Changelings and Maiming Babies

I think I can trace my love of changelings back to a book called The Moorchild, which I read sometime in elementary school. It caught me at the perfect time, on the cusp of dress-up games and Pre-Algebra, and it dealt, predictably, with an adolescent girl who could not fit in. To make it interesting, this particular girl was in fact a fairy, unknown to herself, deposited in a human cradle in exchange for its original occupant. I think I would have grown out of fairies if it were not for that book. Until that time they had been frillsome little things with wands and wings, a tad too flat to hold the interest of a graduate from the Disney movie phase, but this new (actually much older) breed of fairy struck in me something that has never quite left.

Maybe it is that basic human emotion that wells up every so often to convince us that we were dropped into this world unprepared and in completely unceremonious fashion, the idea that we are "other" ourselves, a justification for the incurable loneliness of space between the stars and us. Maybe it is that vague hope that there is a practical reason for the weirdness of ourselves relative to our surroundings (or vice versa). To me, there is an eerie comfort in the idea that I our world may mingle with another, and I am sympathetic to the changeling. But the original tellers of these tales would have taken a much different approach. The changeling was an upset in the routine, a thing to be feared and prevented, and the results of these beliefs were often tragic.

Accounts of stolen children were one of the most popular types of fairy stories across Europe. Traditionally, a fairy would snatch away a child while the mother was not looking and replace it with one of its own kind. It would then tote its human captive back to the fairy kingdom, where he or she would remain unless someone could convince the fairy to come reclaim its own child. Infants in their first six weeks were considered especially vulnerable. To avoid this misfortune, mothers were cautioned to keep young children under constant supervision. Impious mistakes, such as failure to baptize a child in due time, were also linked to fairy kidnappings (Ashliman 26).

Some speculate that the fear of changelings was put into mothers in order to ensure that they took good care of their children. While this idea has merit, the atrocities committed towards children that were suspected of being changelings seems to outweigh its value, to my mind. According to Ashliman, "Symptoms specifically described in the legends include a swollen head, strangely staring eyes, a flat nose, incessant crying, misbehavior, failure to learn to talk or walk, and a voracious appetite" (25). By this account, it is likely that many children suffering from autism, Down syndrome, and other mental disabilities or physical deformities would have been labeled changelings. The standard approach to getting rid of a changeling was torturing it until its fairy parents came to save it, though other methods involved coaxing it to laugh or to utter an exclamation of surprise that would reveal its true identity and force its parents to return its mortal counterpart (27-29).

Legends of changelings end happily more often than not, offering hope to a period rife with birth defects and infant disease. As may be expected, true accounts were often far less positive. One woman who was tried in Ireland for drowning her four-year-old grandson, both mute and crippled, insisted that she had not meant to kill the child, but to "put the fairy out of it" (27). To give an idea of the punishments inflicted on these poor children, I must include one more quote from an Irish story, "The Brewery of Eggshells":

"Although its face was so withered, and its body wasted away to a mere skeleton, it had still a strong resemblance to her own boy. She therefore could not find it in her heart to roast it alive on the griddle, or to burn its nose off with red hot tongs, or to throw it out in the snow on the roadside, notwithstanding these, and several like proceedings, were strongly recommended to her for the recovery of the child" (27).

Legends of changelings were immensely popular and persisted in certain areas into the early 1900s (25). Such beliefs not only explained why some children were not "normal," but excused a family's unwillingness to support these children, who would have been deadweight in a society where all members of a family were expected to contribute their share of labor. Though it is not fair to hold these people at fault for their ignorance, it reveals the darker side of the pre-Victorian fairy story.

One facet of these tales that my sources have not explained, and that fascinates me, is the simple question of why fairies would steal children in the first place. What would a fairy want with a mortal? And yet that is a common theme in other branches of lore as well. Heartbreaking as it is to think of the abuse of handicapped children, I cannot help but return to my original curiosity at the idea of "other" among us. What do they want from us? With luck, more on this later.