- Genre
- Mythological legend
- Source status
- folkloric
- Motifs
- changeling, exchanged children, hundred-year-old oak, astonishment and speech
The story
Long ago, this legend says, laumės sometimes exchanged children. A laumė left her own child with a woman and carried away the woman’s baby. The family knew nothing of the exchange. The child they raised reached twenty without speaking.
One day a beggar stayed the night. The mother told him about the silence, and he wondered whether the child was a laumiukas, a laumė’s changeling. He suggested an astonishing sight: a fire of oak logs in the middle of the room, with a dozen or so broken eggs arranged around it and the silent young person seated opposite.
The family prepared everything. At the sight, the changeling suddenly spoke. The oak had been a hundred years old, it said, and it was five times older still; yet never had it seen anything like this.
After watching the fire a little longer, it vanished before their eyes. This version does not say that the child who had been taken away returned.
Reading the story
The turning point is astonishment that makes a hidden being reveal its age. The association between silence and changelings belongs to historical folklore, not an account of human development; the test in the story is not a suggestion for treating a child.
Told by Berteška in Ožkabaliai, Bartininkai district; recorded by V. Basanavičius in 1905. LMD I 133(108).
Source and retelling
Lietuvių tautosaka, IV (1967), Nr. 539, p. 546: „Laumiukas“. An original retelling of the recorded traditional narrative cited here. The sequence of events and ending are retained in modern language.