Changelings-Are You One?

My favorite concept of faerie lore are Changelings.

Have you never heard of them?

Painting by John Bauer of a human child
in the world of Fae with trolls. Thanks to
Wikipedia.org

Well, you should now. 

A changeling, according to these faerie myths, is a child replaced with a faerie baby. These babies are often unwanted and ugly, and spelled with a glamour so they look almost exactly like the baby that was taken away. A way you can tell a baby is a changeling is if they start speaking in a different language, do peculiar and mischievous things, and start performing things physically impossible.

But there are many ways that you can get rid of a faerie baby as well.

In one episode of So Weird (Yes, I am quoting TV shows now), the main character encounters a changeling and has to lure him away by making the baby laugh. One way to do this is to cook things in an eggshell, which I guess, as well as being incredibly ridiculous and weird, is remarkably humorous to the faerie baby. Another is to open a window, though most faeries, to keep from having to take back their baby, keeps this from happening by using magic.

No one really knows what happens at the opposite end of the spectrum, to the human child who is kept in the care of the faeries. One faerie reference that all should read is entitled 13 Curses, which is about a girl named Red who searches for her brother, who has been kidnapped by faeries. For all who want to read it, please do not look ahead.

*SPOILER ALERT*





Just for those people who need a bit of space before they can skip it. But anyways, in this book, Red finds her brother, but realizes that his faerie parents have adopted him with great care. They glamoured him so that he looked like a faerie, and as time doesn't ever flow in Fae as it does in the human world, her brother was already three years old when he should've just been one.






*END OF SPOILER ALERT*

It is yet to be known whether babies ever do come book from the mysterious haven of Fae. But best be on the lookout-you never know when one might appear.

This child is not mine as the first was,

Yet it lies in my little one's cradle

And sits in my little one's chair,

And the light of the heaven she's gone to

Transfigures its golden hair.

-James Russel Lowell, excerpt from 'The Changeling'