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In addition to being a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, T. Kingfisher's novella Thornhedge is inspired in part by the tradition of stories about changelings. In European folklore, changelings represented an intersection between the fairy world and the human world; a fairy would steal a baby—usually one who had not yet been baptized—from its cradle and leave a non-human replacement.
The human child could then serve as a servant or a source of amusement to the fairies, or, according to some stories, could fulfill old deals with the devil. Meanwhile, the changeling, who was often believed to not be a child at all, but rather an old, worn out, or particularly nasty fairy, or even an enchanted object like a block of wax or wood, would perplex and frighten the parents with its odd appearance, strange behavior, insatiable hunger, and lack of human affection.
Stories of changelings were particularly common in the British Isles; William Butler Yeats's 1889 ...
