Fantastic changelings: liminality and narrative technique in Irish changeling tales

Abstract

Folk beliefs around changelings, iarlaisí in Irish, are numerous in Ireland: fairies would take humans away to the Otherworld, while leaving a substitute in place of the stolen person. A number of studies have been carried out that highlight the aetiological origins of changeling folklore: these narratives would rationalize otherwise inexplicable disabilities and illnesses, such as failure to thrive. Despite the extensive scholarship on this aspect of folk belief and that ‘it may seem there is little left to add’ according to Linda-May Ballard, analysis of changeling tales has taught us that further insights can still be found within them. Consequently, this study analyses changeling narratives in Irish folklore, both in English and in Irish, and focuses on liminality in the Irish changeling tradition as a way to achieve such new understandings. The accounts under examination here focus on those in which the family brutally gets rid of the changeling. I exclude stories in which the fairy creature demonstrates extraordinary capacities for music or speech for example. Simply put, this enquiry examines narratives featuring motif F321.1.4, paying particular attention to the way the fairy interloper is driven out, according to Stith Thompson’s classification. Liminality, the quality of something which is situated, to take up Victor Turner's phrase, ‘betwixt and between’ two spaces or states, physical or metaphorical, is central to changeling tales. The term, popularised by Arnold Van Gennep in his ethnographical study The Rites of Passage, designates the character of that which belongs to these thresholds, be they a dividing line or a border space, and of that which therefore holds characteristics of both worlds on either side of it. The liminality of these accounts, expressed through their characters, settings and plots is also studied through its relationship with the narrative technique of the fantastic. Indeed, the changelings, half-human, half-fairy, are embodiments of liminality in the narratives. Yet the characters are not the only ones to be found on the threshold between worlds. Places, times and even narrative technique similarly possess an in-between dimension. This study centres specifically on the fantastic, a process that blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined, theorized by Tzvetan Todorov amongst others, as it