The Changeling: A Mini-Essay

     From Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s short story “The Elves” (1812) and Maurice Sendak’s picture book Outside Over There (1981) to Jim Henson’s cinematic fantasy Labyrinth (1986) and the anthology film A Christmas Horror Story (2015), the mythological changeling has been featured in art and literature for centuries. Although its name (enfant changé in French, Wechselbag in German, and fairy child in certain English dialects) and other minor aspects vary with each cultural region and historical period, the majority of the legend remains relatively universal: evil entities – often elves, fairies, goblins, or spirits – confiscate a human infant in the dead of night and replace it with an imposter that brings disaster and harm to the parents.[1] Thin, with a big head and blank, staring eyes, changelings torment their human caregivers with incessant bouts of crying, an insatiable hunger, and a series of unfortunate incidents.[2] To rid themselves of this unpleasantness, parents trick the evil entities into retrieving their offspring by mistreating it with violent acts, including dipping it in boiling water, strapping it to a coal shovel and thrusting it into the fire, and abandoning it in the forest.[3] Panged by this cruelty, the entities will return under the cover of darkness to rescue their progeny and return the human infant. Furthermore, because the changeling is not a real child, the parents, in the eyes of many superstitious societies, are absolved of their abusive actions.[4] Although documentation of these supposed switches can be found as early as 1405 in Nicolas of Jawor’s Treatise of Superstitions, belief in their existence continued well into the late nineteenth century, with reports showing that, between 1850 and 1895, eight judicial inquiries in Ireland, Schleswig-Holstein, Scotland, Posen, and West Prussia (and one New York case in 1877 involving an Irish immigrant family) investigated child abuse and death resulting from suspected changeling presences.[5] Recently, anthropologists such as Sarah Hrdy and Nancy Scheper-Hughes have argued that the vast majority of changeling cases throughout history can be attributed to misunderstandings regarding the symptoms of dehydration and malnourishment from illness, diarrhea, and neglect, not supernatural occurrences.[6]

Works Referenced

A Christmas Horror Story. Dir. Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban, and Brett Sullivan. Perf. William Shatner, Zoé De Grand Maison, and Adrian Holmes. Copperheart, 2015.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. “The Elves.” Children’s and Household Tales. 1812. Trans. Margaret Hunt. London: George Bell and Sons, 1905. 161-164.

Haffter, Carl. “The Changeling: History and Psychodynamics of Attitudes to Handicapped Children in European Folklore.” Journal of the History of Behavioral Science 4.1 (1968): 55-61.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.

Labyrinth. Dir. Jim Henson. Perf. David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. TriStar, 1986.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992.

Sendak, Maurice. Outside Over There. 1981. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
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[1] Hrdy, 462-468.
[2] Hrdy, 462-468.
[3] Haffter, 57.
[4] Haffter, 57.
[5] Haffter, 60.
[6] Scheper-Hughes, 364-373.