For the past three years, Dr Simon Young has been part of an international team investigating changeling legends: the widespread belief that supernatural beings (fairies, trolls, witches) substitute humans with magical look-alikes. With the team’s findings now published (The Exeter Companion to Changeling Lore, 2025) and hundreds of records at his disposal, Simon will explore the what, when, and how of changeling folklore.
This remarkable tradition spans far beyond western Ireland, reaching Armenia, the Egyptian Delta, and even tribal Papua New Guinea. It stretches not only through the medieval and modern periods but back into antiquity itself. The team has grappled with fascinating questions: Are child changelings more common than adult ones? How do legends of human mothers exchanging children relate to changeling lore? And perhaps most intriguingly: why did this belief system take hold across perhaps a quarter of the globe?
About the Speaker
Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). He has written extensively on the 19th-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) came out in 2022, with other recent books on The Wollaton Gnomes (2023) The Deerness Mermaid (2025) and the opening volume of his Fairy Census (2023). Simon also co-presents the supernatural podcast Boggart and Banshee with Chris Woodyard.
Articles listing: https://independent.academia.edu/SimonYoung43
Substack: https://britishmythology.substack.com/
Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (Oct 2025) part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, for which he also edited Eerie East Anglia (2024). For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
[Image: from The Changeling, attributed to Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), from The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection.]
