changeling

The English word changeling combines 'change' (from Old French changier, ultimately from Latin cambire, 'to exchange') with the diminutive suffix '-ling.' A changeling was a fairy child left in place of a stolen human baby. The word appeared in English by the 1530s, but the concept was much older — Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Scandinavian, and Germanic folklore all had versions of the substitution story.

The folklore had a function. Medieval and early modern communities needed an explanation for children who were born different — children with developmental disabilities, physical deformities, or sudden behavioral changes after illness. The changeling belief provided one: this child is not yours. The fairies took your real child and left this one. The explanation was supernatural, but the grief was real.

The 'cures' for changelings were horrifying. Irish and English folk practices included placing the suspected changeling on a hot shovel, holding it over a fire, or leaving it on a hillside overnight. The logic was that mistreating the fairy child would force the fairies to return the human one. In 1826, Anne Roche drowned four-year-old Michael Leahy in the River Flesk in Kerry, Ireland, believing he was a changeling. She was acquitted. The jury accepted the defense.

Martin Luther believed in changelings. He wrote that disabled children were massa carnis without souls, placed by the Devil. The changeling belief persisted in rural communities into the 19th century. Bridget Cleary was killed by her husband in County Tipperary in 1895 because he believed she had been taken by the fairies and replaced. The last changeling killing in the British Isles happened within living memory of people alive today.