Changeling
In the folklore of Ireland, Germany and the Slavic lands, a fairy child, or a bewitched stand-in, left in the cradle when the fairies steal a human baby.
Meaning
A changeling is what the fairies leave behind. In the Grimms’ tale it is a child “with a large head and staring eyes, which would do nothing but eat and drink”; in Ireland, Lady Wilde wrote, it was “an ugly changeling” known by its huge appetite and its failure to grow; W. B. Yeats added that it might be only a log of wood bewitched to look like a dying child. The Slavic leshy, according to the Czech scholar Jan Máchal, swapped his own offspring for human children in the same way. The English word dates from the mid-1500s.
Origin and history
The stories tell how to get the real child back. In the Grimms’ version a neighbour tells the mother to boil water in two eggshells on the hearth; the changeling laughs that he is “as old now as the Wester forest” and has never seen such a thing, and as he laughs the elves bring back the right child and take theirs away. Yeats records a gentler Irish ending, in which a fairy came in and returned the stolen baby, saying it was the others who had taken it.
Lady Wilde recorded the belief’s cost. She wrote that it made peasant women “often very cruel towards weakly children”, and that a “trial by fire” was sometimes used to test a child suspected of being a changeling. She tells of a thin, restless child whom a “witch-woman” ordered to be left outside on a shovel for three nights, given foxglove and doused with cold water; on the third night he died.
The children it endangered
In Wilde’s examples the child suspected of being a changeling was one who was weak, wasted, restless or would not grow, and the belief put such children in danger; she calls the women who acted on it “often very cruel”. The Banshee and the Leshy belong to the same world of beliefs about spirits who live beside people.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeBaba YagaThe witch of Russian and Slavic fairy tales, who lives in the forest in a hut on hen’s legs, rides through the air in a mortar steered with a pestle, and eats people, but sometimes helps the hero.
- The same shape in Andean and Inca symbolsTumi (ceremonial knife)A ceremonial knife with a half-moon blade from the north coast of ancient Peru. The gold tumis of the Sicán (Lambayeque) culture carry a god on the handle, often identified as Naylamp, the dynasty’s mythical founder. The Tumi de Oro was declared a pre-Columbian symbol of Peru in 1981.
See also
Banshee, Minotaur, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra, Harpy.
Sources
- Household Tales by Brothers Grimm (tr. Margaret Hunt), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales, translated by Margaret Hunt (1884), no. 39, “The Elves”, third story, Project Gutenberg, no. 39, The Elves, third story
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (ed. W. B. Yeats, 1888), W. B. Yeats (editor), Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Walter Scott, 1888), Project Gutenberg, Changelings, introductory note
- Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (Lady Wilde, 1887), Lady Wilde (Jane Francesca Wilde), Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), Project Gutenberg, Superstitions concerning children, and The Fairy Changeling
- Slavic Mythology (Jan Máchal, The Mythology of All Races, vol. 3, 1918), Jan Máchal, “Slavic Mythology”, in The Mythology of All Races, volume III: Celtic, Slavic (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), Internet Archive, Chapter VII, Silvan Spirits
- Changeling (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Changeling” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry and origin
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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