Changelings An Essay by



D. L. Ashliman

Copyright 1997

Contents

A mother had her child taken from the cradle by elves. In its place they laid a changeling with a thick head and staring eyes who would do nothing but eat and drink. In distress she went to a neighbor and asked for advice. The neighbor told her to carry the changeling into the kitchen, set it on the hearth, make a fire, and boil water in two eggshells. That should make the changeling laugh, and if he laughs it will be all over with him. The woman did everything just as her neighbor said. When she placed the eggshells filled with water over the fire, the blockhead said: Now I am as old

As the Wester Wood,

But have never seen anyone cooking in shells! And he began laughing about it. When he laughed, a band of little elves suddenly appeared. They brought the rightful child, set it on the hearth, and took the changeling away. {footnote 1} * * * * * The following true story took place in the year 1580. Near Breslau there lived a distinguished nobleman who had a large crop of hay every summer which his subjects were required harvest for him. One year there was a new mother among his harvest workers, a woman who had barely had a week to recover from the birth of her child. When she saw that she could not refuse the nobleman's decree, she took her child with her, placed it on a small clump of grass, and left it alone while she helped with the haymaking. After she had worked a good while, she returned to her child to nurse it. She looked at it, screamed aloud, hit her hands together above her head, and cried out in despair, that this was not her child: It sucked the milk from her so greedily and howled in such an inhuman manner that it was nothing like the child she knew. As is usual in such cases, she kept the child for several days, but it was so ill-behaved that the good woman nearly collapsed. She told her story to the nobleman. He said to her: "Woman, if you think that this is not your child, then do this one thing. Take it out to the meadow where you left your previous child and beat it hard with a switch. Then you will witness a miracle." The woman followed the nobleman's advice. She went out and beat the child with a switch until it screamed loudly. Then the Devil brought back her stolen child, saying: "There, you have it!" And with that he took his own child away. This story is often told and is known by both the young and the old in and around Breslau. {footnote 2}

These beliefs continued to exert influence well into the nineteenth century, and in some areas even later. Writing in England in 1890, the pioneer folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland could state: "In dealing with these stories [about changelings] we must always remember that not merely are we concerned with sagas of something long past, but with a yet living superstition." {footnote 4} In 1911 W. Y. Evans-Wentz, himself a true believer in the reality of fairy life, published an extensive study, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, which contains numerous accounts of exchanged children. This book, with a new introduction praising the author for his courageous acceptance of "a greater reality beyond the everyday world," was reissued in 1966. As late as 1924 it was reported that in sections of rural Germany many people were still taking traditional precautions against the demonic exchange of infants. {footnote 5} Finally, writing in 1980, Hasan M. El-Shamy reports: "The belief that the jinn may steal a human infant and put their own infant in its place is widespread in numerous parts of Egypt." {footnote 6} Views held firmly for a thousand years do not die easily, especially when they appear to answer some of life's most troublesome questions.

Folklore suggests that parents sought and received advice and approval from all segments of society before taking any drastic measures with their suspected changelings. The Grimms' accounts offer excellent examples of this broadly based community support: In three of their tales, the advice comes from ordinary people: a neighbor, a stranger on the street, and an unidentified person. In two other instances, the mothers -- peasant women -- are advised by their feudal landlords, and in one tale, "The Changeling in the Thuringian Forest," {footnote 12} the mother receives information from her pastor that enables her to discover her changeling's true identity and to drive him away. Several levels of community support are suggested by the sources of advice in these changeling stories. Peer approval is indicated by the participation of ordinary people in the parents' decisions, and the voice of civil and ecclesiastical authority is added by the pronouncements of the landlords and the clergy.

The mistreatment of changelings in folklore accounts often (although not always) leads to a happy outcome for the human parents and their rightful child. To halt the abuse of their offspring, the otherworldly parents frequently rescue the changeling and return the stolen mortal child. Stories with these fantasy endings provided hope, wish fulfillment, and escape to an era that was plagued with birth defects and debilitating infant diseases.

But not all changeling accounts have happy endings. Often the child thought to be a changeling is driven away or killed, but there is no indication that the healthy original child is returned. The tales that omit the safe recovery of the rightful child authentically illustrate a painful aspect of family survival in pre-industrial Europe. A peasant family's very subsistence frequently depended upon the productive labor of each member, and it was enormously difficult to provide for a person who was a permanent drain on the family's scarce resources. The fact that the changelings' ravenous appetite is so frequently mentioned indicates that the parents of these unfortunate children saw in their continuing existence a threat to the sustenance of the entire family. Changeling tales support other historical evidence in suggesting that infanticide was not infrequently the solution selected.

