Two approaches have dominated explanations of the story of the green children: that it is a folktale describing an imaginary encounter with the inhabitants of another world, perhaps subterranean or even extraterrestrial, or it presents a real event in a garbled manner. The story was praised as an ideal fantasy by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read in his "English Prose Style", published in 1931, and provided the inspiration for his only novel, "The Green Child", written in 1934.