To Prevent Changelings, seek a basal body temperature as cold as iron or a virgin woman’s suffering.
To Ensure The Birth Of A Child With A Caul, A Most Fortuitous Blessing, seek to conceive within 12-24 hours of ovulation or touching the cloak of a master thief.
To Ensure Your Child Is A Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, abandon your daughters by the banks of a river with only a ring and a blanket as markers to their family name.
To Disguise The True Parentage Of Offspring (An Enchanted Bear), speak only Bible verses on your most fertile days of the month.
To Bring About The Birth Of A Snow-Daughter Who Resembles A Human Child In Every Way But Whose Heart Cannot Feel Love, pray to the Blessed Virgin on the days of your cycle when your vaginal mucus is colorless and stretchy, with the consistency of egg whites.
To Birth A Curse-Breaker, purchase a basal thermometer and kill a witch with it.
To Bring Forth A Child Beautiful Enough To Bring Luck But Not So Beautiful It Attracts The Ire Of Lilith, avoid alcohol, caffeine, the left side of the bed, steel, broomsticks, sick or lamed horses, making eye contact with cats, and boasting after the sun has set.
To Cleverly Subvert The Will Of The Bene Gesserit And Bring Forth The Kwisatz Haderach A Generation Early, concentrate deeply on the eleventh day of your cycle and visualize maleness.
Tags: advice, childbirth, families, folklore, parenting, tracking your fertility
Despite the use of bible versus (which will certainly help to conceal your child’s offspring from scrying attempts by Noita [and the child’s regular scent if you happen to be married to a troll or something]), the offspring of an enchanted bear is always going to have four long, thick hairs growing from the center of his or her palms, and also will begin to waste away if he or she does not eat raw meat at least three times between new moons. Of course, everyone needs to make the parenting choices that are right for them, but a half-enchanted-bear-child is a serious, lifetime commitment, and presents many unique challenges that parents of ordinary children may not be accustomed to. I urge potential parents to avoid any kind of congress with enchanted bears unless they are absolutely certain that they’re ready and willing to take on this commitment.
Also, dang, Mallory – your advice is usually pretty great (especially when it comes to helping parents get acclimated to the witch-hands stage of child rearing), but I think sometimes you’re a little cavalier about it. Sure, it’s a fortuitous blessing for a child to be born with a caul, if you want to raise a dhampyr or a zduhac who’ll leave his body at night to protect your village from hailstorms, but no warning about making sure you don’t deliver between Christmas day and the feast of Epiphany? Do you WANT people to have to raise vampires, or to guard them constantly against become aloviti? Sometimes I feel like this is a little irresponsible.
Apparently I need to check out a few books about Serbian folklore from the library.
For whatever reason, I feel like Eastern European folklore is the weirdest folklore of Europe, and that makes it by far my favorite.
Braak what do you recommend? If I were ever to breed I’d defo want a changeling. Or Malachite daughter who could turn a man into a pillar of stone, at the very least.
Well, you got a couple options, but most of them are not extremely reliable. About 70% of changelings aren’t actually conceived that way, they’re usually after-birth abductions. If that’s all you want, the best recommendation is to give birth at night, either during a hailstorm or near a swamp, and leave the baby unattended for long periods out of doors. If you want to conceive a changeling, you got to get yourself to a cabin during the winter months above the arctic circle, with a north-facing window, and sleep for three nights with the window open. This has a pretty good success rate, depending if you want a troll-child or a huldre-child or something (assuming you don’t die of hypothermia, but look, pregnancy and changelings are serious business, if you’re going to get in it, you got to be ready to win it). Make sure that you don’t have any iron in the house and you’re not within the sound of church-bells, too.
Some people find it helps if, every night before you go to sleep, you jump back and forth three times over an all-black calf (that’s back and forth three times, for a total of six), but I’m not sure how much difference it makes.
The second-most reliable option, and this requires a pretty game partner, is to attempt the conception in a barrow-hill, preferably on a solstice, equinox, or cross-quarter day (obviously the days between Highsummer and Imbolc are the best for this). Make sure you and your partner are not wearing any religious paraphernalia. When you’re finished, make sure that you BOTH fall asleep. You’ll know that it worked if you have a dream about an old woman with skin like willow-bark stirring a cauldron made out of an eggshell; when you ask her what she’s cooking, she answers in a language that you’ve never heard though it seems familiar, and you can’t recall on waking. Whatever you do, DO NOT COMMENT on how strange it is to see a soup made in an eggshell. She will disappear up the chimney and you’ll end up giving birth to a stone.
This is great advice Braak. Sadly I hate having cold feet. So changeling is out (also seems like a big commitment), but hopefully if I wander around the Ural mountains I might have a Malachite Daughter. They rarely stick around after 18 and can cry gem stones. Which is ideal. I’d like to get my life back once they are an adult plus make some $$$ on the side.
