Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Changelings

Just writing to mention that I found a bunch of changeling folktales:

British changeling stories
German changeling stories
Scandinavian changeling stories

It's often theorized now that those stories referred to developmentally disabled people, especially autistic people. Chilling, when you think of how they were generally treated in those tales and how they were viewed.

[Edit: here's another story.]

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1 Comments:

Blogger stevethehydra said...

Wow. Some really powerful stuff in there. Some of the depictions make it really obvious that they actually refer to disabled children - in some, it's even possible to make a reasonable guess as to the syndrome. I think i'm going to post about this later tonight...

Martin Luther's "massa carnis" speech is particularly chilling in light of the near-identical rhetoric deployed about disabled people in Germany 400 years later.

1:53 PM  

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