INTRO:
Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world.
These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.
I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.
Just as a pre-warning in this one, there are themes of child loss and child abuse, espeically abuse towards vunerable and disabled children within this episode - so I just wanted to make sure that anyone affected by this knows, and can tune out if they need to at any time.
DESCRIPTION
In today’s episode we’re going to be talking about the sweet little Changelings which derive from European folklore. These are described as a deformed or visibly disabled child or baby, which was really a child of a fairy or elf which has been substituted for the parents human child on the sly. The child was taken for one of three reasons; to be a servant of the fairy captors, for the fairies to receive the love of a human child, or for revenge against the community of humans. They had voracious appetites, and would eat anything in sight, causing trouble for working class parents who would barely be able to afford food on the table as it is.
Most of the time, this exchange was made with a baby fairy, but sometimes it would be an elderly fairy, so that it could live out its life or so that it could die in peace. Usually thought, it was the most beautiful children who were taken, because the fairies wanted a baby with these features.
According to legend, the abducted human children were given to the Devil, or raised under the fairies, never told about their origin. Must be an issue when it comes to growing, but I’m sure fairies have a way around this kind of thing. You could get your original child back by making the changeling laugh or, unfortunately the opposite, by torturing it; this latter belief was responsible for numerous cases of actual child abuse back in the day.
So how would you keep the fairies from stealing your babies?
To spook the fairies, people would often put trinkets and bells beside their babies' cradles and later it was recommended that you should baptize your kids as soon as possible, as it was believed creatures would only take unbaptized children.
Now there is another variation of a changeling within mythology, but it’s more of a glorified very small myth - but I’ll talk about it because there’s a lot of cultural reference around this one. Now it’s been called a couple of different names, but we’re going to call them Botchlings in English. However, these are Slavic creatures and in Polish, they’re called Poroniec. It’s definitely a lot darker than the Changelings, but I think they’re a good fit with each other. I’m going to refer to them by both names going forward.
Now, the Poroniec is said to be an actually a demon that’s either the corpse of a stillborn child, or the improperly buried remains of a child who died very young.
It is said that if a child is stillborn, burying it under the threshold of the house will cause it to turn into a protective household spirit, rather than the horrible Poroniec. They are apparently very powerful, due to their unrealised potential in life.
Now the description of these creatures are pretty gross - they look like a partially-decayed fetus - which are apparently twisted and malformed with hatred and spite. They’re mad with hunger, and they specifically feed on pregnant women’s blood. When it’s full, it can change forms to a hunched over man that can attack and ravage people at will.
A Poroniec will lurk around at night, and they sneak up to an expectant mother as they sleep, and drain theirs and their unborn child’s blood. A woman who is being attacked by a Botchling will start to get weaker and weaker each day, get nightmares and start to become delirious. After a few nights she is completely unable to defend herself, and the Botchling sinks its teeth into the woman until her and her unborn child are no more.
So how do I stop a Poroniec?
The Poroniec curse can be lifted by transforming it into a lubberkin, which is a guardian spirit that watches over the family it never knew in the house it never could call home. That quote is taken straight from the Bestiary from the Witcher games, which I’ll talk about later in regards to this - but I thought it was quite sad.
ORIGIN:
Both of these monsters are based from Europe, with Changelings' histories going back to the 19th century, and the Poroniec is from Polish mythology with rumours of these monsters hanging around from around the same time.
For Changelings - the existence of them is believed to stem from the idea that babies are more susceptible to demonic possession, due to their innocence and age. In medieval times, anything particularly nasty was said to pick on unbaptised children, as I mentioned earlier. Also in the same kind of time frame, children with deformities or illnesses were thought to have been replaced by Changelings, which is why a lot of them were abandoned or killed.
If you thought that your baby had been swapped with a Changeling a lot of people would still care for and love their Changeling child, for fear that the fairies would harm their stolen child, or worse, never bring it back.
Unfortunately, the origin of Changeling stories are all too real reflections of working class families in Europe, pre-industry. Parents and children were forced to work to provide for the family, and having a baby was a drain on these resources with no way to give back for a few years. Yes, a horrible outlook on having kids, but hear me out.
If a family felt unable to care for a child, especially a child who had a disability or health condition, it was easier for them to ‘lose’ a child believing that they had been taken by a gang of fairies, than it was to believe they were going to let their child die or murder them. However, on the flip side of this, others really didn’t like Changelings, and any child suspected of being one was often kidnapped, tortured and left for dead.
There are two very wide-spread encounter-stories about Changelings both stemming from Ireland in the 1800’s.
In 1826, Anne Roche gave little Michael Leahy, a 4 year old boy who couldn’t speak or stand, a bath, three times in the River Flesk; she drowned him the third time. In court she shouted that she was trying to wash the fairy out of him, and she was actually acquitted in the end.
Now this is the worse one; in 1895, Bridget Cleary was killed by several people, including her husband and cousins, after a short bout of what they think was pneumonia. Many people in their village believed that she was a Changeling due to her illness. When in court, her husband defended that he actually believed her to be a fairy, however, many believe that he made up a "fairy defense" after killing her in a fit of rage. The killers were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, as even after her death they swore blind that they killed a Changeling, not Bridget Cleary herself.
