The Watchers

The titular watchers in A. M. Shine’s novel are changelings, a kind of fairy that can transform into a particular human or into various humans. The folklore of Ireland and the rest of the British Isles features many stories of changelings that take the place of human infants; these stories are thought to have been an attempt to explain babies who had physical disabilities of one kind or another. According to Professor D. L. Ashliman, a variety of congenital disabilities and other disabilities were considered signs that a child was a supernatural creature, and the act of identifying an infant as a changeling was used as justification for infanticide (“Changelings: An Essay by D. L. Ashliman.” University of Pittsburgh, 1997). Ashliman has also published additional resources on changelings, including excerpts from Folk Tales and Fairy Lore in Gaelic and English by James MacDougall and Celtic Folklore by John Rhys (Ashliman, D. L. “Changeling Legends From the British Isles and Ireland.” University of Pittsburgh, 2023).

Changelings also appear in the poetry of William Butler Yeats and various contemporaries in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child” features fairies who lure a human child into the wild forest.