Changelings in European Folklore (Part 1)
Plus an update on the novel I’m working on
Hello!
I wanted to begin this post with a thank you to all of my subscribers! I truly appreciate your support. I would also like to extend a warm welcome to new subscribers who have signed up recently. I’m glad that you’ve joined us. I really enjoy writing this newsletter each month, and I’m grateful that you have welcomed me into your inbox. :)
Behind the Scenes: Novel Update
I thought I’d give an update on the novel I’m working on. I’m excited because I’ve now written 51,854 words (30 scenes) towards my second draft. That means that this draft is about 56% complete. Hooray! I still have a bit to go, but my first draft is guiding the way.
I began working on my novel by simultaneously writing out a plot summary of the book, creating character descriptions for all of the main characters, working on world building, and performing research. Using those elements, I then wrote a first draft to create all of the needed scenes and to summarize each scene. If ideas for description, dialogue, and/or interior feelings of the characters came to me, I put those in as well. It was a short draft, only about 20,000 words, but I feel like it helped me to work out intricacies of plot and character, as well as to discover gaps in research and world building.
This second draft is more of an expansion of each scene, writing out each scene in full. Sometimes new ideas come to me, which is fun, and I incorporate them in if it makes sense. I like that each phase has resulted in continued discovery and learning.
In case you are curious, I use a writing program called Scrivener for all of my writing including the novel, short stories, poetry, this newsletter, and notes for my website. (No affiliation—I just love the app!) If you do any type of long-form writing, I highly recommend looking into it.
Exploring Folklore: Changelings (Part 1)
My novel’s plot is based on aspects of various European changeling legends, so I thought we’d explore changelings in the folklore section this month. As this topic is a larger one, I’m going to cover part of it this month and finish it up next month. Let’s jump in!
One of the oldest aspects of folklore involving faeries is the belief that faeries greatly desire human children and frequently steal them away from their mortal parents. Early changeling stories appear in medieval texts and continue through the 20th century. Unlike fairy tales, stories involving changelings are considered to be legends: the accounts are tied to particular places and times, and they contain beliefs that were widely regarded to be true. As Terri Windling writes in her essay, “The Stolen Child: Tales of Fairy Changelings”:
Changeling stories are folk legends, usually set in the same country as the teller, and come from an ancient belief system in which fairies are real, co-existing with mortals.
Children who were not properly protected from faeries were believed to be at the greatest risk of being stolen. Consequently, a variety of protection methods evolved to counter the faeries. While protections varied depending on location and time period, a frequently used form of protection included constant vigilance regarding newborn children. Parents and family/friends would continuously watch over newborns for the first three days of life, then continue a close observance of the child during its first six weeks.
Other protective measures included hanging an open pair of scissors above the cradle (but what if it fell?!), laying a piece of the father’s clothing on the child, or placing salt on the doorstep and windowsills. Baptism of the child was also felt to offer strong protection against faeries.
In spite of the protection options afforded to parents, children were still frequently believed to have been stolen by faeries and replaced with changelings. The folklorist Katharine Briggs explains in An Encyclopedia of Fairies, that the “…true changelings are those fairy creatures that replace the stolen human babies.” The changeling served as a substitute child meant to trick the parents into thinking their child was still there, when really it had been whisked into the faerie realm.
It is interesting to note that the changeling taking the place of the child could take different forms. The changeling might be a faerie child who failed to thrive or an old faerie deemed to be of little use. In either case, the unwanted faerie would be left behind in favor of the human child.
Other times, the faeries might employ the use of a stock: a piece of wood the size and shape of a child and imbued with faerie glamour to make it appear life-like. Once the glamour faded, it would seem that the child had died and the stock would be buried.
But why did faeries desire human children in the first place? Some stories suggest that the faeries were required to pay a tithe to the Devil every seven years and used human children to fulfill that requirement. Other tales reveal that mortal children might be brought into the faerie realm in order to strengthen faerie bloodlines. In some folklore traditions faeries simply prize the beauty of human children, and the desire to possess such beauty is the impetus for child theft.
I’ll leave you with a short changeling tale, “A Pisky Changeling”, gathered by W. Y. Evans-Wentz from Mrs. Harriett Christopher for his book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. (Note that “piskies” is the name for West Country faeries.):
A woman who lived near Breage Church had a fine girl baby, and she thought the piskies came and took it and put a withered child in its place. The withered child lived to be twenty years old, and was no larger when it died than when the piskies brought it. It was fretful and peevish and frightfully shrivelled. The parents believed that the piskies often used to come and look over a certain wall by the house to see the child. And I heard my grandmother say that the family once put the child out of doors at night to see if the piskies would take it back again.
Next month we’ll explore why people embraced changeling legends and what actions they took to get their true children back from the faeries. (If you’d like to read the second post in the series, you can find it here.)
As ever, thank you for subscribing and reading.
All the best,
Steph
PS: Please feel free to forward and share my newsletter with any friends who love story, folklore, reading, or writing. The more the merrier!
This is so bizarre and intriguing. So how many of these changelings would afflict a community, I wonder. And did they find that it was more prevalent in certain families (like families with genetic issues)?