Spirits of the Depths
As far as the eye can see
Even as recently as the 80's, the roaming boundaries imposed on your average child were pretty elastic. As an 80's kid I myself experienced this now rare level of freedom. Yes, there was an arbitrary boundary you weren't allowed to step over, or some derelict deathtrap that was forboden: “Blah, blah, blah – alright Mum, whatever. You enjoy the Emmerdale Omnibus, and getting your hair permed to Brian May proportions, I'll be jousting with death in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, weeeeeeee!”. You were never monitored, or at least not to any effective degree. There were no devices to track your movements. The only real limit to your freedom was curfew, or getting caught titting about by Barbara from next door on her walk home from a shift at Kwik Save.
We've all seen these scenarios played out in films and TV series time and time again: groups of bold youths atop their BMX warhorses, popping wheelies and getting into scrapes that ultimately lead them to victory against some seemingly unbeatable evil. And other than smiting otherworldly necromancers, things were pretty much like that.
As a child in the eighties the playing field felt boundless. There wasn't much to do at home anyway. Video games, though utterly awesome, where embryonic and almost took an entire attention span to load. Films where amazing, but bound to VHS tapes and not ubiquitously on demand as they are today. Outside was the solution to all maladies of the boredom addled mind: open-world, free-roaming, action-adventure, chaos at it's finest. What could go wrong?
The Good Ol' Days.
If things where that lax 40-odd years back, God only knows how slack they were before. Yet, we've all heard our elders talk about how the communities they lived in were smaller, friendlier and more closely-knit than the disconnected masses we find in today's urban spiderwebs. We are told how people relied on outlandish concepts such as shared knowledge, communal discourse and this one weird thing called “trust”. Sure, these wild ideals may seem laughable, perhaps even savage, to we modern know-it-alls - with our smug, search-engine, self sufficiency – but when everybody knew everybody else, the need for lectures on stranger danger probably didn't seem as necessary as they do today.
This isn't to say that Parents let their children run around utterly uninformed, in some twisted game of blind man's bluff with danger. Adults have always preferred that their children return home more or less unscathed at the end of the day. So to help ensure that they did, they would bestow upon their innocent little angels psyche-scarifying horror stories about the hazards that lay hunkered and slavering in the big scary world around them.
Back before automobile jammed motorways, and the now seemingly universal notion that every single person you see is out to steal your virtue, more natural dangers where the order of the day. So, just before precious little Keith, or darling Doreen, set out on their day of dangling from breathtakingly lofty branches, or mixing “magic potions” made from dubious mushrooms and berries, parents would spare a moment to gird them with some stern advice. Using the ignorant child's natural love of cosy bedtime stories as a cruel ambush device, this advice was often served ice cold in the form of a horrifying cautionary tale.
Any parent knows full well that children, other than being the lights of our lives, are at best gallingly nonchalant, and at worst willfully ignorant. That meant these tales had to be potent - weapons grade even - they had to stick with even the most defiant tike and drive them to diversion. Diversion from stuff like, for example, Farmer Grubbins' field, where he kept his easily-riled prize bull, “The Trampler”. For this purpose a pantheon of “bogeymen” where created and employed to act as surrogate deterrents; to haunt those places where parental admonishment could not reach: Which if we're absolutely honest was probably Farmer Grubbins' bull field. Yet Again. Even though they where told THREE TIMES! Jesus, little Keith! Just get to your room!
One such sparkling jewel of temptation sure to brighten the eyes of any adventurous imp is a body of water. Rivers, lakes, meres, bogs, ponds and puddles: you name it kids want in. Literally. The urge to splash in, skim stones across, dive into and generally disturb the surface of any of the aforementioned spans, may seem a mystery to those of us who prefer dry socks, but to any child - including the ones we once where - water = wicked fun. Also, for some reason this “wicked fun” seems especially intoxicating if the water is seemingly bottomless, suffocated with strangulating weeds and has really, really slippy edges.
So once again, our pantheon of preventative “boyemen” ( and women), would arise from the murky depths to devour any ill-informed tomfoolery before it could occur. Essentially It was like an old-school, spoken-word version of the bit in Jaws where that poor kid gets chomped into a bubbling crimson geyser, leaving his mum traumatised near a shredded yellow lilo: just damaging enough to make you stick to carpeted areas for the rest of your days. Job done.