The belief that a changeling was actually much older than the child he was impersonating could lead to a fear of the child, as illustrated in the Icelandic tale "The Changeling who Stretched." {footnote 16} This legend tells of a woman who is left alone in the house with a boy of confirmation age who is suspected of being a changeling. She watches in horror as the lad, who apparently thinks that he is alone, yawns and stretches until he reaches the rafters. Terrified at being alone with this monster, the woman screams, and the boy collapses as if he had been shot, resumes his former size, and returns to his bed. It is easy to see how this tale could have grown out of a woman's fears of being left alone with a mentally retarded but sexually maturing male.

A changeling's ostensibly great age plays an important role in yet another folktale motif: the child who neither matures nor dies, remaining helplessly dependent and insatiably hungry for an interminable amount of time. The opening paragraph of the Norwegian tale "The Changeling Betrays His Age" {footnote 17} exemplifies the problem: "On Lindheim Farm, in Nesherad, there was supposed to have been a changeling. No one could remember when he was born or when he had come to the farm. No one had ever heard him speak, but all the same they were afraid to do anything to him or make him angry. He ate so much that the people at Lindheim had been living from hand to mouth, generation after generation, on his account."

Although other sources suggest that changelings seldom lived longer than seven years, or -- at the longest -- eighteen or nineteen years, {footnote 18} the fear could easily evolve that a changeling might survive several normal lifetimes, bringing poverty and suffering to a family for many generations. To some the burden of caring for a retarded child must have appeared to be interminable. If one believed that such problems may not resolve themselves during an entire human lifetime, then drastic measures would be all the more justified.

The most frequently mentioned preventative practice, and one that undoubtedly evolved because of its positive consequences, was the insistence that the newborn infant be watched very carefully until certain danger periods had passed. "Women who have recently been delivered may not go to sleep until someone is watching over the child. Mothers who are overcome by sleep often have changelings laid in their cradles," recorded Jacob Grimm in his German Mythology. {footnote 19} In the legend appropriately entitled "Watching Out for the Children," we are given to believe that a child would have been stolen by a supernatural being, had not the parents been so watchful during the night. According to most beliefs, a newborn was to be watched continuously for the first three days of its life; a somewhat reduced, but still high level of watchfulness was called for during the first six weeks. The fact that the mother (or her substitute) was expected to keep the baby close at hand for at least six weeks helped to protect it from environmental dangers, aided the child's psychological development, and contributed significantly to family cohesiveness.

Although the welfare of the family (and of society at large) dictated that women recovering from childbirth be spared many of the strenuous tasks that normally were expected of them, the patriarchal bias of German society did not provide for a woman's workload to be lightened for her own benefit. The only acceptable justification for this temporary relief from strenuous duties was the belief that the woman's child was thus being protected from supernatural harm. Numerous other superstitions regulating a woman's post-confinement activities confirm this view, for example, the belief that "if a woman spins wool, hemp, or flax within six weeks of her confinement, her child will someday be hanged." {footnote 22} Consistent with changeling beliefs, this superstitious practice spared the recently delivered woman the hardest of the spinning tasks, not for her own sake, but for the protection of her child.

Another exception is found in the Finnish tale "The Kantele Player," {footnote 26} in which we first learn that a child exchange has taken place when the abducted person -- now a beautiful and mature woman -- appears to a lonely young man who is playing a kantele (a Finnish harp) and reveals her story to him.

The couple seeks out the woman's father, a count, and convince him that his supposed daughter, who is twenty-one years old and "will neither grow nor die," is in truth a changeling, a witch's daughter. "But what should we do with this child who has been with us for twenty-one years?" asks the count. Acting upon the advice of the returning daughter, who knows the ways of witches, they build a roaring fire, and the legitimate daughter herself throws the imposter into the flames. A cry is heard from the witches who have been watching through the window: "Don't burn our child!" The changeling's skin bursts from its body, and only an alder stump is left in the fireplace.

This story has a genuine fairy-tale ending (for everyone save the changeling). The kantele player, in spite of his poverty, marries the count's daughter, and -- we are told -- they still live in the stone house built for them by her grateful father.

True to tradition, the author describes the kidnapping of a mortal child by an old troll woman, who leaves her own misshapen baby in its place. Following the pattern of countless folk legends, the parents are told to beat the changeling child with a heavy cane if they want to recover their own baby. The father is only too willing to abuse the ugly troll child, but the mother's maternal instincts cause her to intercede on the changeling's behalf. Several episodes are described in which the father attempts to follow the community's expectations by cruelly punishing or even killing the unwanted child, but each time the mother selflessly protects the troll baby.

Her kindness and perseverance are rewarded in the end, and the two children are restored to their original parents. Only then do we learn that during his absence the human child had lived in an unseen parallel world to that of his parents. Every act of cruelty or of kindness visited upon the troll child by his human guardians had been duplicated upon him by his troll stepmother. It was a mother's kindness and humanity rather than the expected abuse and neglect that rescued her child. Lagerlöf thus cloaks an ancient and cruel superstition in a modern and humane dress.