Is Your Child a Changeling?

Modern parents are ill-equipped to deal with threats to their families from the fairy kingdom. Kobolds, elves, goblins, pixies, and other magical creatures have a long history of stealing human babies and replacing them with uafs ( or boobies), creatures that look like babies but are actually sinister monsters with a big appetite.

As a society, we do nothing to solve the changeling problem. Modernity has convinced us that changelings are a “myth” or that the concept itself is “ridiculous,” but these stories were widely accepted as true as early as the 1900s, and for good reason: changeling stories paved the way for pre-scientific societies. to describe real events. Moreover, stories about a race of humanoid creatures that steal babies may have a historical basis. (I mean, probably not, but it’s possible.)

How to tell if your baby is a changeling: the first signs

Tales of supernatural beings targeting human infants are known throughout the world, from werewolf kitsune in Japan to the Nigerian ogbanye , spirits that possess newborns only to deliberately die to sow misery. But the classic changelings – humanoid creatures that replace unbaptized babies with identical copies – are mainly a European phenomenon. Here, I’ll focus on the Welsh iterations of changelings, because when you want weird magical stuff, you go straight to the source.

Unlike the fluttering benefactors we now associate with the word “fairy,” the Welsh fairies— Tilwyth Teg— were hardcore. They liked to steal unbaptized babies, especially those who were extraordinarily attractive or well-bred, and then replace them with dense novice or “shift babies.”

If this happens to you, you won’t notice it at first, but according to Wirth Syke’s 1880 book The British Goblins: Welsh Folklore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions , your changeling will soon become “an ugly face shriveled in shape”. hot-tempered, whiny and generally scary. If your child starts biting and fighting and becomes a “poor mother’s horror”, it might be a changeling.

Sometimes the changeling is an “idiot”, but sometimes he exhibits “supernatural cunning, not only impossible for a mortal infant, but not even characteristic of the oldest heads, except for fabulous shoulders.” Changelings are also hungry all the time.

If your child suddenly starts behaving unusually, check with your doctor, as this may not be the result of a supernatural abduction. Many believe that calling a child a changeling was actually a prescientific way of describing neurodivergent children or children with developmental disabilities or other medical conditions. The “symptoms” of changelings, combined with a general description of their endless hunger, paints a disturbing picture of disabled children being abandoned or killed because subsistence farmers cannot afford to feed unproductive family members. The fairy tale part of the story could have been a way to alleviate guilt. Or maybe fairies are real.

Check if your child is a changeling

If your doctor says, “I can’t find anything medically wrong; this is probably the work of Tilwit Tag”, you can confirm changeling status in a number of ways, including:

• Place the child/changeling on the shovel and hold over the fire. (Disadvantage: it will kill your baby.)
• Bathing in digitalis solution. (Fox glove, or foxglove, is a deadly poison, so it will also kill your child.)
• Whipping it with a stick. (The American Association of Pediatricians offers many reasons why spanking children is simply bad parenting .)
• Throw him into the Moldavian River. (By the way, this is the decision of the founder of Protestantism Martin Luther to smoke a changeling.)
• Cooking food for “ten laborers” in eggshells.

All of these tests are designed to force the changeling to reveal their true nature, and it’s hard to tell which one is the most effective, but I would prefer the eggshell cooking test, as it won’t cripple or kill the child in question.

Presumably, cooking (or just boiling water) in eggshells causes changelings to instantly drop their “I’m a baby” pretense and exclaim, “A meal for ten, dear mother, in one eggshell? I saw the acorn before I saw the oak; I saw the egg before the white hen; I have never seen anything like it.” Dead sale, that’s it.

So, you have a changeling in your arms. What is the next step?

Once you have determined that your child has been replaced by an unholy monster, you have several options to get your old child back. However, none of them is reliable – fairies are so strange. But try the following. (Please don’t do any of this.)

• Throw in the river. Sykes described a mother of twin changelings who first performed an eggshell test and then threw the changelings off a bridge. As soon as they touched the water, “goblins in blue pants came to save their dwarfs, and the mother brought her children back.” If that doesn’t work, c’est la vie .
• Beat him with a stick . Sometimes the wails of changelings inspire the faefolk to save their offspring and reclaim yours. Sometimes not.
• Leave him in the forest in the hope that the fairies will return your child. It’s hard to say if it will work, but it’s worth a try.
• Pick them up as yours. There are stories of changelings in which adoptive parents show only kindness to their changelings, and fairy folk eventually return their babies. saying something like, “Because you didn’t hurt our child, we didn’t hurt yours.” You should probably choose this option.

What do changelings want?

It is difficult to understand the motives of creatures from the fairy kingdom. Sometimes changelings are nasty old fairies who disguise themselves as humans to be jerks. Sometimes they are very fond of human food and cannot get enough of it in the caves where they live. Sometimes the fairies put a log in the cradle when they take your baby as the last “fuck you”. Fairies can be real jerks.

Sometimes fairy parents envy human society and wish their children the best, so they send them to live with unwitting owners. Things must have been pretty shitty in faerie if the fairy tale parents chose the life of a medieval farmer for their child, but it’s this motivation that suggests changelings could be real.

Could changelings really exist?

In the animal kingdom, changelings are a real thing : brood parasites are a class of animals that rely on other species to raise their young—spotted cuckoos, for example, lay their eggs in magpie nests, and there are fish and insects that use a similar mode of survival. strategies.

Among humans, however, evidence of changelings is sparse. In the 1800s, there was a rather popular theory that the tales were based on stories about a real tiny race of prehistoric people who lived in Europe until they were driven into caves by an invasion of their lands. According to the theory, these proto-humans sometimes secretly replaced their children with surface-dweller children, simply so that their descendants could have a better life.

There isn’t much evidence to support the specifics (other than some dubious 19th-century archaeological sites), but theories say it’s at least possible, if not plausible. Other human species lived alongside modern humans in Europe as early as 40,000 years ago, so it’s possible that the last of them were driven underground. It’s possible they’re still out there, hiding under bridges in the Faroe Islands or under toadstools in the Irish countryside, waiting for a cute baby like yours to be stolen.