It's possible they've come for the baby—Changelings of Folklore · 9:55pm Aug 25th, 2016
This week the changelings are back!.. At least one of them... In a changed form.
A side thought I had on viewing The Times They Are A Changeling was that Sunburst’s line about the threat to little Flurry Heart was an echo of the changeling stories of European folklore. Let’s take a closer look at these early reports of transdimensional child abduction and identity theft.
Changelings crop up fairly frequently in old folk tales from England, Ireland, Wales, other European countries, and—in varying forms—much of the rest of the world. Of course these changelings have about as much in common with Chrysalis and her army of bug-eyed minions as the fairy folk of old England have with the Disney Tinkerbell clones.
In some remote rural places, there were report of people still believing in fairies as late as the 1950s (after which such old-fashioned superstitious nonsense was replaced by more rational modern theories such as abduction by aliens). This was not a childish fantasy, but a real fear of dangerous magical creatures with a penchant for carrying off human children. Above all else, fairies would covet beautiful babies. A careless mother would leave the crib unattended for a moment, and without her knowing, the fairies would take her child, and leave in its place a changeling – a sickly deformed creature, bewitched to look like the taken infant, so the unlucky parent would not immediately notice the swap, but would, with time, come to realise she was raising a child which was not her own.
In some legends the changeling is a fairy—young or old—intent on mischief or just exploiting the free hospitality. In others it was just an enchanted block of wood. It seems the role of changelings was not as characters to entertain or scare a storyteller’s audience. Instead these were stories of instruction, passed along to provide an explanation as to why some children do not develop properly. In the middle ages, poor communities had no understanding of conditions such as autism, and this was the only explanation available to why a child would grow up unable to walk, talk, or make themselves understood.
To a poor family in centuries past, when all family members had to work from an early age, raising a child with severe physical disabilities or learning difficulties was a burden they could not afford. Sadly, it seems changeling legends provided a convenient justification for the unpalatable practice of infanticide. Many of the stories recommend that a child suspected of being a changeling should be violently whipped (regarded as a panacea for all kind of problems in the medieval world), thrown in the river, or held on a shovel over a hot fire.
In the nicer stories, however, the parent typically finds a way to trick the changeling into revealing its true identity. Upon which the fairies would realize the game was up, and return the taken child.
Further reading: The science of fairy tales: an inquiry into fairy mythology, Edwin Sidney Hartland (1891) Chapter 5.
I heard once there were also some stories where the fairies would return your original child if you treated the changeling kindly enough... Given the reality behind the tales, those give a lot brighter a picture.
(And they even work in the MLP verse - if you feed the changeling enough love, hopefully they'll de-cocoon the pony they're imitating!)
I'm sure changelings were also used to explain what we now know as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or any other sudden illness leading to the death of the baby.
I made a video on this (and other changeling-related topics, such as hive society): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHK-Gp7tyPk
I totally missed the line in the title of this post though, and now I feel dumb for missing it. ;)
Sources I read suggested shoving it into an oven rather than over a fire. Same general principle.