Jenny Greenteeth

Sources link the personal name Jenny/Jinny to regional storytelling practices and linguistically relate the epithet Greenteeth to older names for similar water‑beings (grindylow, forms recorded as 'Grendith' or 'Grinteeth'). The figure appears in local oral and literary sources in northwestern and northern England as a personification of treacherous pond surfaces and drowning risk; in at least one 19th‑century poetic/musical text she is described as a 'goddess of death' in Lancashire folklore. The material supports a likely linguistic and typological derivation from older river‑hag traditions rather than a single authored origin.

Traditional descriptions portray her as green‑skinned with long, dripping hair and sharp, conspicuous teeth; the name 'Greenteeth' evokes algae and pondweed associated with stagnant water. Literary and modern retellings supply variant details (for example, 'teeth like a shark's but green', 'dripping green hair like waterweed', or large round/piercing eyes) but such features are more characteristic of later literary or variant formulations rather than a unified core description.

Across sources her principal ability is physical predation at water's edge: luring, seizing, and drowning children or the elderly. The figure also functions conceptually to explain how a misleading mat of duckweed or pondweed can hide deep or treacherous water. Comparative references in sources note analogous powers (singing, enticement, change of form) in other cultures' water‑beings (e.g., Storm Hag, Qallupilluit, rusalka, kappa), but the supplied English tradition does not reliably ascribe shape‑changing or sonic sorcery to Jenny herself — those details belong to variants or analogues.