RE: My post about vampire lore & the importance of separating new theories and takes from historical sources
People have been asking about the link between Changeling lore and ableist child abuse.
To answer that, let’s get into Changeling lore (bearing in mind that I am only an amateur folklorist who has written this all in good faith to the best of my knowledge, and that I myself am both Autistic and ADHD).
Although the idea of Changelings exists in dozens (if not more) cultures, the conversations on Tumblr have generally focused on Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Scandinavian, and Scottish lore, with an extreme emphasis on Irish stories.
So keep in mind that the names of the Beings I’ll talk about and their lore may shift a bit between these countries and histories. I’ll just try to keep things simple for the sake of this post.
A Changeling in this context is Creature of Fairy (Fairy being the location, not the being itself), who has been switched out for a human child, often (but not always) a newborn infant.
There are many stories following the Changeling myth. In some, an elderly member of Fairy that has become troublesome is disguised as an infant and essentially dumped on the unsuspecting human family to become their problem, while the human infant is stolen to become a servant or sometimes raised as a member of Fairy (more ideally). In this case, the infant seems to become suddenly and extremely unruly, insatiably hungry, and impossible to manage. The family is at a loss, because they don’t know this is actually some rude, old dude pretending to be their kid.
Sometimes, members of Fairy covet an especially beautiful human infant or child, so they spirt them away and replace them with their own Fairy child, or in some stories, even a log, tree, flower, or animal enchanted to gain human intelligence. In this case, the child is well-behaved enough, but compared to the human they’re supposed to be, they seem wistful, despondent, and suddenly extremely odd and often melancholy, because they’re longing for their home back in Fairy or nature.
Sometimes, a changeling is a log or other object enchanted to resemble the stolen human as a corpse, tricking their family into thinking they’ve died, when in reality they’ve been stolen away to Fairy.
This happens to beautiful young women being taken as wives, or for their service as housekeepers and cooks. In some stories, women dying in child birth are offered a job as a wet-nurse in Fairy and are even allowed to visit their own human infants at night from “beyond the grave.” It may also happen to any human with a coveted and admirable skill, especially artists, musicians, and midwives, who are taken to work in Fairy. Sometimes the human has a choice. Often they don’t.
So where does a history of abelist child abuse come in?
Well, the idea of a child being “misbehaved,” demanding, having meltdowns, dissociating, failing to meet what’s considered “normal” childhood milestones (especially involving speech and mobility), and seeming to one day become a “stranger” who no longer acts like the “good,” “well-behaved,” “normal” baby they once were is exactly the way many unsupportive and abusive parents in modern times describe their developmentally disabled children, especially children with Autism and/or ADHD.
Next, some methods for winning a human child back from Fairy and banishing the unruly Changeling from the household are violent and neglectful.
In some stories, a mother should burn the Changeling with a hot poker, or by placing them over a fire in a basket. Sometimes, they may toss the baby or child into water to drown. If the Changeling is an infant of Fairy, its own Fairy mother will come back to protect it from further harm, and she’ll return the human infant as a trade. If the Changeling is an adult of Fairy, it will save itself.
In other stories, the infant or child should be left in the woods or other wild place for its Fairy parents or family to reclaim.
In these stories, the human mother usually arrives home to find her own baby returned safe and sound, if a little skinny and in need of treatment. But in other stories (and in real life practice), the child dies, which is usually presented as preferable to raising a suspected Changeling.
So you see, when these methods were applied to perfectly human children who were simply dealing with developmental disabilities or acting out for other reasons (see: just being a kid), it’s abuse and neglect that could lead to serious harm and even death.
Because of this, many neurodivergent people have come to see themselves in Changeling stories and found comfort and recognition from ancient tales in a modern culture that has rejected and punished us for failing to achieve “normal.”
As a person with Autism and ADHD, I admit I did used to read these stories as a child and fantasize about being taken back to a place where I would belong and fit in. It’s good and valid for modern people to connect to ancient stories. That’s how humanity has always been.
However, there has been talk back and forth in the last threeish years that these myths now belong “only” to people with ADHD and Autism, and that those without are not “allowed” to discuss, study, or adapt Changeling lore.
The trouble starts with: it is not up to say, an American person with Autism (such as myself) to tell Norwegian people they have to give up their folklore.
Next: Not all Changeling lore fits the category of abelist child abuse.
There are stories of simply doing something “strange” in front of a suspected Changeling infant, tricking it into speaking, thus revealing its true identity, as seen in this tale:
[…] the housewife went out and brought in a basket of eggs, which she placed in a circle on the floor. While she was thus engaged, the lad kept looking sullenly at her, and said at length, roughly: “What are you doing in that manner?” “I am making a brewing caldron,” was the reply. “A brewing caldron? I am more than three hundred years old and I never yet saw a brewing caldron like that!”
A similar story of weird egg-use goes:
He had not been long at work before there arose from the bed a shout of laughter, and the voice of the seeming sick boy exclaimed, ” I am now 800 years of age, and I have never seen the like of that before.“
Yet again, in a story collected by W.B. Yeats:
“Oh!” shrieked the imp, starting up in the cradle, and clapping his hands together, “I’m fifteen hundred years in the world, and I never saw a brewery of eggshells before!“
The Changeling then generally leaves on its own or is ousted by threat of fire now that the parent has safely confirmed its Changeling identity, and the human baby is safely returned shortly thereafter.
One might even trick the Changeling by claiming that its own home in Fairy is in peril to oust it. One such story ends:
“Waes me! what’ll come o’ my wife and bairns?” screamed out the elf in the bed, and straightway made its exit up the chimney.
In the case of a Changeling “corpse,” there is no child to abuse. Simply a fake body to be buried and a child to be mourned, while the real child is allegedly off in Fairy. It’s also not always a child. As I said before, it may have been an adult stolen and replaced. Often, these adults were beloved members of a community with what were seen as valuable skills and assets, not someone seen as “troublesome” who won’t be missed.
Sometimes, a sickly Changeling child was left in a human village in hopes that the humans could use their own medical skills to save the child, and the Changeling was treated as a loved (if a bit odd) member of the family until its parents returned. In this case, the humans who took in and treated the child are sometimes rewarded with money or a boon by the grateful parents.
This is where the idea of Changeling lore existing and originating solely as a tool of ableism no longer makes sense. Not all of them include children, disabled or otherwise, not all of them include community members who would have been viewed as disposable or undesirable, and not all of them involve harming or abandoning the Changeling in question.
These tales span dozens of cultures and go back thousands of years. It is not possible to prove that they were invented specifically to dehumanize and abuse neurodivergent children and adults, nor does surviving lore support that claim.
Instead, Changeling lore originated and continued to grow as a part of a long-held collection of genuine beliefs, which sometimes certainly could have been (and absolutely were) exploited to abuse and neglect children and others with disabilities both mental and physical (scoliosis was sometimes attributed to being a Changeling). The abuse is one iteration and exploitation of these stories, and it’s absolutely worth analyzing and exploring (it’d make a great thesis, and many people have already written about it), but it is not the origin.
Nothing, especially not thousand+ year old folklore, exists as one thing or the other. There are endless branches, stretching through vast forests of tales, knowledge, and wonder.
I hope we’ll keep exploring what these stories have to tell us, about the past and about our current cultures, but I hope we’ll keep an open mind (and not simply source tumblr posts as our only take on a multi-cultural concept, as ironic as it is to say in my own tumblr post).
Thanks for asking! I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a few years!
Sources under the cut (not in alphbetical order bc it’s a tumblr post not a thesis):
