Changeling [Cinema] - What is a Changeling?

Trolls with the changeling they have raised, John Bauer, 1913.

In European folklore and, a changeling is the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf or other legendary creature that has been secretly left in exchange for a human child.

In 1843 a Penzance man was charged with letting one of his children be cruelly treated by a servant; the child had been put up a tree and left there for over two hours on a cold winter night.

A human child might be taken due to many factors: to act as a servant, the love of a human child, or malice.

The return of the original child “may be effected by making the changeling laugh or by torturing it; this latter belief was responsible for numerous cases of actual child abuse”.

Some high-functioning autistic adults have come to identify with changelings for this reason and their own feeling of being in a world where they don’t belong and of practically not being the same species as the “normal” people around them.

From Kington comes the sole English example of a tale well known in Scotland, Ireland, and abroad, telling how a changeling was detected and expelled; it was told by a woman who said she had heard it from another woman, ‘who knew that it was true’.

According to some legends, it is possible to detect changelings as they are much wiser than human children.

Since most beings from Scandinavian mythology are said to be afraid of steel, Scandinavian parents often placed a steel item such as a pair of scissors or a knife on top of an unbaptized infant’s cradle.

Every time someone tried to be cruel to the troll, his troll mother was about to treat the human child in the same manner, but when his mother sacrificed what was dearest to her, her husband, the trolls realized that they had no power over her and had to release the human child.

According to some legends, it is possible to detect changelings, as they are much wiser than human children.

In one tale of the Brothers Grimm, there’s an account of how a woman, who suspected that her child had been exchanged, started to brew beer in the hull of an acorn.

Some folklorists believe that fairies were memories of inhabitants of various regions in Europe who had been driven into hiding by invaders.

In 16thand 17th-century England, such an infant was called either a ‘changeling’ or an ‘auf’ or ‘oaf’—a variant of ‘elf’, defined by the OED as ‘a goblin child…left by the elves or fairies; hence a misbegotten, deformed or idiot child’.