Changeling Children

On days when catching up on the news and social media gets annoying, I turn to one of my trusty reading sites Longreads. There's always something in there to draw me in or lead me to more books to discover. I was reading it loads for free till one day, I decided that it was time to pay my dues and paid for a subscription.

That day, a long excerpt caught my eye. This is re-printed from 'Fairies: A Dangerous History' (2018) by Richard Sugg. "Distraught over a sick or disabled child, parents would torture — sometimes even kill — what they believed to be a malevolent stand-in for a stolen baby." Oooh. Witches are put aside in this discussion here. Witches, witchcraft and superstitions. Beyond witch trials, that's a whole new other world of stories that sometimes, aren't just stories even in this 21st century.

It's definitely a genre that filled my childhood reads. My grandmothers believed in fairies. I have no idea where they got that from, but since they had a very British education, that probably explained it. I see them with loads of iron items in the house. I used to think that was just for the kitchen and purposes of cooking. Hahaha. I didn't care since they didn't quite impose their beliefs on me beyond warning me to stay away from the garden at dusk and don't sneak out in the nights. I loved it that they gave me tons of books about faeries, goblins, elves and such.

In Longreads, Richard Sugg's excerpt published in June 2018 is titled, 'Fairy Scapegoats: A History of the Persecution of Changeling Children'. I haven't read any of Richard Sugg's writing, till now. I shall go and get his books and check out the content.

In this branch of research, fairies aren't the kind, generous and mysterious beautiful elves in Tolkien lore. Fairies are evil beings. No child fancied fairies or even want to sight one. In fact, I was kept obediently at home by the thoughts of meeting goblins, demons and fairies more than the thought of breaking bones from falls or getting lost in the woods. I remember being fed tons of Rose Fyleman's poems of fairy folk and fairies at the bottom of our gardens. But somehow, I didn't think fairies were that delightful. I found them a tad creepy. Hahahah. I was more fascinated by the other type of fairies who stole babies and children.

It's rather horrifying to think that people in the past truly believe that fairies stole their children, leaving unhealthy, angsty and odd substitutes (known as 'changelings') who aren't human, and would hence torture and abuse their own flesh and blood in a bid to drive out the changelings. These children inevitably die from 'exorcism' rituals. Eiooow. Medical conditions in children were perceived as 'fairies stole the child'. These lore came out of Celtic region, Norfolk, Nottingham and basically all of eighteenth century rural England and Scotland.

I've heard superstitious sayings and rituals on this side of the world too, but mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody was gonna kill children, but all children were subjected to were the wearing of gold or jade jewelry, silver bangles, red strings, shaving of hair, et cetera. Nobody terrorized me when I was a kid. At least no specific incident that I remember. Nothing burned into my adult memories... because I'm that weird child. I'm soooo glad I wasn't born in that era of the 1700s to 1800s. I might not have survived to teen-hood.

We can only guess how such people made it into adulthood at all. Perhaps their parents were too kind-hearted to subject them to potentially fatal changeling tests; perhaps they underwent them but survived. Such cases also raise the question of when parents stopped trying to get their real child back, and what it felt like to accept that you would live with a fairy for the rest of your life.