A Changeling In Elfland

"She felt the baby leave her arms. She snatched for him, and felt the dear weight once more, as if it had been laid there. 'God be thanked,' she gasped. 'I dropped you but I caught you.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1977), III, p. 24.

She dropped her son and caught a changeling. I quote this passage in order to compare and contrast it with the incident described in the previous post, Temporal Changeling.

While we are here, we should appreciate Anderson's literary writing in The Broken Sword. Imric the elf-earl has kept Gora, a hideous, hairless, green, squat, mad, wolf-toothed, clammy troll woman, chained in an underground cell behind a triple-locked, brass-barred, mould-greened, oak door for nine hundred years. When he tells her to hurry, she thunders and booms:

"'Hurry and hurry, autumn leaves hurrying on the rainy wind, snow hurrying out of the sky, life hurrying to death, gods hurrying to oblivion... All ashes, dust, blown on a senseless wind, and only the mad can gibber the music of the spheres. Ha, the red cock on the dunghill!'" (III, p. 22)

Her commentary on life is:

"'The world is flesh dissolving off a skull... Birth is but the breeding of maggots therein. Already the skull's teeth stand forth uncovered by lips, and crows have left its eyesockets empty. Soon wind will blow through all the bones.'" (p. 23)

We recognize familiar themes from Anderson's works: autumn and leaves; rain and wind; crows and eye sockets.

By magic as well as by the necessary physical act, Imric begets the changeling on Gora. She instantly bears a male human being indistinguishable from the one to be stolen.