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ELVES, DWARFS. 469
steel and needles in the cradle (App., Superst. Germ. 484. 744.
Swed. 118). 1
One of the most striking instances of agreement that I know
of anywhere occurs in connection with prescriptions for getting
rid of your changeling.
In Hesse, when the wichtelmann sees water boiled over the
fire in eggshells, he cries out :
*
Well, I am as old as the Wester-
wold, but I never saw anything boiled in eggshells ; Km. no.
39. In Denmark a pig stuffed with skin and hair is set before
the changeling : Now, I have seen the wood in Tiso young three
times over, but never the like of this : Thiele 1, 48. Before
an Irish changeling they also boil eggshells, till he says :
( I ve
been in the world 1500 years, and never seen that ; Elfenm. p.
38. Before a Scotch one the mother puts twenty-four eggshells
on the hearth, and listens for what he will say ; he says :
( I was
seven before I came to my nurse, I have lived four years since,
and never did I see so many milkpans ; Scott s Mintrelsy 2,
174. In the Breton folksong (Villemarque 1, 29) he sees the
mother cooking for ten servantmen in one eggshell, and breaks
out into the words : I have seen the egg before [it became] the
white hen, and the acorn before the oak, seen it acorn and sapling
and oak in Brezal wood, but never aught like this. This story
about the changeling is also applied to Dame Gauden s little dog,
chap. XXXI. Villemarque 1, 32, quotes in addition a Welsh
in which the
legend and a passage from Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Breton and Welsh formula for great age is already put into
the mouth of Merlin the wild ; in each case an ancient forest is
named. In all these stories the point was, by some out-of-the-
way proceeding, to get the changeling himself to confess his age,
and consequently the exchange. Such traditions must have
been widely spread in Europe from the earliest times ; and it was
evidently assumed, that elves and korred had a very different
term of life assigned them from that of the human race (see
Suppl.).
All elves have an irresistible fondness for music and dancing.
By night you see them tread their round on the moonlit meadows,
1 The Finns call a changeling luoti : monstrum nee non infans matre dormiente
a magis suppositus, qualesputant esse infantem rachitide laborantem (Renvall). A
Breton story of the korrigan changing a child is in Villemarque 1, 25.