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News: Underwater caves off Yucatan yield three old skeletons—remains date to 11,000 B.C.
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the World of Fairies

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Moira Kelliey
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« Reply #15 on: July 28, 2007, 08:20:57 pm »

Identifying a changeling

Changelings would be identified by their wizened appearance, voracious appetite, malicious temper, inability to move, and other unpleasant traits. Medieval chronicles record instances of this, which is one of the oldest known pieces of folklore about fairies.

According to some legends, it is possible to detect changelings, as they are much wiser than human children. When changelings are detected in time, their parents have to take them back. In one tale of the Brothers Grimm, there's an account of how a woman, who suspected that her child had been exchanged, started to brew beer in the hull of an acorn. The changeling uttered: "now I am as old as an oak in the woods but I have never seen beer being brewed in an acorn", then disappeared.

Some people believed that trolls would take unbaptized children.

Beauty in human children and young women, particularly blond hair, attracted the fairies.

In Scottish folklore, the children might be replacements for fairy children in the tithe to Hell; this is best known from the ballad of Tam Lin.

Some folklorists believe that fairies were memories of inhabitants of various regions in Europe who had been driven into hiding by invaders. They held that changelings had actually occurred; the hiding people would exchange their own sickly children for the healthy children of the invaders

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