48: Changelings

On Christmas Eve in 1689, a Swedish farmer and his wife carried their ten-year-old son to the manure heap at the edge of their farm and left him there overnight to freeze. They believed, sincerely and devoutly, that he was a changeling — and that the elves would come in the night and return their real son by morning.

He was not the first child this happened to. He would not be the last.

This week, host Shauna takes you deep into the changeling tradition — into where the lore came from, what our ancestors believed a changeling was, and the documented historical record of what they did to the children they were certain were not their own. From a courtroom in Tralee in 1826 to a Lutheran pulpit in Wittenberg in 1532 to present-day West Africa, this episode walks through five hundred years of folk diagnosis, folk cure, and the children who paid the price.

Sources & Further Reading

• The Gotland Trial Records, 1690 — bound in the Swedish dombok (court book), held in the Swedish National Archives, Stockholm. Studied in detail by Ilmar Arens and Bengt af Klintberg in Rig: Kulturhistorisk Tidskrift, 1979.

• Martin Luther, Tischreden (Table-Talk), volume 5 — first printed 1566; standard scholarly edition in the Weimar edition of Luther's collected works (Weimarer Ausgabe).

• Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, c. 1200 — British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian DX.

• Tralee Assizes Trial Records, July 1826 — the case of Ann Roche; contemporary court reports and transcripts, excerpted in 19th-century Irish folklore writings.

• John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 1860–1862, four volumes — The Smith and the Fairies is in volume 2. Public domain; available free at archive.org and on Project Gutenberg.