Are Changelings Real?

by Cassandra
(America)

Hello Ophelia! I was reading a little bit of Irish myths and legends and I was curious to know if changelings do in fact exist?

Ophelia Fey says -- I think it would be safe to say that changelings live in the realm of Story. They originated back in times of strong superstition and fear. When people did not know how to explain things and so blamed everything on unseen forces -- and perhaps rightfully so with some of it, but not all by any means.

However, people were also much more in tune with those same unseen forces, with nature and the nature spirits. There is much confusion about what may have happened back in those days, and what did not. What was really seen and what was misinterpreted. The issue of changelings is one of them.

As you may know, some stories of changelings involved saying that fae folk swapped babies with humans, leaving behind other children that may have been suffering from disease or various disorders. So this is how they explained what was wrong with some of their children.

Keep in mind though, that fae have different types of forms than you do, and our forms do not have the same types of functions, including birth, growth, and passing. So swapping our young with your young would have been a rather peculiar option.

Back in olden times there may have been a person in a given village thought of as "strange," and who may have been called witch, fae and such, out of ignorance. And so if something "wrong" happened in a village, it was sometimes blamed on these outcast folk. Perhaps children were indeed stolen from time to time (but by other people, perhaps travelers and visitors, not fae). Who knows for what reason.

Stories, though, are almost always based on Something. Something may have happened, and it may have indeed been strange and unexplainable. Such things still happen today, and there are stories of them in books and on your television -- "stranger than science" sort of things. You may have heard of such stories. But as far as changelings go, I would not take such things literally.

Ophelia Fey, fairy