The final fairy tale from the brothers Grimm under the grouping of The Elves is the story of The Changeling. In this story a young mother has her cradle robbed by elves and in her baby’s place they leave a changeling. The changeling is a grotesque child that is strangely misformed and has a huge appetite, all he seems to do is eat and drink. Not knowing what to do the mother turns to a neighbor who tells her to take the child into a kitchen and act like she was going to cook something out of egg shells. This would appear so ridiculous to the changeling he laugh and then the elves will immediately carry him off and return her baby to her. She does this and the changeling does laugh and adds that he is as old as the woods near there and had never seen anything so ridiculous. He is taken away and the mother gets her baby returned to her.
There are many, many fairy tales about changelings and how to get rid of them. They were fervently believed to be real at one time. Martin Luther (founder of the Protestant church) was a big proponent of changelings. He believed that any child born with a mental or physical deficiency was one. He preached that they were spawns of Satan and that they should be killed as soon as possible so they could not spread their evil on this earth. The changeling was viewed as a burden and in that era of working and eating hand to mouth they would have been. Here was a member of the family who likely wouldn’t grow up, who would live on to burden potentially more generations than just the parents as people didn’t live very long, who would eat from the table but never be able to do any work to contribute to it. The child would also likely be left alone most of the day as members of the family left to work and would receive none of the medical care they truly needed. Most fairy tales that talk about them have the parents go to neighbors, employers and the clergy asking what to do about their strange children and are reassured with various answers resulting in either getting rid of or killing the child. Parents seeking moral reassurance to rid themselves of these children usually received it in spades both in these fairy tales and in the society that surrounded them.
After a fairy tale that talked about elves aiding humans (The Elves and The Shoemaker) and a fairy tale about humans aiding elves (Godmother for the Elves) we have a tale that talks about how to deal with the elves when they are being more typically devious. Surprisingly enough it is also one of the nicer ways of dealing with a changeling, by making him laugh to reveal his true self. In the end the first tale’s hope and happiness is effectively dashed by the two tales that come after it. Once more the subtext is that you are to deal with supernatural events with the same hardworking, honest approach you give to everything else but don’t seek it out, in the end dealing with elves and their strange, trickster ways just isn’t worth it.
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