When I was a child in Cumbria it used to be common for people to say you must be a changeling if you had nothing in common with your parents and there were also stories circulating that the gypsies who were passing through the village would steal babies for the fairies taking them from their prams and replacing them with changelings!! Given this rich folklore and fear around changelings from my past I am always surprised now when students have not heard of them. I wrote about Julia Kagawa’s The Iron King’s intertextual relationship to the changeling subplot in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare, Hobgoblins and the Never Never and Generation Dead: YA Gothic Fiction students should rejoice in the new post on the Unchanging Appeal of the Changeling over on Folklore Thursday’s site. Do take a look if you are writing on Julia Kagawa and brush up your Shakespeare. I have this image of Vivien Leigh as Titania, care of the British Library, on my wall so I don’t need an excuse to post it again here. Magical and one hundred percent fey!!
