Commentary: The Brewery of Egg Shells
The Changeling, John Bauer
Changeling Lore-What is a changeling?
Changeling lore is not a new thing-most people in the modern world have heard of changelings, with some even able to cite ways to rid one’s self of a changeling child, and many have listed the protections to protect against a changeling (as such, I will not repeat them here). But what exactly does a changeling look like?
To be honest, no-one’s quite sure. Some parts of the description are standardised-withered, wizened appearance, small, often hungry, often wailing or crying. But what about specifics? Most babies are small, often hungry, and often wailing or crying. Newborns, particularly premature newborns, also have a wrinkled appearance, as if their skin is too great for their size. So what sets a changeling apart?
→ J.G. Campbell notes that a Highland changeling is identifiable by its “large teeth, inordinate appetite, fondness for music, its powers of dancing, its unnatural precocity…”.
→ T. Crofton Croker “described what came to be perceived as the archetypal fairy changeling in his account of an Irish example.” Weak, unable to stand, ugly, emaciated, with black, shaggy matted hair and greenish yellow skin, the changeling had claw-like hands and, despite its young age, many teeth. He makes particular note of the changeling’s crying save when being fed along with its talent as a musician.
→ Writing of changelings found in Germany, Spence writes that they are “known by [their] large, thick-skulled head and…thick neck”.
Evidently, certain changeling features are cross-cultural, yet, as we can see above, some have a regional specificity. To consider the changeling in depth, we must first consider the human belief in fairy lore.
Humans are an odd mixture of logic, reasoning, emotion, and caprice, noted for a need to explain the world around us. Fairy belief, like religion and mythology before it, gives us such a framework-epidemics among cattle, wasting diseases and stroke, infantile paralysis, defect, and failure-to-thrive, are easily explained in fairy terms [Eberly, p.58]. Even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, people attributed disaster to the fairies; the great potato famine of 1846-47 was believed to be the result of a quarrel amongst said fairies [Briggs, p. 283]. In fact, research dated as recently as 1991 notes that a Newfoundland community continues to give credence to fairies and their ilk [Lamb, p.288] (more concerning this below, in Changelings in Communal Assent).
Changelings as Human Children
If we consider fairy belief and fairy lore an artificial construct to give reason to the world around us, it is a small step to consider changelings as actual children seen through a veil of belief and/or disbelief. As Spence tells us,
“Whenever a cretinous or diseased child made its appearance in a family, it was usually regarded as a changeling…the individual case was made to fit the superstition, and thus we possess no standardies data respecting the appearance of a changeling…” [2a] [via Eberly, p. 58].
Such a response is not surprising; humans have had a mingled fear and awe response to so-called deformed and deficient infants for centuries. But while changelings have typically inspired fear, infants born with congenital defects and/or diseases have been ‘valued’ for their difference at one time or another. In fact, the old term for such children, ‘monster’, once had very different connotations to its modern counterpart, meaning something marvellous, “originally a divine portent or warning; monstrous children were sometimes deified…” [Eberly, p. 59]. In ancient Rome, such children were kept for sacrifice in times of emergency, while in Assyria, a child’s defect would be examined by professional soothsayers and used as the basis of a prediction [Eberly, p.59]; such views of deformed infants continued into the time of the Reformation.
Yallery Brown, by John D. Batten
Could Yallery Brown represent an infant with progeria?
So, is there any real evidence to support the claim that changelings were, in fact, real human children born with a congenital defect/disorder? Yes and no. In Fairies and the Folklore of Disability, Susan Schoon Eberly makes a very convincing case for this theory, correlating various congenital defects, such as phenylketonuria and progeria, along with their symptoms with recorded accounts of changeling children (see Fig. 1 below).
Psychosocial dwarfism, the result of parental hostility, has also been mentioned as a cause of the sickening and wasting symptoms seen in failure-to-thrive infants, as has neglect.
If we seriously consider the idea of changelings as human children with congenital defects/disorders, then it is natural for our thoughts to soon turn to the fate of such children. Most changeling tales include some manner of resolution-the changeling is got rid of and the human child restored, the changeling dies and the human child remains lost, a fairy parent appears to claim the child. Not all changelings, however, died in infancy. In many British and Irish tales, changeling shown as an adult, even elderly creature who must be tricked into revealing age, only giving away its maturity when playing the pipes, dancing, or engaging in some similar wild activity [Eberly, p.63]. As adults, changelings are still noted for their ravenous appetite, with one tale insinuating that the fault of one family’s several generations of poverty lay at the ravening changeling’s feet [Ashliman, n.p.].