The Grindylow.
Enter the Grindylow, one of a number of waterborne bogeys employed to put a stop to skinny dipping escapades sharpish. The old stories paint this nasty little monstrosity as roughly humanoid in shape, and beholden of a suitably weedy green complexion. Essentially it resembles a goblin with an distinctly aquatic aspect. Squat yet strong, with slimy, semi-scaled, skin and freakishly long arms, atop of which are affixed powerful webbed claws. The Grindylow is a nightmare to behold, so just the job for scaring the soggy little sock off of any diminutive amateur diver.
Lurking below the surface of algae topped ponds or footwear-munching bogs, this malevolent water spirit waits patiently for anyone careless enough to set a toe within its reach. One slip on the muddy bank and the Grindylow's got you! One foot dangling down into the wafting weeds where they make their nests, and - sploosh! - you'll be pulled down to a watery grave.
Different Place, Different Face.
As I mentioned before, the Grindylow is just one of many forms of the water-bound bogey archetype found across Britain, and in my mind there are at least two solid reason why there are so many variations on the theme. The first, and most obvious, explanation is that water is as ubiquitous as the children that could unfortunately slip and drown in it. So it's inevitable then that warnings stories would evolve similar features in separate locals – similar problem, similar solution.
The second reason is a little more complex. You'll see when I come to write about more of these functionally kindred forms, that their name and shape transmutes depending on where their tales are told. Many people, exploring the UK's mythology from the outside, might see a relatively small tract of land and thus they may have a tendency to paint with broad strokes. Maybe, at most, they would fracture the legends of our land by quarters: England – Scotland – Ireland – Wales. Or maybe the word “United” in our UK would give them a more cohesive picture of the British mindset. However, anyone indigenous to our fair isles will tell you that a space of just a few miles can span many accents, dialects, rivalries, cultural paradigms, colloquial quirks and customs that jostle, mingle and splinter wildly. So why wouldn't our monstrosities do likewise? Just as the Japanese have their wonderfully wicked Kappa to deal with the dangers of their own waters, each with it’s own regional tales, so we too have ours, only in the Britain this phenomenon is vastly more granular in nature. Counties, and further subdividing borders of towns and villages, are filled with innumerable fertile pockets in which this divergent folkloric evolution takes place: here the Grindylow, over there Jenny Green Teeth and so on and on it morphs.
All of this can make our folklore a rather nebulous business, and unfortunately it also makes the Grindylow's habitat a bit difficult to pin down with any great accuracy. They inhabit the upper northwestern region of England, roughly in and around Lancashire and Yorkshire. Now, case in point, I live on the outskirts of this area, and even then I’ve only ever heard the name mentioned once by the fantastically nicknamed Billy Tripe, an old chap who lived near my Nan's. I was more familiar with the image of the water-bogey Jenny Greenteeth, who I was assured lived at the bottom of the lake that sat just a few metres from my childhood home. Comforting.
This local wildling-god is just one small personification of the power of nature, and the danger it poses if not respected. The Grindylow doesn't just dwell in its den of frogspawn draped water-weeds, it is the weeds. Lolling hypnotically in the current, it lures us in, to inspect, to explore, and before we know it we're tangled and gasping for air! The Grindylow isn't just a warning for the overly-curious youngster, but for the overconfident adult too. Nature is parent to us all, and woe betide any of her children too bold to take heed of her cautionary tales.
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Brief notes on Etymology, and further thinks.
The name Grindylow, being a rather strange concoction on the tongue, seems inextricably linked to the monster Grendel from the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Grendel and his mother, both of whom Beowulf fights, live in watery dens (The first in a cave surrounded by a marshland, and the second in a mere). So even beyond the the similarities of the name the aquatic monstrosity theme is already firmly in place. Makes me wonder, with Beowulf being so old, just how long have tales of this beastie been around?
Further to this In his 1906 book, A Grammar of the Dialect of Oldham, the author, Karl Georg Schilling, writes:
“The OE. word "Grendel" of "Beowulf" is still met in the Lancashire Dialects (including Oldham) = a waterdemon to frighten children. It appears in the form Grindylow (grindilau).”
Words: J Munzar - Arts: Tatlock
