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Changelings An Essay by D. L. Ashliman

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Sprite
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« on: October 13, 2009, 12:13:24 am »

A changeling's ostensibly great age plays an important role in yet another folktale motif: the child who neither matures nor dies, remaining helplessly dependent and insatiably hungry for an interminable amount of time. The opening paragraph of the Norwegian tale "The Changeling Betrays His Age" {footnote 17} exemplifies the problem: "On Lindheim Farm, in Nesherad, there was supposed to have been a changeling. No one could remember when he was born or when he had come to the farm. No one had ever heard him speak, but all the same they were afraid to do anything to him or make him angry. He ate so much that the people at Lindheim had been living from hand to mouth, generation after generation, on his account."

Although other sources suggest that changelings seldom lived longer than seven years, or -- at the longest -- eighteen or nineteen years, {footnote 18} the fear could easily evolve that a changeling might survive several normal lifetimes, bringing poverty and suffering to a family for many generations. To some the burden of caring for a retarded child must have appeared to be interminable. If one believed that such problems may not resolve themselves during an entire human lifetime, then drastic measures would be all the more justified.
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