Socially Countenanced Infanticide
Changeling stories detailing physical changes in infants and infant death appear to have been first recorded in the sixteenth century [Lamb, p.292]. It was, in fact, commonly held that mistreatment of and cruel dealings with a changeling would result in the return of the human child and the disappearance of the changeling. Methods of dealing with a changeling include:
- bathing the changeling in a solution of foxglove (Digitalis purpurea, the original source of the heart failure drug digoxin)
- starving the changeling on a dunghill
- throwing the changeling on to a bed of hot coals
- leaving the changeling below the water mark at low tide
- setting the changeling upon a heated shovel
- brewing a concoction in eggshells, or some similar strange action calculated to trick the changeling into revealing its true nature.
It is normal for the parents of children with congenital defects/disorders, to “mourn the loss of the wished-for child” [Eberly, 61]. In time, however, parents come to accept and love their child-indeed, many such stories have been recorded by the media in recent years. In times past, much as today, births, deaths, and marriages were community events. Births, though, may have had more spiritual significance than deaths and marriages, as new mothers and newborns were seen to be as at greater risk of loss to the devil or fair folk. In fact, those women who died pre-childbirth were not, in some places, buried in consecrated ground due to the unchristened soul in utero [Eberly, p. 61]. Perhaps those women who died in childbirth, , or in the weeks after childbirth but before churching-placental blood was thought to attract devils [Eberly, p.61]-were considered unclean and treated in a similar way.
As such, it would not be difficult for parents grieving over a wished-for infant to create distance between themselves and the affected infant, in the manner of “this isn’t my child, my child was normal, my child must have been taken away”.
Interestingly, Eberly goes on to suggest the intriguing idea of grown changelings finding a place in society as solitary fairies, those supernatural beings sometimes associated with a specific place (a cave, a farm etc.), sometimes helpful spirits, such as the brownie and Robin Goodfellow. Such discussion is beyond of the purview of the current post; a review of this idea is forthcoming.
Changelings in Communal Assent
In her study of fairy practice and the production of popular culture, Mary Ellen Lamb suggests that belief in fairies was in actuality a shared social covenant between the lower classes. Citing Keith Thomas, she notes that “fairy beliefs encouraged cleaner houses and dairies as well as to [sic] increased vigilance over newborn infants” [Lamb, p.283]. This is all well and good-but why would a family claim a changeling child had taken the place of their expected infant?
The answer lies in the idea of scapegoating. By giving an affected infant the name of changeling, parents shift blame for producing a child that will not function within the given social structure while also providing an “out” with regard to care of the infant. As both Eberly and Lamb point out, the result of such claims-i.e. inhumane treatment undertaken to demonstrate the “true” changeling nature of the infant-amounts to “little more than socially-countenanced [sic] forms of infanticide” [Eberly, p.62].
It is important to note, however, that not all changeling deaths were the result of parental action: some changelings were seen to sicken and wither without interference; others simply ‘had died’ when a parent looked in, or a human child had been replaced by a dead fairy one, or a stock; and sometimes the fairies were said to have taken an infant leaving nothing in its place. Such incidents are unsurprising-early death is common with many congenital defects/disorders, particularly when left untreated. But in the cases of a dead infant or stock replacing a live infant, or an infant being stolen rather than exchanged, a congenital defect/disorder is not a necessary element of the tale. If we table this idea for said cases, with what are we left?
John Aubrey, an antiquarian and early informant on fairies, penned one of the few first person accounts of changeling lore. (The record is somewhat sketchy, but the following has been quoted in Eberly, Lamb, and Briggs, and so I present it here.)
When we are come to years we are commonly told of what befell us in our infancie, if the same were more than ordinary. Such an accident (by relation of others) befell me within a few daies after my birth, whilst my mother lay in of me being her second child, when I was taken out of the bed from her side, and by my suddein and fierce crying recovered again, being found sticking between the beds-head and the wall; and if I had not cryed in that manner as I did, our gossips had a conceit that I had been quite carried away by the Fairies they know not whither, and some elfe or changeling (as they call it) laid in my room." [Briggs, p.282]
At first, the story may seem of little note, a mere drop in the sea of changeling lore. Yet the following phrases-
“…and if I had not cryed,..”
“…our gossips had a conceit that I had been quite carried away by the Fairies…and some elfe of changeling (as the call it) laid in my room.”
-stand out upon a second reading. The conditional nature of the first suggests that young Aubrey would likely have remained unfound between the “beds-head and the wall”, soon to perish, while “had a conceit” suggests Aubrey thought they did not truly believe in changelings, and “some elfe or changeling (as they call it)” appears to be Aubrey’s attempt to create distance between himself and the “gossips” [Lamb, p.293]. But as in the case of parents with affected infants, the attribution of infant loss and/or death to the fairies shifts blame-if a fairy took the child and laid a changeling in its place, neither the mother nor the attendants could be blamed for said child’s loss.
