Changeling

Description

A changeling can be recognized by a range of traits that differ depending on the culture telling the story. In Irish folklore, a fairy child left in place of a human one might look sickly and never grow properly, sometimes showing odd physical features like a beard or unusually long teeth. These children could also be startlingly intelligent for their age and possess a strange, knowing insight. One way a changeling might reveal itself is by acting oddly when it believes no one is watching—dancing, leaping around, or even playing a musical instrument, though this last detail appears only in Irish and Scottish tales.

There were several reasons why fairies might take a human child. They might want a servant, feel affection for the child, or act out of simple malice.

Most often, the fairies were thought to swap the children outright. In rarer instances, an elderly fairy would be exchanged for a human baby so the old creature could live a comfortable, pampered life with human parents. To protect a child, people used simple charms like placing a coat inside out or open iron scissors near the sleeping baby, or they kept a constant watch over the infant.

Folklorist D. L. Ashliman has suggested that changeling stories reflect the harsh realities of family survival in pre-industrial Europe. Peasant families depended on every member’s labor to get by, and a child who was a permanent burden could threaten the household’s ability to feed itself. Ashliman notes that the frequent mention of changelings having a ravenous appetite points to parents seeing such a child as a danger to the whole family’s food supply, and he argues that these tales, along with other historical evidence, indicate that infanticide was often the chosen solution.

Function

In medieval Scandinavia, people thought trolls preferred their own children to be raised by humans, believing it brought them more honor. To make this happen, trolls would swap their babies with human ones. Some stories said trolls could only take children who had not been baptized, because once a child was accepted into the Catholic faith, the trolls lost their power to steal it. Fairies, meanwhile, were said to be drawn to human children and young women with bright or reflective features, like blonde hair or blue or silver eyes, possibly because they valued such traits.

In Scottish folklore, a child might be taken as a replacement for a fairy child owed as a tithe to Hell, a story best known from the ballad of Tam Lin. Another Scottish belief held that a baby born with a caul, a piece of the amniotic membrane, over its face was a changeling and would soon die, being considered of fey birth. Other tales claimed that fairy children needed human milk to survive. In these versions, a human newborn might be swapped with a fairy baby so the human mother could nurse the fairy child, or the mother herself might be taken to the fairy realm to breastfeed fairy infants.

Human midwives were also thought necessary to help deliver fairy babies. Some changeling stories describe the swapped fairy forgetting its true nature and living out a human life. But in other versions, changelings who remember return to their fairy family, sometimes vanishing without warning. The human child taken in the swap often stayed with the fairy family forever.

Feeling bound to the changeling’s fate, some human families would simply release the changeling into the wild. Some folklorists have suggested that fairies were actually memories of earlier inhabitants of European regions, driven into hiding by invaders. According to this idea, changelings occurred when these hidden people exchanged their sickly children for the healthy children of the occupying invaders.

In folklore

In Cornwall, the Mên-an-Tol stones are believed to be watched over by a fairy or pixie guardian capable of performing miraculous cures. One story tells of a changeling baby being pushed through the stone so that the mother could get her real child back. Evil pixies had swapped her baby, and the stones had the power to undo their magic. In Germany, a changeling is called Wechselbalg, Wechselkind, Kielkopf, or Dickkopf, with the last name pointing to the unusually large necks and heads these creatures are said to have.

German folklore offers several ways to spot a changeling and get the stolen human child back. One method is to confuse the changeling by cooking or brewing in eggshells, which forces it to speak, reveal its true age, and show that it does not belong in the normal flow of time. Another approach is to try heating the changeling in an oven, though this may be a trick based on its ability to withstand heat. Hitting or whipping the changeling is also mentioned.

Ireland

Sometimes the changeling must be fed a woman’s milk before the children can be swapped back. German tradition names several possible parents for changelings: the devil, a belief Martin Luther shared, as he argued for baptizing changelings; a female dwarf; the Fenixmännlein; a water spirit; and the Roggenmuhme or Roggenmutter, a demonic woman who lives in cornfields and steals human children. In Ireland, looking at a baby with envy, called “overlooking the baby,” was thought to put the child in danger, leaving it under the fairies’ power.

The same risk applied to admiring or envying a man or woman unless a blessing was added, with the able-bodied and beautiful being especially vulnerable. Women in liminal states, such as new brides or new mothers, were particularly at risk. Putting a changeling into a fire would make it leap up the chimney and bring back the human child. However, one tale tells of a mother with a changeling who was visited by a fairy woman carrying the human child; the fairy said the other fairies had made the swap and she wanted her own baby back.

The trick of surprising a changeling into speaking by brewing eggshells appears in both Ireland and Wales. Other legends describe ways to stop a fairy from stealing a child. Shouting “Gairim agus coisricim thú” (I bless you) or “God bless you” would make the fairy abandon the child it was trying to take.

In the modern world

The modern English word "oaf," meaning a clumsy or stupid person, traces back to the historical English term for a changeling, "auf." That word likely comes from the Middle English "alven" and "elven," which ultimately derive from the Old Norse "alfr," meaning elf. Today, scholars think some changeling stories were created to make sense of children who were born with deformities, developmental disabilities, or who were neurodivergent. However, researchers Goodey and Stainton argue against simply equating modern ideas of disability with changeling folklore, pointing out that the term is too dependent on context and that current feelings of guilt and discomfort influence how we interpret these old tales.

Medical explanations

Many medical conditions have symptoms that resemble descriptions of changelings in various legends. These include spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, PKU, progeria, Down syndrome, homocystinuria, Williams syndrome, Hurler syndrome, Hunter syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Prader-Willi syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Because congenital disabilities occur more often in boys, this may explain the folk belief that male infants were especially at risk of being stolen by fairies.

Psychologist Stuart Vyse notes that modern parents often have very high hopes for their children, and when those hopes are not met, they may look for a new kind of demon to blame. A condition called regressive autism, where a child develops normally at first and then shows signs of autism, also mirrors the idea of a changeling child. Some autistic adults have come to see themselves as changelings or other replacements, like aliens, because they often feel out of place in the world.

In nature

In nature, many birds, fish, and arthropods practice brood parasitism, which is a form of non-reciprocal offspring-swapping. Instead of raising their own young, these species lay their eggs in the nests of other species, leaving the host parents to care for them. The invading offspring usually hatch sooner and grow faster than the host's own young, taking most of the food and sometimes even pushing the host's offspring out of the nest entirely.

Did You Know?

• The Igbo people of eastern Nigeria traditionally believed that a woman who lost numerous children was being tormented by an ogbanje, a malicious spirit that reincarnated itself over and over again.
• The first monograph-length study on European changelings was Gisela Piaschewski's 1935 thesis 'Der Wechselbalg: Ein Beitrag zum Aberglauben der nordeuropäischen Völker'.