The Disturbing Lore Behind Changelings!

Keep an eye on your baby... if that really is your baby... ಠ_ಠ

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» Researched by: Jon Solo
» Written, Filmed, & Edited by: Jon Solo

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#celticmythology #celtic messeduporigins

[moonprincesst.s.h.ever]

Sadly, the mythology of Changelings was used to explain birth defects and special needs children. People would say that the children were not theirs and the fairies had left behind a Changeling.

[jeffreyes]

In Philippines we have something close to that. It's call Tiyanak. It's sort of a vampiric monster that pretends to be a baby that cries in the middle of the woods. Once you get close to it, it'll pounce on you and eat you up.

[benkenobisgirl]

I remember reading stories about how to get your baby back. One was cooking egg shells. The Changeling would laugh and immediately be sent back while the real baby was returned. One mother confronted the faerie queen and was able to get hers back. Loved those tales.

[ladykoiwolfe]

I was obsessed with this whole concept when I was a teen. It was one of the first Irish bits of folklore I ever heard and it just fascinated me. I even wrote a poem about it.

[KC-tkoi]

I've always kinda felt that myths like these were more of a justification to practice eugenics more than anything else. If a baby is developing very wrong or comes out with a disfigurement, it was socially beneficial to have a "reasonable" excuse to get rid of them and make it feel like the fault of some outside force for the parents

[My_mid-victorian_crisis]

In the late 1800s, in Ireland, a man was acquitted of killing his wife because he thought she was a changeling. She became ill after visiting a "fairy castle"; when she didn't recover as her husband and family thought she should, she was tested. The tests concluded she was human and his wife. Their parish priest even signed off on the fact that she was human. After their families left, he bludgeoned her to death with a lantern. He was arrested and tried for murder. However, he was acquitted on the ground that he truly believed he killed a fairy and not his wife. He spent the rest of his life riding out to the fairy castle and waiting for his wife to come home.

[akirakolappalainen]

My mother used to sing a song about fairies taking away babies when I was little, scared the crap out of me. 😳

[kingbeauregard]

An "oaf" is a word for a big stupid clumsy person, but it's the descendant of the word for "elf". It's the very same changeling concept, where your "real" child had been exchanged for an "elf" that grew up into something not quite human. Remember, in folklore, elves were not necessarily the tall handsome Tolkien characters; they could be, well, oafish.

[lightborn]

Trolls may do this too in some folklore.
But my favorite version are the ghouls in the Lovecraft stories.

[gameover]

So basically changeling’s were actually just babies born with(or developed)disabilities or children that hit puberty early.

Wow this got even darker than the myth.

[shirleymaemattthews]

Fairies had a BIG redemption arc from being child abducting weirdos to being tiny folk with wings who just do pranks, and protect trees.

[edmcintosh]

changelings were often considered to be soulless freeing people and the church to treat them badly...

[AdiiraKuro]

Slavic folklore has a similar tale. If a mother leaves home with her baby sooner than after 6 weeks and lets it out of sight for a moment, it can be taken and exchanged for a fairy baby by Polednice (midday fairy/spirit). If you are able to found out quickly, you can get the original baby back if you let the fairy baby neglected long enough it starts to cry. Polednice will thing you are a bad mom for her baby and will return your own.

[starryeyes]

One of my personal favorite versions is HP Lovecraft’s rendition of it in his Cthulhu Mythos. The doglike corpse eating ghouls can increase their numbers by switching human babies with their own, and raising the humans alongside them so they can grow into cannibalistic ghouls themselves. While the changelings will be raised like normal humans for a couple decades, until they can finally return home once the physical differences become more and more apparent.

[grec.]

The world is so rich with myths and fairytales and folklore. One being more intriguing than the other.

[emelielichterman]

We have a similiar legend here in Sweden, and if I'm not mistaken, it's called 'bortbyting'. It was said that during the first days of a childs life they were at risk for being kidnaped by fae/troll and being exchanged with the faes/trollens children. You could discern the 'bortbyting' from a regular child since they were often illbehaved and mean, sometimes they were also malformed like they had a tail or they couldn't move their feet. If you believed that your child was a 'bortbyting' you could hold the child over a fire and threaten to kill the child and then the fae/troll would appear to get their child back and you'd get yours back.

[DarcBloom]

Weirdly enough I had a strange phobia as a child, that was basically the reverse of this:
Whenever I got picked up after school, I worried that my parents had been replaced with changelings, and I would never know until it was too late.

[constipatedinsincity]

When I was younger my friends Irish Grandmother would call me Changeling. I guess because I was the only black kid in the bunch!I spoke about her having us chasing the end of rainbows 🌈

[danielmalinen]

In Finland, people believed in a similar like myth. Here were so-called groundlings, Maahinen or underground people from the upside down earth which was a kind of pocket dimension called Metsänpeitto. It was claimed that sometimes those groundlings dared to enter the human world and they exchanged human children for their own and took the babies to their own world where they raised humans as livestock for food. A changeling was usually identified when the child stopped being quiet and became cryful, malbehaved and mad. Parents could get their own child back if they left an groundling child, a changeling, in the forest overnight, but if they made a mistake and the child died, it became a screaming ghost, Liekkiö, which haunted its parents until they died. It was also believed that sometimes adult people could also get lost in the world of groundlings, Metsänpeitto, and if, with luck, they somehow managed to get back out of there, they lost their mind and were never, ever, sane again.

[joshsandquist]

It's why you always keep iron around. The fae can't tough iron.