distraction for the day: anyone fancy suggesting me symbology associated with changelings?

[kaberett]

because as far as I can tell from a very cursory search my best bet is "stylised depictions of standing stones" and that's not quite what I'm after, so, you know.

(I am also toying with Symbology Around Metamorphosis, for which chrysalises and pupae seem like the obvious way to go for me for a variety of reasons, but I'm also curious about specifically changelings.)

Comments

[judiff]

Moon phases?
Not being able to/not wanting to touch iron?
Having a birthmark and/or wild/tangled hair

[judiff]

I think changelings are supposed to curdle milk - which could actually be like making cheese or yogurt!

And like annoying Martin Luther (we got Dad a Playmobil Martin Luther when it was the 500 years Reformation anniversary)

[madgastronomer]

Curdle milk and skunk beer.

[jenett]

Eggshells are a thing (if you know the folklore, that's one the classic stories about how to trick a changeling into revealing themselves.)

This is also an area where there's a lot of Victorian Added Weirdness, and so digging into older sources can produce different things than 19th and 20th century stuff does. If you're up for mining a book, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness by Carole G. Silver talks about this.

(I *think* she is reasonably competent about talking about modern comparisons to autism and other related topics which come up, but it's been a while since I read it, and the book came out in 2000, so I am possibly not remembering problems.)

[vass]

Tattoo or poem?

Symbology Around Metamorphosis:
- fire
- rising bread dough

Changeling: cabbage? (I'm not sure if that's linked in the traditional lore, but I'm kind of free-associating with the cabbage patch myth of where babies come from.)

Via Wikipedia:
- corn or rye, as in the Roggenmuhme.

- mountains or hills (as in underhill)

- egg shells (both as changeling lore and Symbology Around Metamorphosis)

Here's a beautiful but troubling story on the Wiki page:

"In one Swedish changeling tale, the human mother is advised to brutalize the changeling so that the trolls will return her son, but she refuses, unable to mistreat an innocent child despite knowing its nature. When her husband demands she abandon the changeling, she refuses, and he leaves her – whereupon he meets their son in the forest, wandering free. The son explains that since his mother had never been cruel to the changeling, so the troll mother had never been cruel to him, and when she sacrificed what was dearest to her, her husband, they had realized they had no power over her and released him."

(ETA: is symbology associated with severely neglected children of mysterious origin useful? If so: wooden horse.)

[kaberett]

In the first instance I am thinking A Dreamwidth Icon, but. :)

Thank youuuuu for these.

[sporky_rat]

The son explains that since his mother had never been cruel to the changeling, so the troll mother had never been cruel to him, and when she sacrificed what was dearest to her, her husband, they had realized they had no power over her and released him."

That's beautiful.

[alexseanchai]

...I am not helpful but the above commenters have got Seanan McGuire's "Earthquake Weather" stuck in my head

[davidgillon]

Can't help thinking there should be something iconically crib-related, but the examples in the wiki article on Changelings are a bit 15th Century.

'The Changeling's Choice' in Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books is an interesting variation on the traditional imagery, her changelings are the product of faery-human relationships and have to be offered 'The Changeling's Choice' - to live as fae or live as human, before they're old enough their instinctive human disguise fails. What they're not told is that choosing human means they'll be killed. It's not entirely traditional, but it does capture the trapped between two worlds elements, and the danger of falling in with the fae.

[ilyena_sylph]

This is what I was gonna say. The crib, I mean.