@baduhennasraven asked for my thoughts on the tooth fairy, since they discovered that one of the Dutch provinces has a little bat collecting lost teeth instead. So here is a little ramble~
The idea of the tooth fairy who comes to give children money in exchange for their milk teeth, is fairly modern folklore (early 20th century), and from the United States. But having a creature to collect milk teeth seems older.
In Europe it’s actually more common to have a little mouse come to collect the tooth, especially in the French speaking countries and the other Romance languages. The mouse leaves a little gift behind, but this isn’t always money. The Dutch bat from Zeeland (we call a bat a mouse with wings) is probably related to her.
I don’t remember ever being told about either the tooth fairy or a tooth mouse when I was little. I think my mother paid me for my lost tooth and saved them in a special wooded box. Several of my friends had a similar box. Somehow the idea that you ought not to let your teeth lying around to get lost on you has stuck... Of course that’s a very old (European) belief, tied to concepts of magic that needed a piece of someone to gain power over them.
Perhaps that’s why this Christian custom recorded in a 1938 publication on folklore from the Dutch province Brabant is deliberately callous about throwing the tooth away. It describes having to toss the tooth over your head while praying:
“Little Jesus, give me a different tooth,
Not one of wood, not one of stone,
but one of bone.”
I’ve heard bits and pieces of other customs, like burying the teeth, throwing them onto a roof, or leaving them for specific animals to find so that you would gain something of that animal in return. But I have to say that this is the part of folklore where there aren’t really any full stories, but mostly saying and anecdotes, so I do not know a lot about it.
I’m very curious to know how my followers dealt with their baby teeth though, so please feel free to comment on this post!
