In the Scottish folk ballad “Tam Lin,” a brave young woman fights to save her lover from the clutches of the Queen of Faery holding him captive, planning to make him a ritual sacrifice. In Sunnyvale author Kimberly Bea’s spellbinding new novel “The Changeling Queen,” the mythical monarch herself gets to tell that tale from her own perspective.
“The Changeling Queen” comes out Oct. 28, an appropriate date for a book that has key events set on All Hallows’ Eve, when the fairy folk are out and about. Bea will have a launch party for the book that evening at Books Inc. Mountain View.
“I’ve been obsessed with the ballad of ‘Tam Lin’ for 30 years,” Bea said. “Despite the fact that it dates back to the 16th century, the female characters have so much agency in it. It’s a girl-rescues-the-guy story, which I always love.” And though Janet, the woman, is unmarried and pregnant, “it surprisingly avoids judgment of Janet; it reads as very, very modern,” she added.
For her retelling of “Tam Lin,” Bea wanted to try her hand at a villain origin story of sorts, exploring the point of view of the Faery Queen, who, in Bea’s sympathetic version, is half fairy and half human and was raised as a changeling child among the mortals.
Told in the first person, partly in the form of flashbacks, the queen shares her life journey, from her early years raised as plain Bess in the home of a kindly village midwife and her boorish husband and children. As a changeling, Bess has always known she’s different, never quite fitting into her human life, but isn’t sure how she’d fare in the Faery realm, either.
She falls in love with handsome Thomas Shepherd, the illegitimate son of a local nobleman. Bess tries to carry on her adopted mother’s work as a healer and cunning woman, but struggles against the conventions of human society and its oppressive attitudes and patriarchal norms. She also must reckon with the pull toward her royal Faery destiny, with its own rituals, customs and ideas of right and wrong – including the fact that every seven years, a life must be sacrificed for the common good, to keep the land of Faery alive and flourishing.
“My interpretation of fairies is, they’re not good, they’re not evil. They have a very different morality than we have,” Bea said. “To me, Faery is outside of that kind of binary Christian morality (of) God vs. the devil.”
Ultimately, the queen has to make difficult choices about where her loyalties lie and what she’s willing to give up or take on.
“What do you do when your healing has to cause someone else’s death? It’s a big moral quandary that she has to deal with,” Bea said. “By the end of the book, the heroine has less become a villain and more a force of nature.”
Though the novel is a fantasy, when writing about events happening in the mortal realm, Bea strove for accurate historical details appropriate to the medieval Scottish setting. She has a particular interest in social history — especially in women’s lives and sexuality — and enjoyed undertaking extensive research and consulting with a critique partner. “I love falling down a good research rabbit hole,” she said.
The concept of a changeling, a substitute fairy child left in exchange for one kidnapped into another realm, is common in European folklore.
“There’s a theory nowadays that people think part of the inspiration for changelings might have been autistic children,” Bea noted. If parents felt their babies or young children stopped behaving as expected, perhaps they feared they’d been replaced by an imposter, she said.
She speculates that postpartum depression could also have played a part in the development of changeling lore. “There’s a notion it should be natural, it should be easy to bond with our children, but sometimes mothers struggle with it,” she said. “I could see someone distancing themselves from their child if she was in the throes of postpartum depression.”
As for the idea of a fairy world itself — the mysterious Underhill — existing alongside ours, reachable when the veil is thin at certain times of the year, or in certain places, “there are a lot of different theories, both modern scholarly theories and from medieval times themselves,” Bea said. “Some people favor the theory that the fairies were the Indigenous population of the British Isles,” with their ancient burial mounds providing the genesis of the Underhill.
“I also have read recently that a lot of the advice on how to protect yourself from fairies – ‘Don’t go into the forest at twilight or noon’ – these were ideas that were just kind of good recommendations to keep yourself safe anyway,” she said, noting that the woods could harbor dangers such as wild animals or bandits. “That kind of intrigued me, that it’s just good common sense.”
But in “The Changeling Queen,” of course, that world is very real. The lush and wondrous Faery realm in the book is populated by all sorts of creatures and figures drawn from mythology and folklore, including brownies, pixies and elfin knights (one of Bea’s personal favorite characters is Jenny Greenteeth, a delightfully creepy water hag.) Bea drew on some traditions particular to the story’s setting in the Scottish borders region, as well as from other sources, when creating her Faery kingdom.
“I would use imagery and descriptive details from Shakespeare, Yeats; any known fairy lore that seemed like it would be relevant, I got to play around with, which is really fun,” she said.
Bea has long been fascinated by ancient history, starting in childhood and continuing through college and graduate school. She grew up in Sunnyvale and moved back a few years ago to be closer to her family after spending 25 years in Minneapolis. She loved writing as a child, then came back to it in post-college adulthood, taking part in the now-defunct National Novel Writing Month challenge and publishing stories and poems in several anthologies.
“It took me a while to learn how to revise, learn how to work with critique partners, to query, to get an agent, which I did when I was 49,” she said. “The Changeling Queen” (published by Erewhon Books) is her debut published book, but she already has her next in the works and ideas for more.
Like many creatives, she’s also had a number of day jobs over the years. She taught history at the university level and worked as a bookseller, an editorial assistant for academic publications and a proofreader for the state of Minnesota’s Revisor’s Office. Now, in addition to her burgeoning writing career, she’s also working to become an English teacher, to share her love of literature and writing with future generations.
As the publication date for “The Changeling Queen” draws near, “it feels amazing … (I’m) pinching myself a lot. It doesn’t feel real,” Bea said. She hopes that after getting lost in her epic fairy tale world, readers will be inspired to explore more about folklore and history. She also hopes they’re moved by the emotional, romantic story.
“It makes me cry at certain points. They say, ‘No tears in the author, no tears in the reader,'” she said, paraphrasing Robert Frost. “And, not to be a total sadist, but I do hope for some tears in the reader.”
The launch party for Kimberly Bea’s “The Changeling Queen” will be held at 7 p.m. Oct. 28 at Books Inc. Mountain View, 317 Castro St. More information is available at kimberlybea.com; Instagram: @bea.kimberly.
