Changelings are early doppelganger portrayals used to make sense of disability.

Evidence

Wing, whose daughter was autistic, had a side interest in the way autistic people were portrayed in folktales, religion, and literature, long before there were medical terms of any kind to describe them. She traced the earliest portrayals of autistic people to Irish and Celtic legends and “the myth of changeling children, left in place of real human babies who had been stolen by fairies.” … Interestingly, changelings are also early portrayals of doppelgangers. The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings, who were identical doubles of the kidnapped children, only with physical deformities or behavioral “trickster” challenges, like having a withdrawn, otherworldly affect. To Wing and her coauthor, the autism advocate David Potter, it was clear that these legends of fairy doppelgangers were ways of making sense of disability. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 670

Categorization

• DEFINE: Connects the child-kidnapped-by-fairies legend to the doppelganger conceit that anchors Klein’s whole book — the doubled child as the original device.
• XREF: Builds on the book’s central doubling premise; connects to changeling folklore as a cross-cultural origin story for the Other-as-double.