The Changeling

The Changeling is perhaps our most popcultural-collage deity, but I hope you will recognise that the power of her myth is already everywhere in our culture. I’m sure you can think of more, and I welcome any ideas you have in the comments. The below list combines a Reading List, and Other Spirits:

(This article was written in 2021 for the Wordpress, as a very initial establishing sketch. Nowadays, I keep all new books on the Reading List; but for posterity, here's the original list)

Fairies

• The Queen of Apples
• Michelle – trad. Colin & Michelle (Channel Islands; see Marie de Garis)
• Tam Lin - the best version is, of course, the Benjamin Zephaniah one

Fairy Tale Princess as Initiate's Death-And-Rebirth Myth

• Snow White (& adaptations thereof)
• Sleeping Beauty (& adaptations thereof)
• the Glass Coffin
• Myrsina
• Bella Venezia
• La Petite Toute-Belle
• Gold Tree and Silver Tree
• Sun, Moon and Talia

Curious Girl Goes Missing

• Miranda – Picnic at Hanging Rock
  • I am devoted to the film, especially the Director's Cut; the book is alright, and I’ve yet to see the TV
• Alice – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  • Never got on super well with the original book, but the popcultural Alice is very much the thing
• Thomas the Rhymer (Child Ballads)
• The Outcasts (1982)
• Little Red Riding Hood
• Maid Marian – especially in the English folk tradition, of Marian as May Queen
• the story of the Cottingley Fairies – the film Photographing Fairies is especially good, and the better of the two films on this topic released this year
• possibly The Village
• It’s probable that I was influenced by Dver/ForestDoor’s vision of “Girls Underground” in this strand
• The Vivian sisters (Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal)

Women Who Break the Rules, Say No, Are “Too” Curious, and Claim Their Power

• Eve – Biblical myth
• Lilith – Biblical myth
• Blodeuwedd (“She wants to be flowers and you make her owls”)
  • An “us” resource for this myth is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service; or the 70s TV adaptation of the same name
• Pandora – Greek Myth
• Sarah – Labyrinth
• Rosaleen – Company of Wolves
• the Red Shoes – Hans Christian Andersen/I am especially passionate about the 1950s film
• The VVitch
• The Secret Garden

They danced down the stairs, into the street, and out through the gate of the town. Dance she did, and dance she must, straight into the dark woods. She was terribly frightened, and tried to take off her shoes. She tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet. And dance she did, for dance she must, over fields and valleys, in the rain and in the sun, by day and night. It was most dreadful by night. She danced over an unfenced graveyard, but the dead did not join her dance. They had better things to do.

Hans Christian Andersen – the Red Shoes

Girl falls in love with a Fairy/must free her enchanted lover

• Tam Lin
• Beauty and the Beast
• The Sleeping Prince
• Nourie Hadig (her name means “a little bit of pomegranite”)
• Mallt-y-Nos/Night Matilda (welsh companion to Annwyn of the Wild Hunt)
• But the Changeling is so popcultural; last night I was listening to the Beetlejuice musical and reflecting that, probably, this counts as a Changeling myth

Innocence/Experience

• the Maiden in Wicca
  • This is the one myth in Fencraft where sexuality is central; but note that she never goes on to be a Mother or wise Crone - she is eternally irresponsible
• Persephone in Greek myth (arguably also a Curious Girl in Fairyland story, and a Women Claim Their Power story, AND a Death-Rebirth myth. You can learn a lot about the Changeling by just watching people have interpretations of the Persephone myth; in many ways, the Changeling is a container for that complexity)
• There’s a lot of films in this genre; I liked Stoker (2013) etc
• The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter, & her interpretations of fairy tales as related to female sexuality
• Lucy – Dracula, a lot of the gothic really

Sad Dead Girls

• Especially this vision of someone vanishing into an otherworldliness
• So, so many folk songs - the hangman's daughter who disappears in the river, the maid cut down by cruel death on the morn of her marriage, the ghostlike presence of 'She Moves through the Fair' - and so forth.
• Cathy – Wuthering Heights
• Virgin Suicides – film, possibly the book – which I haven’t read

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”

1960s dreamgirls the singer is never going to actually talk to

• See Emily Play - Pink Floyd
• Like Emily - All About Eve
• Garden of Jane Delawney - Trees
• Ruby Tuesday - Rolling Stones
• Golden Hair - Pink Floyd
• Moonchild - King Crimson

etc. If my memory serves, the 1960s trope is known as 'the Darling girl', after the 1965 John Schlesinger film about a carefree, unsettled, liberated young woman in Swinging London - in many ways, just the precursor to the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl in the 00s

Despite generally envisaging Fencrafts spirits as appearing in many genders, the Changeling myths are generally extremely gendered. Some possible male variants include:

• Christopher Robin – Winnie the Pooh series? (“child goes into the forest and becomes strange”)
• The Snowman (“child abducted to join magical dance party”)
• The princes of the Sleeping Prince and Nourie Hadig fairy tales
• The Picture of Dorian Gray and NBC Hannibal are possible ways in to thinking about “aesthetic seduction and surrender” narratives for men
• Merlin Wyllt – the myth of Merlin escaping the castle to live wild in the forest
• Penda’s Fen – Stephen is possibly a Changeling, an establishment figure who comes to celebrate all that is mixed, dissonant, impure, and muddy; an outsider in the midst of a community
• Perhaps Tam Lin himself in the Tam Lin myth

It says more about us, than about the Changeling, that these images are hard to find (and similarly, the almost complete absence of people of colour in suitable images I’ve found so far)

I also want to stress the non-gendered nature of spirits in Fencraft. Men of all kinds would benefit if society understood better that they, too, can be made vulnerable, have need to take ownership of sexual shame and autonomy, discover what it is that is their delight, and have it truly recognised that they have a right to no and choose celibacy. Additionally, its undoubtedly true that the Changeling trope is often powered by the artists sexalisation of the figure of young woman; but men have rather a different problem, and while we wouldn’t like to see these predatory ideas transferred over to young men, there is definitely an under-sexualisation, of men rarely being able to experience themselves as beautiful and desireable, that the Changeling perhaps addresses.

Regardless of our own genders, sexualities or experiences, the Changeling calls on us to follow and become her - not just to watch, but to join the dance.

The Changeling pulls on such common themes in or folklore that she’s comparatively easy to playlist – I’m adding songs, and tweaking their order, here.

“Ever drifting down the stream
Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream?
Children yet the tale to hear
Eager eye and willing ear
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die”

Lewis Carrol