However, Poroniec or Botchlings were not really believed as strongly, and are mostly associated with taboos regarding pregnant women at the time, such as not being allowed to get water from a well, not being allowed to leave home with a small child and no sexy times, even with their husbands.
Although both have lots of links to other mythical creatures surrounding babies and undead stillborns in other mythologies, they have enough content for us to cover in whole episodes themselves.
CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE:
Okay so in modern representations - we have art first, with the gorgeous painting named Der Wechselbalg or the Changeling in English, painted in 1781 by Henry Fuseli, this truly represents a Changeling in my eyes. I recommend you check this out if you want to be cultured before I mention 80’s movies that we all know and love.
You can’t talk about babies being kidnapped by fairies without talking about Labyrinth from 1986, this LEGENDARY film with the gorgeous young David Bowie, may Gods bless his soul - I miss him everyday. This film demonstrates how fairies would kidnap the children from their families and make them one of their own (even though they were technically Goblins). BUT can we talk about the songs in that movie for just a SECOND, that song when a very young Jennifer Connelly chases her brother through the weird stair maze with Bowie. SING SONG
Another Labyrinth named film within this would be Pan’s Labyrinth from 2006, although not explicitly about Changelings or Botchlings, this is a good representation of fairies poking about with pregnant ladies and children, I’m sure everyone who has seen this has seen the scene where her mum dies in childbirth after the evil bloke burns the mandrake given to her by the Faun. That movie still scares the living daylights out of me to be honest.
Two more honourable mentions are 2015’s The Hallow and The Hole in the Ground, which is a super new 2019 horror flick. Both of these are horror movies about Changelings murdering their other siblings or other characters in the films, so worth a watch if you’re into that kind of thing.
To lighten the mood, there’s a kids TV show on Netflix called Trollhunters, which features Changelings as the main antagonist race so to say. Cute one to help kids understand these kinds of creatures!
Now onto video games, you can find Changelings in Pathfinder as an enemy type or they’re the titular character in Changeling: The Lost. However, I really want to talk about the Witcher.
Now if you didn’t know the Witcher is a very famous book, video game and now Netflix TV series about Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher, who fights monsters for a living as he has special monster fighting powers yo. Now they’re not explicitly in the series, but in the first chapter of the book and the first main quest line in the video game, you will come across the Botchling as a whole kingdom is being terrorised by it. It’s all to do with the King being a wife beater, and generally a crappy husband and father, but he ends up burying the Botchling and depending on what you choose, you can either kill it or bury it and turn it into a lubberkin - how nice. The reason I mention this is because I adore the Witcher as a game series, and I’ve read the books, written by Andrej Sapkowski, and I honestly recommend them to all. And if you fancy the series, it’s on Netflix, but it's not as good - however, it does have Henry Cavill in it and he is honestly enough for it to be worth it for me.
Book recommendation this week is obviously the Witcher series, there are 6 of them I believe, the first one with the Botchling in being The Last Wish. Other books though about Fairies and Changelings, I would recommend The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology by Edwin Hartland,
Fairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk and
The Vanishing People by Katharine M. Briggs. These are all amazing books about the myths around fairies and all things magical and fantastical, and I highly recommend.
DO I THINK THEY EXISTED?
Now it’s time for, do I think they existed. For the Changeling, I do see why people would believe that they existed, it was very much a comfort (a terrible comfort, but one nonetheless) as infanticide was a very real threat within in the early world.
The fact that Changeling stories talk about their ravenous appetites says to me that the parents of these children saw them as the number one threat to their families' survival, and just accepting that they have to die in order to save the rest of the family just helped them down the horrible inevitable road. So the fairy aspect, is almost like a scapegoat for child murder, which is lovely. So I can kind of believe it to a point, and fairy tales here in the UK are rampant, and people do still believe in them - so who knows.
In terms of the Botchlings, I can very confidently say that I don’t think these existed and thank god. If you saw a mutilated rotting baby crawling at you at night, I think my womb would just shrivel up and die, let alone the rest of me after it’s fangs are out. Again, it’s that making sure that everyone has a proper burial, a ritual that is still so important in most cultures across the world - babies are no exception, be them stillborn or not. As I said earlier though, there aren’t any sightings confirmed of these ones, so they might just be fictional - but that’s the joy of mythology, it all could be!
OUTRO:
I thought this one was a bit sad actually, it really made me feel bad, but also it was very interesting to read up about. I would fully recommend reading up on them or playing the Witcher to be honest.
Next week we’re heading back over to the US of A to look at one of the silliest, most infamous West Virginian residents, the Mothman! I’m so looking forward to this, get your lamps at the ready next Thursday.
For now thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got the twitter for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The twitter is @mythmonsterspod or the instagram is @mythmonsterspodcast. Or you can email me, old fashioned-style on mythmonsterspodcast@gmail.com And share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.
Stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.