Within a few lines, we come to understand that what appears comfortably familiar and even dated — a baby, a footman, a nurse — is no such thing, as this baby is being taken away by creatures who take to their wings as easily as you or I would walk down a road. The baby, at first a ‘he’, very subtly mutates into an ‘it’, and a little further on we learn that the first procedures to be visited on this baby are invasive and denaturing (‘denaturing’, that is, from a human perspective), designed to ‘abate the human smell’ (1) and finally render ‘it’ ‘sufficiently inhumanized to be given its new name’ (2). Within a few sentences, ordinary points of orientation come loose, and this disorientation is pursued systematically to the story’s end as we follow the changeling human in Elfhame as well as the changeling fairy among the humans. The story is a hall of mirrors in which the different sides reflect each other disconcertingly:7 we see humans from fairy perspectives and fairies through human eyes, and the environments of both changelings are defamiliarised and challenged by their very presence.

When Adam, the fairy child left in place of the baby, is told that the cat that suckled him as a baby has died, his first response is to dissect it in order to understand mortality, a very reasonable obsession for someone half remembering the near-immortality of his species. The family’s servant Ailie is dismayed, but how sentimental should one’s attachment be to a suckling cat, even if one weren’t an elf? Throughout these stories, casual cruelties abound in both worlds — famines, wars, exploitation among the humans, and the cruelties of aristocratic boredom among the fairies. These arise sometimes from veritable inhumanity (though what can ‘(in)human’ mean in these stories?), and sometimes out of the necessities of life. In ‘The One and the Other’, for example, the baby’s mother fails to notice the theft of her baby because ‘she was busy making sausage meat and pork pies that day; and this was not her first child, to be studied like a nonpareil. Indeed, it was her ninth, though not all of them had lived’ (2). The fairy baby left behind in the cradle needs to be de-elfinised for the transition as much as the changeling needs to be inhumanised, in his case by having his wings ‘extirpated’ and his blood ‘dosed with an elixir of mortality, compounded from tears and excrement of changelings’, and finally we come to understand one of the mysteries of spiritualism: ‘The transfers die, but tardily and with extreme difficulty, and some have been known to hover briefly in the air — a phenomenon called levitation and usually ascribed to saintliness’ (6).