grin”) + dæle (“divided”), i.e. baring his teeth. Old English gryndal meant “fierce,” but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way ‘round is unknown. Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning “storm wind.” The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there’s no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate. Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, “green lowland”—so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.

In any case, it’s an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history. I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven’t been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth. I’ll keep my eye out, though. You can’t be too careful about these sorts of things.