To Hi Dal Doodle to Fairy Land

When I was very young, maybe four or five years of age, I remember playing on the floor alone. This is one of the first things I can remember. Suddenly I raised my glance and saw my parents' wedding picture on the table. I thought to mysef: Yes, they say that those people are my parents, but I am sure that they are not. They can't be. My parents don't look like that. Who are these people? What on earth I am doing here?

Edmund Dulac: Fairy Land for Edgar Allan Poe

After this moment everything was changed. The light of the Sun, the taste of food and the whole world were different, as if an enchantment had been broken. Ever since I've always felt a vague depression and frustration in my heart. Only when playing and wondering alone in the great northern forests could I feel some true happiness.

Actually, there was something besides this that enrapt my mind: Fairytales. I could not have enough fairytales. I even learned to read just to be able to read fairytales, to not depend on other people´s time and will. I deeply felt that the world of the fairytales was the real world; a world where I belonged to and wanted to be. However, that world was not separeted from the world I was living in. In my universe these worlds were mixed, always together: I was afraid of the nix in the lake, I danced with fairies on the fern meadow, I followed pixies into the darkest forest, I talked with angels and hid myself under the bed in fear of ghosts.

Margaret Tarrant: Secrets

Fairytales also gave me an explanation for what, and how, I was. As I read about changelings, I became entirely convinced I was a one. I was not a freak who was teased by other kids and misunderstood by adults, nor was I stupid or a crazy loser. No, I was a changeling from the kingdom of the fairytales.

Several European folklores tell how wights sneak to a house of a newborn infant. On the Orkney islands, they would to sing the following (quite meaningless?) song, when entering the house without being seen.

Spinning yet, spinning yet?
Got to bed, go to bed!
Short spoon and wooden ladle
Unsound horse and torn saddle
In childbed and unwell;
To hi dal doodle and to hi del doo-dee

Then they could steal the human baby unobserved putting their own child back to the cradle. When human parents came back, they would understand they now had a troll child.

  A 14th century painting in a Danish church, Skamstrup. 
A troll changing the babies.  Link

The ancient Romans didn't have a name for a changeling, but they believed that female creatures called lamiae and strigae could kidnap babies. In Danish a changeling is called skifting, in Norse skiptungr, in Norwegian bytting, in Icelandic umskiptingr, in Swedish bortbyting, in Finnish vaihdokas and in German Wechelbalg. They all have the same meaning as changeling.

John Bauer: An Illustration to Helena Nyblom's The changelings 
in anthology Among pixes and trolls, 1913

Usually, the changeling was ugly and malicious, while the human baby with the trolls was sweet and beautiful. It is quite clear that people believed they had a changeling, when they actually had a retarded or a handicapped child. However, I think this coincedence is a consequence, not a cause, of the folklore.

Changelings could also be wise and intelligent, but they were eccentric: they wanted to barefoot around, and their hair was always hopelessly tangled. Some changelings would forget their origin and live their lives as humans. Others would return back to their wight parents without warning. The human changeling would usually stay with the wights forever.

 John Bauer: An Illustration to Helena Nyblom's The changelings 
in anthology Among pixes and trolls, 1913

Once one had a changeling, there were still a couple of things one could do. For example, one could force the changeling to laugh or to make him utter an expression of surprise by doing something very absurd: brew beer or cook stew in an eggshell or acorn, or make sausages of a dog with all hairs and skin. (I don't know why this would be so awfully strange.) Seeing this craziness, the changeling would expose his true identity, jump up laughing or shouting: Many things I have seen, but never anything so stupid. I'm out of here!

The human mother could also throw the changeling into a hot fireplace or stove, throw them into water, beat them severely with a switch, leave them unfed and crying in an open field. Actually, there is evidence that these things really happened to the suspected changelings, because people believed that the mercilessness towards the changeling would bring the troll mother. She would return the human child and take her own baby with her: Here is your own child. However, I was never as evil towards your child as you were towards mine!

 Arthur Rackham: The Changeling 1905

In the Celtic, more violent version, the mother throws the changeling into the fireplace, and the changeling then flies screaming up through the chimney. In the English, even more violent version, it is described how the changelings would burn as wood if one put them into fire. (I don't even want to imagine how many deviating real babies lost their lives in that way in the past.) 

The best thing one could do to prevent getting a changeling was to baptize the baby, for after that trolls could no longer take him away. Iron scissors or a knife on the top of the cradle would also protect babies, because nature spirits in folklore don't fancy iron. In practice, this also meant that the family and neighbours took it in turns to keep eye on the infant's cradle throughout the first weeks at nights, so that the baby could not be stolen away or replaced by a changeling.

Can the concept of a changeling teach us anything? Folklorists and antropologists have already concluded that changelings were merely some congenitally handicapped children. Thus these fairytales would just be a long and agonising illustration of West European family massacres.

The earlier truth leaves us in a world without magic. Therefore, I can't belive it would be the truth in its entirety.