Home Excerpts Reviews & Events Soundtrack Changelings Underground Writing A Double Life
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Changelings, faeries, hobgoblins, and other things that go bump in the night  William Butler Yeats, who had seen such things all over Ireland, wrote a wonderfully sad poem called "The Stolen Child" in the 1890s. His premise was that the faeries could entice a child from the hearth to their hidden land, and that, furthermore, the child would be better off among the waters and the wild, far away from a human world too full of weeping.The poem itself has been recorded by James Earl Jones on "The Silver Lining" and was set to music by Loreena McKennitt and The Waterboys. This latter version from the album "Fisherman's Blues" kept running through my head during the novel's long gestation. Faeries, changelings, hobgoblins, and other subhuman creatures exist in folklore around the world, and perhaps the most comprehensive place to begin looking for them is D.L. Ashilman's Folklinks. On Dr. Ashilman's site, there's even a section on the changeling legend with links to electronic text versions of the tales from Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. A particularly charming tale is how to get rid of a changeling by boiling eggs. The Endicott Studios takes a long and loving look at the changeling legend and even features the refrain from Yeats's poem. And our friends at Wikipedia can be relied on for entries on both changelings and Yeats's "The Stolen Child." Yeats, of course, has no literary corner on fairy changelings and the stolen child. In Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in which the changeling boy is prized by both the fairy queen Titania who "never had so sweet a changeling" to the fairy king Oberon who says to her "I do but beg a little changeling boy/To be my henchman." Other examples of the stolen child can be found in Thomas Middleton's play "The Changeling," John Galt's novel, "The Stolen Child," and in scores of other works. Fairy changelings appear in one guise or another in contemporary novels, films, and role-playing games.
 In my novel, the faery changelings (as Aniday refers to them) or hobgoblins (as Henry Day says) have altogether different purposes. One vector that went into writing the novel was reading about the cultural significance of the changeling legend. In her book Mother Nature, Dr. Sarah Hrdy digs at the roots of the changeling story as way of using the folktale as a way of disguising the infanticide of unwanted children or those with a "failure to thrive."As with all folk legends, the inspiration of the tale widened into a generalized fear of the unknown. There are fairies, changelings, and other things that go bump in the night that come to threaten our children and ourselves. The subterreanean nature of those fears and how they are expressed through art is part of the thesis of Victoria Nelson's Secret Life of Puppets -- a book I came to after finished the first draft of the novel. But it was uncanny how many aspects of her theory apply to the story. The changelings in THE STOLEN CHILD are, in some ways, not so different from the children. Their powers are few: they are locked in time; they appear to be something other than what they are; they are hypersensitive; they can squeeze into small spaces; they are all we used to be. Hiding in the woods, burrowing under the library, holding on to their mythical nature, they are as frightened of us, as we are of them. |
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