The Science of Fairy Tales / An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology

Simrock, in his work on German mythology already cited, inclines to the opinion that the object of the ceremony which the suspected child is made to witness is to produce laughter. He says: ?The dwarf is no over-ripe beauty who must keep her age secret. Rather something ridiculous must be done to cause him to laugh, because laughter brings deliverance.?[87] The problem set before the heroes of many folk-tales is to compel laughter, but that does not seem to be intended in these changeling stories. At least I have only met with it in one, and it certainly is not common. The confession of age which the ceremony draws forth is really much more. It is a confession that the apparently human babe is an imposture, that it belongs in fact to a different race, and has no claim on the mother's care and tenderness. Therefore it is not always enough for the fraud to be discovered: active means must sometimes be taken to rid the family of their supernatural burden and regain their own little one. In Grimm's story, in which the child laughs, a host of elves comes suddenly bringing back the true and carrying away the false one; and in many of the German and Northern tales the changeling disappears in one way or other immediately after its exclamation. We are sometimes even told in so many words that the changeling had betrayed himself, and the underground folk were obliged to give back the stolen child. And in the Lithuanian story we have cited the laumes straightway falls sick and dies.[88] Such conduct accords entirely with the resentment at being recognized which we have in a previous chapter found to be a characteristic of spiritual existences. It is much more like the dislike of being found out attributed to beings who are in the habit of walking invisible, than any mystical effect of laughter.