The reporting of the results seems dystopian, exemplified by the Daily Mail's headline: After all, what is life except a total drag when you're fugly? Needless to say, the experiment wasn't actually conducted via baby conveyer belt. Instead, six men and six women looked at more than 8, pictures of adults and rated them on an attractiveness scale. It turned out that those who had been born to older fathers were consistently rated as less attractive by their peers — although, with only 12 people doing the rating the conclusion doesn't strike me as watertight.
Women, who are usually the focus of negative publicity surrounding their gross tendency to age and their biological clocks could be excused for feeling a little smug. It is my female peers who sit down to dinner with apparently well-meaning family members only to be told by those who bred young that "the clock is ticking" and that it's "best to pop a sprog out while you've still got good equipment" that's a direct quote. Even in an age of astronomical workloads and a loss of stigma over IVF, women of child-bearing age find it difficult to dodge such comments — especially if they are in relationships.
If you're married, it's even worse: Although it is fragmentary, it contains the mother's grief and the Queen of Elfland 's promise to return her to her own child if she will nurse the queen's child until it can walk. The changelings left by the Mamuna were said to have a noticeably different appearance; a abnormally large abdomen , unusually small or large head, a hump, thin arms and legs, a hairy body, and long claws. Mamuna changelings would also get their first set of teeth prematurely compared to a human baby. In order to protect a child from being kidnapped by the Mamuna, the mother would tie a red ribbon around the baby's wrist, put a red hat on it's head, and keep it out of the moonlight.
Other preventative methods included not washing diapers after sunset and never turning their head away from the baby as it slept. The mother would take the changeling child to a midden , whip it with a birch stick, and pour water from an eggshell over it, all while shouting "Take yours; give mine back.
Since most beings from Scandinavian folklore are said to be afraid of iron, Scandinavian parents often placed an iron item such as a pair of scissors or a knife on top of an unbaptized infant's cradle. It was believed that if a human child was taken in spite of such measures, the parents could force the return of the child by treating the changeling cruelly, using methods such as whipping or even inserting it in a heated oven. In at least one case, a woman was taken to court for having killed her child in an oven.
In one Swedish changeling tale, [29] 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.
The tale is notably retold by Helena Nyblom as Bortbytingarna [30] in the book Bland tomtar och troll. The changelings grow up with their new parents, but both find it hard to adapt: Upset with the conditions of their lives, they both go astray in the forest, passing each other without noticing it. The princess comes to the castle whereupon the queen immediately recognizes her, and the troll girl finds a troll woman who is cursing loudly as she works.
The troll girl bursts out that the troll woman is much more fun than any other person she has ever seen, and her mother happily sees that her true daughter has returned. Both the human girl and the troll girl marry happily the very same day.
Changeling - Wikipedia
In Asturias North Spain there is a legend about the Xana , a sort of nymph who used to live near rivers, fountains and lakes, sometimes helping travellers on their journeys. The Xanas were conceived as little female fairies with supernatural beauty. They could deliver babies, "xaninos," that were sometimes swapped with human babies— some legends claim this was in order for them to be baptized, while others claim that it is because the Xana cannot produce milk. In Wales the changeling child plentyn cael sing. It may be of less than usual intelligence, but again is identified by its more than childlike wisdom and cunning.
That thing you read the other day
The common means employed to identify a changeling is to cook a family meal in an eggshell. The child will exclaim, "I have seen the acorn before the oak, but I never saw the likes of this," and vanish, only to be replaced by the original human child.
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Alternatively, or following this identification, it is supposedly necessary to mistreat the child by placing it in a hot oven, by holding it in a shovel over a hot fire, or by bathing it in a solution of foxglove. Children identified as changelings by the superstitious were often abused or murdered. Two 19th-century cases reflect the belief in changelings. In , Anne Roche bathed Michael Leahy, a four-year-old boy unable to speak or stand, three times in the Flesk ; he drowned the third time. She swore that she was merely attempting to drive the fairy out of him, and the jury acquitted her of murder.
Local storyteller Jack Dunne accused Bridget of being a fairy changeling. It is debatable whether her husband Michael actually believed her to be a fairy; many [ who? The killers were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, as even after the death they claimed to be convinced they had killed a changeling, not Bridget Cleary herself.
wdyt pretty baby = ugly adult and vice versa
The Igbo people of eastern Nigeria traditionally believed that a woman who lost numerous children, whether stillborn or early in infancy, was being tormented by an ogbanje , a malicious spirit that reincarnated itself over and over again. One of the most commonly prescribed methods for ridding oneself of an ogbanje was to find and destroy its iyi-uwa , a buried object tying it to the mortal world.
Many scholars now believe that ogbanje stories arose as an attempt to explain the loss of children with sickle-cell anemia , a congenital disease endemic to West Africa that afflicts around one-quarter of the population.
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Even today, infant death is common among children born with severe sickle-cell anemia, especially in areas of Africa lacking adequate medical resources. The similarity between the European changeling and the Igbo ogbanje is striking enough that Igbos themselves often translate the word into English as "changeling. The reality behind many changeling legends was often the birth of deformed or developmentally disabled children.
Among the diseases or disabilities with symptoms that match the description of changelings in various legends are spina bifida , cystic fibrosis , PKU , progeria , Down syndrome , homocystinuria , Williams syndrome , Hurler syndrome , Hunter syndrome , regressive autism , Prader-Willi Syndrome , and cerebral palsy. The greater incidence of birth defects in boys correlates to the belief that male infants were more likely to be taken.
If you can find them, you will surely enjoy them. Having lived away from those beautiful hills,I let his writing take me home again. Pack has added another worthy work to document the time and place in which we grew up. And he makes it appear so effortless. Hello to my former art teacher! Still remember you with fondness from good old Meade High. I enjoy your weekly column!
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