The Exeter Companion to Changeling Lore: The West Eurasian and Mediterranean Tradition Edited by Davide Ermacora and Simon Young

For centuries, people across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East believed that supernatural beings—fairies, jinn, trolls, or demons—could steal a human child and leave a lookalike in its place. These stories offer fascinating insights into how different cultures made sense of disability, illness, and unexplained transformations.

The Exeter Companion to Changeling Lore (University of Exeter Press, 2025) is the first multi-author volume dedicated to changelings and the most comprehensive study of these beliefs across West Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Bringing together historians, literary scholars, and folklorists, it considers changeling legends from Britain to Armenia and from the Arctic Circle to the Maghreb. Individual chapters uncover new archival material in Hungary, previously undocumented folklore motifs in Ireland, and changeling traditions in countries where they had gone unnoticed—such as Italy and Spain. The book even examines how changeling beliefs have persisted into modern UFO-lore.

Challenging long-held assumptions, this volume overturns the idea that changeling beliefs are to be found in all corners of the globe and that no such tales predate the medieval period. Instead, it reveals that the vast majority of changeling accounts belong to a distinct West Eurasian-Mediterranean tradition, with records stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome. The book concludes with a revised list of changeling motifs, providing a resource for future research.

The Exeter Companion to Changeling Lore is part of the Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief series published by the University of Exeter Press.