ASMR | Exploring the Paranormal: Changelings
Hi sweetsđź’“ Welcome back to another episode of Exploring the Paranormal! Today we'll be diving into European folklore and looking at creatures called changelings. I hope you enjoy this video and if you have any suggestions please lmk in the comments!
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Commentary
A changeling is a human-like creature that was believed to be a fairy that had been left in place of a human stolen by the fae folk. The existence of changelings is believed to stem from the notion that infants are susceptible to demonic possession; many sources, such as the Medieval Chronicles, state that fairies like to prey upon unbaptized children. It was also said that the most beautiful children were the ones who were taken, as the fairies admired those traits. In medieval times, children with deformities, illnesses or unexplained conditions were suspected to have been replaced by changelings which is why many were abandoned or killed. On the other hand, some parents felt as though they had to care for and love their changeling child out of the fear that the fairies would harm their stolen child and never bring it back.
There are a number of traits that changelings may be identified by. In Irish folklore, the fairy child may appear sickly and won’t grow like a human child would, they may even have a beard, very long teeth, extra toes, and a voracious appetite. Their intelligence may be far beyond their apparent age. Their behaviour when they believe they are alone is the best identifier; they may be jumping about, dancing or playing an instrument (this last behaviour is found only in Scottish and Irish folklore).
There are many reasons as to why a human child would be taken by fairies; to act as a servant, for the love of a human child, or malice. It’s thought that fairies only exchanged children, but they would also exchange the elderly fairies in place of a human baby so that the elderly may live in comfort. Fairies would also take adult humans, particularly the newly married and new mothers; young adults were taken to marry fairies while new mothers were taken to nurse the fairy babies. Often when an adult was taken instead of a child, there would be an object left in their place which was enchanted to look like the stolen person. This object would appear to get sick and die, and then be buried by the human family while the real person was living with the fairies. There is a well known case of what was thought to be an adult changeling; a woman by the name of Bridget Cleary was thought to be a changeling and her husband killed her in an attempt to force the fairies to return his real wife.
People devised a few ways to ward off changelings; charms such as an inverted coat or open iron scissors placed where the child sleeps, or constantly watching the human child to ensure they were not taken.
There are some stories that tell of changelings who forget they are fairies and continue to live their life as a human. Those that do not forget sometimes return to their own fairy families and just up and leave their human ones without warning. Stolen human children may often stay with the fairies forever, and there were some families who just turned their changeling loose into the forests. The return of the abducted child may be effected by torturing the changeling, and this belief was unfortunately responsible for numerous cases of actual child abuse
An essay called “changelings” was written by the folklorist D.L. Ashliman, and he proposed that tales of changelings illustrates an aspect of family survival in pre-industrial Europe. A families subsistence depended on the productive labour of each individual, and it was hard to provide for someone who was a constant drain on the families resources. Changelings had a ravenous appetite and many parents viewed their existence as a threat to their families survival. He states that these tales support the other historical evidence that infanticide was a common solution to this “problem”. Changelings were a way for people to explain away those who acted outside of the norm, were a justification for killing, and a way to help people cope with what they did not understand.
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