Our dear friend, the brilliant writer of Indian fairy-inspired books Shveta Thakrar, recently sent us this wonderful blurb for Fairylore:        

“If global folklore were a rainbow, then Fairylore is a portrait painted liberally in all seven colors. It’s the faerie compendium I’ve been waiting for, one that actually represents the vast richness and delectable variations of our world and its magic. More of this, please.”
—Shveta Thakrar, author of the Andre Norton Nebula Award finalist Star Daughter

(Eeee, we were so hoping for responses like this, thank you!! If you haven’t seen them yet, definitely check out all the fabulous blurbs that are rolling in from people like Morgan Daimler, Mary McMyne, Daniel Rabuzzi, and Kelly Jarvis – we’re posting them on our pre-order page!)

In her email with the blurb though, she casually asked us if we could point her toward tales of changelings in India, which we had mentioned very briefly in our book. She told us that she had heard about changelings featured in Indian folklore before, but that nobody seemed to really know where the source for this knowledge was coming from.

Did we know? Heck yeah we did, we are research puzzle FIENDS. And we have the receipts. 

So we thought it would be fun to tell you about our journey on this topic and what we found (and to give you a hint of the kind of research that went into Fairylore and is currently going into our new mythology course… we always try our best to make sure our sources are valid and that we don’t just repeat things because they’ve been said before, so we’re always doing a LOT of this kind of work!) 

So here we go.

In our book, on P. 206 in the “Changeling” entry, we quote Joyce Underwood Munro’s essay “The Invisible Made Visible: The Fairy Changeling as a Folk Articulation of Failure to Thrive in Infants and Children” when we mention that stories of changelings have appeared in places like Egypt and India as well as the Celtic and Germanic countries most know them from. 

Munro’s quotation cites the source for this knowledge as a book called Folktales of Egypt by Hasan M. El-Shamy, a very well-respected source for Egyptian folklore. In that book, El-Shamy does say that the belief is found in India too, on P. 285, but he doesn’t give an example, so that made us be like “okay, but where are YOU getting this from though?”  

To find out more, we went to Stith Thompson’s trusty Motif-Index of Folk Literature. 

Under “Changeling” (Motif F321.1), India is listed with a citation for Penzer VIII 87 n. 1. Um, okay, what’s what? Well, a quick Google search revealed that it was The Ocean of Story, a book translated and edited by a British guy named Norman Mosley Penzer in the 1880s-1920s. It’s a 10-volume English translation of the 11th-century Sanskrit collection Katha Sarit Sagara by Somadeva, and still one of the best repositories of ancient Indian folklore we have in English.

If you go to P. 87 of Volume 8, you get this – 

​​Ah ha! It appears the girl described here is indeed a changeling, a non-mortal substitute for a human child. They even switched her with a human child! Note 1 on this page directs back to Volume III, P. 131, which says this:

Which appears to be a recounting of the birth/switching of the non-mortal girl in the story in Volume 8 (and the section even uses the title “The Substituted Child”!) It doesn’t get much more clear cut than that – the changeling concept is definitely a part of Indian folklore!

Now, did Shakepeare have this in mind when he featured an Indian changeling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Probably not :P. But it’s definitely yet another example of the fact that fairies/fairy-like beings, and their typical shenanigans, pop up all over the world in different cultures and contexts. 

If you want (a lot) more on FAIRIES, definitely click here and pre-order our book before the 10th when it comes out so that you can get all the goodies (including a ticket to our LAUNCH PARTY! There will be prizes! And special guests! Eee!)

And if research like this makes your heart sing too, you’re definitely going to want to sign up for Ravens in the Labyrinth, our new course on world mythology with a delightfully Carterhaugh-ian spin! We’re enrolling until 2/13 at midnight ET, but the early bird price goes away this Friday (1/30) at midnight ET, so click here to check it out! 

(The beautiful Indian nagini image at the top of this post is part of a painting by Annie Stegg that was made for the book!)