Well, you’ll need to find yourself a miner whose been transfigured by his contact wit the Mistress of Copper Mountain. I’ve heard she’s partial to gingers, so. Good luck.
Do you have any recommendations for books to read about Eastern European folklore? I work in an academic library, but the only book I see that we have under “Europe, Eastern — Folklore” is a book about Eastern European dance.
Unfortunately, I don’t! I did most of my reading in undergrad, which was [coughcoughetcetera] years ago, and I can’t now remember any of the titles. If you ever swing by the library at UMass-Amherst, though, my recollection is that it was pretty well-stocked.
Switching Genres:
Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals by Pavel Bazhov by amazing. (It’s also free online)
http://www.4to40.com/folktales/index.asp?p=The_Malachite_Casket
Ukrainian Folk tales: Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales
The Firebird and other Stories (Classic)
Russian Fairy Tales (Illustrated) Paperback – January 16, 2012
by Alexander Afanasyev (Author), Ivan Bilibin (Illustrator)
And a contemporary one is Noturnes by John Connolly has a some great (and creepy) short stories. Including one about a changeling.
It’s not specifically Eastern European, but if you’d like some specifically caul-related folk lore Night Battles by Carlo Ginzburg is fun. It’s centered on the Friuli (a rural area of Italy near Venice) but I believe there was a fairly heavy Eastern European influence.
I have a friend who wanted to marry a bear in his youth, I don’t believe he was aware of the discriminatory realities he would face. Then again he was also very hairy.
I love you.
“Oh dear god, it’s a changeling sure, just look at its withered face and pale drooping flesh– oh wait, that’s all of us, never mind.”
A++ disapproval on the faces of the background ladies there. “A lot of effort for … that, if you ask me. No, you just rest. You’ve done plenty.”
“is this…what kind of goo is this on it? Is this changeling goo?”
“It’s placental fluid.”
“So. Like troll-goo or something.”
I love how the baby has an equally underwhelmed expression. “A lot of effort for….this. If you ask me.”
It’s a little eerie to me how much the baby-holding lady looks like Geraldine McEwan in Henry V (see: link).
Mom just looks so depressed in this picture. Not tired, not filled with the natural complicated emotions that can accompany the hormonal roller coaster of childbirth, not sore in places she never thought she’d be sore – just kind of weary and resigned.
“To Disguise The True Parentage Of Offspring (An Enchanted Bear), speak only Bible verses on your most fertile days of the month.”
That’s funny, my wife always did tha… oh god, wait, does this mean litte Beorn isn’t… oh god…
Alternatively, if you WANT to birth monsters, Scandinavian folklore tells us you can stretch the fetal membrane of a foal between sticks and crawl through it naked. The birth will be painless and all your daughters will be werewolves, which is pretty sweet if you ask me.
HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS.
Childbirth education in this country is a joke, I tell you.
not seeing a downside here, other than crawling through fetal membrane, i guess
What if I WANT a changeling?
Right? What’s so bad about a changeling?
the only book on giving birth & raising children i want will be authored by mallory ortberg.
What Not To Expect When You’re Expecting?
The Nonsense Book of Baby and Child Care?
😉
Wait, is that the left side of the bed as you’re looking in it, or lying in it? This is a crucial point I MUST KNOW
Get into the bed from an end, and lie perfectly still in the middle. It’s the only way to be sure.
It’s always the eye contact with cats that fucks up my protective charms game.
To Cleverly Subvert The Will Of The Bene Gesserit And Bring Forth The Kwisatz Haderach A Generation Early, concentrate deeply on the eleventh day of your cycle and visualize maleness.
I was going to make a Dune joke but then I remembered that that dullard Duncan Idaho is apparently the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach and I just lost all will to live
Man, intensedebate, you are giving me agita today.
I’m very happy that there’s a place on the internet where the changeling epidemic is routinely discussed in a frank non-changeling-shaming way
also, yikes, left the page open in the background and it twice started playing an audio ad at me. this will under no circumstances cause me to turn adblocker on on this site, but, y’know, in case you didn’t know, you got some ads that autoplay their noisy bits, even in the background.
This is one of my favorite posts by you ever, Mallory. Brava!
P.S. As I am a changeling, I quite appreciate the frankness and candor of this article!
Well, you'll need to find yourself a miner whose been transfigured by his contact wit the Mistress of Copper Mountain. I've heard she's partial to gingers, so. Good luck.
I think this is an excellent time to remind everybody that my next-door neighbor told me, out of the blue, that her son was born still in his afterbirth, and slipped out in very little time. There was no reason for me to need this information.
Although it did give me an opportunity to warn her that he might very well become a werewolf, and she should be on her guard.
Holy sweet jesus that last one is all anybody ever needs to know about Dune.
Where am I supposed to get all these rings?!