Perdita, by Arthur Rackham
Lamb also notes that ‘changeling’ may have been a term applied to illegitimate children, as in the case of Perdita, the changeling in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, as a way of bestowing an acceptable social status despite a likely ‘shameful’ origin. Such “fairy references disguise a shared understanding of her shameful origin” [Lamb, p.284], in much the same way changeling references may disguise negligence and/or neglect.
Note: Perdita was not, in fact, actually illegitimate but rather deemed illegitimate by her father, as a result of his jealousy. Thank you to
himmapaan for pointing this out.
For such blame-shifting, scapegoating, and even lying to work, though, there is a certain element of community assent involved. Even if Lamb is correct in her ideas, it is near certain that some believed in fairies and the supernatural, just not the majority. To summarise: in the case of changeling children, fairy references would allow the infanticide mentioned earlier, disguise neglect and/or negligence, and bestow needed social status. To the modern mind, the need for such fairy references is oblique at best; the assent of a community to these falsehoods is hard to imagine. But in times past, communal assent to falsehood may have provided protection, in cases both unwarranted (e.g. deliberate harm of a person) and perhaps unwarranted (negligence). Indeed to carry Lamb’s point further, attaching the label of changeling to a child that has died as a result of a mother’s post-partum depression may have been a necessary coping mechanism for the mother and relatives. It is important to note, however, that communal assent was not always given, and that it was sometimes forced upon a person (as in the case of a woman being “taken by the fairies” to cover rape and sexual assault) [1].
Regardless of the view one may take of the ideas presented throughout this post, one thing is clear: changelings were treated in an abominable and inhumane fashion, ostensibly as a result of their appearance. And although I was already aware of this, the changelings in the stories I have read have always appeared to remain unharmed. Now, though, I think I shall not ever look at a changeling tale in quite the same way I once did.
Note: LiveJournal appears to have difficulty rendering tables of this size. For whatever reason, it is placing the table too far down the page; scroll down to see. If anyone has a suggestion for a more appropriate fix, please let me know.
Fig. 1- table of congenital defects and symptoms, with changeling lore and description. Note that symptom lists are by no means exhaustive; story quotes from, correlations made, through use of Eberly (see references).
Congenital Defect/Disorder
Symptoms
Changeling/Fairy Description
Possible Community Label
Cretinism (effect of prolonged hypothyroidism), hypothyroidism
Mental retardation; bucephalic eyes (cow-eyes); small size; frizzy hair; sometimes hypotonia (severely reduced muscle tone).
Slow; child-like intelligence; large, round eyes, frizzy hair; loose-jointed and amorphous.“small, hideous dwarf…[with eyes] round and fierce as a bull’s… squat, strongly made, with red frizzy hair.”
Lunatic, mooncalf, oaf, Amadan (God’s Fool)Brown Man of the MuirGrograch, Grogan[Note: parts of Switzerland, where disorder was endemic, such children were viewed as lucky; community belief that they drew God’s wrath upon only themselves thereby protecting the community at large.]
Blind oesophagus, cleft palate, blockage of small intestine, galactosemia (inability to digest milk)
Crying; ravenous appetite; small size due to lack of nutrition.
Small size; crying and/or wailing; constant appetite whilst never seeming to gain weight.
Common changeling
Cystic fibrosis
Ravenous appetite; severely retarded growth; small size; early death.
Constant appetite whilst never seeming to gain weight; small size, early/easy death.
Common changeling
Down syndrome
Mental retardation; downward tilting eyes; sometimes smaller head size; sometimes unusually shaped head; small size; eyes with epicanthic folds; sometimes hypotonia (severely reduced muscle tone).
Quiet, slow, unresponsive child; unusual shaped head; unusual head size; large or cow-like eyes/different eyes; slowness learning to walk; loose-jointed, amorphous body type.
Common changeling; solitary fairy Grogach, Grogan (sometimes over-sized head, unco-ordinated); possibly seal-person
Williams syndrome (associated with hypercalcemia, also known as Elfin Facies syndrome, Williams-Beuren syndrome, et. al)
‘Pretty’, light-skinned; prominent forehead; hypertelorism (wide-spaced eyes); epicanthic folds; short, upturned nose; frequently large, low set ears; frequently small jaw; sometimes pointed chin; sometimes bow of upper lip, especially in infants; small size; heart disease, mental retardation; low, hoarse voice; open, easy disposition.Patterns of repetitive speech (including echolalia, stereotypy) possible with hypercalcemia.
Elven/pixiesh/fairy-like features, particularly of eyes, lips, ears, and chin; confidence; small size.repetitive speech may account for “changeling-child poetry speak”.
Fairy child changeling (in contrast to other supernatural races outside the scope of this post)
Cerebral palsy
Sometimes paralysis; inability to move much; sometimes involuntary and jerky movement; sometimes slow, rhythmic, and smooth involuntary movements; inability, difficulty and imbalance walking, sometimes slowness to walk
Wild dance of changeling may be representative of patient with severe cerebral palsyappearance of walking on tip-toe, goat-like gait.
Urisk
Spina bifida
hydrocephalus (water on brain) resulting in greater than usual head size, mental retardation, brain damage, paralysis; partially exposed spinal cord.Over time: muscle imbalance leading to walking on ball of foot.
Oversized head; slow to learn, unresponsive infant; very still; “trough-backed”.Over time: appearance of walking on tip-toe, goat-like gait
Common changeling;Stock;Urisk; Scandinavian Ellewomen
Dwarfing syndromes including achondroplastic dwarf syndrome, costovertebral dwarf syndrome
Achrondoplastic: unusual or misshapen limbs; oddly placed ears; large head; short limbs.Costovertebral: sometimes mental retardation; frequently clubfoot; small trunk; normal limb size.
Costovertebral dwarf? “squat, hairy man, strong as a six-year-old horse, and with arms as long as tackle poles, and too bright.”Arms may appear long in contrast to small trunk.
Boggart
Progeria
Often appear normal at birth, perhaps thickening of skin.After a few months: aged-appearing wrinkled skin, stiff, mottled, and inelastic; high prominent forehead; protruding eyes; small mouth; receding jaw; very small, pinched nose; high hairline with fine, sparse hair; continuing dimuntive size, with gaunt appearance.Over time: stooped posture; narrow shoulders; appearance of muscle atrophy; large, stiff joinst; high, piping voice; inability to reach sexual maturation, early death often as a result of heart disease (atherosclerosis and angina pectoris).Note: no mental defect.
Small; aged, even ancient appearance; fine, soft hair; brown skin; intelligent.
Yallery Brown
Hunters syndrome, Hurlers syndrome(archaic: gargoylism)
Appear normal at birth.Over time: heavy-browed; thick, square jaw; coarse dark hair over most of body; bulging eyes, claw-like hands; hoarse-breathing; sometimes humpbacked; sometimes dark skin; frequent mental retardation after age two.Temperament also affected: Hurler’s patients often, pleasant, lovable; Hunter’s patients often, hyperactive, noisy, rough, aggressive.
Lived alone in a cave; liked to fish; head of a wolf; covered in short, brown hair. Noted for leaving people alone if left alone.
Wulver
Anencephaly
Small, unusually shaped head; head size may make eyes appear bigger, face smaller.
Seal’s face--large eyes, small face
Human fairy hybrids: seal-people including silkies, roanes.
Syndactyly, exfoliar disorders
Syndactyly: webbed digits, may join two, three, four, or all.Exfoliar disorders (e.g. ichthyosis): fish-scale skin, platy masses of keratin in skin which may be localised (e.g. hands and feet) or cover whole body.
Webbed digits, fish-skin
Human-fairy hybrids: seal-people including silkies, roanes; merrow.
Phenylketonuria (PKU)
Unable to metabolise nutrients, essential amino acids leading to malnturition, sickliness, small size, and frailty; patterns of repetitive speech (including echolalia, rhyming, and stereotypy); frequently blond hair, fair colouring, blue eyes; slow growth.By six months, may include seizures, tremors, hyperactivity, and increased irritability.Mental retardation when left untreated; cerebral palsy in ~34% cases; whiny voice; mousy odour, Malnutrition and small size may lead to an aged and wrinkled appearance in skin, sallow skin.
Repetitive speech may account for “changeling poetry speak”.“the fairies steal bice, blonde babies, they usually place in their stead their own aged-looking brats with short legs, sallow skins, and squeaky voice.”
Repetitive speech may account for “changeling poetry speak”.“the fairies steal bice, blonde babies, they usually place in their stead their own aged-looking brats with short legs, sallow skins, and squeaky voice.”
Footnotes:
[1] For more on fairies and communal assent, see next week’s review and discussion of Lamb’s work.
References:
Ashliman, D.L. "Changelings". (1997): n.p.
From http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/changeling.html
Briggs, K.M. “The English Fairies.” Folklore 68.1 (1957): 270-287.
Text kindly provided by JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258158
Eberly, Susan Schoon. “Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids and the Solitary Fairy.” Folklore
Text kindly provided by JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259568
Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2003): 277-312.
Text kindly provided by JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2902152
Westropp, Thomas Johnson. “A Study of the Folklore on the Coast of Connacht, Ireland.” Folklore 29.4 (1918): 305-319.
Text kindly provided by JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1255282
MacRitchie, David. Fians, Fairies and Picts.
Text kindly provided by Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17926/17926-h/17926-h.htm